Worth of Fairy Tales in Jeanette Winterson's "the Passion"

In the opening, she shares her childhood encounters with women in prose with the children’s rhyme “a little girl who had a curl”. This personal anecdote introduces the topic of the portrayal of women in literature, as well as establishes a connection with her audience.

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 his evaluation of Little Red Riding Hood, Bill Delaney states, “In analyzing a story . . . it is often the most incongruous element that can be the most revealing.” To Delaney, the most revealing element in Little Red Riding Hood is the protagonist’s scarlet cloak. Delaney wonders how a peasant girl could own such a luxurious item. First, he speculates that a “Lady Bountiful” gave her the cloak, which had belonged to her daughter. Later, however, Delaney suggests that the cloak is merely symbolic, perhaps representing a fantasy world in which she lives.

non-fiction. From her wide array of published works this critical analysis will be focused on her

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.

Triumphant reward in spite of unjust punishment is a universal sentiment that transcends languages and cultures. There are thousands of folktales and fairy tales that are firmly rooted in individual cultures, yet the tale of Cinderella has been told through many centuries and throughout the far corners of the world. With thousands of versions of this classic tale in print worldwide, the tale is believed to have originated with the story of Rhodopis, a Greek slave girl who is married to an Egyptian King. The story of Rhodopis, which means rosy-cheeks, dates back to 7 BC and is attributed to a Greek geographer named Strabo. The Chinese variation of this fairy tale is named Yeh-hsien. The Chinese version is traceable to the year 860 and appears in Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang by Duan Chengshi. Yeh-hsien is a young girl, motherless and in the control of her stepmother, who befriends a treasured fish. The jealous step-mother kills the fish, but it’s bones provide Yeh-hsien with magical powers, eventually enabling Yeh-hsien to escape the control of her step-mother for a royal life. The Story of the Black Cow which is found within the pages of Folk Tales from the Himalayas by John Murray, published in 1906, the child who is mistreated by a stepmother is a male and the role of savior is portrayed by a snake, with a cow serving as the moral of the story, faithfulness. These two versions of Cinderella carry many common threads that are

Does deviating from one’s gender norms inevitably doom one down a spiral of moral corruption? Tim O'Brien, author of “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” and Ernest Hemingway, author of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, certainly seem to hold this view, as evident by the fates of the major female characters in their respective works. The deviance of the major female characters in both works appears to corrupt not only themselves, but also pollute their partners, causing them to suffer injury or harm as a result. The degree of injury ranges from negligible, like Fossie’s demotion and broken heart, to fatal, like the bullet that rips through Macomber’s skull. It begs the question, are these stories meant to serve as cautionary tales for their female readers, or possibly for their husbands, so they may recognize gender deviance and stop it in its tracks before their wives transform into Margot Macomber or Mary Anne Bell? This essay will analyze what such characters say about pervading views of women, both in society and in literature.

In Hopkinson's story, experience is central as it leads to potential complications the grandmother tries to avoid for her granddaughter by telling her personal story. The mother opposes her mother's urges for protection and tells her it is not necessary to frighten her daughter because “girlie's too young yet, there's plenty of time.” (2). The mother sees her mother's personal story as a “ghastly old wi[fe's] tale[s].” (1-2) therefore there is no rush to inform her child on dangers, but also because she believes her girl is too young. This opposition between both characters links to a broader opposition between two different ways to report events: on the one hand this story could be based on realistic facts when on the other hand it contains allegories and a moral which are features of fairy tales. This text mixes both types which revels Hopkinson's style, designated by herself in a 1999 interview with Gregory E. Rutledge, as "speculative fiction” and defined by Jewelle Gomez in her article “Speculative Fiction and Black Lesbians”: “I conflate the terms science fiction and fantasy fiction under this rubric [Speculative Fiction] because each in its own way addresses human concern with the future, with magic, and with the preternatural.” (949). The story borrows its

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.

Woolf demonstrates how women writers have often failed in this because of our frustration and bitterness with a world that presented to us and our writing not welcome, or even indifference, but hostility (41). She makes it clear that if there is ever going to be a “Shakespeare’s sister,” we must---at least while we are writing---swallow that sense of having been wronged, for it stands as an impediment to our creativity. This is the mental freedom that women writers must attain.

Fairy tales have always been focused towards children ever since Walt Disney took over the industry of remaking these stories. He took out all of the gore and some of the violence to make it more acceptable for children. With Anne Sexton's version of Cinderella, she brings back the gore and violence to its full capacity just like with the original Brothers Grimm story. Sexton's poetic version of Cinderella gives a humorous and eye-opened twist to this classic fairy tale. What brings all of these stories together is the way they all socialize women to make them naive. With this in mind, fairy tales do humiliate and objectify women to get them to accept violence within society.

One of the most influential writers Adrienne Rich once said, “She is afraid that her own truths are not good enough.” Adrienne Rich talks about women’s role and issues in her essay called “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”. She describes how women during the 1977 lied about everything. They lied about their appearance, their job, their happiness, and even about their relationship. Adrienne Rich is one of the most powerful writers, who identifies herself as lesbian feminists. Her work has been acknowledged and appreciated mainly in her poems. Throughout her decades of work as a writer-activist, Rich uses essays, speeches, and conference papers, magazine, articles book reviews, and personal reflection to articulate with

The unique style of Kate Chopin’s writing has influenced and paved the way for many female authors. Although not verbally, Kate Chopin aired political and social issues affecting women and challenging the validity of such restrictions through fiction. Kate Chopin, a feminist in her time, prevailed against the notion that a woman’s purpose was to only be a housewife and nothing more. Kate Chopin fortified the importance of women empowerment, self-expression, self-assertion, and female sexuality through creativity in her literary work.

This powerful statement from Hillary Clinton underpins the injustices of female representation in the past. This silence is evident in the Bible verse, ‘Let your women keep silent in the churches,’ (I Corinthians 14: 34-37) and Virginia Woolf’s concept that “Anon … was often a woman [who could not otherwise get the respect of male counterparts].” (Virginia Woolf, 1928, A Room of One’s Own. PAGE). These are only two examples of how females have been largely disempowered by the male constraints of literature. In recent history feminists have deemed it necessary to research the lost and forgotten females and retell history from a distinctly female perspective. This issue is of significant concern to Carol Ann Duffy, the current Poet Laureate. Duffy subverts fairytales, myths and historical stories to empower women, giving them a voice and allowing their stories to be heard. This essay will argue that Carol Ann Duffy presents a feminist perspective in the poem ‘Little Red Cap’.

Many female writers see themselves as advocates for other creative females to help find their voice as a woman. Although this may be true, writer Virginia Woolf made her life mission to help women find their voice as a writer, no gender attached. She believed women had the creativity and power to write, not better than men, but as equals. Yet throughout history, women have been neglected in a sense, and Woolf attempted to find them. In her essay, A Room of One’s Own, she focuses on what is meant by connecting the terms, women and fiction. Woolf divided this thought into three categories: what women are like throughout history, women and the fiction they write, and women and the fiction written about them. When one thinks of women and