Class Notes and Quiz

Notes:

- The Cinderella Complex - talked about The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir; about sense of passivity induced by fairy-tales. Read excerpt, "The Wish To Be Loved": a woman's divorce forces her into real independence, mostly because she has children to support, and she sees that independence wane fast after moving in with a man again. The words "pseudo independence", "facade", and "wish" made multiple appearances; so did the mantra that boys learn true independence, while girls only learn enough to get by until they can be "taken care of".

This might have applied to more women when it was originally written, but not so much in 2008. It's still present, though - but most women I know, my age and older, find that outdated kind of thinking odd, even frightening. It scares me more to think of my independence taken away, which is what "being taken care of" means to me. I am not a knick-knack needing careful dusting during its shelf-life.

- Questions: How are women "trained", as the author put it? What specific circumstances brought her to the point where she changed so much? Children want to please. It is the biggest, most satisfying thrill to make your parents laugh or feel proud of you. Children will go to great lengths to please their parents, and anyone else lucky enough to demand such respect; ergo, they make themselves open to social and cultural "training".

- Women in business - "womanness" taken away, replaced by androgyny? Emasculated. The definition of "womanness" and what it means to be a women in business do not have to be so separate. It is limiting to view business and womanness as being impossible to overlap in nature.

- How do these attitudes come to us? I think the strongest of these attitudes are inherited in the subtlest, most ingratiating ways possible - so subversive as to be hard to see, much less believe. Like germs. Curiosity and a demand to Know make people open to influences from every direction, and we are a learning species. An animal that learns with experience inevitably forms opinions, and attitudes come from those opinions; they must have some kind of survival worth, but it also seems to be how people are wired.

- Mention of Blade Runner

- "Being Prince Charming can't always be fun - can't be yourself"

- Cinderellas must dumb themselves down to qualify

- fairy-tales as a form of cultural ideology - in the dolls we buy, the movies we watch, the newspapers we read - causes wounds, forces you to be someone you're not, amputates a part of you that you can't show to the world

- can art do anything? What's the value of a re-telling? Art presents unfamiliar perspectives and different ways of looking at the same issue; it's an expression of the individual in a defined community, thereby further defining that individual as well as his or her community. Re-telling a story might mean the listeners come away with something they wouldn't have if they had just read it. Maybe the brain is tuned to listen for different threads in oral stories. In hearing it, the storyteller's presentation and tone, the gist of the story, and one's immediate reactions to it are foremost, instead of a literary analysis or brief mental summary of a text.

Carter's re-telling of Cinderella:

- Mother has more agency, and chooses to be more self-sacrificing
- Cinderella runs from home straight to another mother
- Final lessons through feeding, clothing, etc.
- Does ending negate what mother did?
- Reader projects own experiences on a text - varying results come out of it


QUIZ:

In the re-telling of fairy-tales, does art help counteract ideology (ie, being wounded by wishes)?

Yes. Taking a known story and treating it as a skeleton that needs fleshing out both shows and inspires creativity. It is a creative effort that can go in any direction - by the end, the story might not even resemble what the Grimm brothers recorded two hundred years ago. For example, any of Angela Carter's stories are clearly based on well-known fairy-tales - Sleeping Beauty, Puss-in-Boots, etc. - but her treatment of them results in very different stuff. For example, her Sleeping Beauty was a pretty girl - a thin, pale girl, who was also the last Vampire of a long line of Vampires. She nearly eats her Prince Charming, who is nothing more than a hunky young guy looking for a place to rest because his travels as a tourist took him a little too far out of the way. Avoiding fairy-tales gives them a false power, as though they will make the next generation relapse into antiquated models of thought. Using them as material to be altered and fitted at will puts them in their places.

Notes on Quiz:

- Changes biases
- Artistic nature of re-telling the story provides a beauty that compensates for the more realistic, mixed bad-good endings
- Personal experiencing of it is a way to counteract ideology
- Can you live without an ideology? Constantly building, re-structuring? Acts as an additional tool?
- Fairy-tales said to be universally applicable - changing them, and having different results as a consequence, is okay