Sunday, February 4, 2007
blog # 2
OK so before i begin let me first apologize for posting this blog later then the specified time, i did not see the schedule on line and did not know that i was the lead blogger. anyways after reading the Hansel and Gretel variants this week i noticed a few things. first of all i realized the Hansel and Gretel and molly whuppie were similar stories, because they both seemed to have one character who out smarted the " evil" character and ended up saving the others. in Hansel and Gretel this character was Hansel, he came up with many different ways to save his sister, and in molly whuppie, molly was the clever character who saved all of her sisters and in the end she was rewarded for everything that she did. also the juniper tree and the rose tree were obviously similar. another common theme throughout out all four of these was that the children were all mistreated by their step- mothers. this came as a surprise because when you first think of the relationship between a mother and child you think of love, even though these stories spoke about step-mothers, this helped to shine a different light onto the fathers relationship with his children though, which i really happened to like. another thing i realized while reading these was that they were not like the stories i read as a child. in fact most of the variants we have read have been scary and violent. i sometimes wonder if that is why Zipes claims that children's literature does not exist?
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2 comments:
After reading all four stories, I find that they are all a little too creepy for me.I find that the Rose-Tree and the Juniper-Tree to be similar. It seems that all four stories are similar in some ways because in every story, there is an "evil" one and there are sisters and brothers involved and can't forget that they all have something to do with death and eating their own child. I mean, for a child to read these stories, I would think that they would be traumatized in some way.
In response to the lead blogger, I thought that Gretel also was smarter than the witch when she pushed her into the stove to save herself and her brother. I noticed that there is a common theme in these stories, the children are thrown out by their parents and must fend for themselves. They might come across trouble, but manage to get themselves out of it. In the chapter in Zipes I was bothered about how negative he was towards Disney and the other auther. He said that they didn't just translate the Grimms' stories, they "cared more about their own concers in creating their Snow Whites than the concerns of children." They both were probably writing from their "inner Child" and either way the stories are still read and watched by children and loved by many generations. So my question is does it really matter if its written by an adult from thier perspective of once being a child?
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