If one were to be asked about the backbone of fairy tales, an answer would likely include true love. Regardless of the origin, tales from across the world reflect instances of enamorment and devotion, with most providing numerous examples of the bond between family and the lust shared by lovers. In many cases, endearment is the driving force for the actions of protagonists: princes search for their one true love, brothers protect their sisters, and parents dote on their children. While “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” aims to support the idea that love and passion are everlasting, it instead imparts the idea that love is a variable entity and not always as transparent as it seems.
“The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” begins by introducing a king and queen who finally produced an heir after a long struggle. Desiring blessings for their daughter, the monarchs invited all the kingdom fairies to her christening and prepared a magnificent feast with ornate gifts for each fairy. However, a fairy they had deemed missing appeared, and despite the king’s best efforts, felt unwelcome. While the others blessed the princess, the offended sprite cursed the child to die at the prick of a spindle. One fairy was able to alter the spell to make the princess sleep for one hundred years in lieu of death. The sovereigns then banned spindles from the kingdom. Sixteen years later, the royal family vacationed at a country palace, where one matron was unaware of the spindle ban. Upon her
In the article, Feminism and Fairy Tales, Karen Rowe focuses on the impact that fairy tales have on relationships and expectations for women today. One may wonder why it is love that is so prominent in fairy tales, rather than something else. However, Rowe provides the answer in her writing by saying, “…marriage is an estate long sanctioned by culture and theoretically attainable by all women” (356). Rowe suggests that many women dream of some day meeting their own Prince Charming and essentially writing their own fairy tale. Where, in order to do so, fairy tales have led them to believe that there is such thing as a perfect love, that marriage saves a woman from the harsh realities in life, and that life only truly begins with marriage.
“Shrek!” involves an ugly and repulsive creature, named Shrek, who meets a witch that tells him of an ugly princess that he decides to search for. Along his journey, Shrek encounters other creatures on his way to the castle of the ugly princess. Shrek finds his way to this ugly princess, marries her, and they both live on together spreading fear wherever they go (Steig). In Charles Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” the king and queen’s daughter is cursed to fall into a deep sleep when she pierces her finger on a spindle. This comes to pass and the princess along with the rest of those in the castle fall into a deep sleep until a prince comes and awakens her. He marries her, they have children, and they go back to his kingdom where the prince’s ogress mother attempts to eat Sleeping Beauty and her children but is saved by a servant and the prince (Perrault). In the DreamWorks production, Shrek, the ogre, Shrek, has his land overtaken pushing him to see Lord Farquaad who directs him to find him Princess Fiona for him to marry. Along with his new companion, Donkey, Shrek goes on a journey to rescue Fiona from her tower and bring her back to Lord Farquaad so that he may marry her to make himself king. Shrek intervenes rescuing her from Lord
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 Tatar’s article, An Introduction to Fairy Tales, she draws us in by describing childhood books as “sacred objects.” She takes a quote from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. describing how the stories give lessons about what a child subconsciously knows - “that human nature is not innately good, that conflict is real, that life is harsh before it is happy - and thereby reassure them about their own fears and their own sense of self,” (Tatar 306). She describes how many adults long for the simplicity of enjoying those stories in their childhoods, only to realize that they outgrew them, and instead have been introduced to reality. The original stories were more for adults rather than for children. Nowadays, stories have been adapted to be more suitable for children. Fairy tales may allow a kid to wonder due to their charm, but they also can
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.
In The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood by Charles Perrault, the message is quite different. This version is gruesome and should not be watched by children. This version of the tale could be viewed that killing is okay if a person does not like someone or is jealous of something that person has. Cannibalism and killing are the two main themes in this version of Sleeping Beauty. It is clear that that this fairytale was made for people who enjoy reading gruesome stories.
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
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
Today's culture is one dominated by the media. People, especially young, impressionable females, are bombarded with images of “beautiful” and “desirable” women; these “sexy” women are lacking modest clothing, wearing copious amounts of make up, and are content to be viewed as objects, particularly by members of the opposite gender. In a society where the vision of true beauty has been distorted to such an extreme, fairytales serve as a reminder of the value of a beautiful
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 love story is one of the oldest and most cherished traditions in any world culture. The prevalence of romantic works throughout history, whether Greek myths, Jane Austen’s dramatic narratives, or today’s dime-a-dozen romantic novels, ultimately encourages us to believe in the power of true love. We identify with the archetypal star-crossed lovers, who combat established convention in order to assert their romance, because we too yearn for our own “happily-ever-afters.” When used in conjunction with reason, love is the highest form of compassion – without it, we could not possibly interact productively with one another or develop as individuals. But when we take a new perspective and examine love as an independent,
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.
The consanguinity is finally seen in the theme of the fairytales is the consistent ideology of how girls must change almost everything in order to find true love. One must finally ask themselves if finding true love is worth giving up yourself, family and your identity in order to have a chance at true love.
Basile’s Sun, Moon, and Talia starts with the king asking the wise men what will happen to his daughter. They say Talia will be hurt by a splinter of flax. Eventually a splinter of hemp went into her finger, and she died. The king was so devastated, he kept her on a chair in the palace. Another king was hunting with his falcon, and the falcon entered the window of the castle. The other king that visited sleeping beauty could have found her unconscious body sexually irresistible. He then raped her dead body, and impregnated her (Bettelheim 227).
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.