Unit 3 - Fairy Tales

From wishing newlyweds a "happily ever after" marriage to celebrating a football team's "Cinderella season," fairy tales seem enmeshed in Western culture. Novels, plays, movies, musicals and even television series' are based on old fairy tales. As critic Max Lüthi remarks, however, "Our attitude toward fairy tales is ambivalent." Are they just for children? In a world increasingly driven by technology, do we still need stories about talking frogs and magic rings?

To answer such questions, we will examine the characters and plots of a few well-known fairy tales. We will examine systems of classification and apply them to fairy tales such as "Cinderella," paying paying particular attention to questions of class, gender, and power. Who gets to be prince? What makes a step-mother wicked? To help us understand the role of audience, we will explore the psychology of fairy tales, reading works on the subject by Freud, Jung, Bettleheim, and others. Finally, we'll talk about how casting, costume, set design, and animation in film adaptations of fairy tales influence our interpretation of the tales.