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Jun. 24th, 2009 10:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
issenlloSo recently I've been on a fairytale kick. Actually, I'm pretty much always on a fairytale kick. I love fairytales: my favourite tale is Hansel and Gretel. Anyway, recently I read three books on the topic. One is about the Grimm brothers, one about 20th century poetry inspired by Grimm fairytales, and one where women writers talk about fairytales.
Title: Clever Maids: The Secret History Of The Grimm Fairy Tales
Author: Valerie Paradiz
I didn't know that the Grimm brothers, far from going about the countryside and shaking up old storytellers for their repertoire, actually sat around in their studies and wrote up stories told by their lady friends. Possibly this has to do with the movie I watched.
But anyway, the fact that tah-dah! the stories were from women comforted me a lot. I liked the idea that women were the storytellers, and the Grimm brothers were merely the compilers (and editors). This book is an account of the Grimm family, and how the brothers grew up to become interested in scholarship, philology, and folksy stuff, and how the friendship that their little sister Lotte had with another (wealthier?) family enabled them to come into contact with lots of young women who knew and collected fairytales.
The injustice, of course, was that many of these women, mostly educated and of good families, never even got a mention in the book of collected tales. Yes, they didn't write or make up the tales from scratch, but they searched out storytellers, spoke to them, and collected the stories. I think that merits a mention, even if as researcher. Instead, the Grimm brothers just credited the tales to 'the folk'. Bleh.
I was pleased to read, at the end of the book, that a few of the women who had helped them went on later to write books of their own and even became quite respected for their work. So yeah.
Title: The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales
Editors: Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson
As part of my skittish aim to read more poetry (I suck at appreciating verse), I picked this one up, hoping to read about different interpretations of fairytales, continuations, alternative endings, re-tellings from a different POV, etc. (In short, fanfic about fairytales.)
I guess I was hoping for something like Anne Sexton's Transformations, which is strange and scary and yet, er, bewitching, or at least not as fraught as Angela Carter's books.
This one? Well, it's a compilation after all, so there're hits and misses. Tho' must admit that while a lot of them are entertaining, such as the one where Bugs Bunny talks to Little Red Riding Hood (by Time Seibles), the majority are focused on a very small group of fairytales: Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and The Twelve Dancing Princess. Ah, and of course Little Red Riding Hood. Sooo... not really that representative of Grimm's fairytales (even if they're the more well-known ones).
And may I just rant for a moment how utterly boring it is to read poetry about Sleeping Beauty? It was a boring tale in the first place and it hasn't been much improved by reading peoms about how she was dreaming and dreaming and how magical this was, until her prince came. When I was young, the version I read had all these outakes about the servants who were frozen in place by the spell, the ordinary people in the kingdom who were doing their stuff and then the spell caught them (imagine creeping out of your mistress's room to be confronted by your outraged wife, and then! Bam! Frozen!)--which was vastly entertaining and a hundred times more interesting than a girl who went to prick her finger on a spindle. Bah.
I liked some of the poems, though, especially the ones about the more gruesome tales, such as the girl without hands. (Sexton's version is good too, but that's not in here). And also "Queen Charming Writes Again", Cinderella writing a chatty letter to her fairy godmother, by Pamela White Hadas. Curiously, the (many) poems based on Cinderella are quite interesting, yet the (many mooore) poems based on Sleeping Beauty are... okay, no more ranting. Maybe it's because Cinderella has a lot more action in it. Hey, when you talk to mice your life is automatically more interesting, yes?
Or maybe it's my own bias--I read an interpretation somewhere that posits Cinderella to be a magic practitioner (if a passive one), and that's really cooler than waiting for your prince to come have sex with you in your moment of vulnerability.
Title: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
Editor: Kate Bernheimer
Actually, I thought this was yet another compilation along the lines of The Poets' Grimm. Just grabbed it off the shelves at the library. In fact, it's a collection of mini-essays wherein writers write about the fairytales they've liked, or how it inspired their writing, or whatnot. I'm only just into it, but it's been much more fun than I thought.
I'm also, oddly, finding a camraderie with Margaret Atwood because she writes about how much she likes the tales with birds in them, like Six (or Seven) Swans and Juniper Tree. Oddly because I'm not a big fan of Atwood.
And this take on the Little Mermaid by Rosellen Brown gave me a pleasant feeling of yes! someone agrees with me :-P
She is deprived of her voice, of her personality, her self, left only with her looks, which are captivating but (to the prince's eternal credit) insufficient compared to the pleasures of a complete speaking woman.
(She's not referring to the Disney version, of course.) I remember when I first read Anderson tales and thought of the transformed mermaid, "she hasn't got a chance". But I've never really thought about how the prince's preference for the girl from the convent is a credit to him. But yeah, it is. Least he's not one to think a woman is a dumb (literally) prize as the princes for, say, Sleeping Beauty do.
Looking forward to the rest of this book.
Title: Clever Maids: The Secret History Of The Grimm Fairy Tales
Author: Valerie Paradiz
I didn't know that the Grimm brothers, far from going about the countryside and shaking up old storytellers for their repertoire, actually sat around in their studies and wrote up stories told by their lady friends. Possibly this has to do with the movie I watched.
But anyway, the fact that tah-dah! the stories were from women comforted me a lot. I liked the idea that women were the storytellers, and the Grimm brothers were merely the compilers (and editors). This book is an account of the Grimm family, and how the brothers grew up to become interested in scholarship, philology, and folksy stuff, and how the friendship that their little sister Lotte had with another (wealthier?) family enabled them to come into contact with lots of young women who knew and collected fairytales.
The injustice, of course, was that many of these women, mostly educated and of good families, never even got a mention in the book of collected tales. Yes, they didn't write or make up the tales from scratch, but they searched out storytellers, spoke to them, and collected the stories. I think that merits a mention, even if as researcher. Instead, the Grimm brothers just credited the tales to 'the folk'. Bleh.
I was pleased to read, at the end of the book, that a few of the women who had helped them went on later to write books of their own and even became quite respected for their work. So yeah.
Title: The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales
Editors: Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson
As part of my skittish aim to read more poetry (I suck at appreciating verse), I picked this one up, hoping to read about different interpretations of fairytales, continuations, alternative endings, re-tellings from a different POV, etc. (In short, fanfic about fairytales.)
I guess I was hoping for something like Anne Sexton's Transformations, which is strange and scary and yet, er, bewitching, or at least not as fraught as Angela Carter's books.
This one? Well, it's a compilation after all, so there're hits and misses. Tho' must admit that while a lot of them are entertaining, such as the one where Bugs Bunny talks to Little Red Riding Hood (by Time Seibles), the majority are focused on a very small group of fairytales: Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and The Twelve Dancing Princess. Ah, and of course Little Red Riding Hood. Sooo... not really that representative of Grimm's fairytales (even if they're the more well-known ones).
And may I just rant for a moment how utterly boring it is to read poetry about Sleeping Beauty? It was a boring tale in the first place and it hasn't been much improved by reading peoms about how she was dreaming and dreaming and how magical this was, until her prince came. When I was young, the version I read had all these outakes about the servants who were frozen in place by the spell, the ordinary people in the kingdom who were doing their stuff and then the spell caught them (imagine creeping out of your mistress's room to be confronted by your outraged wife, and then! Bam! Frozen!)--which was vastly entertaining and a hundred times more interesting than a girl who went to prick her finger on a spindle. Bah.
I liked some of the poems, though, especially the ones about the more gruesome tales, such as the girl without hands. (Sexton's version is good too, but that's not in here). And also "Queen Charming Writes Again", Cinderella writing a chatty letter to her fairy godmother, by Pamela White Hadas. Curiously, the (many) poems based on Cinderella are quite interesting, yet the (many mooore) poems based on Sleeping Beauty are... okay, no more ranting. Maybe it's because Cinderella has a lot more action in it. Hey, when you talk to mice your life is automatically more interesting, yes?
Or maybe it's my own bias--I read an interpretation somewhere that posits Cinderella to be a magic practitioner (if a passive one), and that's really cooler than waiting for your prince to come have sex with you in your moment of vulnerability.
Title: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
Editor: Kate Bernheimer
Actually, I thought this was yet another compilation along the lines of The Poets' Grimm. Just grabbed it off the shelves at the library. In fact, it's a collection of mini-essays wherein writers write about the fairytales they've liked, or how it inspired their writing, or whatnot. I'm only just into it, but it's been much more fun than I thought.
I'm also, oddly, finding a camraderie with Margaret Atwood because she writes about how much she likes the tales with birds in them, like Six (or Seven) Swans and Juniper Tree. Oddly because I'm not a big fan of Atwood.
And this take on the Little Mermaid by Rosellen Brown gave me a pleasant feeling of yes! someone agrees with me :-P
She is deprived of her voice, of her personality, her self, left only with her looks, which are captivating but (to the prince's eternal credit) insufficient compared to the pleasures of a complete speaking woman.
(She's not referring to the Disney version, of course.) I remember when I first read Anderson tales and thought of the transformed mermaid, "she hasn't got a chance". But I've never really thought about how the prince's preference for the girl from the convent is a credit to him. But yeah, it is. Least he's not one to think a woman is a dumb (literally) prize as the princes for, say, Sleeping Beauty do.
Looking forward to the rest of this book.
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Date: 2009-06-24 10:44 am (UTC)http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/sleepingbeauty/stories/sunmoontalia.html
http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/sleepingbeauty/index.html (If the prince's mother is an ogress...)
no subject
Date: 2009-06-24 10:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-25 09:11 am (UTC)Disney's version is fun, and a lot of the toned-down children's versions (like the one I read as a kid) are not bad, but when I look at the other versions, I get creeped out.