Correchet, Camille
Prof. Fonts
ENC 1102-3
15 February 2012
Conventional
In the real world, problems and complications come up and happily ever after’s don’t exist. Sexton takes the classic story of “Cinderella”, reworks it, and makes it into her own twisted version of a fairytale. She starts the audience off with a few little “rags-to-riches” accounts comparing modern culture’s unrealistic dreams to what life really is like. Then she goes into telling the readers the famously known fairytale in a sardonic tone. The audience gets a sense of frustration from her way of expressing herself in each little story she talks about. She shows the world that its not always rainbows and butterflies, the real world is more complicated than that.
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Women have the right to love someone and not think about her financial future with that person and focus on what is really important for a relationship to work. When one is in a relationship, he or she will only make it work with honesty. Love isn’t about only making him happy and catering to his every need; it’s about both sides pleasing each other and working things out when necessary with nothing to hide.
Moreover, women get their perspectives of love, and men in general, from their past experiences or from what they’ve seen around them. One loses hope on being happy when a traumatic event in a relationship of any kind happens. Rooney remarks: “A feminist isn’t born a feminist; she is born from her understanding of the world and how her parents conducted themselves with each other…experiences are the platforms in which any life is held by” (15). Despair is the perfect way to describe how one feels when life doesn’t turn out the way one thinks it will. Sexton’s poem shows her view on the world and the reader can tell that she has a sort of grudge with happiness.
To sum up, Sexton’s “Cinderella” highlights despair and the misconceptions women have about love and life. Fairytales bring hope to young hearts around the world but get crushed when real world situations happen. Happily ever after’s can exist but not in any kind of perfect form, there is no such thing as perfection, and life’s complications come up from
Cinderella is a childhood fairytale that we all love and remember. It is a tragedy that turns into love and happily ever after in the end. In contrast to this popular story, Anne Sexton's version of Cinderella is a dark and twisted version of the classic fairy tale. It takes on a whole new perspective and is fairly different from the childhood fairytale that most of society knows. The poem takes less of a focus on the happy ever after in Cinderella and makes it into vivid bloody and violent images. She retreats more toward the pain and neglect. The poem is not based off the Disney version of Cinderella, but rather original dark version by Brothers Grimm. Sexton uses a very sarcastic and
“Going up in the World: Class in ‘Cinderella’” is a scholarly article written by Elisabeth Panttaja that analyzes the roles of the mothers and the importance of class within these times. Panttaja focuses her article on the Grimm version, which is most famously critiqued and discussed. The article analyzes the importance of the mothers, which leads to the overall concept that the natural mother’s role seems irrelevant, yet Cinderella’s entire destiny is based upon her. The mother’s also show similar goals: get their daughter(s) married into power. Cinderella wins this battle, however, for she is the “true bride.”
Anne Sexton was a junior-college dropout who, inspired by emotional distress, became a poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize as well as three honorary doctorates. Her poems usually dealt with intensely personal, often feminist, subject matter due to her tortured relationships with gender roles and the place of women in society. The movies, women’s magazines and even some women’s schools supported the notion that decent women took naturally to homemaking and mothering (Schulman). Like others of her generation, Sexton was frustrated by this fixed feminine role society was encouraging. Her poem “Cinderella” is an example of her views, and it also introduces a new topic of how out of touch with reality fairy tales often are. In “Cinderella”, Anne Sexton uses tone and symbolism to portray her attitude towards traditional gender roles and the unrealistic life of fairy tales.
Children often learn about their society’s ideals of love and relationships from fairy tales. Told from a female perspective, the poem Puce Fairy Book by Alice Major challenges and disproves the unfeasible and degrading expectations that women are held to, specifically by men in relationships. The motivation of the speaker, addressing a male counterpart, is to say that she does not care for other’s opinions of her faults and does not desire such unaccepting people in her life. Major’s use of fairy tale allusions and metaphors play an important role in establishing the central message that is the “perfect” ideological image that society has created for women to conform to are unrealistic and
In her article, “Cinderella: Not So Morally Superior,” Elisabeth Panttaja illustrates the important role of parents in a childhood. She talks about the importance the mother plays in all versions of Cinderella as well as evidence showing what lack of parenthood does to children. Panttaja claims by way of the Grimms Brothers version of Cinderella and how each mother wants to guarantee a bright and happy future for their daughters by marrying them off to the prince. The similarities between the wanting of Cinderella and the stepsisters married- and doing anything to get it- contradicts the idea that Cinderella and her mother were morally superior, or different at all, from the stepmother and sisters.
In the familiar more traditional version, Cinderella is a poor maid girl that, with the help of fairy godmother, gets a chance to meet prince charming. They fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after, and then what? What is a happily ever after? Is this even a realistic thought? In the dark comedic poem Cinderella, Anne Sexton forces the reader to examine this question. Utilizing literary devices such as tone, imagery, and style, Sexton encourages the reader to think about how silly and unlikely a fairy tale ending actually is.
Throughout his article, Poniewozik claims that the modern fairy tales have showed the perfect fairy tale that women can have both a man and a career. However, Orenstein would agree that fairy tales have changed, but points out that The Bachelorette show is quite similar to Cinderella and how it shows the harsh truth of reality, such as greed and lies(285). Orenstein includes this to cause people to realize that our expectations of romance and marriage have been changed for the worse into something that is far from what we have expected (286). But this intrigues people to want to watch the the shows. While Poniewozik points out the unrealistic features of fairy tales (324). The author argues that women can get everything they want, and that is fine. But it does not show the truth of reality nor that nothing is perfect. Poniewozik argues that the modern fairy tales are very optimistic about love while Orenstein shows the damage that fairy tales have caused to our expectations of romance and marriage. Poneiwozik includes The Prince & Me and Ella Enchanted and the happily ever after ending while Orenstein talks about the shows, The Great Race and Tales of Times Past with Morals, but the shows do not have a happy ending due to the themes of greed and lies incorporated into the
Growing up in today’s society can be traumatizing for any child. When it comes to growing up as a young girl, however, it can be downright devastating, but not only for the child but the parent as well. There are so many decisions to be made when choosing how to raise your child, assuring that you have instilled proper values to develop a healthy sense of self-worth and confidence.
Adults realize that despite Cinderella’s charismatic traits, Cinderella’s behaviour in Perrault’s tale is not acceptable for today’s modern western woman.
Sexton initially presents examples of success stories in which people, with lives of hardship, receive everlasting happiness due to superficial commodities. Sexton creates emphasis for the multiple stories
Cinderella’s story is undoubtedly the most popular fairy tale all over the world. Her fairy tale is one of the best read and emotion filled story that we all enjoyed as young and adults. In Elizabeth Pantajja’s analysis, Cinderella’s story still continues to evoke emotions but not as a love story but a contradiction of what we some of us believe. Pantajja chose Cinderella’s story to enlighten the readers that being good and piety are not the reason for Cinderella’s envious fairy tale. The author’s criticism and forthright analysis through her use of pathos, ethos, and logos made the readers doubt Cinderella’s character and question the real reason behind her marrying the prince. Pantajja claims that
Every author, poet, playwright has a subtle message that they would like present to their audience. It may be a lifelong struggle that they have put into words, or a multiple page book that took a lifetime to write. A poet by the name of Anne Sexton sought out to challenge society’s views of women by writing “Her Kind”. A poet, a playwright, and an author of children’s books, Anne Sexton writes about the conflicts of a social outcast living in modern times. She voices the hardships she faces through three different speakers in her poem. At the end of the poem, the woman is not ashamed nor afraid of whom she is and is ready to die in peace. In Anne Sexton’s poem “Her Kind”, the main idea the speaker is depicting is the multiple stereotypes placed on a woman, by society. Sexton’s vivid use of imagery paints a picture of the witch, house wife, and mother cliché, while also implying the poem is autobiographical as Sexton went through her own personal struggles during her life.
Young girls are often stuck in a world of make believe, they are fed fairytales, dream up unimaginable views of reality and believe everyone will find their prince charming. This unrealistic perspective is formed through their experiences with different fairytales. As G.K. Chesterton tells the fairytale are a realistic world for children, “Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten”. Fairytales lead these girls to believe that in order to find true love there is some sort of intense journey one must go on. This idea of a journey for love has created a specific ideology for what love is and how to achieve it. In the text Beauty and the Beast by Madame Le Prince
Many great literary and artistic geniuses have been troubled with deep melancholy and phrenic illness. Anne Sexton is an example of a poet with such quandaries who utilized her personal despair to inspire her poetic works. Sexton’s raw material on the inequality of women in a flawed society has sprouted an uproar for change.
Despite gender, living conditions or cultural backgrounds most people grow up reading or hearing stories of heroism and damsel in distress scenarios. Anne Sexton turns stereotypes on their head in her satirical poems of classic fairy tales, including Snow White and The Seven Dwarves and Cinderella. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves tells the tale of a young princess with hair as black as coal and skin as pale as snow, whose life is thrown into turmoil at the hands of her overbearing stepmother. Cinderella tells the story of a young girl who she spends her life is yearning for the prince’s ball, and similar to Snow White, Cinderella’s stepmother is influencing her life, however she is a positive character throughout the story. This sheds light on the stepmother in Snow White’s piece as despite the fact that Snow White’s stepmother clearly does inherently evil things, a re-reading demands a re-examination of why. It is throughout these tales’ where stepmothers are only trying to protect their children from the world around them, however in Snow White an outside motive, the beauty provided by the mirror and the pride manifested by poison, creates a barrier between the queen and her stepdaughter, thus giving her the title “Evil”.