Fairy Tales are Interesting (Things I Learned at School 1)

[One of my professors last year told me that you remember 10% or less of what you learn in university 10 to 20 years later. I forget the exact number. I don't think doctors fall into this category, but myself as a liberal arts student probably does. So I think that I'm going to do a little rambling here and there when I learn something that I find interesting, so that I can go back and try to remember what I was doing if I need to for whatever reason.]



I'm taking a course on fairy tales, and we've recently finished reading Cinderella. We read a few different versions of the story, but the two that I decided to write my (very late) paper on are Cinderella by Charles Perrault, and When the Clock Strikes by Tanith Lee.

Perrault's Cinderella is the typical story that everyone knows. It's the one that they basically copied into Disney. It didn't have toes being cut off, and no ones eyes were gouged out by birds. It was pretty sanitized compared to the Grimm or Lee's version. I won't recount all the details of the story, because everyone knows that version. It's such a typical fairytale where everything ends up happy in the end. Something that I found interesting were the morals at the end. It said that 1. Woman need more than beauty to be successful. They need charm and grace. 2. No matter how talented you are, you need someone like a fairy godmother to help you succeed and form connections in the world.

Lee's version is much darker, and instead of Cinderella being this helpless girl who is helped by everyone around her, she's a witch, casts spells, and uses her sexuality to push the prince into madness. It's an excellent story, and it appears to be more feminist thinking than the older version. Even when I was reading feminist literature about fairy tales, there didn't seem to be much about anyone who didn't conform to typical gender roles.

There was an article at the back of this anthology that talked about "women" and "women learned to be more submissive and expectant" and "women identify with her romantic ideals" and "women this" and "woman that". Are all "women" really looking for a prince charming?

I keep thinking a lot about queerness and gender theory lately. I feel like I'm becoming a one-track record, but its just what I'm thinking about, so therefore I have to write about it. I've learned too often that if I think about something, and don't do it no matter how crazy it seems, or how difficult it is, it makes me feel worse. I feel guilty, and I can tell that it actually hurts me. I think that's part of the reason why I feel compelled to write so much all the time. Even if its bad and unpolished writing straight from my fingers and head (much like this is).

I think I'm eventually going to write myself out of this topic, and when that day comes, I'll gladly take a different lense to view everything with. I can see myself saying, "What are the environmental themes in this story?"

I've also been reading up lately on gender neutral pronouns. Someone I follow on flickr opts to use them over he/she. I wikipedia'd it, and I couldn't quite make out which definition I like the best, or which is the most commonly used "z" pronoun set. There's ze/zir/zhe and a couple of others. I don't think I'd ever use "zhe" in writing even though I'd imagine there's no difference in pronunciation between "ze" "zi" and "zhe". I'm not a hundred percent sure if these are the actual pronouns, I'm just going from memory.

I don't know if I would choose to tell people to call me gender neutral pronouns. I'm pretty "she" most of the time, and even if I wasn't, I don't know if I would care enough to use different pronouns. Maybe I'll think differently about this all in three years.

So, back to fairy tales, I was thinking about ze on flickr, and I was wondering what a fairytale about ze look like. What would zir fairtale say? What would a non-heteronormative tale look like? I don't know. There's probably been authors who've written gender alternative fairytales, but they're hard to find because I've looked for them. Maybe I'll look again, because I'm positive that they exist.

Anyways, I think that's enough rambling on for now.