FAIRY TALES

Past, present and future

Source

This presentation has been adapted from the following essay:

Patricia Duncker, ‘Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter’s Bloody Chambers’, Literature and History 10 (1984) 3-14

Do you agree?

Human unconscious is not a treasure vault containing visionaryrevelations about ourselves. It is rather the cesspool of our fearsand desires, filled with the common patterns that are also the

projections of the ways in which we have been taught to perceive the world. And the deep structure of those patterns will reflect the political, social and psychological realities within which we

exist as best as we can. The unconscious mirrors these changing realities. Nothing else. And the fairy tales, the received collective wisdom of the past have been and still are used as the textbooks

through which those lessons are learned. - Patricia Dunker, 1982.

Questions ….

What are the key texts read or viewed in childhood that have laid the bricks of your inner worlds, your unconscious?

To what extent have you been able to question the political, social and psychological realities represented in the world of these texts?

Folk / Fairy tale

The Fairy (more properly folk) tale, according to Duncker, was the narrative art of the people, and was communally owned.

It has been appropriated by the ruling class at a specific point in history, transformed, rewritten, possessed.

The Fairytales became children’s literature at a particular moment in the history of their transmission. Originally they were nothing of the kind.

Past - What is the origin of the words, fairy tales?

The German term Marchen – fairytale- comes from the Old high German word, Mari, or Gothic mers, Middle High german Mare – which means news or gossip.

The term Volksmarchen, or folktale, acknowledges the people – das Volk – as its rightful owners.

The term fairy tale comes from the French conte de fees, most probably derived from the Countess d’Aulnoy’s collection, Contes de Fees (1698), translated into English in the following year as Tales of the Fairys.

Present - Fairy tales are…

The term Fairy tales is now used to describe both the orally transmitted folktales

and the literary productions of

bourgeois and aristocratic writers of the late 17th and 18th century.

Past - Fairy tales - The rise of the bourgeoisie and the invention of childhood.

The classical notion of education and of childhood as a time of preparation and initiation into the adult world was not generally held during the Middle Ages. It apparently started with the rise of the bourgeoisie.

Our world is obsessed by the physical, moral, and sexual problems of childhood. This preoccupation was unknown to medieval civilization, because there was no problem for the Middle Ages: as soon as the child had been weaned, or soon after, the child became the natural companion of the adult.

- Philip Aries, Centuries of Childhood, 1960.Q. How does this approach to the child s education and

learning differ from the approach to learning today?

Past - Renaissance

During the Renaissance: new emphasis on education for the middle and upper

classes. the reinforcement of patriarchy under Protestantism

endorsed a more rigid hierarchy within the family and the state.

Fairy tales were absorbed into the structure of educational propaganda for children.

It was a means of harnessing and containing the radical current of popular culture of the lower classes.

Q. Postmodernism prides itself in representing

low culture. What are the positives and negatives of this practice?

Past – Folktales to fairy tales

The original folktales were a collective enterprise produce by both audience and narrator, which articulated the aspirations and desires of the people and their fight against social injustice.

The world of these tales reflects the solid walls of feudalism; it is ruled by kings and queens, bound by fixed class hierarchies, filled with peasants, soldiers, dragons and magic.

It is a primarily rural order, there are no signs of industrialization.

The trades are traditional weavers, spinners, millers, merchants.

And the tales stress inequalities in superlative terms; the kings are always the wealthiest and most powerful in the world, the poor shepards and peasants the most helpless, destitute and underpriviliged mass nature ever suffered to survive upon the earth.

Past – Folktales to fairy tales While the hierarchical structures of

power, status, class, social and financial inequalities could not be overcome in REALITY, it is in the unstable world of Fairyland that it a reversal of situation is achieved through MAGIC.

Cinderella becomes a princess The frog becomes the prince.

Past - Folktales to fairy tales

Fairytales therefore deal in transformations which:

o subvert the apparently unalterable social realities

o magic translates, fragments, invertso the lower classes are upwardly mobileo official morality is calmly set aside o cunning and deception pay off (Puss-in-

Boots)

Present - Folktales in FairytalesThe folktales live in fairytales and continue

to mirror the times which produced them. Stepmothers were common in a time

period where lives were short and many women died during childbirth

Marriage at puberty was also common Wells were the centre of village life.

Fairytales – Perrault, d’Aulnoy & Grimm

Charles Perrault, Countess d’Aulnoy and Brothers

Grimm are writers of the large collection of Fairytales who wrote in the last years of the 17th century and who borrowed their stories from folklore and rewrote them exclusively for children.

From the 17th century onwards, fairytales which were, as folktales, a literature of protest for adults became a property of childhood.

Purpose of the Fairytale

Fairytales as educational literature for children became an opportunity to serve many purposes: They were the parables of wisdom and

experience passed on from adults to children. The transition from adolescence through puberty

to adulthood was brutally taught through these fairytales in which inequalities are painted unambiguously in the characters of excess.

The sexual symbolism (big bad wolf; red hood) was implicitly embedded in the tales and remained a mystery to children

What are Fairy Tales? What do you think?

Are Fairytales parables handed out to children as working tools, ways of dealing with the world rather or are they weapons of understanding and change?

Are fairytales about power and the struggle for possession, by fair or magical means, of kingdoms, goods, children, money, land, and-naturally, specifically, - the possession of women?

Questions to ask about representation of gender when studying fairytales and their film adaptations?

What are the representational limits that are put into place within a Fairytale?

What conventional binary oppositions are represented? How is feminine desire represented? How are the dangers

/fears of feminine desire represented? What are the proposed solutions in the fairytale and the film? Are they the same? Why /not?

What assumptions are being made about growing up for girls and boys?

What support structures are there for young girls? If characters are drawn as extremes or in black and white,

evaluate the strength/weakness of the good/bad man/woman? What conclusion can you draw about the power of the good woman vs the power of the good man?

Questions about class…

What rigid hierarchies of class are obvious in the fairytale and film?

What magic is employed to subvert or invert these hierarchies?

How does the film’s mise-en-scene depict these extremes of class .e.g. rich vs poor, king vs commoner?

Identify the virtues/vices that become a means to become rich and powerful? E.g beauty/ brains/ cunning/ magic etc.

Questions about adult/child relationship?

What are the relations between adults and children based on in the fairytale and film? Obedience? Trust? Fear? Love? Support? Confidence? Exploitation?

What attitudes are held regarding the education of children ? How do kids learn?

How are these relationships similar to or different from the fairytale?

How is the real conflict between families, men and women, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons represented?

Questions to ask about ideology…

What is the dominant ideology about children that underlies the fairytale and how is this ideology similar to/different from the ideology about children in the film?

What realistic/ idealistic notions about the simple, rustic and rural lifestyle of the common man are endorsed/ rejected in the fairytale and the film?

In what ways has the postmodern consumer ideology of desire and ownership influenced the mise-en-scene of the film?

Your task… due Thursday 11/4/13

Compose an IMAGE which successfully conveys your visual response and viewpoint of fairytales after reviewing your fairytale and film adaptation-

A few examples are given ahead….