Thinky thoughts about princesses and stories

[jelazakazone]

I heard this piece on the radio about princesses and the new movie Brave and it got me to thinking.  I would love to see a story about a princess who isn't fighting an older evil woman, who has a female best friend, and may or may not be a warrior, but she's fighting something and she wins.  Maybe it's time to unpack the original Grimm's Fairy

Comments

[dunderklumpen]

I always thought that the Grimm's fairytales were incredibly fascinating. They're called "folktales" which implies that they're tales narrated over many generations and came directly from the people. But that's only half true.

The Grimms collected folk tales as bases of their stories but they reworked them really much. They did two things: 1. They emphasized the archetypes. Folk tales usually don't work with defined characters but with archetypes - the good, the bad etc. That's the basic of the most successful Grimm's fairytales like "Hänsel and Gretel" or "Snowwhite". You always have a good party and a bad party. Of course the good has to win over the evil.

For children this basic truth is what attracts them to the stories. For them it's only important that the good wins - no matter how. When I look at "Hänsel and Gretel" today I think it's an incredibly brutal and gruesome end for the witch to burn in the oven. But as a kid I wasn't aware of that. I only knew that the good had won. Nothing else mattered. I couldn't grasp the brutality of the end. The same e.g. with Rumpelstilzkin who tore himself apart. Even that a really cruel death.

So the Grimms wanted their tales to follow this model of archetypes, of good and bad, win and loss. That's why they rewrote them, added parts, stroke parts, changed the end etc.

2. At the same time they also added current morals and believes. In the popular fairytales which most people in the world know you don't get them as much because these fairytales emphasizes morals which are the same everywhere in the world - e.g. that you keep your virtues.

But there are others - less known stories - which show some of these "current" thoughts. E.g. there's the story of Allerleirauh (all-kinds-of-fur) who runs away from court because her father in his grief over his wife's death decides half mad to marry his daughter. It's a really complicated situation. In this story they show clearly that incest is seen as wrong because the daughter runs anway from home but they also let the court council voice that it's wrong to marry your own children. Here you clearly have the matter of incest as a moral motif.

Often you have stories about the poor and the rich. Through some situation they get tested and usually the poor keep their moral integrity and/or help a person in need. The rich on the other hand don't. The result is that the poor get a reward and the rich end in disaster. That shows that even the people on the lowest social class can be better than the socially higher ranking "rich ones". these are morals set against the historical reality.

[jelazakazone]

*nods* Yes, it's the moral element of the tales that has been lost in the Disney-fication of them.

Not Bettelheim. Joseph Campbell! I had to google it to find it. George Lucas knew about Campbell's ideas when he wrote Star Wars.

[dunderklumpen]

That makes me want to reread the fairytales and Bettelheims "Children need fairytales". But I have the books somewhere in a box in the cellar. No idea where...
Maybe I could take a look at Campbell as well.

:)

[jelazakazone]

I haven't actually read Joseph's Campbell's book (or Bettelheim's for that matter), although I'm familiar with both.

Go down to your basement and do a little digging;)