Fat Is Not A Fairy Tale By Jane Yolen Essay

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From the time girls are little, they are taught to be pretty. In Fat is Not A Fairy Tale by Jane Yolen, she explains how she has come to understand that all of the glamorous princesses that little girls look up to are all unrealistically thin, with beauty being their most important asset. She tells her point in a sarcastic and bitter way, showing how this anorexic beauty is not something to look up to and want to become someday. She wants to let the reader know that this romanticizing of skinniness is not a reality.
Yolen displays her hatred for the cliché through her play on words from the start of the poem. She expresses her belief in the need of healthy and normal role models. Going on with parallelism for 2 stanzas, she uses spin off names for the princesses such as "Cinder Elephant," (Yolen 2), and "Sleeping Tubby," (Yolen 3), where the "princess is not anorexic, wasp-waisted", ( Yolen 6). She is naming all the options of titles where princesses are large, rather then, "anorexic" or tiny.
She begins to speak directly to the reader, getting them to realize that even though they have read her thoughts, they do not quite understand them. She tells the reader they are …show more content…

The sun represents nature, how everything made by God is beautiful the way it is. The wheels which are inherently round are explained to be a necessity. If the wheels were not round, what would be the point? The cookies are known to be round, it is familiar. The round princess represents emotion, affection, love, and individuality. By including the princess in this last stanza, it emphasized that the princess should be able to receive the acceptance that the previous items have. Their “roundness” should never be questioned, it can just be the way it is, “Where everything round is good- the sun, wheels, cookies, and the princess," (Yolen

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