...Fairy tales are more than just stories read to children before bedtime. They contain valuable messages commonly overlooked. In Maria Tatar’s piece, “An Introduction to Fairy Tales,” she explains how powerful these messages can be. Fairy tales often imply life lessons and incorporate them into their stories. These messages mold and make people into who they are today. As time goes on people forget about the fairy tales read to them as children, but some continue to keep the stories with them. Fairy tales help to build children’s imaginations and also build a sense of character, even at a young age. As adults fairy tales incorporate extreme power. As a person grows and matures they start to realize how fairy tales relate to the real world. Adults also comprehend messages in a fairy tale a younger child does not fully understand. They can see in a fairy tale what makes sense and also what is impossible in real life. Fairy tales cannot only bring you peace, happiness, joy and comfort, but also bring back many memories. If an adult read a fairy tale that was once read to them as a child, most of the time, a thousand memories would come flooding back to them. This could be very pleasant experience but could also be upsetting, especially if a person experienced an unpleasant childhood. It is important to keep fairy tales alive because they are a major part of who people are today. They are a very important part of culture because fairytales have been around since the ancestors...
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...Dave’s feigned Italian persona in Breaking Away is his own version of that filth. This is an assumption based on the harsh, degrading commentary towards his Italian persona made by his father. But while Cinderella’s filth was caused by the loss of her parents and the uptake of her cruel stepmother, Dave has no such visible reason for his uptake of the persona. However, that does not mean he is not his own version of Cinderella. Throughout Breaking Away, Dave’s relationship with his father is portrayed as strained and negligent. Through both Jacqueline Schectman’s article, ““Cinderella” and the Loss of Father-Love,” and Maria Tatar’s article, “An Introduction to Fairy Tales”, their father-son relationship and Dave’s Italian persona can be reevaluated to make sense of the connection between his father’s ill treatment towards him and his newly acquired personality that is overlooked in the film. A connection that reveals that there is a potential causation between his lack of fatherly love and his acquired persona, all tied together with the need to seek comfort in a figure. Even if that figure must be...
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...antithesis and finally sublation. The resolution is an epiphany of sorts that, like a quest, comes only at the end, after having undergone various trials. I would like to think that this piece of writing exhibits the point I wish to instill: the necessity of imaginative freedom in myth. Let Absurdity Reign Erich Fromm interprets the story of Little Red Riding Hood as the “expression of a deep antagonism against men and sex” (TFL 241). Men (who are represented by the wolf) are seen as “ruthless and cunning animals, who turn the sexual act into a cannibalistic ritual” (CFT 7). A man is a heartless animal driven by the two most primary animal faculties: lust and hunger. Susan Brownmiller contrasts this position with her interpretation of the same tale as a “cultural story that holds the gender bottom line by perpetuating the notion that women are at once victims of male violence even as they must position themselves as beneficiaries of male protection”(CFT 8). Thus, according to Fromm, it is the wolf himself that symbolizes men, whilst for Brownmiller the story itself perpetuates a message of gender prejudice and stereotyping. On top of these two interpretations one could heap psychoanalytic interpretations of womb envy by the wolf (Anne Sexton), the succumbing of a young innocent youth through lies and trickery, thereby straying from the idealized Christian path, the loss of virginity and innocence as symbolized by that pivotal symbolic breaking of the bottle and so on and so on and so...
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...Disney and the American Princess: The Americanization of European Fairy Tales [pic] Marina Alexandrova Student number 3021874 MA Thesis, American Studies Program Utrecht University Course code 200401064 23943 words 12 August 2009 Contents Title page………………………………………………………………1 Contents……………………………………………………………….2 Introduction……………………………………………………………3 Chapter 1: European Fairy Tales and Values about Gender and Class………………………………………10 Chapter 2: Disney Animation and American Culture…………………24 Chapter 3: Disney Animation and (Gender) Commodification…………………………………………..55 Conclusion…………………………………………………………...73 Bibliography…………………………………………………………78 Introduction Among the various aspects which define contemporary life, popular culture – and in particular, American popular culture – is undoubtedly one of the most ubiquitous and long-lasting. Throughout the twentieth century, people around the world have enjoyed film, music, animation, and written works by various authors and artists. One of the most famous and significant American entertainers of the lot has been Walt Disney, introducing millions of children and adults to his world of limitless (or so is widely believed) imagination and magic, from the earliest short cartoons produced in the 1920s, to full-length feature animations such as Snow White and the Seven...
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