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Comment
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bilbo
Registered User
(1/8/03 1:32:39 pm)
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moral frameworks/motifs,symbols from where...
hello, I'm an art student trying to write a dissertation- please argue with me.
Are fairy tales moral frameworks created by our collective unconcious to help in the search for both a more utopian sosiety and for one's SELF through symbols and motifs from our spiritual inheritance?
Are not the cultures in which these tales have manifested, closer to nature (and therefore to themselves), or at least more spiritual than the modern western world in which the media has taken and abused this communal property to meet its capitalist ends?
Which came first, dream fantasies or folk/fairy tales?
Any reply would be appriciated.
bilbo
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Gregor9
Registered User
(1/8/03 1:42:24 pm)
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Re: moral frameworks/motifs,symbols from where...
The short answers would be:
No, no, and dreams came first.
I'll think on it awhile further though, but someone wiser will no doubt weigh in with specifics in the meantime.
Greg
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Jane
Unregistered User
(1/8/03 3:44:54 pm)
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Yes, yes, and dreams came first
I do not completely agree. In my opinion I would say yes, yes and then for the third question, I agree with Greg's answer that dreams came first.
Jane
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MollyBee
Unregistered User
(1/8/03 5:02:37 pm)
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moral frameworks/motifs, ...
Perhaps one could begin by saying that a fairy/day dream or a sleep dream arises from the unconscious and sets up a tale. Once told and an audience hears a judgement is made. Agreements or otherwise become collective in time carried into the generations ...
so too, then symbols,... yet for each invidividual as we experience life, each has a personal set of symbols that, shall I say, "excite" us: i.e. the merry-go-round, an animal as totem, ... Man has his senses - a pinch hurts, a smell waters the eyes, a sight ... bad. good is delight and the hope for a utopia is there
Closer to the nature ... we too are as creatures of the earth; many love to go the sea (waters), or mountains,
The affinity to relate is there ... we stop to watch ..
Thanks for the opportunity for me to express.
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bilbo
Registered User
(1/9/03 3:38:26 am)
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thankyou
thankyou everyone for replying, this is such a friendly site! I'm still researching and haven't actually started writing yet... why does everything I come up with turn into some search for a better world?(don't answer that) I'm trying to bring it more down to earth.... maybe just: Why fairy tales are good for us, oh but its all to dreamy. I'm sitting on the shoulders of giants here, I'll return when I have the courage to stand.
bilbs
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Rosemary
Lake
Registered User
(1/9/03 10:59:57 am)
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shoulders
I've heard a story about a religious debate. Someone used a myth about the earth resting on a elephant that rests on a turtle. A sceptic asked, "What does the turtle rest on?"
"Young man, it is turtles all the way down."
Grinning, ducking, and jumping off the tip of the iceberg....
Rosemary
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Jane Yolen
Unregistered User
(1/10/03 1:51:02 am)
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Janes
Is there another Jane on the board? I don't remember writing the above note.
Jane Yolen
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Rosemary
Lake
Registered User
(1/11/03 11:39:50 pm)
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fairy tales and moral system
Bilbo,
I looked for an email address for you but couldn't find one. I'm very interested in what moral system, if any, really fits with the fairy tales we know best. There were some relevant posts in the "Why dwarves?" thread.
Rosemary
r@rosemarylake.com
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MollyBee
Unregistered User
(1/16/03 7:28:57 am)
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Fairy tales and Moral system
Man hopes for the best. Living is hard. Sad things happen - destruction of nature through storm - life is consumed by another (i.e. today birds on road-kill) - ... but man hopes and dreams of better as utopian thoughts of a good bright world in contrast to a sad and dark world. It is out darkness comes light as in the moon phases ... the agricultural cycle and celebration.
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Kevin
Smith
Registered User
(1/22/03 10:00:01 am)
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Some arguments
1. Are fairy tales moral frameworks created by our collective unconcious to help in the search for both a more utopian sosiety and for one's SELF through symbols and motifs from our spiritual inheritance?
No. I don't believe there's such thing as a collective unconscious, and find Jung far too 'woolly' in his thinking. Do the tales express unconscious desires? Perhaps, but they do so in a Freudian way: as Fredric Jameson says "history is what hurts". The fairy tales collected by the Grimms for example have a fascination with weaving and spinning wheels, not because weaving is a potent mythical symbol but because it was a chief source of peasant income. So, the story in which a princess gets out of weaving by showing her husband various women disfigured by the task, is an act of wish-fulfilment for the women who are forced to undergo this difficult and boring task.
There is a utopian drive in the fairy tale, but this is a drive created in a particular sociohistoric circumstance, not a result of an eternal drive predicated on some prelapsarian view of society.
2. Are not the cultures in which these tales have manifested, closer to nature (and therefore to themselves), or at least more spiritual than the modern western world in which the media has taken and abused this communal property to meet its capitalist ends?
Perhaps. But you have to remember that fairy tales are not timeless, and change depending on the social formation that they are told in. In the case of the French fairy tale boom of the seventeenth century, claiming the tellers are "closer" to nature is problematic indeed. For this audience, the fairy tale is a fashion, and their fascination with the form is precisely for its artifice. These were not peasants or artisans, but an aristocracy far removed from what we would call nature or the real world in many ways.
As to whether the media has "abused" communal property, there's a curious paradox. There's a long tradition of bowdlerising folk tales to make them more acceptable to the moral climate of the time exemplified in Charles Perrault, and in the infamous editing of Wilhelm Grimm. But, if it were not for these collectors we would not have the tales in a written form. Tales change over time, and were it not for the collectors, whether writing for pecuniary gain or intellectual curiosity, we would have no record of the ways in which tales have changed over time.
3. Which came first, dream fantasies or folk/ fairy tales.
Dreams. This is not to say that dreams are uninfluenced by fairy tales, but i think most cognitive psychologists would tell you that dreams came first.
----
The way your questions are posed suggest you are looking at fairy tales from a Jungian psychoanalytic perspective. I'd suggest reading the following books as an alternative marxist/ historicist view:
Bakhtin, M.M _The Problem of Speech Genres_
Jameson, Fredric _The Political Unconscious_
Ong, Walter _Writing and Technology_
Warner, Marina _From the Beast to the Blonde_ and
_Making Monsters_
Zipes, Jack _The Brothers Grimm_
and _Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion_
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