Erin Gouner

• "…from its origins, the central theme of the fairy tale has always concerned the struggle of the imagination (representing the spiritual side of humanity) against the hard reality of exploitation and reification (representing the rise of inhumane technology)."
• "The literacy fairy tale was first developed in salons by aristocratic women as a type of parlor game by the middle of the seventeenth century. It was within the aristocratic salons that women were able to demonstrate their intelligence and education through different types of conversational games…such challenges led women, in particular, to improve the quality of their dialogues, remarks, and ideas about morals, manner, and education and at times to oppose male standards that have been set to govern their lives."

-Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tale as Myth Myth as Fairy Tale. The University Press of Kentucky, 1994.

• "She [Marie de France] excels in storytelling: in shaping often simple, apparently naïve stories so as to make them powerfully evocative and anything but naïve. Her characters are memorable, lightly sketched and yet psychologically convincing, even when they are engaged in fabulous actions. And she creates a highly distinctive fictional world, an imaginative "Brittany" that is simultaneously the world of fairy tales and a dreamlike version of her own courtly circle."

-Wilkie, Brian and Hurt, James, eds. "Marie de France." Literature of the Western World, Volume 1: The Ancient World Through the Renaissance, 4^th ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1997.

Related Genres: myth, folklore, fable

Representational Genre: dialogue + narrator

Narrative Genre: romance (doomed lovers, separation of lovers, ends happily) and tragedy (death of hero, revenge, resolution)

Example: Yonec by Marie de France, late twelfth century

Highlights of Example: trapped woman, magic, animal as symbol, ends with resolution to problem, Oedipal Complex

Additional Examples of Genre: Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Beauty and the Beast, Rumpelstiltskin, The Frog King, and The Little Mermaid

Applicable Course Objective: 3…the variations on aesthetic form and gendered values developed by women authors.

Research Sources: See definitions above, plus http://web.english.ufl.edu/exemplaria/yonot.html

Questions: Before you learned about fairy tales today, what were your thoughts on the genre?

After today’s presentation how do you feel about fairy tales now?

What are some fairy tales that you can see have a hidden or deeper meaning?