Fairy Tales

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Fairy Tales
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Folk Fairy Tales

• Oral tradition
• Reflect values of culture at the time
• Women telling stories to young children
• Peasant political information
• Brief, dramatic and memorable narratives
• Message stays with listener/reader
• Express multiple meanings
• Adaptable without changing story

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History Of Tales
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The Enlightenment

• Mostly atheist or deists
• Conscious mind is rational
• Rational Good
• Reason leads to virtue
• World is mechanical, rational, machine-like
• Adulthood Capable of mature reasoning
• Perfectibility of human through intellect

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Romanticism

• True meaning impossible through human reason
• Reach ultimate truth through imagination,
  irrational, insanity and subconscious
• Children are better humans
• World ambiguous place Paradox, Dualities
• Supernatural
• Experience is real knowledge books are
  theoretical

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Strangers

• Central theme in fairy tales
• Confrontation with something uncommon
• Peasants want to stay or return home
• Traveling is not good

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Women

• Women are the focus of tales Old Wives Tales
• Temptation and Redemption through women
• Paradox

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Fairy Tale Women
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Men

• Children had few encounters with men
• Fathers are often missing in stories
• Seen as weak characters or aggressors

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Children

• Romantics
• Ideal people as they live in dreams
• Capable of total innocence which is lost in
  adulthood
• Main threat to girls are older women
• Peasants
• Children Little adults
• Expendable
• Mortality rates, disappearances
• Work in fields
• Support parents in old age

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Adolescence

• Biological equivalent of the Fall
• Lose innocence through knowledge

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Three Approaches
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Folklore/Historical

• Anthropological study of illiterate peasants
• Closest to original versions
• Peasant stories of people who subsist
• Class information

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Freud

• Most prevalent view of fairy tales
• Instinctual drives sex, aggression
• Determined by subconscious

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Feminist

• Focus on role of women or girls in tales
• Women are victims
• Gender issues
• Aging Older women as demons/witches