fairy tales
DESCRIPTION
Fairy tales . Past, present and future. Source . This presentation has been adapted from the following essay: Patricia Duncker , ‘Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter’s Bloody Chambers’, Literature and History 10 (1984) 3-14. Do you agree?. - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
![Page 1: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
FAIRY TALES Past, present and future
![Page 2: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/2.jpg)
Source This presentation has been adapted from
the following essay: Patricia Duncker, ‘Re-Imagining the Fairy
Tales: Angela Carter’s Bloody Chambers’, Literature and History 10 (1984) 3-14
![Page 3: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/3.jpg)
Do you agree?Human unconscious is not a treasure vault containing visionaryrevelations about ourselves. It is rather the cesspool of our fearsand desires, filled with the common patterns that are also the
projections of the ways in which we have been taught to perceive the world. And the deep structure of those patterns will reflect the political, social and psychological realities within which we
exist as best as we can. The unconscious mirrors these changing realities. Nothing else. And the fairy tales, the received collective wisdom of the past have been and still are used as the textbooks
through which those lessons are learned. - Patricia Dunker, 1982.
![Page 4: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/4.jpg)
Questions ….What are the key texts read or viewed in childhood that have laid the bricks of your inner worlds, your unconscious?
To what extent have you been able to question the political, social and psychological realities represented in the world of these texts?
![Page 5: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/5.jpg)
Folk / Fairy tale The Fairy (more properly folk) tale,
according to Duncker, was the narrative art of the people, and was communally owned.
It has been appropriated by the ruling class at a specific point in history, transformed, rewritten, possessed.
The Fairytales became children’s literature at a particular moment in the history of their transmission. Originally they were nothing of the kind.
![Page 6: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/6.jpg)
Past - What is the origin of the words, fairy tales? The German term Marchen – fairytale- comes from
the Old high German word, Mari, or Gothic mers, Middle High german Mare – which means news or gossip.
The term Volksmarchen, or folktale, acknowledges the people – das Volk – as its rightful owners.
The term fairy tale comes from the French conte de fees, most probably derived from the Countess d’Aulnoy’s collection, Contes de Fees (1698), translated into English in the following year as Tales of the Fairys.
![Page 7: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/7.jpg)
Present - Fairy tales are… The term Fairy tales is now
used to describe both the orally transmitted folktales
and the literary productions of
bourgeois and aristocratic writers of the late 17th and 18th century.
![Page 8: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/8.jpg)
Past - Fairy tales - The rise of the bourgeoisie and the invention of childhood.
The classical notion of education and of childhood as a time of preparation and initiation into the adult world was not generally held during the Middle Ages. It apparently started with the rise of the bourgeoisie.
Our world is obsessed by the physical, moral, and sexual problems of childhood. This preoccupation was unknown to medieval civilization, because there was no problem for the Middle Ages: as soon as the child had been weaned, or soon after, the child became the natural companion of the adult.
- Philip Aries, Centuries of Childhood, 1960.Q. How does this approach to the child s education and
learning differ from the approach to learning today?
![Page 9: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/9.jpg)
Past - Renaissance During the Renaissance: new emphasis on education for the middle and upper
classes. the reinforcement of patriarchy under Protestantism
endorsed a more rigid hierarchy within the family and the state.
Fairy tales were absorbed into the structure of educational propaganda for children.
It was a means of harnessing and containing the radical current of popular culture of the lower classes.
Q. Postmodernism prides itself in representing low
culture. What are the positives and negatives of this practice?
![Page 10: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/10.jpg)
Past – Folktales to fairy tales The original folktales were a collective enterprise produce by both
audience and narrator, which articulated the aspirations and desires of the people and their fight against social injustice.
The world of these tales reflects the solid walls of feudalism; it is ruled by kings and queens, bound by fixed class hierarchies, filled with peasants, soldiers, dragons and magic.
It is a primarily rural order, there are no signs of industrialization. The trades are traditional weavers, spinners, millers,
merchants. And the tales stress inequalities in superlative terms; the
kings are always the wealthiest and most powerful in the world, the poor shepards and peasants the most helpless, destitute and underpriviliged mass nature ever suffered to survive upon the earth.
![Page 11: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/11.jpg)
Past – Folktales to fairy tales While the hierarchical structures of
power, status, class, social and financial inequalities could not be overcome in REALITY, it is in the unstable world of Fairyland that it a reversal of situation is achieved through MAGIC.
Cinderella becomes a princess The frog becomes the prince.
![Page 12: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/12.jpg)
Past - Folktales to fairy tales Fairytales therefore deal in
transformations which:o subvert the apparently unalterable social
realitieso magic translates, fragments, invertso the lower classes are upwardly mobileo official morality is calmly set aside o cunning and deception pay off (Puss-in-
Boots)
![Page 13: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/13.jpg)
Present - Folktales in FairytalesThe folktales live in fairytales and continue
to mirror the times which produced them. Stepmothers were common in a time
period where lives were short and many women died during childbirth
Marriage at puberty was also common Wells were the centre of village life.
![Page 14: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/14.jpg)
Fairytales – Perrault, d’Aulnoy & Grimm
Charles Perrault, Countess d’Aulnoy and Brothers
Grimm are writers of the large collection of Fairytales who wrote in the last years of the 17th century and who borrowed their stories from folklore and rewrote them exclusively for children.
From the 17th century onwards, fairytales which were, as folktales, a literature of protest for adults became a property of childhood.
![Page 15: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/15.jpg)
Purpose of the FairytaleFairytales as educational literature for children became an opportunity to serve many purposes: They were the parables of wisdom and
experience passed on from adults to children. The transition from adolescence through puberty
to adulthood was brutally taught through these fairytales in which inequalities are painted unambiguously in the characters of excess.
The sexual symbolism (big bad wolf; red hood) was implicitly embedded in the tales and remained a mystery to children
![Page 16: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/16.jpg)
What are Fairy Tales? What do you think?
Are Fairytales parables handed out to children as working tools, ways of dealing with the world rather or are they weapons of understanding and change?
Are fairytales about power and the struggle for possession, by fair or magical means, of kingdoms, goods, children, money, land, and-naturally, specifically, - the possession of women?
![Page 17: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/17.jpg)
Questions to ask about representation of gender when studying fairytales and their film adaptations?
What are the representational limits that are put into place within a Fairytale?
What conventional binary oppositions are represented? How is feminine desire represented? How are the dangers
/fears of feminine desire represented? What are the proposed solutions in the fairytale and the film? Are they the same? Why /not?
What assumptions are being made about growing up for girls and boys?
What support structures are there for young girls? If characters are drawn as extremes or in black and white,
evaluate the strength/weakness of the good/bad man/woman? What conclusion can you draw about the power of the good woman vs the power of the good man?
![Page 18: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/18.jpg)
Questions about class… What rigid hierarchies of class are obvious
in the fairytale and film? What magic is employed to subvert or
invert these hierarchies? How does the film’s mise-en-scene depict
these extremes of class .e.g. rich vs poor, king vs commoner?
Identify the virtues/vices that become a means to become rich and powerful? E.g beauty/ brains/ cunning/ magic etc.
![Page 19: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/19.jpg)
Questions about adult/child relationship?
What are the relations between adults and children based on in the fairytale and film? Obedience? Trust? Fear? Love? Support? Confidence? Exploitation?
What attitudes are held regarding the education of children ? How do kids learn?
How are these relationships similar to or different from the fairytale?
How is the real conflict between families, men and women, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons represented?
![Page 20: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/20.jpg)
Questions to ask about ideology…
What is the dominant ideology about children that underlies the fairytale and how is this ideology similar to/different from the ideology about children in the film?
What realistic/ idealistic notions about the simple, rustic and rural lifestyle of the common man are endorsed/ rejected in the fairytale and the film?
In what ways has the postmodern consumer ideology of desire and ownership influenced the mise-en-scene of the film?
![Page 21: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/21.jpg)
Your task… due Thursday 11/4/13
Compose an IMAGE which successfully conveys your visual response and viewpoint of fairytales after reviewing your fairytale and film adaptation-
A few examples are given ahead….
![Page 22: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/22.jpg)
![Page 23: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/23.jpg)
![Page 24: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/24.jpg)
![Page 25: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/25.jpg)
![Page 26: Fairy tales](https://reader031.vdocuments.net/reader031/viewer/2022012922/56816650550346895dd9ce14/html5/thumbnails/26.jpg)