Good Fairy Research Articles

Female images in A.P. Platonov's fairy tales

This article examines female images based on the material of A.P. Platonov's fairy tales. The purpose of the study is to expand the understanding of the author's literary heritage, as well as to show important aspects of human nature, human relations and the role of women in history and culture. The tasks that were solved within the framework of this study: 1) to analyze the role of women in Platonov's fairy tales; 2) to study the image of women through the prism of the socio-cultural context; 3) to identify the types of fairy-tale heroines found in the works of A.P. Platonov. The heroines of fairy tales are represented by such female images as the "heroine-savior" or "warrior woman", "evil stepmother", "good fairy" or "sorceress", wise "old lady". The methods used are literary analysis, typological analysis, cultural approach, structural method and others. The scientific novelty of the work is due to the fact that for the first time the material of analysis is female images in A.P. Platonov's fairy tales. As a result of a comprehensive analysis, the following conclusions were made: the study of female images in Andrei Platonov's fairy tales allows us to see a variety of typological images of women, socio-cultural features inherent in his works, features of domestic life, motherhood and other aspects related to women. Studying these aspects helps to broaden the reader's horizons. The heroines also serve as a critique of social norms and values, to identify problems of inequality, discrimination or injustice. Studying these images helps to understand the difficulties and challenges faced by women, their role and position in society, their rights, responsibilities and limitations. The author uses female images as symbols or metaphors to convey certain ideas or concepts, they help to expand the understanding of the text and discover hidden meanings.

Fairy tales or fairy fakes?

When adults (or children) want to find really good fairy tale books, doing so is not as simple as it seems. Although bookstores are full of children’s books, only some are worth reading. As a result, potential readers are often helpless since they cannot decide which book to choose or what qualities a good fairy tale should contain. Many rewritten versions of tales show some similarities based on the ways they have been adapted. Naturally, the modern versions are not of the same quality and range from quite good versions to absolutely bad ones. This paper will analyse how one particular type of rewritten tale is constructed through the well-know story of Cinderella. In this paper, the tales that have been created on the basis of an original are viewed as ‘redundant’, because they seem to be a kind of extension of the tale, one containing subsequent stories added to the basis. These books are sold as tales, although we will see that they do not meet the requirements of tales at all.

Containing the good idea fairy: A deep dive into Navy firearms restriction policy

ABSTRACT Statement of Problem: US Navy suicide is an ongoing concern, with more than half of suicide deaths each year related to firearms. Although decreasing firearms access by those who are at risk for suicide has been well-established as a tactic for reducing risk, implementation of firearms restrictions has a significant cultural and occupational impact among service members that may increase the stigma of seeking mental health care. During a recent Deep Dive review of all previous year suicide deaths, subject matter experts from across the US Navy identified significant variability in command utilization of firearms restriction. Methodology: Based on this finding, a review was conducted to identify best practice for firearms restriction related to suicide risk across the US military services and municipal police departments. Findings: Findings from this review suggested that the Department of the Navy may benefit from adopting consistent standards for disarming and rearming service members at risk for suicide, base decisions on objective suicide risk rather than routine stressors, decrease access primarily when service members are off duty, and engage with service members to decrease core drivers of suicide behavior through command channels. Implications: Implementing these recommendations may be a crucial step in balancing precautions to decrease suicide risk with the stigma of firearms restriction in military settings.

Articulations of antimicrobial resistance in trade union financed journals for nurses in Scandinavia - A Foucauldian perspective.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacterial infections is a growing threat to humanity and a challenge to healthcare systems worldwide. Healthcare professionals have an important role in preventing AMR and the spreading of infections. This article focuses on trade union financed journals for nurses in Scandinavia studying how the journals articulate AMR to its readership. A systematic literature search over an eleven‐year period was conducted, using web‐based national trade union financed journals, searching for ‘bacteria’ and ‘resistance’. A thematic analysis, inspired by Foucault's concepts of power and governmentality, was made of 131 texts to understand, which kind of practices, strategies and policies the journals frame regarding AMR. The time period studied resulted in the recognition of four separate themes: the horror scenario, the ‘dangerous’ other, healthcare professionals as a source of resistance development and AMR as a field of research and producer of research qualifications. The study concludes that the journals tend: to present AMR in apocalyptic terms with more research and pharmaceutical industries needed for avoidance; to point out problems in other countries, populations, and sometimes nurses’ working conditions, but primarily with other professionals’ behaviour; and lastly, to present the nurse as a good fairy and disciplinator of doctors.

George Augustus Sala and the Nineteenth Century Periodical Press: The Personal Style of a Public Writer by Peter Blake

Reviewed by: George Augustus Sala and the Nineteenth Century Periodical Press: The Personal Style of a Public Writer by Peter Blake Rachel Calder (bio) Peter Blake, George Augustus Sala and the Nineteenth Century Periodical Press: The Personal Style of a Public Writer (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 289, $199.95/£65 (cloth). In the introduction to Peter Blake’s new work, a quotation from Charles Pebody, author of English Journalism and the Men who Made It (1882), describes George Augustus Sala as the “beau-ideal of a journalist” thanks to his “readiness, his picturesque sensibility, his aptitude for vivid and graphic writing, his great powers of expression, and his still greater powers of illustration” (3). This is an apt description of Blake’s approach to his subject, a study of the versatility and breadth of Sala’s skills and interests and an investigation of how his style of journalism contributed to the rise of the New Journalism. The phrase is repeated in the concluding sentence of the book in a way that seems accidental rather than deliberate, suggesting that the unifying themes of the book are evident but not pulled together fully at the end. Over a publishing career spanning forty-seven years, Sala was an artist, engraver, journalist, novelist, pornographer, and special correspondent, and between 1860 and 1863, he was also editor of a periodical, Temple Bar, although this last role is mentioned but not explored in this study. His output was prodigious: Blake notes five early panoramas from the 1850s, twenty-three novels and works of non-fiction (mostly travel writing), hundreds of articles (although he lists only fifty of the “primary” pieces), as well as two plays, including a pantomime from his pornographic period entitled New and Gorgeous Pantomime entitled Harlequin Prince Cherrytop and the Good Fairy Fairfuck or Frig the Fuck and the Fairy (1878). Most of the chapters focus on Sala’s career as a contributor to the periodical press, although the final chapter looks at his interest in flagellant pornography, material that was not published in periodicals but in novel and dramatic form and therefore sits a little uncomfortably with the book’s title. [End Page 525] Sala was born in 1828 in London. His mother was an opera singer and singing instructor who moved in high and low circles; she was described as both a “grande-dame and a second-rate artiste” (22). Sala grew up around the theatre and met writers and performers early on, which gave him an ability to move convincingly amongst and between several social classes. He suffered an early trauma when, at six years old, he went blind for two years after an attack of encephalomyelitis, an inflammatory reaction in the brain from an exposure to measles. Blake suggests that this early physical and psychological trauma had a huge influence on Sala’s creative development and that his temporary loss of vision gave him a heightened sense of the visual that coincided, happily, with the rise of the illustrated press. Sala seemed almost destined to be a journalist. He was a voracious consumer of printed materials and as a young boy bought several periodicals each week, including the Illustrated London News, Penny Magazine, Saturday Magazine, Sunday Times, and Weekly Dispatch, all with his own pocket money. He also spoke several languages and travelled in Russia and Paris, absorbing the poverty and deprivation along with the thrilling dissipation and bohemianism. His early inclinations were towards the visual arts, but these ambitions were crushed when his hero, George Cruikshank, failed to take him under his wing and when his work was rebuffed by Punch. Thanks to his mother’s connections, Sala was soon introduced to Charles Dickens, who was impressed by the young man’s expressive writing, his interest in everyday urban life, and his willingness to try to understand the lives of the poor and precarious. He was the second most prolific contributor to Household Words, with 160 articles, but was later unfairly accused of imitating the master when his pieces had been subedited to appear more “Dickensy.” Like Dickens, Sala walked all over London (and Paris) and absorbed but did not judge life on the streets. He developed an...

The Ethics of Human Cloning in Narrative Fiction

The Ethics of Human Cloning in Narrative Fiction

DICKENS'S “JEWISH QUESTION”: PARIAH CAPITALISM AND THE WAY OUT

The story – we might almost saylegend – of how Dickens came to make the character of Riah inOur Mutual Frienda benign figure and a deliberate revision of Fagin, underworld denizen ofOliver Twist, is well known. In 1860, an Anglo-Jewish couple, J. P. and Eliza Davis, bought Charles Dickens's London home, Tavistock House. Dickens remarked to his personal secretary, William Wills, that he could not recall any “money-making dealings . . . that have been so satisfactory, considerate, and trusting” (Johnson 487). This expression of relief and slight surprise that the sale of his property to a Jewish family was without complication followed on Dickens's suspicion, crudely expressed earlier in the negotiations, that the “Jew Money-Lender” (as he referred to J. P. Davis) would not come through on the deal (Stone 243). But, though the Davises proved surprisingly cooperative in this phase of the transaction as far as Dickens was concerned, Mrs. Davis did ultimately have a complaint to register with the great writer and delivered it politely in a letter three years later. It was not about the house or the terms of purchase but rather about the character of Fagin, created by Dickens in 1837, some twenty-six years earlier. English Jews, she told him, had taken offense at this portrayal of one of their people and believed Dickens had done them a “great wrong” by offering the greedy, thieving, child-corrupting, sausage-eating criminal as representative of their “scattered nation” (Lane 98). Still, she added, while the author lived he might conceivably “justify himself or atone” for this deed. Apparently contrite and unaware of feeling any of the prejudices his portrait of the London fence might convey, Dickens declared in a letter back to Mrs. Davis that he had only “friendly feelings” for the Jews. His contrition did not end there. For the novel he was then beginning to write, Dickens would create a beneficent Jewish character, Riah, friend to the river dredger's daughter, Lizzie Hexam, and her misshapen companion, the dolls’ dressmaker, Jenny Wren. As the late-nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish poet and novelist Amy Levy put it, Dickens “trie[d] to compensate for his having affixed the label ‘Jew’ to one of his bad fairies by creating the good fairy Riah” (Levy 176).

National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England (review)

National Dreams: The Remaking Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England. By Jennifer Schacker. Philadelphia: University Philadelphia Press, 2003. 198 pp. Folklorists commonly agree that, in the nineteenth century, Englandcontrary to both Scotland and Wales-did not sport a living tradition folk and fairy tales. Whatever the reasons for this development might have been, it appears as a matter course that towards the beginning the nineteenth century the growing reading public in had to look for other than local traditions to satisfy their curiosity in terms popular reading matter. Wherever those other traditions would be found-in European or nonEuropean countries-they were bound to be adapted to the contemporary English world view in order to prove appealing and, hence, commercially successful. This general situation constitutes the theoretical grounding for Schacker s journey through the national dreams the day. As a point start, Schacker follows the evaluation one of the earliest systematic observer's folktale publication in England (8), Charlotte Yonge (see also 44-45, 47), who in her 1869 essay on Children's Literature the Last Century evaluated three publications the early nineteenth century as real good fairy books': Edgar Taylor's translation the brothers Grimms Kinder- und Hausmdrchen, published under the title German Popular Stories (1823), Thomas Crofton Crokers Fairy Legends and Traditions the South Ireland (1825), and George Webbe Dasent's Popular Tales from the Norse (1859), from whose introduction Schacker takes her title (see 134). To this trinity, Schacker has added another highly influential publication the time, Edward William Lane's translation the Arabian Nights (1838-40), the first ever English-language translation rendering a more or less complete text as prepared directly from the Arabic. Besides being welcomed by the public as popular reading matter, these four collections share another criterion, easily recognizable from their respective titles: all them present popular tales from regions other than England-Germany, Ireland, Norway, and the Arab world. In the light present day considerations about the marketing specific products and the ways to meet the expectations readers, Schacker's study promises fascinating reading, and indeed it is. Schacker's study is clearly structured and in its four main chapters presents the four collections considered: Taylor (13-45), Croker (46-77), Lane (78-116), and Dasent (117-137). The main chapters are bracketed by an introduction (1-12) and a conclusion (138-150), and followed by notes (151-178), a bibliography (179-188), and an index (189-195). Within the main chapters, the author develops detailed discussions the background and contemporary English reception the respective works. The discussions as a rule comprise a standard set arguments dealing with the translated publication in its original context, the biography its translator (and editor), the translator's theoretical considerations in choosing and adapting the tales, and the collections story success, together with a discussion the publishers and their editorial strategies; except for Dasent's work, illustrations are also considered as an important constituent in the transmission (mental) images. Of the four collections discussed, two are particularly noteworthy for their ensuing repercussions: Taylor's reductive presentation a German peasant world, convincingly visualized in George Cruikshank's illustrations, proved so successful as to instigate the original collection's authors to prepare a similar selection in German; and Lane's narrative image the Arab world, accompanied by a wealth annotation and illustration both relying on firsthand experience by its readers was soon taken as an ethnographic guide mirroring contemporary reality. Schacker's writing is dense and convincing, and the impressive multitude her detailed arguments is difficult to summarize. …

Forty Acres and a Pool

he move to a remote region in the Louisiana Purchase was going to fix things, be reparation for the decade-long syllogism of a relationship that had us pressed in place, palms flattened to a metaphorical steel cylinder, as surely as if responding to centrifugal force. Ineffably, Claribel had been chosen, as if by a heretofore inapparent in our lives Good Fairy, to become Chief Life Force of a national, if languishing, Save the Planet publication. You know the one: twenty-five years ago, you picked up a copy along with your nickel bag from the corner news stand. No one reads it anymore, but we all used to gaze a glazed pupil at it four o'clock in the morning between the Twinkies and the M&Ms. She'll bring it back to its formner popularity. Claribel will make it more popular even than a nickel bag, won't she? The call came for Claribel on one of the many many glum days she'd watched colleagues of ten and fifteen and twenty years tenure drop-kicked by one or more of the whiny, weepy third generation pisspoor manager-owner scions of that Mom and Pop shop grindstone Green Magazine where she'd worked her nose off for most of the decade we'd been together. As Green greened everywhere else on the planet it tanked at that place, the Green Magazine family heirballs wheelbarrowing money to clown car after clown car full of honkin' come and go cartwheeling consultants, firing willy, firing nilly their own employees even as they themselves vacationed large and often, the whole famdamnly! The loonier they are, it seems, the bigger their chateaux in Gstaad, in Tuscany. Insane on the Seine, the lot of them. A bigger la-la bust, those human vegetables, than Monsanto's genetically engineered corn! Why don't you unionize? Demand a raise? Say something? Fuss! How can you continue to wipe your feet clean of your human rights,

Sperm and scrambled eggs

Sperm and scrambled eggs

Great organizing principles

Great organizing principles

Touring machines

Touring machines

A neuronal correlate of consciousness?

In a previous article in this series, Lewis Wolpert [1] introduced the good fairy godmother of science (GOOFGOOS) who, like a Greek oracle, will answer one specific question. My question to her would address the heart of cognitive neuroscience: the relationship between our perceptions, thoughts and memories and the activity of nerve cells that must somehow be responsible for the associated subjective experience. Understanding this relationship entails pinpointing the neuronal populations in the brain that express the correlates of consciousness. So my question is, “are there specific neurons whose activity mediates consciousness?” That is, neurons whose firing gives rise to the current content of my consciousness?

The good fairy godmother of evolutionary genetics

Most evolutionary geneticists would agree that the major problems of the field have been solved. We understand both the nature of the mutational processes that generate novel genetic variants and the populational processes which cause them to change in frequency over time — most importantly, natural selection and random genetic drift, respectively. While there is plenty of debate about the relative importance of different processes in patterns of evolutionary change, no serious evolutionist will now defend onceprevalent views such as orthogenesis (predetermined evolution) or the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Indeed, jaded researchers might claim that all the soluble and interesting problems have been disposed of, leaving us with the insoluble and the trivial, as Wolpert suggests for developmental biology [1]. My own feeling is that there are still many intellectually exciting and potentially soluble problems, although we will never again come up with concepts as fundamental as those formulated by the ‘founding fathers’ of population genetics (Fisher, Wright and Haldane), or do experiments as path-breaking as Dobzhansky’s demonstration of natural selection acting on polymorphic chromosome inversions. The two most pressing questions I would put to a good fairy godmother of evolutionary genetics are these. First, what is the frequency distribution of selective effects among new mutations — how often do they have positive, negative or neutral selective effects, and how large are these effects? And second, what is the total rate per genome at which mutations that have a sizeable impact on fitness appear? I would like my questions answered for my favourite organism, Drosophila melanogaster, as much of the empirical work relevant to these questions has already been done using this delightful creature. Answering the first question would bring us close to understanding the role of selection in controlling the frequency within a population of variants at particular nucleotide sites. This issue was first raised thirty years ago, with the discovery of large amounts of within-population variation at the amino-acid sequence level [2], but has never been conclusively answered. The discovery of large amounts of silent and noncoding site variation has simply modified the question: are most nucleotide changes so slightly advantageous or disadvantageous that their fate is controlled mainly by genetic drift? Or is a significant fraction of variants subject to selection that is so weak as to be undetectable by direct measurement but strong enough to exert an influence on their evolutionary fate? We simply do not know, despite increasing statistical evidence from case studies of sequence variation and evolution of both DNA and protein which suggest a role for selection [3]. The other reason for asking this question is that many features of genetic systems are likely to have been shaped by the input of deleterious mutations at loci scattered across the genome [4]. From several Drosophila experiments, along with indirect evidence from other sources, it seems likely that a newly formed zygote in a higher eukaryote has a probability close to one of carrying a new deleterious mutation with an effect on its fitness of the order of one or two per cent relative to the fitness of nonmutant individuals [5]. If true, this has major implications for the evolution of sexual reproduction and genetic recombination, diploidy versus haploidy, outbreeding versus inbreeding, sex chromosome evolution and the evolution of ageing [4]. In addition, rates of evolution and variation for less strongly selected mutations may be influenced by strongly deleterious alleles at neighbouring sites on the chromosome; we may have to modify current theories that treat loci as essentially independent units before we can properly test hypotheses about the causes of nucleotide site evolution and variation [6]. In the absence of good fairy godmothers, I am much more sanguine about answering the second question than the first; it essentially requires brute-force application of mutation-accumulation methods, on a sufficiently large scale that one can have confidence in the resulting estimates. The first is more elusive, but will no doubt provide population geneticists with harmless employment for years to come.

A forest of principles

I am astonished at Lewis Wolpert's claim that all the big principles in biology are understood — especially in developmental biology. If one knew all the principles then new facts would simply slot into their expected places, as they do in any well understood aspect of physics. But in all areas of biology bewildering new facts are discovered at an increasing rate. I frankly do not believe that Wolpert has a conceptual scheme where each new fact simply evokes an acquiescent nod of the head. Either he is goading us into protest or his ‘principles’ are very different from mine.What can we expect of principles in biology? Consider ‘the principle of quasi-optimal design.’ There are physical limits that dictate the relative sizes of parts of different-sized animals. Thus, a mouse's eye is many times larger than an elephant eye scaled down in proportion to the size of the mouse: the latter would have a minute pupil giving appalling spatial resolution and admitting very little light. Similarly, the elephant's legs would break every time it stood up if they were simply the mouse's legs scaled up in size.These ‘design principles’ are our minds' generalization from particular instances that have been embodied in genomes under the action of natural selection. We have successfully found a few such generalizations, but we emphatically do not understand all the physical limiting factors that have moulded the genomes of all species, and I have not even heard mention of limiting factors in development, although they must surely exist.Now consider a problem in neuroscience. The neocortex of the brain is large in primates and huge in humans; comparative neuroanatomists have told us that it stores knowledge of the world, and if they are right, we can understand the selective advantage it gives us. Neurophysiologists, on the other hand, tell us how the neocortex represents sensory stimuli but say nothing about how this representation is analysed, stored, accessed or used. Only a fool could hold that no new principles might emerge from reconciling these two astonishingly different accounts.I think my examples illustrate the general nature of biological principles. There are not just a few universal ones like the great conservation laws of physics. Instead, they form a forest, and quasi-optimal design is but one tree in it — or perhaps just a branch of the Tree of Adaptation. Wolpert might claim that adaptations are all examples of a single general principle which we already know, but this is unhelpful because we need to know what factor is limiting in each particular case: optics will not help you to understand the elephant's leg bones or neocortical size. If we did understand all the relevant limiting factors, we would be closer to knowing why a species has evolved to a certain average size, why the mass of its neocortex is a particular fraction of its body mass, and so on for many questions that we do not yet even know enough to ask. It is an absolutely safe bet that there are many new principles waiting to be found.Mendel discovered both a whole range of new facts and the principle by which they could be understood, but few are so lucky nowadays. Thus, my request to the good fairy godmother of science would be “Please give me exact references to some facts that require new concepts for their understanding”. I would add “Please pick facts pointing to concepts appropriate for my energies and abilities; I could not handle a tree of Darwinian or Mendelian size, but I would greatly enjoy some of the conceptual fruit still to be found in plenty out among the leafy branches of the Biological Forest of Principles”.

Are You Telling Stories?

I am going to tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a good fairy called Narrative. Narrative spent her time rushing around the Kingdom, clarifying thoughts and saving ideas in distress. Everybody loved Narrative and would call on her whenever their understanding needed a little help. But on the far side of the Kingdom there was a dark, scary place where all the children had to go, for 190 days a year. While all took Narrative with them, none knew for sure whether her power could still be used, and effective learning take place...

The good fairy godmother of science.

There is a story that Einstein did not pursue a career in mathematics, not because he was not good enough, but because he did not have the ‘nose’ for recognizing the important problems. It is just as creative to define scientific problems as it is to solve them. As Peter Medawar put it, “Science is the Art of the Soluble”. So the trick is to define those problems that can be solved and to know what questions to ask. A fundamental change in biology occurred, for example, when the questions about proteins changed from asking where the energy to synthesize them comes from, to where the information comes from for putting the amino acids in the right order. Of course, this required Sanger's discovery that there is a right order.With the powerful techniques of molecular biology, genetics, electrophysiology, imaging and so on that are available today, there may be a tendency for science to be technology-driven: the techniques dictate the next experiment. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In my own field, developmental biology, I have argued that the principles are understood and all that remains is to fill in the details of how the thousands of genes controlling development work [1xDo we understand development?. Wolpert, L. Science. 1994; 266: 571–572Crossref | PubMedSee all References][1]. But am I correct? Perhaps there are many new principles to be discovered and I have not framed the questions correctly.But the more general issue is: what are the really interesting questions in biology that need to be answered? If the good fairy godmother of science (GOOFGOOS) allowed one to ask just one question to which she would give the correct answer, what would one ask? There are limitations — one cannot ask a very general question, such as: how does the brain work? It has to be more specific, and should be answerable in no more than 30 words. The nice thing about asking the GOOFGOOS is that she does not demand that we know how to solve the problem, or have the techniques to do it.The question I would like to ask the GOOFGOOS is this: is the egg computable? In other words, is there some computation that would enable us to predict the outcome of embryonic development? And if that were not possible, would it at least be feasible to simulate the whole process and so arrive at the outcome? Such a simulation might require the behaviour of every cell to be modelled. If so, how much detail in each cell needs to be included? And how ‘sharply’ must the initial conditions be defined? I await the answer with little optimism.I am greedy. I want to ask one other question. How is the left–right asymmetry of the embryo set up? We think it is based on an asymmetric molecule that becomes aligned with respect to the anteroposterior and dorsoventral axes and then provides a left–right bias [2xThe development of handedness in left/right asymmetry. Brown, NA and Wolpert, L. Development. 1990; 109: 1–9PubMedSee all References][2]. Are we right?

Eleanor and Franklin Redux

Eleanor and Franklin Redux Allida M. Black (bio) Doris Kearns Goodwin. No Ordinary Time. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. 759 pp. Illustrations, notes on primary sources, notes, and index. $30.00. Historians assessing Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency have never known what to make of Eleanor and Doris Kearns Goodwin is no exception. Treating ER’s public life only as an extension of FDR’s political aspirations, historians of the New Deal and the American homefront during World War II depict the Roosevelt White House as the perfect political paradigm, where FDR is the quintessential pragmatist and ER the idealistic neophyte. Struggling to explain the role she held within her husband’s administration, they rely on convenient images promoted by the members of FDR’s inner circle. Against the dramatic backdrop of marital infidelity and the Great Depression, ER’s strong sense of noblesse oblige compels her to become the “conscience” of the New Deal and speak up for those left outside reform. She is depicted as either the perfect political wife who serves as her invalid husband’s “eyes and ears” or the New Deal’s “good fairy” who turns to politics only after her husband turns to another woman for comfort. 1 Even those biographers and scholars who depict ER as a successful politician argue that she did so only to help her husband or to compensate for the disappointments of a loveless marriage. They treat ER’s activism superficially, refusing to examine why she developed such finely honed skills and chose politics for the arena in which to utilize them. In these accounts, ER’s heroic acceptance of martyrdom justified her venture into politics. Focusing on her determination to help her husband cope with his paralysis, what Frank Freidel labeled her “remarkable reserve,” Arthur Schlesinger and James Macgregor Burns see ER’s major accomplishment as her victory over her mother-in-law in the duel for her husband’s future. Concentrating on the disappointments and betrayals she encountered throughout her childhood and her early marriage, later biographers and historians alike agree with Joseph Lash that ER was “a woman of sorrow who had surmounted her own unhappiness and managed to carry on, stoical toward herself, understanding and tender toward others.” Thus William Chafe could declare in Without [End Page 307] Precedent: The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt that “if Eleanor had achieved an unparalleled amount of political influence, it was in place of, rather than because of, an intimate personal relationship with Franklin” (p. 11). 2 Nor is the fascination with Eleanor Roosevelt’s emotional development limited to FDR’s infidelity. All Roosevelt biographers also accentuate the fragility of her early family life. Again the portrait of ER as unfulfilled and scarred emerges. “She went out into the social world with a morbid sense of personal ugliness,” writes J. William Y. Youngs. Lois Scharf, relying on evidence initially presented by Lash in his discussion of ER’s childhood, seconds his analysis and takes it one step further. “So many emotional earthquakes so early in life,” she writes, “made it impossible for Eleanor Roosevelt ever to feel that secure or certain again.” 3 Until Blanche Wiesen Cook’s Eleanor Roosevelt appeared in 1992 and resurrected the complex totality of ER’s life, historians remained content to focus on this stoic yet tender depiction. To have done otherwise would have required extensive and inventive research. ER’s personal papers were not ever opened to the public until Lash published Eleanor and Franklin and Eleanor: The Years Alone in the mid-seventies; hence scholars interested in Eleanor Roosevelt had limited primary source material with which to work. In addition, ER carefully constructed an image of her activities in four autobiographies, thousands of newspaper columns, and over four hundred articles that would complement, rather than detract from, FDR’s legacy. Moreover, ER was extremely reluctant to have her papers opened to the public and only agreed to donate them to the Roosevelt Library after she and close friends removed any material she did not want scholars to see from her collection. Goodwin tries to amend this historiography with her...

Magic Mirrors: Society Reflected in the Glass of Fantasy

Magic Mirrors:Society Reflected in the Glass of Fantasy Jane Yolen (bio) It surprises no one that authors are mired in society and that their work reflects current thinking. Though one must always take into account that books will be a year or more in production, such titles as Norma Klein's Mom, the Wolfman, and Me and Judy Blume's Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret? followed closely on the heels of the sexual revolution; Virginia Hamilton's Zeely and The Planet of Junior Brown appeared after the onset of President Johnson's "Great Society," and fictional accounts of child abuse, Indian rights, women's issues, and nuclear concerns all have been published in the decade of public awareness and social legislation on such issues. It is a bit more difficult to track such authorial politics in fantasy books; but the issues and prejudices are still there if one digs deeply enough. Fantasy authors reflect the society they live in just as authors of realistic fiction do, though their work is like the wicked queen's magic mirror that did not always give her the answer she expected. In Charles Kingsley's Water Babies, the picture of society's underbelly and the plight of the poor chimney sweeps is only the outward reflection, the first casting of the mirror. Kingsley's anti-black, anti-Jewish, and anti-Catholic attitudes, quite typical of a Victorian gentleman, are easy to excise in bowlderized editions of the book. But he also disguises his good fairy in the one impenetrable mask he can devise, that of an Irish washerwoman, and thus shows his anti-Irish and anti-female sentiments in the magic mirror. Rudyard Kipling's otherwise brilliantly conceived fantasy The Jungle Books is marred for the in-depth reader by its jingoism and wog-hating attitudes. The feral child Mowgli is a "Godling" but he is also only an Indian, and Kipling's white English sentiments can be seen in the portraits of the other Indians in the book who are without exception venal, stupid, cruel, or helpless. Hugh Lofting's Dr. Doolittle and Mary Travers' Mary Poppins share a cultural bias against peoples of color, though it was years before those beloved books were taken to task for their prejudices. The original Oompaloompas in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory have skin that is "almost black" and are "Pygmies . . . [i]mported direct from Africa." Imported as if they were no more than yardgoods. In later printings of the book, their skin color and place of origin are changed, but not the fact of their importation1. That is the bad news. The good news is that fantasy books deal with issues as thoroughly as realistic fiction-but one step removed. Randall Jarrell's The Bat Poet is about the artist in society. Robin McKinley's Demar books (The Blue Sword, The Hero and the Crown) are about active women in restrictive societies. Patricia Wrightson's A Little Fear is as effective and affecting a piece about old age as one might find. It is the phrase "one-step removed" that we must consider. Fantasy fiction, by its very nature, takes us out of the real world. Sometimes it places us in another world altogether: Demar, Middle Earth, Earthsea, Prydain. Sometimes it changes the world we know in subtle ways, such as telling us about the tiny people who live behind the walls of our houses and "borrow" things. Or that in a very real barn, but out of our hearing and sight, a pig and a spider hold long, special conversations. Sometimes what makes a book a fantasy is the traveling between planets (Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time), between worlds (the Narnia and Oz books), between times (Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden or Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court); or the traveler him/her/itself is from somewhere else, such as Nesbit's psammead. By taking that one step away from the real or actual world, the author allows us to pretend that we are not talking about the everyday and the society in which we live. It is...

Medical Research: Good Fairy for the NIH

Medical Research: Good Fairy for the NIH