Fairytale Essay

Fairytale is one of the intricate genres in literary history. It is impossible to say exactly when the first fairytale was created. They have been in practice since the beginning of time. The famous scholar Jack Zipes agreed that evolution of fairytales could not be determined. In his book The Irresistible Fairytales, he says: “It is impossible to trace the historical origins and evolution of fairytales to a particular time and place; we do know that humans began telling tales as soon as they developed the capacity of speech. They may have even used sign language before speech originated to communicate vital information for adapting to their environment” However, studies show that the origin of fairytales is rooted in oral folk stories.

Jack zipes believes that fairytales were first narrated to members of tribe in order to elucidate natural occurrences such as the change of the seasons and shifts in the weather or to celebrate the rites of harvesting, hunting, marriage and conquest. The emphasis in most folk tales was on communal harmony (zipes,10). His research has revealed that, Fairytales had been orally created and transferred from generation to generation and often carried underlying message of warning and advice. Some critics confuse the oral folktale with the literary fairytale. Windling in contes de fees says that it is necessary to focus our attention on the difference between oral folktale and literary fairytale. According to Tismar, Literary Fairytales are “written by a single identifiable author” and are unreal and complex, whereas folktales “have no author” ; they are passed down through the oral tradition. The literary fairy tale as a genre was developed through its shift from oral to written form, whereas the history of folk tales can be reached back to thousands of years. Jack zipes agreed that it is very

Women, while staying at a home used to narrate stories to their children and they mostly shared their ideas and stories in order to escape their routine life. According to Terri-Winding: “Straparola, Basile, Perrault and even the Grimm Brothers made no secret of the fact that their source material came largely or entirely from women storytellers. Yet we are left with the impression that women dropped out of the history of fairytales once they became a form, existing only in the background as an anonymous old peasant called Mother Goose”. Then, it was in late 17thc that French writers institutionalized the genre of literary fairytales. Fairytale was developed in salons as a parlor entertainment by aristocratic women. These literary fairy tales did not replace the oral tradition Instead, the oral tradition served as a means for aristocratic writers to obtain new stories(zipes,10). According to Jack Zipes “ storytelling, riddles and other parlor and salon games had been common in Italy, Spain, England and France since the sixteenth century”. As women in bulk were storytellers or story creators in salon, so the first set of literary fairytale was also written by women. It was the Marie-Catherine d’ Aulnoy of Paris, who wrote a fairytale entitled as “The Isle of Happiness”. She