The Role Of Sexuality In The Happy Prince And The Nightingale And The Rose

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

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.

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.

True love’s path is paved with every step. Through the assistance of fanciful elements as well as characters Puck and Oberon, the true message of love in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is revealed. The four lovers know the direction in which their hearts are inclined to turn, but when the love potion is administered, the bounds of their rectangle are thrashed without knowledge or consent. The rapid shifts in affection between the play’s “four lovers” is representative of the idea that love isn’t a conscious choice, but a cruel game in which we are the figurines, being controlled by whomever the player may be, relating the characters’ karmic fates.

As a child, I was told fairytales such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs every night before I went to sleep. Fairytales are an adventurous way to expand a child’s imagination and open their eyes to experience a new perspective. Modernizations of fairytales typically relate to a specific audience, such as adolescence, and put a contemporary spin on the old-aged tale. Instead of using whimsical themes heavily centered in nature, the contemporary poems connect with the reader in a more realistic everyday scenario. Also, many modernizations are written in poetic form to help reconstruct a flow in the piece and to develop or sometimes completely change the meaning from that of the original fairytale. Comparing Grimm’s Fairytale Snow White

In the folktale “The Blue Beard” written by Charles Perrault, conforms to both Dworkin’s and Lurie’s representations of fairy tale heroines. Perrault states, “The fatal effects of curiosity, particularly female curiosity, have of course long seen the subject of report” (133). Andrea Dworkin author of “Women Hating” and Alison Lurie author of “Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups” explain their different views regarding the heroines in fairy tales.

When you see or hear the word “Cinderella,” you probably think of the classic fairy tale you watched as a child. It may have even been your favorite Disney princess story or movie. Even if you did not, you probably heard about the story or get a sense of what it is about. The classic story seems to be popular for little ones, and it also makes them feel happy and want to become a fairy tale princess themselves. Walt Disney excluded the use of gore and violence in his version of “Cinderella”, but Anne Sexton did not. She brought back the gore and violence just like the original Brothers Grimm version of “Cinderella.” Anne Sexton’s poetic version gives and eye-opener twist to the classic fairy tale. The reasons she brought back this version of the story may relate to her life. Throughout Anne Sexton’s life, she faced many traumatic events and became very depressed

There is nothing more precious and heartwarming than the innocence of a child. The majority of parents in society want to shield children from the bad in life which is appreciated. Within human nature exists desires of inappropriate behavior; envy, deceit, selfishness, revenge, violence, assault and murder. The most well-known fairy tales depict virtue and the evil in life. Even more important, the form and structure of fairy tales suggest images to the child by which he can structure his daydreams and with them give a better direction to his life. (Bettelheim).

The tradition of telling fairy tales to children effects not only the listener but also the reader. Maria Tatar, in her book Off with Their Heads!, analyzes how fairy tales instill and reaffirm cultural values and expectations in their audience . Tatar proposes that fairy tales fall into three different tale-types: cautionary tales, exemplary stories, and reward- and- punishment tales. These three types portray different character traits as desirable and undesirable. Due to the tale’s varying literary methods it can change the effectiveness of the tale’s pedagogical value. In Tatar’s opinion, all of these tales are similar in the way they attempt to use punishment, reward, and fear to encourage or discourage certain behaviors. In the cautionary fairy tale “The Virgin Mary’s Child”, the use of punishment and fear to discourage certain behaviors is enhanced by the Christian motifs and values employed by the tale. These literary devices encourage the audience to reflect on and internalize the lessons that are presented in the fairy tale.

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.

In Margaret Atwood’s poem “There Was Once”, Atwood uses irony to point out the societal problems within the genre of fairy tales. Charles Perrault, the author of the short story “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”, writes about fantastic creatures, magic, and love, following the generic conventions of fairy tales. When compared to Perrault’s short story “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”, Atwood’s poem both compliments and contrasts Perrault’s. These two texts, although similar, offer different views on the genre of fairy tales.

A Midsummer Night 's Dream is a play about love. All of its action—from the escapades of Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, and Helena in the forest, to the argument between Oberon and Titania, to the play about two lovelorn youths that Bottom and his friends perform at Duke Theseus 's marriage to Hippolyta—are motivated by love. But A Midsummer Night 's Dream is not a romance, in which the audience gets caught up in a passionate love affair between two characters. It 's a comedy, and because it 's clear from the outset that it 's a comedy and that all will turn out happily, rather than try to overcome the audience with the exquisite and overwhelming passion of love, A Midsummer Night 's Dream invites the audience to laugh at the way the passion of love can make people blind, foolish, inconstant, and desperate. At various times, the power and passion of love threatens to destroy friendships, turn men against men and women against women, and through

In 1888, Oscar Wilde published a set of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales and "The Young King." These stories, "revealed another approach to moral situations and human relationships" (Stayley 319). The fairy tales were perhaps the first time Wilde introduced homosexual undertones into his works. For example, in the story The Happy Prince, a male bird and a statue of a Prince fall in love. Although it could be argued that the love between the Prince and the bird was only that of friends, most likely Wilde is expressing his own feelings of homosexuality through the bird and the Prince's relationship. For example,

However, few realize that there are many communal ideas imbedded in the plots that often go unrecognized. Fairy tales, more often than not, highlight a multitude of social aspects which might seem inappropriate for children. Constantly evolving, fairy tales, as indicated by Yolen and Zipes, illustrate the sexist views of the dominating class, the societal beliefs as they change throughout history as well as the community’s values especially during crisis.

As we grow up, we hear fairy tales and we read them into our lives. Every word and every image is imprinted into our minds. The fairy tales we read are never abandoned. They grow with us and our dreams become molds of the many morals and happily ever afters fairy tales display. We tell children fairy tales when they go to sleep and they read them in school and we even have them watch Disney adaptions that reinforce them further. Generally, they were everywhere while we grew up and they continue to be present while children are growing up now. But what influence do these stories have? We casually expose our children to these tales, but in some cases they can have particularly, harmful personal effects on them, although there is nothing completely or visibly “bad” about them or about the characters in them. Before we divulge our youth to these stories, we should assess their substance and see what sort of effect they may be having on them. They have received so much scrutiny and have been studied by many. Recognizing fairy tales effects on the minds of children is vital in their development. This paper will focus on the underlying messages that the average person wouldn’t recognize in these everyday stories. There’s a modern distort with fairy tales because while they still are widely popular with the youth, they influence children’s self images, outlooks on reality and expectations for their futures, especially for young women.