Time All Changes Essay, Research Paper

As time goes by things change. Fairy tales are no exception to this rule. A great many things in fairy tales have changed. These changes range from the change in how fairy tales are presented; how the actual content of fairy tales have changed from past to present; how the stereotypical fairy tale has evolved and also how the idea of utopia has changed over the years.

A fairy tale is an element of mass media called the mass medium. A mass medium is a tool used to get certain news and ideas circulated around a community. In the beginning fairy tales were handed down verbally from one person to another. The person who would tell these tales is called ?the storyteller.? After a while stories began to become written down, the stories could now be mass-produced and distributed to a very large community. Ideas could now be spread quicker and society began to change.

Nowadays fairy tales are very seldom written down. They are now distributed through a new mass medium called the motion picture. A movie is a story you can see on a big screen or on a television. These new style fairy tales have all of the same elements as their predecessors. Ernest Bloch describes, ?The new fairy tale princess is Greta Garbo.? She was an actress from the 1940?s and was in a lot of romance movies. The romance movie is basically a fairy tale. It has al the

Pape Pg.II

elements including the princess who has now evolved into the lead actress and the prince has evolved into the lead actor. The story follows the same basic structure and usually has the same outcome of the classic fairy tales, which is usually the prince and the princess living happily ever after.

Another aspect of fairy tales that has evolved is the content of the fairy tale itself. In the beginning fairy tales were extremely graphic in content to better grab the reader?s attention and get the point they?re trying to make across. For example in ?The Juniper Tree? by the Brothers Grimm the stepmother?s hatred towards her stepson is best described when ?she slammed the lid down so hard that the boy?s head flew off and fell into the chest.? Then to cover up what she had done ?she put the boy?s head back on his neck and tied a scarf around it so that you couldn?t see that anything was wrong.? After that she let her daughter believe that she had killed her brother and then the stepmother said she would ?cook him up in a stew? which his father then ate. In the end the son became a bird who took revenge on his stepmother by crushing her to death with a millstone. The moral was that kindness is rewarded and wickedness is punished. Another example of the vulgarity and graphic content of fairy tales is in ?The False Grandmother? by Italo Calvino. This ?Little Red Riding Hood? rewrite uses an ogress in place of the wolf as the antagonist. When the ogress kills the grandmother she puts ?her teeth on to stew in a small stew pan? and she puts the grandmother?s ears ?on to fry in a frying pan.?

Pape Pg.III

When the girl gets to her grandmother?s house the ogress tries to get the girl to eat ?the beans broiling in the broiler? and ?the fritters in the frying pan.? In the end when the ogress is chasing the girl she drowns in the Jordan River because in the beginning of the story the girl gave the river her cakes to allow her to pass the river. The moral was what goes around comes around. The author used the vulgarity in order to better give an accurate description of how wicked the ogress really was and to show how her wickedness was punished in the end.

Contemporary fairy tales are very different in content then the earlier versions. The books nowadays are less vulgar and graphic. Authors now try to use friendlier tactics to get their ideas and morals across. They accomplish this by showing how the characters work together to achieve their goals. Authors even use more child friendly characters to achieve this. They use characters such as ?Barney the purple dinosaur? and ?Teletubbies? and other characters like that. The best example on a wide scale would be from the Disney cartoon movies such as ?Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? and ?Cinderella.? Ernst Bloch states ?Walt Disney?s fairy tale films revive elements of the old fairy tale without making them incomprehensible to the viewers.? This statement doesn?t necessarily relate to the topic at hand but Walt Disney did make his versions easier to understand. This includes editing out a large amount of the violence so that it would be more socially

Pape Pg. IV

acceptable to the youth of our time. In the end of his versions the characters rejoice in the idea that they succeeded in achieving their goals by working together.

The original stereotypical fairy tale is another aspect that has changed over the years. This type of fairy tale is a story in which you have a beautiful princess who is waiting for her handsome prince. Before he comes to rescue her she must first go through the persecution of the antagonist who is usually a wicked family member. Probably the best example of this is ?Cinderella? by the Brothers Grimm. This is the best example because it has all the elements of the stereotypical fairy tale. Cinderella is ridiculed and forced to work for her ?Wicked stepmother? and stepsisters. In the end her prince rescues her and they live happily ever after, with little effort from Cinderella. This is another stereotypical aspect of fairy tales, the idea that a woman was better seen and not heard. Also she had o only wait for her prince to come and rescue her. Barbara Walker made an attempt to refute and change this stereotype with her revision of ?Cinderella? entitled ?Cinder-Helle.? In this story Walker attempts to change the stereotype of women and show them that they can control their own destiny and that they don?t have to wait for their prince to come to them. Walker used the woman?s menstrual blood as a symbol of power. She describes it as ?moon blood? and stresses the idea that this is all you need to control your fate. This story however is ultimately unsuccessful. Even though she

Pape Pg.V

introduces the ideas of women being in control of their destiny, it still harbors many of the elements that make the stereotypical fairy tale what it is.

Finally the role of utopia in fairy ales has always been an instrumental part of the dream that the fairy tale represents to its reader. In the beginning utopia is described according to Bloch as being the place where you can ?escape an ogre? or ?transcend the clouds and have a place in the sun? nowadays we know that ogres and such don?t exist so we have to relate a utopian world to our own present day society. Huge monarchies now have to become big businesses and kings and other royalty become CEO?s and other members of upper management. The castles that used to transcend to the sky are replaced with huge towers and skyscrapers. The utopian dream has since changed from becoming royalty and ruling over a large kingdom with a lot of wealth to becoming the head of a multi-million dollar corporation and lots of stocks and a high net worth.

In conclusion time changes all. Fairy tales are no exception. Fairy tales changed along with the times in many ways including how fairy tales are presented as a mass medium though the ages; how they have gone from being graphic and vulgar to becoming the friendlier versions they are now. Also how the stereotype of fairy tales has attempted to change over time along with the changing beliefs and how the utopian society and dream has changed over time.

327