Fat Is Not A Fairy Tale By Jane Yolen

If the Romantics were to examine the way high school teachers approach literature with their students, they would applaud these instructors’ use of poetry and fiction to guide the learners’ beliefs. For example, in selecting poetry to supplement coursework, I have recited “Fat Is Not a Fairy Tale” by Jane Yolen to discuss its values, the values of American culture related to feminine beauty, and the repercussions of valuing a restrictive beauty ideal. It is easy to lead students to an interpretation that fosters tolerance, which coincides with the Romantic approach of teaching poetry: to make better people (because in this post-modern era, better people are tolerant). For the Romantics, this instructional purpose is explicit, whereas modernist instructors implicitly maintain this value.
Upon this clash, the antithesis (the self-consciousness that has come out of itself) is cancelled out and subsumed into another self-consciousness that supplants the other self-consciousnesses that existed formerly. This process called aufgehoben (overcoming) continues until the sentient being recognizes itself as Geist (“Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel” 537). While Hegel frames this process through historical and economic systems, the concepts apply to individual people and literary characters. Hegel and the Romantics influenced literature and literary analysis for decades. In fact, many of the values embedded in these two forces still infiltrate secondary and post-secondary educational