The Final Blog (Reflection)

I really enjoyed this class! And I learned a lot, even though right now I’m drawing a blank. But I really enjoyed reading all the different tales, and even seeing the movies—I think I saw Disney’s “Snow White” and “Cinderella” once upon a time, but I barely remembered them. So it was cool to watch them both from a, “Oh so that’s what happens in these movies” perspective, as well as comparing them to the original tale(s). It was also really cool just to see how different versions of the tale compared with each other (including stuff like "Sonne" and "Pretty Woman"), and learning about the different cultures of the tales we were reading. So I guess the answer is yes, I did like all of the material covered, except for a lot of the Bettelheim stuff, cause I have personal beef with Freud. 

 

I don’t think reading the materials was really challenging for me, in the sense that the tales weren’t dense academic papers or wordy purple prose novels. The harder parts of the class were when we analyzed the works, because they required more thinking than just reading the tales and analysis is my weak suit. If someone asked me, “Why is Little Red Riding Hood’s riding hood red?” I would say “I don’t know! Because it’s red!” Suffice to say I was always very confused how Bettelheim drew the conclusions he did. (Have I mentioned I hate Freud? I hate Freud. Jungian analysis is much more intuitive for me, and I’m glad we spent more time doing that.)

 

I don't know why my first thought was Hairspray,
but we're going to pretend it's relevant because "Bluebeard".

All in all, I had a lot of fun! Eating eggs and chocolate, listening to Dr. Ochieng tell us stories (I think he was my favorite guest speaker, cause he was the most fun), watching different videos, hating on Disney, and discussing all the tales. I never realized how many fairy tales there were, or that there were multiple versions of the same story. I also never knew Oscar Wilde wrote (really sad) fairy tales, or that the stories by The Brothers Grimm so heavily reflect the time period they were living in. So I'm really, really glad I took this class, and I'm happy non-Honors students got to enjoy it as well. And now anytime someone says not to do something, I’m going to immediately think, “Ah, a prohibition!”

 

 

Arabic Fairy Tales

One of the things special about Arabic folk tales is that not only were they told at night in the home after the day’s work was done, but they were a public spectacle, too. People told stories in the marketplace, and held poetry competitions, and while I don’t remember hearing anything like that when we were talking about African, Jewish, Native American or Indian tales, it does remind me of ancient Greece. There is also the interesting distinction that in Arabic culture, men told stories in public, and women were the ones telling stories in the home. This wasn’t really mentioned in any of the cultures.

 

Storytelling is a dying tradition in many cultures, and Arabic culture is no different. But unlike the other cultures we’ve talked about, it becomes a big deal during the month of Ramadan.  Stories are culturally significant in the other cultures, too, but they don’t have a time where, even in the present day, storytelling reemerges into the spotlight. 

 

I also find it interesting that Arabic folk tales are divided into five main categories. Usually, we categorized tales by their function—to teach a lesson, or show how something came to be, or just to be entertaining. But Arabic tales had five specific groupings determined not by their function, but by the type of tale (historic: Sirat), featured characters (Kalila wa Dimna and Joha), author (Fables of Luqman), or context (Arabian Nights).

 

 

Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales

While religion is not entirely unique to Oscar Wilde’s stories, compared to the other European fairy tales we’ve read, religion (or in this case specifically, Christianity) has never been featured quite so heavy-handedly before. Sure, Gretel pushed the “godless witch” into the oven, but “The Selfish Giant” is the first tale I’ve read so far to feature a character who is almost literally Jesus. It’s possible to point to other tales and say they have Christ-like qualities, but those characters don’t disappear and later reappear with nail wounds on their hands and feet and take a character to their garden, “which is Paradise” (334). And none of the other stories featured the literal Christian God, either. Again, we’ve seem some hints of Christianity in other tales. But it’s much more prominent in Wilde’s stories.

Another thing nearly unique to Wilde are the endings. Most of the stories we’ve read have ended happily—for the protagonist, anyway. (If you’re evil, you’re out of luck). There are exceptions to this, however. “Bluebeard’s Egg” is special in that it ends on a neutral but uncertain note, with no real conclusion. But several of the Beauty and the Beast tales end sadly, usually with death: specifically “Urashima the Fisherman” (which could arguably be a legend and not a fairy tale, but I’m counting it) and “The Swan Maiden”. (“The Dog Bride” also ends with the death of a non-villain, but he’s not the protagonist either so I’m just gonna ignore that one.) Similarly, all three of Wilde’s stories end with the death of the main character(s). I hesitate to call all of these endings sad, however, because while “The Selfish Giant” ends with the death of the giant and “The Happy Prince” ends with the death of the swallow and the prince, they then go spend eternal life in heaven (considered a good thing). It doesn’t matter what your religion is or isn’t, that’s just how the stories end. But “The Nightingale and the Rose” is just sad all around, though; I won’t hesitate to call that story a tragic tale—which something we usually don’t see in fairy tales, but not unique to Wilde. 

 

 

One thing completely unique to the stories, though, is the fact that (two separate times!) there’s a bird who loves a human (or statue of a human, I guess), and this bird is not and was never a human. It’s kind of like Beauty and the Beast stories, where we have some almost-bestiality, although it doesn’t count because the animals are actually people under curses or what have you. (Or, the person becomes an animal, in the case of the “Tiger Bride”). There’s still no bestiality in Wilde’s stories cause the student is completely unaware of the nightingale and the Happy Prince is just a statue, but it’s different because the birds are actually just birds.