Cinderella: Or, On the Virtues of Shutting Up and Sitting Down
There are many ways of critiquing folktales. However, they all agree on one central point: the tale is told to children so that they will behave. In less coercive terms, one might say the story is that so that the child will grow up to be a functional part of society. Either way, it boils down to the same thing. These stories are finely tuned propaganda pieces designed to inculcate into children the basic "virtues" needed to make them obey and keep to their place in the world. Among the many stories that for centuries now has been teaching children, especially the young girls at which it is aimed, to be meek and quiet beneath the command of their superiors and elders has been Cinderella.
One the face of it, this folktale may seem almost subversive. After all, Cinderella manages to go from being a servant in her own house to being a princess. What could be more revolutionary than that? After all, the narrative here clearly states that the grown-ups, those eternal enemies of childhood and children, are out to get our heroine. The parental figures are seen as either evil or ineffectual, and their pet children as terrors. One might say there has never been a fairy tale more on the child's side than this one, in which she not only has every right to condemn her parents, but also to gain the power to lord it over them. However, like Cinderella's dirtyness, the subversive nature of this fairytale is only skin deep. The subversion is only there for the sake of convincing the child that the narrator is really on her side, that this story was written for her, that it is not really grown-up propaganda, but a real and true story about her estate. A story about a good, well-behaved heroine in a perfect family will not inspire good behavior. It will probably inspire anger. In the...
Disguise in Fairy Tales Deceit is the purpose of disguise, whether it is well-meaning or not. Cinderella dons the disguise of a beautiful princess to win the heart, mind and affections of the handsome prince. The wolf in Grimm’s “Red Riding Hood” dons the disguise of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother in order to eat the girl after he has already eaten the grandmother. In The Ballad of Mulan, the girl dons
Media presentations of justified violencemay also change the belief that violent behavior is wrong, encouraging the development of pro-violence attitudes. […] Violence is acceptable because it is not real, therefore "victims" do not really suffer (Funk et al. 26). Given this serious -- and well-documented -- consequence of even imaginary violence, writers and readers of fairy tales should exercise care that their depictions of violence are truly relevant to the
popular culture is relatively young and new in modern society. Sociologists and psychologists began to pay attention to it only at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth. Popular culture is a set of values, customs and system of beliefs which are common for people of different financial, class and gender background, so that it forms a wide group of people which goes
film "Pretty Woman" is, in many ways, a modern day Cinderella story (Kelly 1994). To begin with, the major premise of both stories is that a woman of extremely low social standing succeeds in joining with a man of power and wealth. Additionally, both tales involve an element of deception: the females are forced to pretend to be something they are not. Also, both women are rescued from their
CinderellaDisney\\\'s animated Cinderella is a classic fairy tale film that was first released in 1950. The story follows the life of Cinderella, a young girl who is mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters after the death of her father. Despite her difficult circumstances, Cinderella remains kind and hopeful, and ultimately wins the heart of the prince with the help of her fairy godmother.The Grimm version of Cinderella, also known as
Holes by Louis Sachar Louis Sachar makes this fantasy story seem realistic by the way he intertwines the elements of fantasy or supernatural, with the everyday things that are going on. The story opens with a description of Camp Green Lake, a very brief glimpse in to why anyone would go to a lake where there is no lake and moves to Stanley's arrival at the camp. The more or
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