PhD entry #2
I'm meeting with my supervisor tomorrow, so I thought I'd jot this down now before my thoughts are altered by the discussion we'll certainly have about it.
Upon reflection, my mind has focused on Bluebeard. At first I thought there wouldn't be enough material to work with - there is no Disney film (for obvious reasons) and the most recent live action film is French, there is also scarcity of YA novels, which ideally was going to be a big chunk of my modern interpretations literature. Yet, the more I read, the more I think it could be a good fit notwithstanding the lack of modern retellings. In particular, I find that it lends itself well to talk of other fairy tales that contrast with Bluebeard. Beauty and the Beast is the most obvious one: the similarities are uncanny, and though it could be said that BatB does not feature a villain, if we look at it in tandem with Bluebeard and as a 'happily ever after' version of that, then the Beast and Bluebeard can be ascribed to the same category.
Red Riding Hood could also be talked about in conjunction with Bluebeard, and here the villain is more obvious and definitely ripe for redemption in recent adaptations, of which I have read a few already. These three are most obviously about the man/woman dichotomy, so I think the greater struggle will be linking this villain-centric, male-dominated story to the more obviously feminine ones of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. One way to get around the problem would be to look at Perrault as a whole, instead of using just Bluebeard as a starting point. All the fairy tales mentioned here belong to his tradition of folktales and, as a group, the modern adaptations double in number.
This brings us neatly back to my issue with keeping things focused and tight. One fairy tale, with the caveat of being able to occasionally digress and explore similar tales, holds the research monster at bay. One collection of fairy tales, Perrault's in this case, strikes me as an unstable flow of text after text (after text). It will have to be talked about tomorrow, I suppose.
Upon reflection, my mind has focused on Bluebeard. At first I thought there wouldn't be enough material to work with - there is no Disney film (for obvious reasons) and the most recent live action film is French, there is also scarcity of YA novels, which ideally was going to be a big chunk of my modern interpretations literature. Yet, the more I read, the more I think it could be a good fit notwithstanding the lack of modern retellings. In particular, I find that it lends itself well to talk of other fairy tales that contrast with Bluebeard. Beauty and the Beast is the most obvious one: the similarities are uncanny, and though it could be said that BatB does not feature a villain, if we look at it in tandem with Bluebeard and as a 'happily ever after' version of that, then the Beast and Bluebeard can be ascribed to the same category.
Red Riding Hood could also be talked about in conjunction with Bluebeard, and here the villain is more obvious and definitely ripe for redemption in recent adaptations, of which I have read a few already. These three are most obviously about the man/woman dichotomy, so I think the greater struggle will be linking this villain-centric, male-dominated story to the more obviously feminine ones of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. One way to get around the problem would be to look at Perrault as a whole, instead of using just Bluebeard as a starting point. All the fairy tales mentioned here belong to his tradition of folktales and, as a group, the modern adaptations double in number.
This brings us neatly back to my issue with keeping things focused and tight. One fairy tale, with the caveat of being able to occasionally digress and explore similar tales, holds the research monster at bay. One collection of fairy tales, Perrault's in this case, strikes me as an unstable flow of text after text (after text). It will have to be talked about tomorrow, I suppose.