Blog Entry#11

Hans Christian Anderson and Oscar Wilde fairy tales, are presented as fairy tales that are not for children. They are dark stories which do not end with Happily Ever After -- in fact the hero or heroine often dies at the end and although there is sometimes a ray of hope as the author shares how the deceased is now within reach of heaven or has been reunited with loved ones, they never end the way that fairy tales are known to.

While I enjoyed the stories by Anderson, I have to say that I preferred reading Oscar Wilde. He is, and remains, a satirist, even when composing fairy tales. One of my favorite experts was from "The Happy Prince" when he talked about the sparrow and the wind.

" His friends had gone away to Egypt six weeks before, but he had stayed behind, for he was in love with the most beautiful Reed. He had met her early in the spring as he was flying down the river after a big yellow moth, and had been so attracted by her slender waist that he had stopped to talk to her.

"Shall I love you?" said the Swallow, who liked to come to the point at once, and the Reed made him a low bow. So he flew round and round her, touching the water with his wings, and making silver ripples. This was his courtship, and it lasted all through the summer.

"It is a ridiculous attachment," twittered the other Swallows; "she has no money, and far too many relations"; and indeed the river was quite full of Reeds. Then, when the autumn came they all flew away.

After they had gone he felt lonely, and began to tire of his lady- love. "She has no conversation," he said, "and I am afraid that she is a coquette, for she is always flirting with the wind." And certainly, whenever the wind blew, the Reed made the most graceful curtseys. "I admit that she is domestic," he continued, "but I love travelling, and my wife, consequently, should love travelling also."

"Will you come away with me?" he said finally to her; but the Reed shook her head, she was so attached to her home.

"You have been trifling with me," he cried. "I am off to the Pyramids. Good-bye!" "

I thought it was terribly witty, this comparison between young women and the reeds and the swallow with young men. The way the beautiful Reed bends and sways, flirting with the wind and the swallow both, instantly painted for me a gorgeous, but flighty, young early 20th century women, who, although proclaimed to love one man, couldn't help but make advances elsewhere when someone should give her any speck of attention.

*Edit: I realize that this post is a week late and probably won't be credited. I just realized that I never actually wrote it, but thought I would anyway, regardless, because I truly loved this week's reading.

Blog Entry#10

Although many other fairy tales which we have read possessed religious undertones, none so much as the Jewish ones. Obviously, being a religion as well as a culture this is not surprisingly. Where European fairy tales focus on human protagonists, African on animals, the Jewish fairy tales focus on the Rabbi.

The tales present a moral to be learned -- as most fairy tales do. They underline the Jewish wit and intelligence. Most minorities, in their folk and fairy tales, tend to poke fun at the majorities such as in some of the stories where the priests are outwitted by the Jewish Rabbi. Or like in the story where the young man has to speak in sign language to the priest and although it is misinterpretation on both sides, it is the bravery and sense (the idea that if they do not at least try, they still will all die), that saves them all.

They also, as religious tales, incorporate motifs of faith and God, and draw on the divine power, as in the story as the Rabbi Adam who defeats the sorcerer with not only his intelligence, but also his own power which has been given to him from God and his trust that he will be able to overcome this evil with His help.

Blog Entry#9

Bluebeard is a much darker villain than we've seen in other stories. While there have certainly been other sinister antagonists, Bluebeard's cruelty runs much deeper. As a man who desires to marry young women whom he then sets up for failure. Bestowing upon them a test of their obedience which their curiosity is sure to win, he now feels he has a troublesome wife whose punishment can only be death and thus begins the vicious cycle as he looks for his next victim.

It is a twisted person, indeed, who keeps memorabilia of his bloodied victims in a locked room for his new wife to stumble over.

My favorite version of Bluebeard was certainly the Fitcher's Bird by The Brother's Grimm. Although her older sister's fell into the same trap as the young bride in Bluebeard by Charles Perrault, the youngest sister, who is "clever and cunning", is able to outwit her husband and save not only herself, but her dead sisters and any other young women who would have otherwise fallen victim to the sorcerer's cruelty.

It is still a brutal story, regardless of the cleverness of the heroine who does not rely so desperately on her siblings aid to free herself. The descriptions of the hacked up bodies as well as the dismembered remains of her sisters which were "chopped to pieces", leaves the reader with a truly chilling effect.

Still this version does, unlike Perrault's Bluebeard, was not as suspenseful. To have the sorcerer go through the first two sisters in a similar fashion, but then the third -- and youngest -- to prove to be the bright young heroine is typical in fairystories. However, to only have one young women and that desperate moment when she is living her last moments and waiting for the arrival of her brothers, the reader -- after witnessing how dark the story has been thus far -- does begin to fear for the life of the young bride.