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Author
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Comment
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Martina
Unregistered User
(2/4/06 12:02 pm)
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Mother/Daughter/Disability
I am looking for a fairytale or greek myth to use as structure for a modern story. I'd like to fit in as many elements as possible, but I'm having trouble coming up with the right story.
I'm looking for a tale of a mother trying to pigeon-hole her daughter and make her what she is not. The mother can have good or bad intentions, but ideally her goals would be oriented towards her daughter's beauty.
Then something happens to the daughter, she is deformed, and rebels against her mother's plans. Moral should be something about Daughter realizing self is more than just beauty, and mother should realize she can't live through her daughter, has to face self.
I know these goals are SO specific, but like I said, the fairytale doesn't have to fit all of these elements. I was thinking Rapunzel could work, but with the witch being the mother-figure who traps her beautiful daughter in the tower. The tower would be like her deformity, and it would be about the daughter being lonely, bound by a chastity belt, etc... But this story isn't ideal, and I don't like the fact that she's rescued by the prince...
I've scanned some (not all) of the archives for ideas, but have come up short.
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(2/4/06 1:13 pm)
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Re: misc
Rapunzel isn't really rescued by the prince, though--as princes go, he's pretty ineffectual, what with the knocking her up and not rescuing her and jumping off the tower and wandering blinded through the wilderness.
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Martina
Unregistered User
(2/4/06 2:01 pm)
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Girls with Disabilities, and proud of it...
Veronica, good point... I need to read different versions of Rapunzel, because I would like to find one with a more pathetic Prince.
Adding on to my first post, I've read in several other topic/postings about stories dealing with Disabilities... yet I am having trouble finding a tale of a Woman/Girl with a disability who is the Protagonist, who KEEPS the disability at the end, makes the most of it, accepts it, etc. The only thing that comes to mind would be Shrek, and Princess Fiona's journey, but I'd like to find something that is more classic. Though maybe there isn't anything?
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neverossa
Registered User
(2/4/06 7:46 pm)
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disabilities
In fairy tales generally you find a ritual aspect that deals with the social embodiment of the character, more than with his/her own personal and spiritual development.
Fairy tales reflect something universal but were not created in modern time... thats' should be remembered.
People of different times think differently.
Recovering from disabilities in fairy tales correspond to the entering in a social order, to a social recognition of the self. Think of THE GIRL WITHOUT HANDS. She has a pure soul, but she's doomed to a tragic hidden life. Her hands grow again (really or symbolically) in the moment in which she enters again a human society. I've said elsewhere that a disability indicates a supernatural or abnormal status in fairy tales. So... going beyond it, is becoming human again.
Anyway for your story I can think of a Greek myth, involving a mother and a daughter, that of Proserpine.
The story is famous. Proserpine has no apparent deformity, but anyway she goes to live in the underworld, she's "half dead, half alive". And her mother at last has to accept this. That her own daughter has grown in something different from her. That (recalling all the vegetation stuff that is linked to the myth) to be glorious and beautiful during spring and summer times, she has to cross all the world of soil, seeds, corpses and darkness.
Hope to have been of some help!
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KathieRose
Unregistered User
(2/4/06 8:43 pm)
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Mothers. daughters. disability
<<<Anyway for your story I can think of a Greek myth, involving a mother and a daughter, that of Proserpine.
The story is famous. Proserpine has no apparent deformity, but anyway she goes to live in the underworld, she's "half dead, half alive". And her mother at last has to accept this.>>>
The myth is much more complex than this. It's the mother, Demeter, whose outrage at her daughter's abduction [Persephone/Prosperine does not go willingly to the underworld, despite modern revisionings of this myth] who stages a protest against the gods and withdraws her gift of grain from human beings and forces Zeus to bring Persephone back. On the other hand. Persephone comes back changed-- she is now Queen of the Dead and, because she willingly or unwillingly [depending on which version of the myth you read] ate several pomegranate seeds in the underworld, she now must return to it during part of each year. THIS is what the mother must accept, that the mother-daughter relationship will never be exclusive again and that her daughter is a more complex figure with obligations to two worlds. [See my book, Life's Daughter/Death's Bride: Transformations Through the Goddess Demeter/Persephone for more-- it's out of print but amazon and Powells and other places usually have used copies.]
The mother's envy of her daughter's beauty of course appears in tales like Snow White [though there it's the stepmother, one degree removed from the 'good', biological mother]--but I can't think of any tale offhand in which the mother disables the daughter and the daughter transforms into someone who sees herself beyond her deformity. Very interesting theme, though.
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