There Was Once By Margaret Atwood Essay

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 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.

The extent to which the Lais of Marie de France can be categorized as fairy tales is dependent on the definition of “fairy tale.” Using various scholars’ definitions of “fairy tale” and conceptions of the fairy tale genre, criteria for “fairy tales” arises. Then, close-readings of three lais, “Guigemar”, “Lanval” and “Yonec”, are used as a mechanism for meeting or failing the criteria. This methodology is then evaluated and problematized. The criterion for fairy tales includes origin, form, content, style, and meaning. Etymologically, the word ‘fairy tale’ has disputed origins. Supposedly, it comes from the French “contes des fees” or “tales about fairies”, popular in French courts and salons in the seventeenth century. However, Jack Zipes argues that “conte féerique” actually translates to “fairy tales” and refers to narrative form, rather than content.

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

Fairy tales have been told for years and have been adjusted as authors see fit to portray their particular message or create a more applicable story for a new culture or era. At times, these tales remain true to their purpose even when written in different. By specifically evaluating the purpose, moral, and characters within two versions, Brothers Grimm’s titled “Briar Rose” and Charles Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” an understanding of their relevance can be distinguished. These versions of Sleeping beauty act as one of these tales though “many…have done their best to make her story go away” (Tartar). Although written in an earlier era, Brothers Grimm’s “Briar Rose” and Charles Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” work effectively on a modern teenage and young adult audience evident in the similar purpose through their tale’s distinct morals and character portrayal.

"Once upon a time," the most used introduction phrase in common fairy tales used to start an adventure. These adventures have been around for years. The importance of some tales might be more significant than others, also based on culture. My goal for this paper is to educate my readers with the importance of fairy tales, especially for younger children. Fairy tales have been around for centuries from generations to generations. Different cultures, such as the Japanese and Western, have also expressed them differently. All these fairly tales teach children different aspects of life, which make these tales so important.

Fairytales are full of archetypal models of behavior and appearances. The question is who created the feminine figures in fairytales? Who branded the helpless girls or princesses, and the wicked stepmothers and witches? How do these archetypes affect the postmodern woman’s self-image and perception

Neil Gaiman’s Snow, Glass, Apples takes all prior knowledge about what a fairy tale generally consists of and ignores it. Breaking down all barriers of what is considered the typical fairy tale format, Gaiman does not shy away from delving into the taboos of society.

In a society unbridled with double standards and set views about women, one may wonder the origins of such beliefs. It might come as a surprise that these ideals and standards are embedded and have been for centuries in the beloved fairy tales we enjoyed reading as kids. In her analytical essay, “To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tales”, Karen Rowe argues that fairy tales present “cultural norms which exalt passivity, dependency, and self-sacrifice as a female’s cardinal virtues.” Rowe presents an excellent point, which can be supported by versions of the cult classics, “Cinderella” and “Snow White”. Charles Perrault’s “ The Little Glass Slipper” and the Brothers Grimm’s “ Snow White” exemplify the beliefs that

Angela Carter, an English writer, is best known for her feminist rewriting of classical fairy tales. In her stories she prominently uses themes, such as, virginity, the pornographic image, violence and sex, and many others. Degrading someone to the status of a mere object, in other words objectification, is a theme Angela Carter shows in many of her fairy tales, specifically the objectification of women. According to Carter, the objectification and subjugation of women is part of a “latent context” of fairy tales that she expressed simply by virtue of being a woman. Both “The Tiger’s Bride” and “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” are fairy tales intertextually linked with “Beauty and the Beast” and show the reader Carters’ views on femininity. Not

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”.

Since the beginnings of the abridged and ‘sanitized’ versions of classic fairytales were publically circulated, the design and principle intentions of the fairytale have steadily morphed and changed as society similarly paralleled. Over time fairy tales have been transformed radically as they naturally will continue to do according to the age they are rewritten and reproduced.

By reading and analyzing Charles Perrault 's "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood," we can easily use the same tactics to depict Margaret Atwood 's "There Was Once." Both stories show how women even in classical times, were seen as poor, meek and weak and could not survive without a strong male figure to come and rescue them. This is a recurring theme in every major love story, the weak, broken "damsel in distress" who must be "rescued" by a handsome, strong, and powerful male figure, thus creating a hindering mindset towards our girls that they can 't survive in the world without men to save them (Greenwood Encyclopedia 851-852). Therefore, powerful company 's such as Disney have been pushing this untrue agenda on our young boys and girls of the world and creating a faux male dominative society and altering the minds of our female youth and creating a false stigma that happiness and success relies on a man. We also see restriction towards education, sexuality, and even individuality. Issues, that are addressed by "The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales: Q-Z," "The Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature," and "The Hard Facts Of the Grimms ' Fairy Tales."

Nobody made me do the things I did, nobody scolded me, nobody punished me but me. The shrill voices were all inside. Do this, do that, you lazy heap of dirt” (2). Coming from the first passage of Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch sets a revision of popular fairy tales whereas internal voices, seen as personal experience, and their comparison to external voices, seen as societal expectations, create places where these stories change. This shift can be seen as a move away from the original well known story or aspects of that particular story, while also representing a change in the narrator of the story itself.

The innocent and classic fairytales our modern generation use to educate children and have grown to love are derived from stories dating back hundreds of years ago that are truly corrupt and convoluted. Our unexpecting society of media consumers are mainly unaware that the origins of these fairytales are much more than the basic plots and archetypal figurines that we have become so accustomed too. Fairytales can harbor deeper meanings through the author's deliberate word choice and story development to represents issues of social, economic, and cultural importance. The poet Anne Sexton shares her insight into the historical past of women being of weak status and state through her ironic writing style in her poem Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.