Are the Fairy Tales truly beneficial to the growing kids?
From ages people tell or read the fairy tales to their children before they go to sleep. The well dressed and friendly looking witches or personified animals with supernatural powers may all seem to be very exciting and entertaining. However the embellishment cannot cover the unacceptable behaviors such as abandonment or extreme violence. They are devastating to the growing kid and its perception of world, family and its members. Instead of calming the children down before they fall asleep they cause an anxiety and uncertainty of the following day because mom might die and a soulless stepmother can force their father to abandon them. Kids also realize that in the times of any kind of
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Moreover, it creates inequality of gender since the male is considered right, good, and gets rewarded but the female is portrayed wrong, bad and gets punished. This is why the girls reading the fairy tale might never gain high-level of self confidence and might have a low self-esteem knowing that they represent the sex that is weaker and not authoritative. On the other hand boys reading the story might exalt themselves only because they were born male. Lastly, in the fairy tale “The Little Red Riding Hood” kids are shown that the repercussion for mistakes might be deadly. “The poor child, who did not know that it was dangerous to stop and listen to wolves, said: “I’m going to see my grandmother and am taking her some cakes and a little pot of butter sent by my mother”” (Tatar 16). The result of talking to the cunning wolf was that both of characters were devoured. The Little Red Hood made only one mistake which was talking to the stranger but the consequences of that are overpowering. She is the innocent and trustful little girl who should not walk through the forest on her own, and if …show more content…
The lack of real partnership between the males and females, depriving women of their rights, creating an incorrect image of masculinity and adulthood, and blaming kids for their mistakes are not the values which guarantee a happy and successful life. The Elizabeth Danish, the author of an article “Influence on Fairy Tales on Children” states that kids “should be exposed to lots of different stories and stimuli so fairy tales alone aren't going to have any particularly stronger impact on their development.
Throughout history it is known that fairy tales were written to teach children lessons about life in a way they could understand and that is fun and unique. Authors of fairy tales put simple lessons into the stories so the children could understand them easily while reading. Whether this be a lesson to be nice to all people, like in Cinderella, or to not judge someone by their appearance, like in Donkey Skin, both by Charles Perrault. Each fairytale has a moral that can be found throughout reading the stories that teach children right from wrong while letting them use their imaginations to discover that moral. The good and the bad lets them express their thoughts openly, rather it be their negative thoughts through the villian or their
Children can identify themselves with fairy-tale characters; they imagine themselves as heroes, who are capable of killing dragons, or simpletons, who demonstrate the superiority over clever people. Fantasies based on the fairy tales are extremely important part of the children’s lives, and this is not only because they describe threatening situations that resemble main fears of a young child such as the fear of getting lost, fear of wrong decisions, fear of monsters or evil animals. Happy endings, which are always present in fairy tales, give children the confidence that despite all their fears they will be able to win in the end. This knowledge helps them to prepare for the difficulties of life, regardless whether they are real or imagined (Doughty, 2006).
Tatar, Maria. Off with Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992. Print.
Tatar, Maria. "Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’" The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2002. 17-27 371-373. Print.
“I've told her and I've told her: daughter, you have to teach that child the facts of life before it's too late” (Hopkinson 1). These are the first three lines of Nalo Hopkinson's fairy tale “Riding the Red”, a modern adaptation of Charles Perrault's “Little Red Riding Hood”. Perrault provided a moral to his fairy tales, the one from this one is to prevent girls from men's nature. In Hopkinson's adaptation, the goal remains the same: through the grandmother biographic narration, the author advances a revisited but still effective moral: beware of wolfs even though they seem innocent.
Zipes, Jack. When Dreams Came: True:Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. New York: CRC Press, 1999.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage, 2010. Print.
Fairy Tales have been around for generations and generations. Our parents have told us these stories and we will eventually pass them down to ours. In this time of age the most common fairytales are Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and The Beast and many more. Children idolize their favorite character and pretend to be them by mimicking everything they do in the stories. The character’s behavior is what is viewed as appropriate in society. These fairy tales show a girl and a boy fall in love and live “happily ever after”. The tales in many people’s eyes resemble a dream life that they would want to have of their own. However, have you ever really looked at what makes up a fairy tale? Many things are unrealistic but the most unflattering aspect of these tales is how women are depicted in them. Fairy tales give an unrealistic view to how women should look and behave in real life.
Bettelheim, Bruno. “Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation. “The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 1976.
For centuries, fairytales have been used for instruction; to teach children what is expected of them as they age and what terrors behold them if they do not comply with the guidelines laid out for them by their culture/society. Many of the tales were purposely frightful in order to scare children away from strangers, dark corners, and traveling off the beaten path into the dark thicket. Charles Perrault first began writing fairy tales in the late 17th century to educate his children. The morals of those tales often center on what is expected of young women; that they should remain ‘pure’ and ‘docile’. He wrote the tales in a time period when fairytales or ‘jack’ tales were looked at as instructional lessons. They were also widely told around the fire, as entertainment, for adults. Angela Carter adapted Perrault’s classic tales in the 1970’s; changing the victim...
I am writing this paper because I was assigned to write it as a class project. Along the way I realized the importance of sharing the real meanings of all these stories. Stories are important because in the society we live in things are constantly changing. Fairytales change but the base of the story always remain the same no matter how many times it has been retold. It’s important to reveal the true meanings of these stories, even with its dark characteristics, because the world is dark .Children need to know that there are people that have told stories relatable to what they are going through. Fairytales help the development of children; it helps their maturity as they confront someone else’s tough situations, instilling hope of a more positive ou...
Setting the tale in Nazi Germany creates an atmosphere of fear and anxiety, and establishes a set of circumstances in which it is possible for people to act in ways that would be unacceptable under other circumstances. The stepmother is a good example of this. She is the force in the family – it is she who decides that everyone in the family will have a better chance of survival, if they split up – the children going off alone together and the parents going in another direction. Unlike the portrayal of the stepmother in the Grimm fairy tale, this stepmother is not wicked. She is strong willed and determined, but not evil, although she is protecting herself and her husband by abandoning the children.
Throughout literature, authors employ a variety of strategies to highlight the central message being conveyed to the audience. Analyzing pieces of literature through the gender critics lens accentuates what the author believes to be masculine or feminine and that society and culture determines the gender responsibility of an individual. In the classic fairytale Little Red Riding Hood, the gender strategies appear through the typical fragile women of the mother and the grandmother, the heartless and clever male wolf, and the naïve and vulnerable girl as little red riding hood.
Fairy tales have been a big part of learning and childhood for many of us. They may seem childish to us, but they are full of life lessons and intelligent turnings. Components of fairy tales may even include violence, but always with the aim to provide a moral to the story. Hansel and Gretel is in itself a very interesting story to analyze. It demonstrates the way that children should not stray too far from their benchmarks and rely on appearances. In 2013, a film adaptation was produced. This film is produced for an older public and has picked up the story to turn it into a more mature and violent version. Hansel and Gretel is a German fairy tale written by the Grimm Brothers which has undergone several changes over the years and across the cultures which it touched, but for the purposes of this essay, I will stick to the original story. In the development of this essay, I will analyze the components of this tale by the Brothers Grimm based on the factors listed in the course syllabus (violence, interpersonal relationships, the function of magic and the ending), and I will then do a summary and comparison between the story and the film which was released in theaters recently.
Little Red Riding Hood can be seen as taking the role of the Wolf. Unlike Perrault’s short story where Little Red Riding Hood has a purpose for going to grandmother’s house, she does not have any such purpose in Roald Dahl’s poem. Little Red Riding Hood can be interpreted as a villain in Roald Dahl’s poem for the fact that the situation is inverted and Little Red Riding Hood commits the treacherous act of killing. This too plays along with the aforementioned idea of the Wolf not being entirely seen as a villain in Roald Dahl’s