Abstract
In this essay, I suggest that fairy tales have particular value for students studying at the university level. Assigning fairy tales allows students to read familiar stories from their childhood and reconsider them from critical perspectives. When teaching a college course on fairy tales, my students and I utilize three essential frameworks for understanding fairy tales, focusing on the psycho-social development and sexual maturation of the human person, feminist critique and the need for gender equality in a patriarchal world, and audience reception and reader responses leading to emotional progress and even spiritual enlightenment. Students primarily familiar with Disney film versions of fairy tales enlarge their understanding of multiple versions of tales, both early modern and contemporary. They become familiar with classic fairy tale writers and collectors, such as Charles Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Oscar Wilde, Andrew Lang, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Anne Sexton, Angela Carter, and J.K. Rowling as well as fairy tale scholars like Bruno Bettelheim, Maria Tartar, and Jack Zipes. Their study not only results in a firm grasp of the key aspects of story in general, but in the ability to see connections between the real-world problems of the 21st century – such as poverty, starvation, disease, inequality, child abuse, human trafficking, and abuses of political power, among others – and lessons learned from fairy tales. This essay analyzes “Beauty and the Beast” as a key example of the genre and identifies pedagogical strategies for teaching it.
Highlights
Students primarily familiar with Disney film versions of fairy tales enlarge their understanding of multiple versions of tales, both early modern and contemporary
They become familiar with classic fairy tale writers and collectors, such as Charles Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Oscar Wilde, Andrew Lang, J.R.R
Most familiar to my students are classic fairy tales featured in films like “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” (1937), “Cinderella” (1950, remade 2015), “Sleeping Beauty” (1959, remade as “Maleficent” in 2014), “Little Mermaid” (1989), “Beauty and the Beast” (1998, remade 2017), “The Princess and the Frog,” (2009), “Rapunzel”, and “Aladdin” (1992, remade 2019)
Summary
When American students come to their university studies, they already know many fairy tales, certainly in part because of Walt Disney films that they watched repeatedly throughout their childhood.. Whatever view one takes of Disney fairy tale films, whether positive or negative, there can be no doubt that Disney has kept alive a culture of fairy tale telling and re-telling, viewing and re-viewing, that has shaped the imaginations of thousands of children and adults and put a heavy emphasis on the desirability of a happy ending Those hard at work in the Walt Disney Studios are not unaware of the cultural critique of their fairy tale films, and in response, they have produced a series of films that provide ironic critique of their past productions. My students tend to be familiar with these films as well, and so they enter our classroom enchanted with fairy tales and critical of them both ethically and aesthetically
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