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Author
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Comment
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jess63
Registered User
(1/12/04 11:57 am)
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Re: Darwin's Origin of the Species
Thanks, Sarah! I guess I was off by about 20 years on the theory, but I am pretty sure that the Darwin was on the Beagle in the mid-1830's. Still, HCA would not have known about that; according to Heidi's annotation, which I know was not as off-the-cuff and as from memory as my comment about Darwin, "The Little Mermaid" was first published in 1837. Does anyone know about debates of that time about "animal souls?"
It is clear that HCA was trying to differentiate between near-men
and true men. I had to laugh at your last comment.
Jess
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Nalo
Registered User
(1/12/04 5:45 pm)
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Re: No Ordinary Love
It might rhyme, but it's still grammatically wrong. It bugs me, cause I have to correct it way too often from my students. Doesn't help if they hear it on an album they've just bought and so quite reasonably think it's correct. Where was her copy editor?
-nalo
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AliceB
Registered User
(1/13/04 8:39 am)
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Don't discard Darwin yet
Although The Origin of the Species was first published in 1859, many of the ideas regarding evolution were being discussed well before then -- before even his travels on the Beagle. Darwin pulled them together and made sense of them, brilliantly, but his theories weren't out of whole cloth. It is quite possible that HCA heard various conjectures of the sort. Whether it influenced him in writing The Little Mermaid, however, I don't know.
Alice
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Nalo
Registered User
(1/19/04 10:23 am)
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Re: Little mermaid and Feminism
We stand in very different places, then. I don't feel excessively strong; not quite sure, given what I have to do to survive in this world, what "excessively" strong would be. And from my vantage point--writing letters to try to save Amina Lawal's life; being stuck on the third plane in a row beside an older male-female couple where the man spent the whole trip verbally abusing his wife; watching my male friends ignore their health and their emotions because it isn't 'manly' to take care of yourself--the world around me is sure as hell not post-feminist, but still very much in need of feminist/humanist thinking and some serious systemic changes in how we treat and view women, men, and everyone in between. So no, it's not at all obvious to me that we're in a "post-feminist" age of "excessively" strong women.
And I can and do still enjoy Hans Christian Andersen's work, as much for his skill as a writer as for the enjoyment I get from critiquing his writing with folks who like to do that kind of thing. Even a critique that perhaps stretches its point too thinly can be an intriguing one.
I have a post on my blog about an argument I used to get into with a lover, particularly when we watched movies together. I would want to talk about the film, to make observations that were often in relation to how the film treated gender, race, sexuality. He would complain that I didn't know how to enjoy the experience, which I found pretty presumptuous, because that _was_ how I enjoyed it; by responding to it. Art evokes a response, else why bother making any? Sometimes we're moved to uncritically let the experience wash over us, and sometimes we're moved to analyze. Sometimes we can work from a doubled consciousness a la Dubois and do both simultaneously. On a forum like this, I'm interested in hearing all the different types of responses there can be, through all the different filters that people in this group are likely to apply, to this literature we all love.
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AlisonPegg
Registered User
(1/19/04 1:06 pm)
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Different places?
Well... strong is good and I 100% applaud strong women. What concerns me though is balance and fairness to all. I like men after all...!! And I don't think you'd disagree with me on that. But all around me I see a very significant change going on. It's the girls who are doing better at school, the female students who are getting the best degrees and then moving swiftly into the better paid jobs. Where does that leave the young men? Looking around at the sons of my friends, none are married and none have children. At the same age practically all my generation had settled down. I think we are moving into the generation of women who will see few if any grandchildren. And look at the suicide rates in young men! That is not a pretty statistic. I am certainly not advocating a move backwards. Far from it. But I think we need to be aware of the imbalances we are creating.
Refreshing to see a film like "Master and Commander" where even boys are seen behaving like real men for once. Significant maybe of a need for change.
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AliceB
Registered User
(1/20/04 8:21 am)
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Re: Different places?
Hmm... Why is it that men need to be manly and women womanly? I don't think that gender stereotypes are correlated to birth rates -- just to gender stereotypes. Birth rates tend to drop with wealth, not a rise in power by women.
I think a study of fairy tales based on the depiction of gender roles is fascinating. Did HCA mean that all women should be submissive, or quiet, or whatever, I really believe is beside the point. Every tale is told in the context of the society in which it was created. An analysis of The Brady Bunch tells you a great deal about what society thought of family roles in the 1970s. A study of the gender roles in The Little Mermaid tells us something about the role of women in HCA's society. I don't view that as negative, or positive, but rather as instructive. It will not detract from the power of the tale.
All the best,
Alice
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jess63
Registered User
(1/20/04 11:56 am)
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Feminism, HCA, and today
Hmm. While I don't consider myself a "feminist" per se, I guess I am not sure what that really means, I do consider that intelligent woman have, and have always had, a need to be an equal partner in a family's intellectual, economic, physical and emotional pursuits. When I look at the roots of the so-called "feminist movement", it seems to indicate the same thing, see e.g. Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique."
So what does this have to do with HCA? Well, at one time only the very uppermost classes had leisure time of any sort, and, as pointed out in an earlier thread, women had the satisfaction of contributing to the family through house trades (there is a term for this, but I cannot think of it right off) - baking, weaving, midwifery, etc. But during the intervening generations, a middle-class arose which in theory would enable intellectual women to pursue more professional pursuits, or become completely domestic depending upon the woman and the society's expectations. Much of this change was occuring during the lifetime of HCA. Think of HCA's contemporaries; I could list many women in many areas that were not upper class, but middle class, that contributed to society in some great manner during his lifetime - something that was almost unheard of a generation or two earlier. Women too were the intellectual partners (if not the economic partners) of their husbands. True some women are still brow-beaten, but I think there have always been strong women and weak women - just as there have always been strong men and weak men. True feminism, I think, is the recognition of this and generation of an expectation of equality of opportunity in all things, including raising children, education, voting rights, household decisions, as well as career decisions.
Middle to upper class women during HCA's period were not neccesarily "silent partners" even if they were not recognized officially as holding a career. They often interceded on their husband's behalfs, were advisors to their spouse and often then indirectly to his colleagues, created and ran charitable organizations (those that now hire a "professional staff"), etc. Intellectual women who were not given adequate opportunity to pursue their interests suffered the same boredom and dissatisfaction that was apparent in the interviews that led to "The Feminine Mystique". (see "Madame Bovary" while written by a man, I cannot help but feel that it was representative of the lives of some women during the 1830's or for a later similar expose of discontent see "The Awakening") .
Where am I going with all of this? I guess my point is that we should not assume that women of HCA's period were all wilting violets, content to be submissive to the whims of a male-dominated society. HCA, himself, was taken with a career woman at one time, and his "The Red Shoes" has been suggested to be his "revenge" against not accepting his attention (see also "Symphonie Fantastique" by Berlioz for a similar reaction).
Boy, did I ramble here. I hope you got something out of this.
Jess
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Bielie
Unregistered User
(1/22/04 9:41 pm)
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Feminism and the Flintstones
Hi again.
I think the point that literature reflects the culture of the time is well taken.
What does "The Flintstones" say about recent American culture? I cringe everytime my children watch Fred putting Wilma in her place (in the kitchen) on Cartoon network.
Or is my feministic soul a bit oversensitive?
Bielie
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RymRytr1
Registered User
(1/23/04 10:24 am)
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Re: Feminism and the Flintstones
I only have 10 minutes until the bell rings here, so I'll ramble
a bit too.
If you are a evolutionist, consider the "Flintstones" and the natural development of women's role. Someone had to go out of the cave and try to kill something, or fight off other predators to get at the remains of what was just killed by one of them.
Someone had to leave the cave and run after some creatures, running them "to earth", over long and exausting distances.
Someone had to die and not be absolutely essential to the continuation of the species.
This fell to the male. A female, breastfeeding a small child, and pregnant with the next was physically unable to become the more muscular of the species. It was the "natural selection" for the female role then, to stay in the cave and do those things which did not require constant abrasion with danger.
Yes, I admit there was the occasion... however, this is an over-all, generalization.
The male then, became the more-physically-fit. The stronger of these over came the weaker, to dominate both the animal life and the human kin.
If you can imagine the exhilaration and adrenalin rush of you and 3 or 4 others, killing something as small as a Bison, let alone a Mastodon, you would then "feel" the pride that over-developed into the "male chauvinism" you are battling today.
Times have changed - drastically. Women do not have it any where near as bad as it used to be, here in the US, Canada, England, ???. There are still places on this planet where men preform "gasoline divorces"; girl babies are killed; young girls are sold to slavers for money to keep the family alive; women are kept in slave-factories to produce the goods we all buy, etc.
We should all count our blessings as to the ease with which we live!
Not even a hundred years ago, life here in the U.S. was difficult
for both male and female. Try reading "The Virginia House-Wife"
by Mary Randolph, to see why your Great Grandmother did, just to
get a meal on the table. It's a real eye-opener!
Rym Rytr
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AliceB
Registered User
(1/23/04 11:00 am)
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Re: Feminism and the Flintstones
Rym Rytr, you're a hoot! So what does it tell us that male lions are much bigger and stronger than females, yet it's the females that do all the hunting?
Alice
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AlisonPegg
Registered User
(1/23/04 1:21 pm)
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The 27 faces of men....!!
A little light relief after all this academic talk.....
news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=85542004
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janeyolen
Registered User
(1/28/04 6:29 am)
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Re: The 27 faces of men....!!
Well, he may be a "gender expert" but he sure knows nothing about folklore if he thinks the Grimms invented Sneezy, Sleepy, Dopey, Doc et al.
Geeze...
Jane
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Nalo
Registered User
(1/28/04 6:38 am)
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Re: Different places?
Err...women still make 74 cents to every dollar men make.
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jess63
Registered User
(1/28/04 9:18 am)
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Re: Different places?
Nalo,
Amazing, isn't it?!. Especially when one considers that the "disparity in wages" figure is usually adjusted for time women spend away from a career child raising - the usual excuse given by men - as if the skills honed during that time have no economic value.
Jess
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Niniane
Sunyata
Registered User
(3/29/04 12:07 pm)
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Sedna and seafoam
I *am* jumping into this thread a little late, but with all the
latest talk about Sedna in the astronomy news, I have been remembering
the Inuit
myth. Bits of pieces of Sedna falls into the sea, and
she eventually becomes Goddess of the Sea, but she was a bit of
a victim in that tale before she err... became one with the sea.
Interesting parallels with the Little Mermaid there. I've always
been fascinated with "what might have happened if she actually
got turned into seafoam", as opposed to what happened in both
the original story and in the Disney version.
(extra thoughts responsible for the "edit" tag)
I'm just interested that HCA chose to depict the feminine as connected to water, then makes the "fate worst than death" scenario = "becoming one with the water", and then, when she makes the ultimate sacrifice, she gets "saved" and becomes a wind (air?) spirit instead. In the words of Tori Amos
"I guess I'm an underwater thing
So I guess I can't take it personally"
Beg your pardons for this rambling digression, I've been wanting to jump into this topic for awhile but kept getting distracted. It's a great discussion!
Anita Harris.
Terra Mythogene
www.mythopoetica.com
Edited by: Niniane Sunyata at: 3/29/04 12:24 pm
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aj
Unregistered User
(3/30/04 3:40 pm)
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little mermaid tales
you should try reading "Undine" by Fouque or "Pack of Lies" (the author escapes me but you can find it inf the collection The Queen's Mirror)
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