Fantasy has been used for countless generations as a way to escape the uncertainty and confusion of reality. Instead of searching for the scientific cause of plague or bad harvest it was easier to blame an unsavory neighbor or start a witch hunt. However even in modern times fairy tales are still utilizing the same common tropes such as “the princess in distress” and the stereotypical Viking journey. ”Bones” and “Snow, Glass, Apples” adapt classic fairytales for modern day by destroying these stereotypes. In the text “Bones” by Francesca Lia Block the protagonist is in the hands of a ruthless killer. However unlike the original folktale where she is saved by her brothers the protagonist in this story must subvert the damsel in distress …show more content…
“Bones” a modern recall of the French folktale “Bluebeard” has several parallels to the original story. In both “Bones” and the original folktale Bluebeard is a murderer who slays his wives after they discover the bones of their predecessors in a forbidden room. The motif of a key, stained in blood, which can’t be washed off and a fairy is present in both stories. The author also alludes to a story within a story when the protagonist of “Bones” states “I couldn’t quite remember the story…dying girls [and] the key had blood on it” as she struggles to remember the original folktale (123). This allusion is also shown when she states “he said he named himself for bluebeard” (123). “Snow, Glass, Apples” also draws from the original version of Snow White but also makes several changes. The poisoned apple motif is a constant in all versions of the story. However, in the original version the queen’s motives for poisoning Snow White are to kill her so she can remain the most youthful, and beautiful. However in “Snow, Glass, Apples” the queen has to kill Snow White so she will stop killing the merchants and forest-folk who contribute to her kingdom’s economy. These parallels to the original stories make them worth reading because the characters and storylines are already familiar to the reader. The authors then take this a step forward by relating the stories to real world issues.
Snow Falling on Cedars, a novel by David Guterson, is a post World War II drama set in 1954 on the island of San Piedro in Washington State. The story’s focal point is the murder trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, who is accused of killing a fellow islander, Carl Heine, Jr., supposedly because of an old family feud over land. Although the trial is the main focus of the story, Guterson takes the reader back in time through flashbacks to tell a story of forbidden love involving two young islanders, Ishmael Chambers and Hatsue Imada (Kabuo’s future wife). At the time of their romance, interracial relationships were considered strictly taboo because of racial bias. It is through both this love story and Guterson’s remarkable use of setting and imagery that the reader is informed as to why racial prejudice is so high on the island of San Piedro at the time of the trial and why Kabuo is not merely on trial for Carl’s murder, but also for the color of his skin.
In “The Classic Fairy Tales” by Maria Tator and “Mad Shadows” by Marie-Claire Blais, both texts deal with the idea that suffering and understanding are deeply connected. The authors aim to prove that suffering and understanding go hand in hand in order for change to occur. In “The Classic Fairy Tales”, Beauty and the beast, Snow White and Cinderella, will explore the relation between understanding suffering via transformation, desire, and physical injuries, when compared and contrasted with Mad Shadows.
Everyone remembers the nasty villains that terrorize the happy people in fairy tales. Indeed, many of these fairy tales are defined by their clearly defined good and bad archetypes, using clichéd physical stereotypes. What is noteworthy is that these fairy tales are predominately either old themselves or based on stories of antiquity. Modern stories and epics do not offer these clear definitions; they force the reader to continually redefine the definitions of morality to the hero that is not fully good and the villain that is not so despicable. From Dante’s Inferno, through the winding mental visions in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, spiraling through the labyrinth in Kafka’s The Trial, and culminating in Joyce’s abstract realization of morality in “The Dead,” authors grapple with this development. In the literary progression to the modern world, the increasing abstraction of evil from its classic archetype to a foreign, supernatural entity without bounds or cure is strongly suggestive of the pugnacious assault on individualism in the face of literature’s dualistic, thematically oligopolistic heritage.
...n” is a great example of an old myth or tale reconstructed and adapted for a modern audience in a new medium. It is a progression on one hand in its use of modern language, setting, and style but it is also the product of the old myths in that it is essentially the same on the thematic level. In addition, the level of self-awareness on the part of the narrator and, by extension, the author marks it out as an illustration of the very notion of evolutionary changes of myths and fairy tales. Adaptation is the solution to the fairy tale, and fairy tales have been endlessly changing themselves throughout history and, by some strange transforming or enchanting power endlessly staying the same.”
Bluebeard, a fairytale by Perrault, is about an affluent man who is known and revered on account of his despicable blue beard. Even though he has had several wives, their whereabouts are a source of mystery. As such, Bluebeard purposes to persuade one of his neighbor’s daughters to take his hand in marriage. Eventually, his efforts pay off and he ends up tying the knot with one of his neighbor`s daughters. After some time has passed in their marital union, Bluebeard announces to his wife that he must set off on an important journey. Before commencing on his journey, he gives the castle`s keys to his wife and the liberty of having access to all the rooms apart from a single room. However, his wife overwhelmed with curiosity goes against her husband`s instructions. As soon as she opens the door to the forbidden chamber, she stumbles upon the sight of the corpses of Bluebeard`s previous wives dangling on the wall. The horrific sight baffles her and she ends up dropping the key on the floor that is doused in blood. Her attempts to clean the stained key are futile. Circumstantially, Bluebeard makes a surprise return to his castle to find his shaken wife. He then discovers his wife`s unforgiveable mistake and purposes to kill her. Just as Bluebeard is about to strike down his wife, her brothers come to her rescue and kill Bluebeard. Being his closest heir, Bluebeard`s wife inherits his entire property and every one lives happily ever after (as is always the case in most fairytales).
Tobias Wolff is framing his story Hunters in the Snow, in the countryside near Spokane, Washington, where three friends with three different personalities, decided to take a trip to the woods for hunting in a cold, snowy weather. The whole story follows the hunting trip of these three friends. The reader can easily observe that the cold, hostile environment is an outward expression of how the men behave towards one another. Kenny, with a heart made of ice is rather hostile to Tub, while Frank is cold and indifferent to Tub and his pleas for help.The environment is matching the characters themselves, being cold and uncaring as the author described the two from truck when they laughed at the look of Tub: “You ought to see yourself,” the driver said. “He looks just like a beach ball with a hat on, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he, Frank?”(48). Near the beginning of the story the cold and the waiting surely creates an impact in the mood of the character. Tub is restless from the wait and the cold adds on to it. He complains about being cold and Kenny and Frank, his friends tell him to stop complaining, which seems to be very unfriendly. Wolff builds up the story on the platform of cold weather and the impact of the cold on each character slowly builds up.
Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blond on Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Chatto & Windus, 1994. Print.
The fairy tale begins with a miller betrothing his daughter to the first suitable man who comes along. The man choosen happens to live deep in the forest, and fills the daughter with dread everytime that she sees him. One day, the suitor demands that his bride come visit him at home. When she tells him she does not know the way, he says he with spread the path to his house with ashes. Nodoubt this fictional element is meant to invoke sadistic images of Nazi Germany and the use of ashes of cremated concentration camp inmates for road construction. The daughter does follow the path with great unease, however, as she follows the path she marks it with peas. She finally comes to the house, and is promptly warned by a bird that she is entering a house of murderers. The girl enters and house and finds it almost entirerly deserted. However, in the basement she finds an old women who repeats the bird’s warning. The crone then prphesizes that the girl will marry death and her bridegroom only seeks to kill her, cut her pieces up, and eat her. As the two prepare to escape, the bridegroom and his band of theives return with maiden [virgin]. The old woman hides the girl behind a large barrel. From her hiding place, she whitnesses the thieves give the maiden three glasses of wine to stop her heart. They then rip her clothes off, and hack the body into pieces with axes. On of the murders notices the girl wears a gold band, but cannot pull it off her finger. He cuts off thefinger which flies from the table and lands in the girls lap. Before the thieve can look for it, the crone offers them some wine, which she has laced with a sleeping potion. The thieves fall prey to the potion and sleep deeply. The g...
Roses are red, violets are blue, Snow White has changed, everything’s new. This is a different beginning than the original story of Little Snow White by the Grimm Brothers and retold by the director Rupert Sanders, in the movie Snow White and the Huntsman. The original story portrays Snow White as a beautiful, but naive, young woman, leading up to her eating a poisoned apple from the evil queen. The evil queen has been jealous of Snow White after she has grown up and become more beautiful. Although in both the story and the movie, Snow White eats a poisoned apple, Snow White in Snow White and the Huntsman is portrayed as more brave and courageous, even after she wakes up from the poisoned apple. In the end, both the story and the movie show that Snow White’s triumphs out rules all, no matter what is thrown at her, but the difference is in how. While there are many common motifs across the story and the movie; Gender roles have changed over time, as shown in the
Anne Sexton’s poem “Cinderella” is filled with literary elements that emphasize her overall purpose and meaning behind this satirical poem. Through the combination of enjambment stanzas, hyperboles, satire, and the overall mocking tone of the poem, Sexton brings to light the impractical nature of the story “Cinderella”. Not only does the author mock every aspect of this fairy tale, Sexton addresses the reader and adds dark, cynical elements throughout. Sexton’s manipulation of the well-known fairy tale “Cinderella” reminds readers that happily ever after’s are meant for storybooks and not real life.
This modern fairy tale contains diverse characters but none of them are as important as the grandmother. In fact, through her narration the reader gets the basic information concerning the familial context. The story revolves around a grandmother, a mother and a granddaughter, which thus sets the point of view of the story, the grandmother is the narrator therefore the reader gets her perception. Besides the domestic context, the lack of other contextual clues, such as the time or the location of the story, gives room to her story and her final purpose: teaching and, at the same time, protecting her grand-daughter from risks represented by men here symbolized by a wolf. The way this unnamed grandmother reveals her life exemplifies two properties of fairy tale as mentioned by Marina Warner in “The Old Wives' Tale”: “Fairy tales exchange knowledge [using morals] between an older [most of the time feminine] voice of experience and a younger audience” (314). As suggested in the text, fairy tales are a way to teach insights of life through simple stories directed to, most of the time, younger generations. Most of the time because fairy tales' moral work on dif...
“I've told her and I've told her: daughter, you have to teach that child the facts of life before it's too late” (Hopkinson 1). These are the first three lines of Nalo Hopkinson's fairy tale “Riding the Red”, a modern adaptation of Charles Perrault's “Little Red Riding Hood”. Perrault provided a moral to his fairy tales, the one from this one is to prevent girls from men's nature. In Hopkinson's adaptation, the goal remains the same: through the grandmother biographic narration, the author advances a revisited but still effective moral: beware of wolfs even though they seem innocent.
Over the years, Snow White’s story has been told in numerous different versions then its original version in 1812 by the Grimm Brothers. The main basis of the story has remained the same. Only a few minor tweaks to the story have changed. The three versions of the story that are going to be analyzed are the original story “Little Snow White” by the Brothers Grimm, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” by Disney, and “Mirror, Mirror” by Disney also. They each were created in very different times and the original story has changed over the years to appeal to the audience of that time. No matter how many versions there are Snow White is considered, one of the most cherished fairy tales of all time. They each use different methods to get their story across by using different colors, word usage, and scenes.
Though the evils of the world may discourage us from reaching our full potential, fairytales such as Little Snow-White by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm teach us that good will always triumph over evil. As many tales of its kind, Little Snow-White uses a number of literary devices to attract a younger audience and communicate to them a lesson or moral that will remain with them throughout their lives. Since children have such an abstract stream of thought, it is vital to use language and devices that will appeal to them as to keep them interested in the story.
Neil Gaiman’s “Snow, Glass, Apples” is far from the modern day fairy tale. It is a dark and twisted version of the classic tale, Snow White. His retelling is intriguing and unexpected, coming from the point of view of the stepmother rather than Snow White. By doing this, Gaiman changes the entire meaning of the story by switching perspectives and motivations of the characters. This sinister tale has more purpose than to frighten its readers, but to convey a deeper, hidden message. His message in “Snow, Glass, Apples” is that villains may not always be villains, but rather victims.