|
Author
|
Comment
|
Cliff
at USC
Registered User
(4/14/06 8:23 pm)
|
Gender Message in Fairy Tales with Contemporary Significance
Hi, I hope somebody can help me with this. I am in a writing class connected with a gender class. Our latest writing assignment is to analyze a fairy tale and identify the most signficant gender message expressed, and why it is important. It should also have contemporary significance. Before my teacher said it had to have contemporary significance, I cam up with the idea analyze three different interpretations of Sleeping Beauty from different eras, and show how each interpretation expressed a slightly different gender message, and how the different gender message reflected different gender ideals of each era and society. When my teacher explained that this needed to have some sort of contemporary significance, I came to a loss as exactly how to do this with the same sort of idea. Does anybody have any ideas or think they could help out? Thank you very much
|
kristiw
Unregistered User
(4/14/06 9:34 pm)
|
book suggestion
I've been doing something related to this recently, and I think you might want to look at Alessandro Levorato's book, Language and Gender in the Fairy Tale Tradition. She does a close linguistic breakdown of literary retellings of Little Red Riding Hood, looking at nine different versions from The Story of Grandmother to Roald Dahl, in their historical context. Of course, that's if you're dealing with written texts. My own work was with individual retellings, and how oral reproductions of stories reflected personal and cultural backgrounds-- but maybe that's more ethnographic an angle than you want to take?
I actually think it would be easier to do three different interpretations of a fairy tale within the same, contemporary context than in different eras-- that way you could talk about complicated gender messages. I'm wary of saying that there is a single "most significant gender message" for any particular time period.
|
Writerpatrick
Registered User
(4/15/06 8:13 am)
|
Re: book suggestion
Fairytales weren't written yesterday. Gender roles have changed a lot since the stories were written, so it would be difficult to find any true contemporary significance in the originals. Retellings might have some insight.
|
evil little pixie
Registered User
(4/15/06 9:40 am)
|
Re: Gender Message in Fairy Tales with Contemporary Signific
If you haven't already found it, this page has some good info:
www.surlalunefairytales.c...tales.html
Good luck!
|
kristiw
Unregistered User
(4/15/06 11:30 am)
|
original?
Question for Writerpatrick: what do you mean by "originals"? All the written versions of oral stories we have reflect the time they were written in, but other than literary fairy tales like Hans Christian Anderson's or (some of) the French salon writers', anything written down is at least one step away from any original oral version... and there's no such thing as an original oral version since it changes every time it gets told. I don't think you can talk about folktales as if they were immaculate primary texts that have been progressively corrupted; the beauty of it is that there is no static story but a fluid text being constantly renewed.
|
Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(4/15/06 12:01 pm)
|
significance
Fairy tales continue to have contemporary significance in earlier forms not because of when they were written down or created, but because of when they are read, and the Grimms' versions of fairy tales continue to be read today--many, if not most, of the picture-books in children's libraries and bookstores are based on Grimm fairy tales or are even directly translated.
|
AliceCEB
Registered User
(4/16/06 6:39 pm)
|
Re: significance
Taking what Veronica said, what do you think of doing the analyses you had contemplated of the three versions, distilling the gender message of each, and then figuring out from each of these messages their contemporary significance? The contemporary significance may be negative, but it still has a significance.
Best,
Alice
|
MaireSmith
Registered User
(4/16/06 11:34 pm)
|
Re: Gender Message in Fairy Tales with Contemporary Signific
I think your idea of doing a comparative analysis of three versions of Sleeping Beauty is a great idea (I'd probably use the picture series by Burne-Jones, Sherri S Tepper's 'Beauty', and Jay Williams' one in 'The Practical Princess and other liberating fairy tales', which has a rather lovely sleeping prince).
One of the things you could focus on, if you're concerned about what the tutor will think, is the way retellings of stories virtually always have contemporary significance.
Burne-Jones's can be seen as a rebellion against the industrial revolution.
Williams' is more than simply a rebellion against traditional gender roles; it could easily be used to look at the popularity of self-referential art and the growth of self-consciousness in our society.
Tepper's is full of ecological messages. Not hard to see contemporary significance there, really. It would be really cool to look also at her approach to feminism and compare it with Williams'.
__
Maire Smith |
