Final blog

Thinking back on this semester and this class, I learned so much about fairy tales that I never would have imagined. What I knew about fairy tales was basically just from Disney movies. And those are completely off from the original versions. There were a few tales I had heard or read before this that weren’t Disney, but the majority of it was Disney. Now when I go back and watch some of the Disney movies it is really fun to see the difference. When I was younger I thought that those were the only versions of those tales. But in this class we looked at a lot of different versions of one fairy tale. And it was really interesting to see how different cultures had the same stories; it was just the small details that were different. And too with that is was the culture, but also the time period that influences these stories hugely. The last movie we watched, Pan’s Labyrinth, I had seen a few times before the class, but when we watched it at the end of the semester there were a bunch of things that I didn’t see earlier that I see now, and I also have a new perspective on some of it. Mostly I didn’t pick up on all of the number things that were going on through out the movie, like the number three. And too how the captain related to the pale man. I didn’t pick up on that until I saw it again at the end of this semester. There are so many things that I have learned in this class, and I have been applying that to my life, and analyzing different things using fairy tales. Overall this was a great semester, and a learned so many new things about fairy tales.

Guest speaker- Martinique and Guadalupe

Dr. Jacqueline Couti came this week to give her talk titled “Folk and Fairy Tales From Martinique and Guadalupe”. Like in the African tales the theme of the trickster was very present. As well as in the African tales animals were a bigger part. In one of her stories animals were being traded, and their wealth was displayed. The young boy played the trickster, and he worked his way up from being very poor, and with literally nothing besides his accra, to being very high up in social status. He did this by visiting a few families and tricking them all until he got what he wanted. This reminded me of the story of pus in boots because the son thought his parent had left them nothing when they died, but it turned out to be the best gift. But to use that gift effectively they also had to be very cunning and witty. In these cultures what color you are is very important. Basically the whiter you are the higher up your status is. So with the boy being the trickster he was very dark, but by tricking a higher family of social status he married one of the daughters. So by doing this he married up in class. This was also a very different theme, because usually it is the women that marry. And basically their only goal in the fairy tales is to get married, but in this it was the boy that wanted to marry. Overall this was one of my favorite talks. These stories also reminded me a lot of the stories from Africa.