Fairy Tale Ending Research Articles

Judicial diversity, the woman judge and fairy tale endings

The story of the woman judge as one of exclusion and isolation plagued with allegations of bias is well documented. Interestingly, despite significant differences in time and place, a common theme unites these tales: the woman judge is a dangerous outsider, a threat to the aesthetic norm. The judicial climate, at least in most of the common law world, is somewhat chilly: reactions to her presence on the bench vary from the largely indifferent to the downright hostile. Why is this? After all, most people, perhaps acknowledging the political and democratic gains underlying calls for a more representative judiciary, would wish to encourage – or at least not discourage – judicial diversity.Taking the stories of the woman judge as its starting point, this paper contends that underlying these tales is an image of the judge that is as much intuitive as it is reasoned; that our understanding of the judge and judging is as much derived from the imagination as from what is conventionally considered as rational thought. Thus, the paper deploys the narrative strategies of fairy tales in an attempt to disrupt the imaginative hold of familiar yet particular images that infuse and distort current discourses on adjudication. It suggests that despite the Department for Constitutional Affairs’ ongoing quest to increase diversity within the judiciary, current initiatives do not confront fully these instinctive images. As a result, their narrative of inclusiveness and difference fails. In response, the paper appeals to the imagination as a route toward engendering new conceptions on the judge and judging, the possibility of truly diverse judiciaries and, perhaps, a fairy tale ending to the woman judge’s story.

Commentary: A fairytale ending?

“And they all lived happily ever after,” happens only in fairy tales. The clever hospital doctors have made a fascinating physiological diagnosis, and the patient has stopped vomiting and returned...

“I just want to be a decent citizen”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For instance, Norma Rae (1979) and Silkwood (1983) both use melodrama to engage the sympathies of the audience, while making liberal arguments for labor unions and against workplace exposure to hazardous chemicals, respectively. Christine Gledhill, Steve Neale, and Linda Williams have each argued that melodrama functions as a cultural “mode,” with a sphere of influence wider than a single genre. As part of this argument, Williams (, p. 42) has noted that melodrama constitutes the principal mode of film‐making in Hollywood. Although I find this position convincing, in this paper I have focused specifically on melodrama as a discrete film genre rather than an overarching mode. In fact, one might suspect that the left's suspicion of affect, emotion, and bodily response corresponds to the decline in leftist rhetorical agency and appeal in the last decades of the twentieth century. While the film overwhelmingly corresponds to the genre, it does depart from melodramatic conventions in a few ways. In one notable deviation, it does not foreground a musical score or theme song [unlike Norma Rae or Titanic (1997)]. The film also downplays its romance narrative, subordinating it to plotlines featuring Brockovich as a professional and a mother. Although a heterosexual couple is formed—a convention upon which many melodramas and almost all Hollywood films rely—the couple's status at the end of the film remains ambiguous. Instead, Brockovich's professional and maternal commitments are given precedence over her romantic relationship. Although by advocating mandatory welfare‐to‐work programs for mothers on welfare, conservative politicians might seem to have conceded that mothers can work and still be good mothers, their agenda has been chiefly to promote a work ethic rather than to legitimate working mothers. One might even suspect these legislators of seeking to punish poor mothers by preventing them from behaving like traditionally good mothers and staying home with their children. Thanks to Hiram Pérez for pointing this out. While this list is by no means comprehensive, the proliferation of angelic, ailing mothers in domestic melodramas of the last decades of the century suggests that these films represent a mournful elegy for a disappearing, idealized, entirely domestic mother. As increasing numbers of mothers work outside the home, these melodramas testify nostalgically to the decline of the stay‐at‐home mother, figured by her literally dying body. This list also raises the possibility that Erin Brockovich succeeds as a mother because of her good health, a notable attribute in a film about the toxic effects of chemicals upon the body. The film thus suggests that one of the dangers posed by corporate pollution is that it prevents women from being effective mothers. The film also earned the distinction of being the first movie starring a woman to sell more than one million DVDs, an arena primarily dominated by action films with male protagonists (Lew Irwin ). Conservative writer Michael Fumento also decries the payment Brockovich received, as well as other aspects of the film and the historical events it represents (2001). Neither Norma Rae nor Silkwood, for instance, have fairytale endings. Norma Rae, though empowered and triumphant, remains poor at the end of the film, while Karen Silkwood, in accordance with historical fact, is killed. Phillip Lopate (), for example, argues that Erin Brockovich ultimately advocates complicity with corporate power: “If you can't beat them, join them. There is no perceptible alternative.” Ann Douglas ([] 1998, p. 4), for instance, has characterized nineteenth‐century sentimental fiction and its twentieth‐century counterparts (popular songs and movies) as purely passive exercises in emotional consumerism. See Flo Leibowitz (1996) for a different response to this charge. Elaine Roth is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the English Department at Indiana University South Bend, where she teaches Screenwriting, Film Criticism, Women in US Film, and Introduction to Film Studies, among other courses. She is currently working on a project on Steven Soderbergh's films. E‐mail: elaroth@iusb.edu

Cinema 2001: Despite Hobbits, Hallucinations, and Artificial Sweeteners, Kubrick Re-Emerges

Despite the greater attention paid to Oscar™ winners (A Beautiful Mind.) and money-making fantasy adventures (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings), a more significant film from 2001 is likely to be the posthumous “collaboration” between Kubrick and Spielberg in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, largely forgotten a year after its release. Although some reviews were scathing, blaming Spielberg for suger-coating Kubrick’s uncompromising critiques of human nature, it is possible that this film does carry a quite dark message given its focus on the shallowness of purpose in human life that can be reduced to a (mechanical) child’s obsession with becoming real so that it can be loved. The seeming fairytale ending may be read as Spielbergian (overly) sweet, but it may also be seen as Kubrickian horror as this desperate Pinocchio-like robot is all that remains of human culture in a distant, icy future.

Fate and Fortune in a Modern Fairy Tale: Louis Sachar's "Holes.".

Louis Sachar's Holes, first published in 1998, is an impressive example of how the themes and motifs of one of the oldest genres, the fairy tale, live on in contemporary children's fiction, and thus provide authors with an alternative to ‘gritty realism' as a means of presenting to young readers the harshest of topics and environments. This article shows how Sachar adapts some of the characteristics of fairy tale, such as magic objects and formulae, stereotypical roles and repeated motifs, within a story set in a desert penal establishment for young offenders. Because of this blend between fantasy and realism, the provision of the novel with a ‘fairy tale ending’ by means of a number of otherwise unbelievable coincidences, does not overtax the reader's credulity, but rather endows the novel with a positive message about the qualities of the human spirit.

The Blind Daughter in Charles Dickens's Cricket on the Hearth

The Blind Daughter in Charles Dickens’s Cricket on the Hearth Elisabeth G. Gitter (bio) The Cricket on the Hearth, Charles Dickens’s third and best-selling Christmas book, concludes with a spontaneous celebratory dance, “quite an original dance, and one of a most uncommon figure.” 1 In a Christmas Eve 1845 review, William Makepeace Thackeray singled out this finale for special praise, characterizing it as “a grand pas d’ensemble, where the whole dramatis personae figure, high and low, toe and heel to a full orchestral crash, and a brilliant illumination of blue and pink fire.” 2 Quoted whenever critics find themselves at a loss for something nice to say about a book that, even at the time, struck many reviewers as farfetched and sentimental, Thackeray’s glowing description is not strictly accurate. 3 While it is true that the sighted characters all form couples for the grand finale, blind Bertha provides the music but does not join the dance. On the sidelines, plucking her harp for the pleasure of the others, Bertha remains alone, excluded from the celebration of satisfied desire represented by the ending. 4 Irredeemably ineligible for marriage, she exists outside the conventions of narrative closure. Neither dying, like Nydia, the lovelorn blind flower girl who conveniently drowns herself at the end of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii, nor achieving marriageability through a physically transformative “softening,” like Dickens’s other dolls’ dressmaker, the deformed Jenny Wren of Our Mutual Friend, blind Bertha is excluded from the dance that her music makes possible. Marginal and partnerless, she is nevertheless necessary for the final pas d’ensemble; without her, there can be no fairy-tale ending. Notwithstanding the old saying that the happiest marriage imaginable would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman, blind women in the nineteenth century were not generally thought to be marriageable. 5 In the [End Page 675] early years of the century, education became increasingly available to them in privately endowed or state schools for the blind, where they were trained in music as well as in trades such as weaving and basket making; as adults they could often find residence and employment in the sheltered workshops attached to many of the schools. While it was not unheard of for blind women to marry, the assumption was that they could not participate in the sexual economy. As the blind orphan Gertrude bluntly puts it in André Gide’s La Symphonie Pastorale, “no one marries a blind girl.” 6 Thus, when Laura Bridgman, the deaf, blind girl whom Dickens visited in 1842 at the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, and about whom he wrote at length in American Notes, asked her teacher, “Do you think I shall ever be married with a gentleman whom I love best and most?” her teacher records in her journal of 1845 that her reply to the blushing sixteen-year-old was an unqualified “No.” 7 When it was explained that marriage, “the crown of earthly life,” was “not for her,” Bridgman spelled out, with trembling fingers, the words: “Am I not pretty?” 8 The eminent psychologist and early Freudian, G. Stanley Hall, who had studied Bridgman for many years, remarked when she reached the age of forty-nine that she had finally “passed safely through the most trying period of womanhood” without instruction on sexual matters, and that it was probable that in her the sexual instinct had “failed to mature—as in blinded birds or rabbits who do not develop sexually.” 9 Fifty years younger than Bridgman, Helen Keller had fewer illusions about her marital prospects. In response to Alexander Graham Bell’s urging that she think about marrying some day, she replied, “I can’t imagine a man wanting to marry me . . . I should think it would seem like marrying a statue.” 10 In fact, when a suitor did later appear, Keller’s family insisted that the engagement be broken; the story of her life, for them, could not conceivably include marriage. In the literature of the nineteenth century, however, blind characters were more easily integrated into marriage plots than they were in life. In fiction, through...

Enchanted Readings and Fairy Tale Endings in A.S. Byatt’s Possession

Enchanted Readings and Fairy Tale Endings in A.S. Byatt’s Possession

On Music Therapy, Fairy Tales and Endings

This article opens by questioning the validity of making a close therapeutic relationship within an institution. In attempting to resolve this dilemma, it then looks at the function and nature of fairytale as a way of describing music therapy. Two analogies are used: one emphasising the facing of inner problems and conflicts, the other emphasising escape from the problems of the outer world. In conclusion, it looks at fairy tale endings in order to pose a solution for the opening question.

Literature for Young People Between Liberation and Suppression

Literature for Young People Between Liberation and Suppression Winfred Kaminski (bio) "Reading, Culture, Youth"—in the West German context, the last of these terms may well seem to contradict both the first and the second. "Young people don't read"; "Youth has no culture." Both are common pessimistic propositions, and both are correct, if what we are saying is that youth seems uninterested in the activities of the socially dominant culture and does not take part in them. If, however, we really want to talk about a "youth culture," we must be more precise about what we mean: is it a culture produced for the young or one produced by it? The two may be very different, and have little in common. Moreover, few in the dominant culture—even those publishing houses that deal in books for young people—have done more than complain about the reading interests of youth. They have not analyzed the reading of youth and are unsure about the identity of the phantom audience they supposedly address. The official literature itself—addressed to readers of fourteen years and up—is, nevertheless, a much discussed "product." These texts generally fit the formula proposed by Erich Kastner: "Literatur in der Kniegeuge" [literature on bended knee, i.e., which stoops down]. Youth literature, as we know it in West Germany, is generally structurally deficient as literature. Although it purports not to be didactic, its secret center is pedagogical; while its writers stoop down to talk to its readers, these readers grow beyond them. In order to properly understand the youth literature of West Germany today, we must first realize that young people do read. We cannot take for granted the adult point of view of a cultural deficit or vacuum. If we look, we can find an unofficial but vital youth culture different from that of grown-ups. This culture produces a literature both written and read by young adults. In substance and form this literature is also quite different from that produced for young adults by established publishing houses. If writers of official youth literature want to be read, they must first, understand young readers and then, find both formal means and subjects of interest to them. They can find such a change of perspective already present in some of the novels not specifically published for youth, but adopted by adolescents because of the ways in which these books treat their subject matter. These novels do not deal specifically with youth protests such as those which have taken place in Zürich, Berlin and elsewhere, yet they are basically anti-establishment. They are aimed at a negation of the status quo; they imply a young reader. Two books of this "genre," both published at the dawn of the eighties, are Michael Endes' The Neverending Story (1979) and Christiane F., 1978), the latter published as an autobiographical documentary in the weekly magazine Stern. The Neverending Story [translated and made into a movie in the United States], with its young savior hero whose quest preserves the country of Fantasia, belongs to a [End Page 201] fantasy form more familiar up to that time in the United States and Great Britain than in West Germany. On the other hand, Christiane F., a story about the grey and dark cities and the green and grassy countryside, begins in hard-boiled realism and has a fairytale ending. Starting out as a documentary, Christiane F. put an end to the belief in realism as an acceptable literary possibility: only the fairy tale could do justice to life's wonders. These two bestselling works not only marked the beginning of a trend towards fantasy in West Germany but succeeded in depicting the state of extreme vulnerability which Heinrich Hesse in Der Steppenwolf (1927) describes as "Die Schutzlosigkeit der Nichtgleichgeschalteten," the defenselessness of the unprotected. These books suggest that the younger generation lives in what the grown-ups might interpret as a pathological stupor: "im innersten Kern seines Wesens angefault" [rotten at the core of its being]. This is a state depicted as early as 1906 by Frank Wedekind in his play, Frühlings Erwachen [The Awakening of Spring]. The Neverending Story and Christiane F. are...

Changing Affective Life in Eighteenth-Century England and Samuel Richardson's Pamela

Changing Affective Life in Eighteenth-Century England and Samuel Richardson's Pamela JUDITH LAURENCE-ANDERSON For literary critics and many readers, a problem with England's first novel, Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), has always been under­ standing how any sensitive, religious woman could possibly marry a man who has been constantly abusive to her, both verbally and physically, who has kidnapped her and held her prisoner, and who has even tried to rape her on two occasions. We have to wait for Clarissa (1747-48) to receive an acceptable moral answer. On a psy­ chological level, however, research into social history is steadily fur­ nishing us with increasing insights about how much the emotional lives of our ancestors differed from our own. These insights, I be­ lieve, go a long way toward explaining, if not justifying, the conduct of both Pamela and Mr. B. The new realization that domestics played a very important role in the social structure of the past,1 with as much as 40 percent of the population having been servants during adoles­ cence, further aids our understanding of this novel. By choosing a young female servant as his single correspondent, Richardson could contrast earlier, more brutal attitudes toward women, children, and domestics with the new desire for companionate love and the respect for individual rights which were emerging in England at this time. Richardson's psychological intuition, moreover, led him to dramatize 445 446 / LAURENCE-ANDERSON conflicts in sexual relationships which our society still has not fully resolved. For these reasons, Pamela records with psychological accu­ racy what it was like to be a young female domestic in the eighteenth century, and only when we fully understand the psychological ten­ sions her experiences would have created can we ask why any sen­ sitive, religious woman would marry a man who has tried to rape her twice. Apart from the novel's obvious fairy-tale ending, there are many problems involved in the transfer from literature to social history.2 No matter what amount of historical data is unearthed to get a glimpse of a real eighteenth-century Pamela, she still remains, after all, a lit­ erary character. With a novelist such as Richardson there are further problems; one must constantly explore not only what he deliberately set out to do, but also his unconscious intentions and his fantasy life.3 This enmeshes the reader in a whole network of assumptions not only about Richardson but about his readers in the past and his read­ ers today. In spite of these pitfalls, recent scholarly speculations about life in the eighteenth century are invaluable tools for the liter­ ary critic. Keeping in mind, therefore, that whatever I am going to say is problematic at best, I would like to hazard certain conjectures about changing emotional life in England in the eighteenth century and Richardson's Pamela. To begin, most critics agree that Pamela reflects the growing indi­ vidualism of eighteenth-century England. More recently, social his­ torians have claimed that major changes in the quality of family re­ lationships also occurred at this time, probably earlier in England than in other countries.4 Put very simply, their essential point is that love for one's spouse and one's children, as we think of it, has by no means been a histori­ cal absolute, but rather is a relatively new phenomenon in western culture, of the last two or three centuries. Before that, as we have learned, individuals tended to diffuse their emotional loyalties to a large group of relatives, kin, and neighbors rather than concentrate them on what is today called "the nuclear family."5 Put another way, persons before the eighteenth century usually would not permit themselves to become too emotionally attached to single individuals, since death was all too frequent, and necessary psychic health re­ quired horizontal rather than vertical investment of affections. This meant that if a spouse or child died, they could more easily be re­ placed in one's emotional life. In certain ways, this parallels the de­ scription by Bruno Bettelheim, in Children of the Dream, of what hap­ pens in the emotional life of children raised in kibbutzim. Instead...

Fidelity and Infidelity: And What Makes or Breaks a Marriage

Dr. Saul, psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, has selected from the early years of his practice a number of examples of unhappy marriages, each illustrating a different type of marital difficulty. He tells about them so well that the reports seem like interesting short stories rather than case studies. He shows how, almost always, the marital difficulties depend on the personality problems of one or both partners, and the personality problems arise from early childhood experience. While describing these cases, the author explains much about mental mechanisms without using jargon and without appearing dogmatic. The lay reader, to whom the book is addressed, will certainly find much that is interesting. Whether he will find help in solving his own marital problems is questionable. Most of the stories seem to have a modified fairy tale ending: they were married and, following analysis, lived happily ever after. Does Dr. Saul believe that similar individuals