Monday, October 26, 2009
Fairy Tales
In her work Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale. Paula Gunn Allen illustrates how a Native American tale reveals much about its culture of origin, its gender relations especially, and those of cultures that become its audience. I believe the fairy, tall, etc. tales of a culture have unique and meaningful interactions with the actual lives of people in that culture. For example, when I was a young girl my brother and mother told me jokingly about how there's a leprechaun with a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The next time I saw a rainbow, fearless me took it upon myself to follow that rainbow (in where I could interpret its end was). So, dear readers, can you think of instances where the fantasy of our culture's tales interacted with the reality of your lives? What does this say about how fantasy is constructed through real experiences, or how conversely fantasy may shape actual events? Or are they all just kiddie stories that we've outgrown?
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I feel like it is very common for children to create false expectations about adulthood based on different stories targeted at them. Think of when people say something like, "It's just like a movie," meaning we end up comapring reality to some idyllic image from a film. Take, for example, Disney movies like Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid... and on and on. Not only can these films give girls false expectations about having good hair, but also expectations about romance and love that are unrealistic. These can also lead to people acting particular ways based on these characters, like young girls thinking they have to fulfill some of the common characteristics held by those well-loved Disney princesses.
ReplyDeleteJacqueline Rose writes about how childhood, in many ways, doesn't exist. Her basic argument is that childhood is something that we construct (as a kind of other) to our lived experience as adults, when in reality, our understandings of our childhoods are constantly in flux and changing based on our experiences as adults. Hence Peter Pan: the boy who never grows up. So as always, I'm putting pressure on these questions to see if our conceptions of childhood/ish fantasies can be complicated.
ReplyDeleteNow, as far as fantasy bleeding into real life goes, let's just say that I like to imagine that a certain television show is actually based on my life as an adjunct professor. Also, I'm delusional.
I'd like to add a bit to what Marielle said on the topic of how the stories that children hear influence their expectations of life. I only ever bought Barbies so that I could throw them out and keep their dogs, but I know that many little girls grew up with Barbie as their idea of the "way a girl should be." With improvements in technology, little girls today can not only buy the dolls (and their life's accessories, such as cars, cute boyfriends, and handbags), but they can also watch fully animated movies featuring Barbie in different roles of heroine and damsel in distress. The expectations that the Barbie's image fosters in these children is entirely unrealistic, but they learn to look up to and idolize this made-up woman anyway. A study was done on the proportions of Barbie's body, and the results showed that her bust to waist ratio is so disproportionate that she would not be able to stand upright. Also, her legs are so long that she would be incapable of walking normally. In fact, the level at which little girls internalize the fantasies of Barbie's world is so great that a Pregnant Barbie was withdrawn from the market because there was no wedding ring painted on her finger. Though I recognize that fantasies generated by Barbies are entirely different from fantasies generated by oral tradition, I think that they are similar in the profundity of their effect on children's ever-shifting concept of self.
ReplyDeleteI have an extremely exaggerated version of such an innocent thing for parents to do. When I was younger, my parents would scare the heck out of me by saying I shouldn't get lost when I'm out with them, that I should always stay with them. They told me all sorts of crazy stories about how if I'm kidnapped, I'll get my eyes gouged out, or my hands and legs chopped off, and made to beg on the streets for some sort of crime lords or another. So, naturally, I always stuck by their side. As I grew older, I realized that people don't actually do that here, or at least not commonly. But, to my parents, who grew up in India, this was a common occurrence. For those of you who have seen Slumdog Millionaire, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. But in any case, these stories made me a lot more careful and cautious, which I guess was a good thing in the end.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the comments above. Like the idea of Barbie and Disney Princesses common conceptions introduced in early childhood do tend to stick with us and give us a sense of hope and a mold to fill as we grow and experience life. I think that as we mature we usually succumb to reality, a realization that my legs will never be as long and skinny as Barbie or where is 'my' prince charming, but personally, I think it's important to have these early lessons because they inspire a sense of identity, good or bad, early on.
ReplyDeleteGood thoughts all, thank you! I agree with Zach that having positive early experiences helps us to build identity, because confidence and love for self, others, and the world is necessary to do so. For that reason I'm not so sure that I buy into Rose's argument that we construct childhood in our imaginations. I believe that rather childhood is a certain stage of consciousness, a necessary one for mental and spiritual development, that gradually diminishes and evolves into later life stages with loss of innocence. Anxiety, as we discussed yesterday, perhaps comes from this shift of consciousness and loss of innocence. Change is hard, but needed to move on in life. We can make the change easier, perhaps, by monitoring the mythical nature of what we tell children to teach them about the world, helping them to build identity but not setting them up for painful leaps of awareness later on. Barbie's a fine doll to play with, but personally I'll tell my little girl that she's beautiful just as she is, even if she doesn't have Barbie's legs and flowing blond hair.
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