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Comment
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Midori
Unregistered User
(5/7/01 9:35:00 am)
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emotional identification
Terri,
I agree completely that it is wonderful to watch the vain and nasty girls get their comp uppence...but I think that is a given from the very beginning of the tale...we know that the virtuous will succeed, that the selfish will get what they deserve. So on one level that message is a well worn path. But I think the appeal in treading it over and over again (especially in the hands of a good story teller, whether its an oral performer or Joss Whedon) has to do with the contrastive emotions evoked by the presence of the bad girl. The good girl alone (a model of behavior) is not very interesting really...especially because I believe in many ways her perfection is out of reach for most of us normal ambiguous types (let's leave hero and heroine tales a little to one side here...I'm focusing more on those purposefully goodchild/bad child narratives). To get only the good girl's tale is instructive I suppose but dull (either that or I am a very naughty child! Which on yet another of those tangents reminds me of the fabulous editor who first published Margaret Weis's "Curious George" books because she wanted books for "naughty children" whom she thought infinately more interesting.) We *need* as an audience the bad girl and the emotional friction between the two tales--it's that emotional rollercoaster which keeps us coming back to the story, whose message we know only too well. Our own lives exist somehwere in the border between the two tales...and we can enjoy, feel the success of the perfect child (we rarely are) and the liberation of the dreadful child doing those things we only wish we were awful enough to enjoy doing. (just think of all those times you have supressed the urge to be horrible to someone...especially if they deserved it...because you knew in the wider picture of things it wasn't quite right, it wasn't principled, it wasn't...well, good.) It's not so much that we identify with the characters, so much as we enjoy the emotional rollercoaster response, experiencing in the tale the conflicts of the self that the stories expose and the story teller shamelessly exploits. But the narrative is a safe place in which to have those feelings....so they can be outrageous, but remain contained.
I also suspect that earlier female characters have quite their share of outrageous and impolite behavior...and get away with it. I'll have to go back through Straparola and the rest to find them...I know there are collections of tales that have wives when hauled into court for their adulterous affairs acquitted because they were able to prove that their husbands were dreadful lovers and it was their right to seek such pleasure somewhere else. Naughty, transgressive behavior regarded as a woman's right! Madonna Santissima! And certainly among the Commedia dell'arte, where many of the scenarios come from Arcadian folk tales, there is the tradition of Columbina, the irrepressible serving girl who sleeps around, is adored, makes fun of men and in general is witty, outrageous, bawdy and very much loved. Which is interesting because the audience as equally loves Isabella, the beautiful and usually very chaste Innamorata. So here we have both good girl and bad girl together...with equal success for all.
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Midori
Unregistered User
(5/7/01 9:50:53 am)
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threats
Luciana,
I don't think that theses tales are so much lessons in manners (or even veiled threats about what will happen to you if you don't comply). I really do think they are hugely fun rather than instructive. But as has been very aptly noted above, I do think that there is a seriousness to the concept of manners in some of the tales, especially when they relate to hero and heroines. There the manners are not only to demonstrate the good and noble character of the hero, but often point to important connections...creative alliances with the natural world, the gathering of powerful forces behind the cause of the hero/ine that suggest their importance. In the final moments of these tales there is often a wonderful image of wholeness, connection to the fantastic/natural world, a reinstated social world (as the hero/heroine ascends into a position of power) and with marriage, a balance between male and female strengths. Good manners, right deeds all along the way insure the arrival to this moment. But in the tales that indulge and enjoy the wonderfully wicked against the perfectly pious, it's always a stalemate...a mirror image of good and bad and they are never resolved. That's why I think its the experience of narrative friction in those irreconcilible tales that we enjoy and makes come back to them.
( and don't think I didn't use a few of those threat-tales to get my kids to go bed early! Shame on me!)
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(5/7/01 12:05:14 pm)
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good girls/bad girls
Heidi and I talk about this in our good girl/bad girl section in MIRROR, MIRROR. There are an enormous number of variants world wide, Terri.
The problem we both see is that the good girl is rewarded in materialistic ways--gold, jewels, marriage to the chief/king/god. And of course that falls down when you think about the real world. As a moral tale, it rattles with insincerity. And as Terri and others points out, the bad girl has all the good lines (and fun) on the way to total destruction.
I think this is why Madonna appealed so much to her audience. "I'm a bad girl and having fun and wearing the great bad costumes and in the end can have the money and baby and handsome husband, too!" Different stories for a new era. Cinderella would definitely dance in her barefeet well past midnight these, days, and hang the sparkly dress.
Jane
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Terri
Unregistered User
(5/8/01 7:39:59 am)
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manners in fairy tales
Midori, Jane, thanks for the thought-provoking posts, which I don't have time to properly comment on this morning! I hereby toss the ball to someone else on this board....
Midori, we definitely have to do a panel on "Trangressors:
Bad Girls in Myth and Fairy Tales" at next Year's Wiscon. Delia
and Heinz will help (I'm remembering Heinz's "Dangerous Women"
article: www.endicott-studio.com/fordangr.html)
-- and perhaps Greg will too, if he's serious about coming next
year.
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(5/8/01 11:14:00 am)
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Wiscon
Alas--was just asked to be GOH at Wiscom and had to decline as it comes right at Scotland time. Otherwise I would insist on being on the panel with the two of you!
Jane
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Terri
Unregistered User
(5/9/01 7:04:41 am)
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Wiscon
Alas indeed! You'd be a perfect Wiscon Guest of Honor, in your multiple roles as fiction writer, poet, editor, anthologist, and folklorist. Perhaps another year, or are you always in Scotland then?
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(5/9/01 2:00:07 pm)
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Scotland
Except for ALA which is usually some time in Jun or July (and I didn't go last year and not going this year) I spend the time in Scotland. I have so little time there as it is. . .
Jane
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Gregor9
Registered User
(5/10/01 12:53:15 pm)
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Bad Girls?
Terri,
I do intend to come next year--it's already in the works, which is to say, my con of choice for next summer.
The topic really appeals, too, as a)the "Bluebeard" book in progress certainly glides around this topic, and b)the book-in-progess that just went to Delia has as its protagonist a female trickster. I definitely want to circle this topic. Let's keep it alive till then.
G
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