Art of Fairytales

 Chapter 9: The Soul Music of the Juniper Tree          The most interesting part of today's reading, in my opinion, was the examination of the Juniper Tree story. In this essay, the idea is presented that this sort of fairytale, actually harbors a sort of "ugliness" that is actually described as peculiar beauty. The story is odd, not much of it making logical sense, yet audiences continue to come back for more. There is something so beautiful within the chaos that readers delve straight back into the world in which they were horrified to enter.           In continuing my reading, I further understood that this is the same phenomenon in many types of fairytales. The ones where the beauty dies, the ones with rape, the ones with incestual relations, the ones with broken families and disoriented siblings. It is in this chaos, that we continuously find beauty. Why is that? While I believe part of it is the consistent pursuit of cur...

           In chapter seven of the Cambridge Companion, the idea is brought up that fiction acts as a test to our theory of mind, enabling us as readers to understand other people's thoughts without misinterpretation. Fairytales, furthermore, are seen as instructions to the human behavior and thus essential to human survival. The interesting part about this mixture of fiction and fairytale is that fairytales allow readers to experience and live through interiority without the physical use of emotions and feelings within the text.           The author goes on to discuss in many tales how the use of introductions acts as vehicles to our emotional attachment to characters and our understanding of the stories we are reading. When the position within a family is named, the individual is a prince or a princess, their first name is included within their title, their parents position within society-- whatever these attributes may be an...

           In chapter three of this companion, we are met with a certain hypothesis that aims to understand how stories like Sleeping Beauty could be used to understand the true wants and needs of the female psyche. In this portion, three portions of the hypothesis are presented which I personally, found very interesting.           The first portion of the hypothesis was that in the case of Sleeping Beauty and the like, the woman is actually freed from seemingly domesticated duties. She is no longer needed to cook and clean and take care of the household as she is physically unable to do so. On top of this, she is arguably in a better environment than her own home-- enjoying the comfort of a "relaxing" sleep on a soft and plush bed. The second prong of this hypothesis is that women no longer have to experience the whoas of childbirth and infertility, miscarriage and the struggles of raising a human. Instead, the woman (in some ...

         While reading Oscar Wilde's, The Selfish Giant , I thought about the fact that Wilde was an alleged predator to a young boy of 21 years. While he was tried and found guilty of his endeavors, he still continued his relationship into his later years and ultimately only ended the affair when the lovers family demanded it. In this particular story, the giant was infatuated with a young boy who went away after he built a wall and cast the kids of the garden out.           All throughout the story, the Giant is sad because the little boy had vanquished, only to be reunited with him later on. The boy is then named as "Jesus" which was a plot twist, especially since I did not know that Wilde was much of a religious person. However, this was not the first time that this form of pedophilia as well as religion came up in Wildes' texts. One could take the Nightingale and the red rose as a metaphor for wanting "worldly things" over...

"Nothing made the princess happier then learning about the human world up above."          While reading these stories, I think the most predominant theme that stuck out to me was the curiosity for an unknown world. The princess was interested in a world beyond anything she had ever known, and I think this is a take on a childhood sense of curiosity that is innate. Children, especially those who are sheltered, don't get to see the world for what it is and once they grow up and have their own free will to do as they wish, they are met with a world they know nothing about-- leaving them to struggle and be confused.           Hand in hand with this idea is the idea that sheltered children become poor as they get older, an idea that at the time of conception, was looked down upon because being "poor" was nothing short of illegal. Some could argue that the "child going up to the big world above" and making these huge massive acknowledgem...

           In the Introduction to the Trickster(s), the narrative decision to include food and hunger in many fairytales from childhood is an interesting one. Although I had never noticed it before, after reading the introduction it became apparent to me that this theme is quite prominent in many fairytales and even across the many versions of Hansel and Gretel that we see in this book.           When speaking about food in general, I think it is important to note that in many of the versions of Hansel and Gretel that we are reading, the children start out as healthy and normal children. For kids, this is a resemblance to their own lives, being well fed and able to nourish their bodies. However, the sudden change to the forest or other "foreign" areas leads the children to be starved. This lack of food, resembles a child's worst fear of being left and vacated to fen for themselves at a young age. Children cannot take care of th...