My thoughts: The introduction was too long, it was 1 minute and 33 seconds long taking up a huge chunk of time that could be used for information. Audio was patchy. It was very muffled to started with, becoming clearer towards the end. Images chosen were pixelated. The narrator wasn’t engaging enough with his delivery and could have emphasised certain words to keep audience interest. Sentences ran on together and he could have slowed down his pacing. Despite these flaws, the content was thoroughly captivating and I’m keen to learn more regarding fairytales - particularly the women creating them and why men took these stories for own profit and gain. The content was well written and thought provoking to take notes from and highly quotable as a starting point for my own work.
Fairy Tale: A Very Short Introduction
- 1: A fairytale is a short story filled with enchantments that is classic and familiar, often nursery standard . Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty.
- 2: “Fairytale” is a generic narrative term for a certain kind of enchanted story that takes you to another world, a secondary world as Tolkien called it. For example, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by Shakespeare is a fairytale play.
- 3: One of the characteristics of both a fairytale and the fairytale genre is that is often imagines a previous teller. The story that you are hearing now is a variation on something of the past.
- 4: Fairytales are written in a shared language of symbols and images. We know we’re in fairytale territory when we have “blood fading on the snow” or a red apple that might be poisoned or birds that sing or an enchanted castle. There’s a repertory of picture motifs.
- 5: The fairytale can enter very dark places. Mothers die at the beginning of fairytales. Stepmothers are cruel. Siblings can fight. Tyrants murder people, parents abandon their children. These are very, very difficult areas that the fairytale goes into. It has made them a tool for many people to return to look at how we can cope with the tests that life presents us with.
- 6: Fairytales are not only mobile across cultures ad across time but between media. We remember the first fairytales we heard from the pictures. (that’s true!)
- 7: The media through which fairytales travel spread not only in book form as illustration and print and on the human voice but above all through the performed media. Film has played an enormous role in the distribution of fairytales with Disney’s Snow White (1937), one if the most watched films in the world - still.
- 8: A dominant characteristic of the fairytale is almost too obvious to say. It’s enchantment and supernatural. But the supernatural is there to help us hope because another feature that’s really important is that the end of the story holds out consolation that whatever horrors have been described they are going to come to an end.
- 9: On the whole, even children know this is a made up world where anything can happen because it’s been invented but it does not command the deep commitment of belief.
- 10: The heroes and heroines overcome their destinies which are terrible. The ragged skivvy in the hearth is going to become a princess, the feckless boy who never does anything right who is booted out by his parents turns out to be the hero who kills the giant. There’s a spirit of heroism in the humour of the tale and very often a fairytale undercut itself at the very end. So, for example in the conventional ending of a fairytale which is, “well they all lived happy and content while we sit here picking our teeth.”
My thoughts: This is quite a short and snappy video on the 10 things that make up a recognisable fairytale. It was well edited, well paced, Dame Marina has a clear knowledge and understanding on the subject, a very warm and welcoming presence and is a pleasure to listen to. Some thing were repeated, such as "enchantment,"which didn't particularly need to be said over and over and some of this is very surface level and introductory. It's a good starting point for my research but I'm not sure if I will draw much from it for physical creation of work or academic writing, as it is rather simplistic.
Marina Warner in Conversation - On Fairytales
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKSeHHgzjns
"Archetypal", the word archetype is a word coined by Swiss psychologist -. Marina tends to be very critical of him. "I think that, on the whole, the theories of the archetype don't allow enough room for historical change. This is also true of Freud to some extent because Freud's interpretation of the myths is quite... if you think of how he interpreted Electra or Oedipus, these are quite closed systems - a universal application. What I resist n both of them is the idea that there is a fixed set of co-ordinates which we can't get past. The Wicked Stepmother is usually seen as an archetype. The older woman, the vengeful queen, as in "Snow White." Marvellous Disney, terrifying film, which I think is a marvellous film but it shouldn't be seen as a writ (?) for human nature. The wicked Queen in that is an archetypal wicked, older woman. What I argue, in my approach to fairytales, is that this wicked older woman is the product of certain strains and inequalities in social systems. One of the things that used to be the case up until the discovery of penicillin is women died in childbirth. Frequently, very high rate all over the world, or they died of fever and that is something that has changed now. And, when women died in childbirth, the remarriage of widowers in Europe was very high. Of different social classes, too. If there were surviving children, the new wife would come in. Women did not control their property, did not have jurisdiction over their children, so there was tremendous competition for resources. And there's nothing like competition fr resources to turn people against one other.
One of the things that is deeply mysterious and endlessly fascinating about stories is how ancient they are. I always remember a marvellous moment when John Berger, who unfortunately died recently, he did a piece - it was a wonderful talking piece - about the history of art and he took us down into the bottom of the underground. He talks about the cave paintings from thousands of years ago and he described them very brilliantly that when you look at the drawing of a bear or the drawing of a deer, you can smell the animal so vivd. And then he said, "In the beginning there was no fumbling." So, from the beginning of the first human strokes that depicted, it was amazing. Picasso couldn't do as well! That's the same with narrative. Narrative in the beginning, there is no fumbling. Gilgamesh is still one of the best stories ever written and we have little bits of it that come out of the desert and we can add them now to it. Cinderella, I take Cinderella as it's probably one of the most widespread stories, there is a 9th century version... the earliest version I think still yet to be discovered, it may have, since I did my research, been another one but, is ninth century and Chinese. And in this version where she marries a scholar, it's not a prince as there's the values of Chinese society - Tang Dynasty society - and her slipper is gold, not glass. But otherwise it's very similar. The fairy godmother coms in the form of a fish. The Chinese have a veneration for beautiful golden carpe, she's inside the carpe. There are variations but the structure is exactly the same; she's lost her mother, a stepmother comes in, stepmother prefers her own two children, two sisters, and treats her as a servant, beats her, and so on. Doesn't want her to go to the local feast, the golden carpe helps her. But it's very clear from the way the story has been taken down, from a storyteller, that the storyteller knows that the audience knows the story already. He doesn't explain things! So, this is not a new story. This is a shared story that is already shared. And part of the pleasure for that very early ninth century audience was recognising a tory they already knew. So it's already there, its an ancient story. There are classical antecedents as well, in Herodotus I think, there's a trace of a similar Cinderella story. It's there in every kind of culture.
I'm not a archetypal... I don't believe this is hardwired. I don't believe that Cinderella pops up autonomously in this part and that part. Because we all have these stories imprinted in our brains. I believe in diffusion and that's why I'm very interested in networks that carry stories from a well, across a caravan, across the desert, the Silk Road. There are identifiable routes. The seas are very important, the ports are very important. So I believe that people tell these stories and that, in some ways, what's hardwired are the structural elements that people then remember so they can re-embroider it, So the hatred for an incoming mother for earlier children, that kind of thing, remains a structural, almost nodes, around which the memory can build the next version of the story. In Cinderella the most famous version, in the West, is the 17th century French version by ? and in his old age when he wrote down the fairytales and he says that he knew them from servants and from little biddies. He's quite contemptuous. This idea of disparaging the stories while actually telling them at the same time is very structural to the dissemination of fairytales. In one of the very early and beautiful versions the
I'm not a archetypal... I don't believe this is hardwired. I don't believe that Cinderella pops up autonomously in this part and that part. Because we all have these stories imprinted in our brains. I believe in diffusion and that's why I'm very interested in networks that carry stories from a well, across a caravan, across the desert, the Silk Road. There are identifiable routes. The seas are very important, the ports are very important. So I believe that people tell these stories and that, in some ways, what's hardwired are the structural elements that people then remember so they can re-embroider it, So the hatred for an incoming mother for earlier children, that kind of thing, remains a structural, almost nodes, around which the memory can build the next version of the story. In Cinderella the most famous version, in the West, is the 17th century French version by ? and in his old age when he wrote down the fairytales and he says that he knew them from servants and from little biddies. He's quite contemptuous. This idea of disparaging the stories while actually telling them at the same time is very structural to the dissemination of fairytales. In one of the very early and beautiful versions the
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