Tales of Wizards, Fairies, People, and Change

             I used the book of Grimm’s Fairytales as the basis of my project. I also used some scholarly journals that talk about how gender roles are subliminally engrained in these stories through implications of domesticity, wicked witches, and “happily ever afters” with the same “prince charming”. However, actual stories from the Grimm’s collection has functioned as my primary source, as it provides examples that back up Kilbourne and Berger’s claims that women who are seen as beautiful are more likely to be sought after. I believe in order for this message to be altered in media is if it is expressed to younger crowds. Television shows, movies, and kid’s stories need to show a more balanced view of gender and, even, women empowerment. This would serve as a form of media literacy in a fun, hands-on way in early education that I’d hope to build on through publication.

               In my tumblr presentation, I have included a clip from a German movie called Germany Pale Mother or Deutschland, bleiche Mutter because it is what originally sparked my interest in this project. In the particular scene I show a piece of, the mother tells the Grimm fairytale Robber Bridegroom to her daughter as an escapist method because the Holocaust had just ended. The parallelism between the set up in the movie and the actual fairytale was astonishing, and when the time comes that the mother tells the part where the girl is getting eaten by the groom and his friends, the mother is actually getting raped by two American soldiers in the movie. Although controversial, these Grimm tales use things like cannibalism to animate and take away from very real experience of something like a woman being raped. The expression on the little girl’s face, though, was the beginning to it all. She was stunned in silence, expressionless, and it was shocking to see a young child unresponsive to such an inhumane act as rape. I actively connect it to how callous and desensitized children learn to become with certain images the media project. In the case of Disney movies based on Grimms’ Fairytales, children blindly accept the roles that are given to them through images and movements right before their eyes. Cinderella, a poor girl taken in by her stepmother, does all the laundry, cleaning, and feeding. Snow White does the same for seven small men and, even worse, a woman becomes haggard and ugly (which means she’s got to be a witch, right?) and makes it so that Snow White cannot wake up until she is kissed (and, therefore, saved) by a young handsome prince. Uh… there’s a problem with all of that and it is the same strenuous illusion popping out to our youth. 

Go to:  http://givemeadifferentfairytaleending.tumblr.com/