scholarly journals Reading Hair as a Symbol to Understand Changing Gender Roles in “Rapunzel” and Rapunzel’s Revenge

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 53-72
Author(s):  
Suchismita Duttagupta

Fairy tales have always been captivating for young readers. Since most of the fairy tales have their source in oral folktales, they highlight traditional gender roles and create stereotypes. As Maria Nikolajeva (2003) states, fairy tales reflect its own time and society. Evolution in readership has led to a change in these reflections. “Rapunzel” is one of the most iconic fairy tale characters and she is known for her long golden hair. Hair carries symbolic implications and is often associated with femininity, and exhibits how societal control influences how she/he wears their hair. By the transformation of her hair in the adaptations, the authors depict a change in the traditional gender roles. Rapunzel’s Revenge by Shannon and Dean Hale will be read as a counter-narrative to Grimm‟s “Rapunzel” to investigate the changes in the fairy tale genre and enable a reading of the changing hair symbolism in order to understand the change in gender roles and identity.

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 49-71
Author(s):  
Anastasia Ulanowicz

“We are the People”: The Holodomor and North American-Ukrainian Diasporic Memory in Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s Enough. Although the Holodomor — the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933 — has played a major role in the cultural memory of Ukrainian diasporic communities in the United States and Canada, relatively few North American children’s books directly represent this traumatic historical event. One exception, however, is Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s and Michael Martchenko’s picture book, Enough 2000, which adapts a traditional Ukrainian folktale in order to introduce young readers to the historical and polit­ical circumstances in which this artificial famine occurred. By drawing on what scholar Jack Zipes has identified as the “subversive potential” of fairy tales, Skrypuch and Martchenko critique the ironies and injustices that undergirded Soviet forced collectivization and Stalinist famine policy. Additionally, they explicitly set a portion of their fairy tale adaptation in Canada in order to gesture to the role played by the Holodomor in structuring diasporic memory and identity, especially in relation to post-Independ­ence era Ukraine.«Мы — народ»: Голодомор и североамериканско-украинская диаспорная память в книге Enough Марши Форчук Скрыпух. Несмотря на то, что Голодомор — голод в Украине 1932–1933 гoдов — сыграл важную роль в культурной памяти украинских диаспорных общин в Соеди­ненных Штатах и Канаде, относительно мало североамериканских детских книг описывает это травматическое событие. Важное место в этом контексте является книга Марши Форчук Скры­пух и Майкла Мартченко «Достаточно» 2000, которая адаптирует традиционную украинскую сказку для того, чтобы познакомить молодых читателей с историческими и политическими обстоятельствами этого искусственного голода. Опираясь на то, что ученый Джек Зайпс назвал «подрывным потенциалом» сказок, Скрыпух и Мартченко критикуют иронию и несправедли­вость советской принудительной коллективизации и политики сталинского голода. Кроме того, они установили часть своей сказочной адаптации в Канаде, чтобы показать роль Голодомора в структурировании диаспорной памяти и самобытности, и связи последних с независимой Украиной.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-235
Author(s):  
Dwi Windah Wulansari

Abstrak  - Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mencari bias gender yang terdapat pada hasil terjemahan buku cerita anak di bandingankan dengan hasil terjemahan google translate. Dalam penelitian ini menggunakan metode deskriptif kualitatif. Sumber data dalam penelitian ini adalah dongeng Bawang Merah dan Bawang Putih yang diterjemahkan dan diceritakan kembali oleh Gibran Maulana dan diterjemahkan melalui aplikasi Google Translate Hasil penerjemahan antara Google Translate dan penerjemah hampir sama yaitu mengenai nama tokoh, nama ganti orang dan nama ganti kepemilikan. Pada aplikasi Google Translate dapat melakukan kesalahan karena konteks, budaya, nama orang, dan kata ganti orang tidak dapat terbaca dalam aplikasi tersebut. sedangakan hasil terjemahan dari penerjemah mengalami human error. Penerjemah dalam buku cerita anak masih belum bisa lepas dari pengaruh ideologi patriarki yang dapat ditujukkan dalam peran gender tradisional yang digambarkan yang membuat peran laki-laki lebih unggul daripada perempuan. Kata Kunci: bias gender, cerita dongeng, google translate Abstract - This study aims to look for gender biases found in the results of the translation of children's storybooks in light with the results of the google translate translation. In this study using a qualitative descriptive method. The data source in this study is the fairy tale of Bawang Merah and Bawang Putih which were translated and retold by Gibran Maulana and translated through the Google Translate application. The results of the translation between Google Translate and the translator are almost the same, namely regarding the names of characters, people's names and ownership names. The Google Translate application can make mistakes because the context, culture, people's names, and pronouns cannot be read in the application. while the translation results from translators experienced human error. Translators in children's story books still cannot be separated from the influence of patriarchal ideology which can be shown in traditional gender roles which are described which make the role of men superior to women. Keyoword : gender bias, fairy tales, google translate


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-57
Author(s):  
Alizon Pergher

In the past, literature for children and adolescents reflected society’s belief that young readers were not supposed to think for themselves. Stories were vehicles to provide direct, simple moral lessons. Those moralistic books reinforced gender and good / evil tropes, leaving little room for interpretation, moral grey areas and non-traditional gender roles. In this paper, we examine two contemporary books, Le Combat d’hiver (2006) et Le Chagrin du roi mort (2009), as examples of how youth literature has evolved. In both books, readers are presented with complex characters, plots and themes that encourage personal reflection. Morals are not something to be taught but rather felt.


Author(s):  
Marina Warner

Fairy tale hovered as a form of literature between children and adults, but in the Victorian era, the fairy way of writing became a mode of communicating moral values, political dreams, and even scientific knowledge to children. Printing technology made books with pictures one of the most exciting and successful ventures of the nineteenth century, and fairy tales began to be produced deliberately to appeal to an audience of young readers. ‘Childish things: pictures and conversations’ explains that, on the whole, the role of artists who helped create fairy tales has been neglected. It describes the re-writing of fairy tales for this younger audience. Modern fairy tales display a darkening tone.


Author(s):  
Jessica R. McCort

This essay focuses specifically on the recent fairy-tale novels Coraline and A Tale Dark and Grimm as examples of gruesome, morally impactful modern fairy tales. Jessica R. McCort situates these particular books in relation to twentieth-century women authors’ dark fairy-tale revisions that emphasize identity development and the current cultural moment, a time in which mainstream American culture is obsessed with the darker side of fairy tales and the resurgence and rehabilitation of the fairy tale. Both Coraline and A Tale Dark and Grimm, filled with violence, gore, and horror, hearken back to the literary fairy tales that precede them and concentrate on the idea that children must learn to conquer their demons in order to achieve self-awareness. As McCort argues, these novels illustrate that children can gain, through textual encounters with the horrific, an enhanced sense of self and the power of bravery. In the end, this essay argues that these books are excellent examples of the social importance of maintaining terror as part of the texture of modern fairy tales for young readers, especially those in which the pursuit of personal identity is at the apple’s core.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 235-247
Author(s):  
Valentina Denzel

Abstract During its brief existence from 1976 to 1978 the French underground feminist magazine Ah!Nana represented a powerful medium to discuss various topics related to women, sexuality, and discrimination. One of its main goals was to challenge traditional (literary) female role models, including housewives, submissive mothers, and “damsels in distress.” Through the adaptation of fairy tales, a genre particularly suited through its imaginative worlds to challenge preconceptions and norms, Ah!Nana deconstructed and questioned binary gender roles and heteronormativity. This article analyzes cartoon artist Nicole Claveloux’s queer adaptation of the nineteenth-century fairy tale “Histoire de Blondine, Bonne-Biche et Beau-Minon” (Blondine, the Good Doe, and the Gallant Cat) by the Comtesse de Ségur. Claveloux addresses her queer parody to an adult audience, and conveys a new perspective on gender, sexuality, and humanness that is in line with Ah!Nana’s promotion of second-wave feminist standpoints and punk culture. She advocates the exploration of new sexual pleasures, and the disruption of bourgeoisie values, including binary gender roles.


Author(s):  
Angelika Juško-Štekele

The aim of the paper is to identify deviant patterns of behavior between wife and husband in Latgalian household folk-tales by rising those characteristic and action strategies, which in accordance with the public assessment are recognized as non-compliant for traditional gender roles. The empirical source of the research is Latgalian household folk-tails, which thematically cover a variety of relationship models peculiar for a family (husband and wife). For the analysis of a deviant feature developed in a story the author applied theory of social action established by the sociologist Talcott Parsons. In the context of a fairy-tale, the actors (a husband and a wife) should not be regarded as individuals in a sense of a separate person, but instead as representatives of the given gender. Therefore, the nature of their actions is not individual as well, but instead more culturally-historically determined, which in accordance with the folk theory proposed by Richard Dorson is “real situation and local environment”. Deviant behavior scenarios in fairy-tales allow to evaluate developmental tendencies of a family as an institute for a period starting with 20th century, when folk-tales chosen for the empirical source were written, up to nowadays, when in the form of strategic documents are raised such problems of family institutes as significant decline in the amount of registered marriages and increase of divorced marriages.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-184
Author(s):  
Željka Flegar

This article discusses the implied ‘vulgarity’ and playfulness of children's literature within the broader concept of the carnivalesque as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World (1965) and further contextualised by John Stephens in Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction (1992). Carnivalesque adaptations of fairy tales are examined by situating them within Cristina Bacchilega's contemporary construct of the ‘fairy-tale web’, focusing on the arenas of parody and intertextuality for the purpose of detecting crucial changes in children's culture in relation to the social construct and ideology of adulthood from the Golden Age of children's literature onward. The analysis is primarily concerned with Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes (1982) and J. K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard (2007/2008) as representative examples of the historically conditioned empowerment of the child consumer. Marked by ambivalent laughter, mockery and the degradation of ‘high culture’, the interrogative, subversive and ‘time out’ nature of the carnivalesque adaptations of fairy tales reveals the striking allure of contemporary children's culture, which not only accommodates children's needs and preferences, but also is evidently desirable to everybody.


2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-91
Author(s):  
Nancy M. Arenberg

As a transnational Israeli writer, Chochana Boukhobza delves into the complex problem of crossing borders in Un été à Jérusalem (1986), a text which focuses on the unnamed protagonist's trip from Paris to visit her family during the summer months in Jerusalem. Although the narrator had resided in Israel previously, she is forced to grapple with her ‘Otherness’ in Jerusalem, especially as a Jew originally from Tunisia. The narrator's crisis of exile is defined by her sense of disconnection to her family, the city, Israeli politics, and women's traditional roles. In this essay, particular emphasis will be placed on the protagonist's penchant for profaning Jewish cultural and religious practices, which is articulated through a series of corporeal transgressions. To launch this revolt against the patriarchal structure of the nation in Israel, the narrator rejects the submissive role assigned to Jewish-Tunisian women, and, in so doing, dismantles traditional gender roles.


Author(s):  
Jack Zipes

This book explores the legacy of the Brothers Grimm in Europe and North America, from the nineteenth century to the present. The book reveals how the Grimms came to play a pivotal and unusual role in the evolution of Western folklore and in the history of the most significant cultural genre in the world—the fairy tale. Folklorists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm sought to discover and preserve a rich abundance of stories emanating from an oral tradition, and encouraged friends, colleagues, and strangers to gather and share these tales. As a result, hundreds of thousands of wonderful folk and fairy tales poured into books throughout Europe and have kept coming. The book looks at the transformation of the Grimms' tales into children's literature, the Americanization of the tales, the “Grimm” aspects of contemporary tales, and the tales' utopian impulses. It shows that the Grimms were not the first scholars to turn their attention to folk tales, but were vital in expanding readership and setting the high standards for folk-tale collecting that continue through the current era. The book concludes with a look at contemporary adaptations of the tales and raises questions about authenticity, target audience, and consumerism. The book examines the lasting universal influence of two brothers and their collected tales on today's storytelling world.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document