amandaonwriting:

The Disturbing Origins of 10 Famous Fairy Tales

by Emily Temple (reblogged from Flavorwire) 

Sleeping Beauty
In one of the very earliest versions of this classic story, published in 1634 by Giambattista Basile as Sun, Moon, and Talia, the princess does not prick her finger on a spindle, but rather gets a sliver of flax stuck under her fingernail. She falls down, apparently dead, but her father cannot face the idea of losing her, so he lays her body on a bed in one of his estates.
Later, a king out hunting in the woods finds her, and since he can’t wake her up, rapes her while she’s unconscious, then heads home to his own country. Some time after that, still unconscious, she gives birth to two children, and one of them accidentally sucks the splinter out of her finger, so she wakes up. The king who raped her is already married, but he burns his wife alive so he and Talia can be together. Don’t worry, the wife tries to kill and eat the babies first, so it’s all morally sound.

Little Red Riding Hood
If you can believe it, the Brothers Grimm actually made this story a lot nicer than it was when they got their hands on it. In Charles Perrault’s version, included in his 1697 collection Stories or Fairy Tales from Past Times: Tales of Mother Goose, there is no intrepid huntsman. Little Red simply strips naked, gets in bed, and then dies, eaten up by the big bad wolf, with no miraculous relief (in another version, she eats her own grandmother first, her flesh cooked up and her blood poured into a wine glass by our wolfish friend).
Instead, Perrault gives us a little rhyming verse reminding us that not all wolves are wild beasts — some seduce with gentleness, sneak into our beds, and get us there. The sexual undertones are not lost on us — after all, the contemporary French idiom for a girl having lost her virginity was elle avoit vû le loup — she has seen the wolf.

Rumpelstiltskin
This story is pretty simple: a miller’s daughter is trapped and forced to spin straw into gold, on pain of death. A little man appears to her, and spins it for her, but says that he will take her child in payment unless she can guess his name. In the Grimm version, when the maiden finally figures out Rumpelstiltskin’s name, he reacts rather badly: ‘The Devil told you that! The Devil told you that!’ the little man yelled, and in his fury he stamped his right foot so hard that he drove it into the ground right up to his waist. Then he took hold of his left foot with both hands and tore himself in two.” Ick.

Cinderella
Here, Perrault is much nicer than Grimm — in his version, the two cruel stepsisters get married off to members of the royal court after Cinderella is properly married to the prince. In the Grimm story, not only do the stepsisters cut off parts of their feet in order to fit into the glass slippers (surprise, surprise, the blood pooling in their shoes gives them away), but at the end, they have their eyes pecked out by doves. Just for good measure.

Snow White
First of all, in the original 1812 Grimm version of this tale, the evil Queen is Snow White’s actual mother, not her stepmother. We don’t know, but that makes it a lot more terrifying to us. The Disney version also left out the fact that the Queen sends the huntsman out to bring back Snow White’s liver and lungs, which she then means to eat. And the fact that she’s actually not in a deep sleep when the prince finds her — she’s dead, and he’s carting off her dead body to play with when his servant trips, jostles the coffin, and dislodges the poison apple from SW’s throat.
Most notable, however, is the punishment the Grimms thought up for her. When the queen shows up at Snow White’s wedding, she’s forced to step into iron shoes that had been cooking in the fire, and then dances until she falls down dead.

Hansel and Gretel
The version of the story we know is already pretty gruesome — the evil stepmother abandons the children to die in the forest, they happen upon a cannibalistic witch’s cottage, she fattens them up to eat, they outwit and kill her and escape. The Grimm version is basically the same, but in an early French version, called The Lost Children, the witch is the Devil, and the Devil wants to bleed the children on a sawhorse. Of course, they pretend not to know how to get on, so the Devil has his wife (who tried to help the poor kids earlier in the story) show them. They promptly slit her throat, steal all the Devil’s money, and run off.

Rapunzel
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. Well, in the Grimm version, she does, a little too often, to a prince, and winds up pregnant, innocently remarking to her jailer witch that her clothes feel too tight.
The witch, not to have any competition, chops off Rapunzel’s hair and magically transports her far away, where she lives as a beggar with no money, no home, and after a few months, two hungry mouths to feed. As for the prince, the witch lures him up and then pushes him from the window. Some thorn bushes break his fall, but also poke out his eyes. For all this extra bloodshed, however, there’s still a happy ending.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears
In this tale’s earliest known incarnation, there was no Goldilocks — only the three bears and a fox called Scrapefoot, who enters the three bears’ palace, sleeps in their beds and messes around with their salmon of knowledge. In the end, she either gets thrown out of the window or eaten, depending on who’s telling the tale. Interestingly, it has been suggested that the use of the word “vixen” to mean female fox is how we got to Goldilocks, by means of a crafty old woman in the intervening story incarnations.

The Little Mermaid
We all know the story of the little mermaid: she sells her voice for a pair of legs, flops around for a bit, then wins her prince’s heart, right? Well, not exactly. In Hans Christian Andersen’s original tale, she trades tongue for legs all right, but part of the deal is that every step will be nearly unbearable, like walking on sharp swords, and the day after the prince marries someone else, she’ll die and turn into sea foam.
Hoping to win the prince’s heart, she dances for him, even though it’s agony. He claps along, but eventually decides to marry another. The mermaid’s sisters sell their hair to bring her a dagger and urge her to kill the prince and let his blood drip onto her feet, which will then become fins again. She sneaks up on him, but can’t bring herself to do it. So she dies, and dissolves into foam. Later, Andersen changed the ending, so that the mermaid becomes a “daughter of the air” — if she does good deeds for 300 years, she can get a soul and go to heaven. Many scholars find this rubbish.

The Frog Prince
Traditionally the very first story in the Grimm Brothers’ collection, this story is simple enough: the princess kisses the frog, out of the goodness of her heart, and he turns into a prince. Or, if you’re reading the original version, the frog tricks the resentful princess into making a deal with him, follows her home, keeps pushing himself further and further onto her silken pillow, until finally she hurls him against the wall. Somehow, this action is rewarded by his transformation into a prince, but it’s not even the most violent. In other early versions, she has to cut off his head instead. That’s rather far off from the traditional kiss, don’t you think?

aeromachia:m-azing:lizdexia:

Hey guys. So I want to talk to you about one of the greatest heroines ever written for young adult literature, and that is A Series of Unfortunate Events’ Violet Baudelaire.

In any discussion of women in YA lit, there are basically three names that come up: Bella Swan (generally derided as weak and useless), Hermione Granger (whom everyone agrees is THE BESTEST!!!!), and Katniss Everdeen (jury’s still out on that one, but the consensus as far as I’ve seen is that feminist bloggers and Twilight haters alike super love her). Violet rarely comes up, which I think is a shame, because I would argue that she’s perhaps better written than all three of those other young women.

Note that I’m not saying she’s a better woman. This isn’t one of those posts where someone tries to empirically prove that this character is TOTALLY BETTER than that character, because I find that sort of thing dull and counterproductive. I’m not trying to pit different ladies against each other, because I’m generally against that sort of thing (though I don’t think having a preference between two female characters or real-life women makes you sexist). This is more of an exploration on how young women are treated in books geared toward tweens, and how we could all perhaps take a lesson from Daniel Handler (a male writer, interestingly enough) in this arena.

The first thing that strikes me when analyzing ASOUE from a feminist perspective is that Violet is, of course, a skilled inventor, a field in which you don’t see many fictional women. A different writer might have stuck to more “traditional” gender roles and cast Violet as the bookish wordsmith and Klaus as the science-minded inventor, but wouldn’t that have been boring, really? The boy tinkers around in his laboratory and invents things that save the day, and his sister occasionally correctly defines a word. Boring. But what’s even more interesting to me is that Violet, despite having tremendous skill in a traditionally “non-feminine” area, is never presented as The Exceptional Woman, which is perhaps my least favorite trope in fiction, one that has ruined countless characters for me (Veronica Mars, Ginny Weasley, River Song). Rather, each of the kids in the book has one particular skill that saves everyone else’s asses at least once, and even among the girls, they’re evenly split between the “feminine” (Sunny the cook, Isadora the poet) and the “masculine” (Violet the inventor, Fiona the mycologist).

Furthermore, her looks are only commented on once or twice, and always by another character — never by herself or the narrator. This is significant. Young women in literature are almost always given a thorough physical description, whether it’s fawning or, more commonly, one of those “So-and-so was hardly beautiful — in fact, she was really rather plain, with boring brown eyes and long dark hair that fell into her face” deals that contemporary authors love. Even in Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, Katniss and Hermione’s appearances are mentioned quite a few times. But in ASOUE, none of the Baudelaire kids are really described in detail, aside from Klaus’s glasses (which are often a plot point) and Violet tying up her hair when she has to think. THIS IS HUGE. I don’t know if I’m making a mountain out of a molehill here, but honestly, it’s so refreshing to see a teenage girl character who isn’t defined in any way by her looks, whether beautiful or exceptionally “plain.” It simply doesn’t matter; she’s got 99 problems but a zit ain’t one. Similarly, while she and Klaus both get romantic subplots with tertiary characters, they never threaten to take over the actual plot. These kids are kind of busy trying to escape a crapton of people who want them dead, and there’s not a ton of time left over to moon over Quigley Quagmire (though I loved their little romance, don’t get me wrong!).

Furthermore, LET’S TALK ABOUT THE MORAL AMBIGUITY OF THIS CHARACTER. There are quite a few moments in the books wherein Violet and Klaus discuss whether or not their actions — causing lots of deaths, burning down the carnival and the Hotel Denouement, et cetera — mean that they’re just as bad as the people from whom they’re running. I mean, there have probably been lots of essays written about how smart these books are (come on, it’s essentially a kids’ book series about ethical relativism!) but honestly, how often in the lit world, kids’ or adults’, do you see teenage female characters struggling with these kinds of huge moral issues? Not particularly often, to my knowledge.

This obviously isn’t the most well-written little post and I’m probably going to revise it a bunch of times until it’s actually a smart piece of analysis and not just a FEELINGS GEYSER about a criminally underrated kids’ book series, but for now, I’m just going to post it and that’s that.

The end, but not really.

#accurate as fuck

excellent character, excellent series

Famous Novelists on Symbolism in Their Work and Whether It Was Intentional 

fishingboatproceeds:

justmargaret:

mentalflossr:

It was 1963, and 16-year-old Bruce McAllister was sick of symbol-hunting in English class. Rather than quarrel with his teacher, he went straight to the source: McAllister mailed a crude, four-question survey to 150 novelists, asking if they intentionally planted symbolism in their work. Seventy-five authors responded. Here’s what they had to say.

IT DOESN’T MATTER IF THE AUTHOR PUT IT THERE INTENTIONALLY OR NOT. That is not the point. Reading is not a game of Clue; books are not a mystery that you have to solve by putting all the pieces together. That’s not the point. Find the meaning you want to find in it. That’s what we do with books because that’s what we do in life.

What Margaret said. If the point of reading is merely to understand precisely what the author intended, then reading is just this miserable one-sided conversation in which an author is droning on to you page after page after page and the reader just sits there receiving a monologue.

That’s not reading. That’s listening.

Reading is the active co-creation of a story, complete with all its symbols and abstractions. 

To read well, you have to understand that sometimes an oligarchic pig is not just an oligarchic pig. Maybe Orwell intended Animal Farm to be about how dangerous pigs can be. Maybe he had a personal vendetta against pigs. It doesn’t matter. It happens to say a lot about how humans organize themselves, and how power and social status shape our understanding of justice. It happens to capture the limits of human empathy, and how those limitations can lead to structural inequality.

I don’t see how it matters at all whether Orwell intended his book to be as good as it turned out to be. So when the story above says that a 16-year-old went “straight to the source,” the article is dead wrong, because every story has two sources: writer and reader.