Indo European Folktales Study guide

Indo-European
Braod geographical grouping with a common linguistic background
William Jones founded that Sanskrit was similar to Latin and Greek
Proto-Indo European : no actual proof this group of people existed
Folklore
Colloquial definition: is a folktale true or not?
Scholarly definition: how does a tale reflect the customs or values of a people
Precursors to the Grimms

Anne Sexton relation to the Grimms
Snow White – Anne Sexton
Focus: female beauty
Mirror motif
Superficial male desire – women is an object of beauty, man knows nothing else about her
Mother-daughter conflict
Queen is losing beauty with her age, jealous of Snow White because Snow White is becoming more beautiful
Happy ending?? Snow White is made to look like a china doll – she is beautiful on the outside but empty on the inside, an object to be viewed
Similarities
Real subject matter
Issues/themes are similar
Differences
Narrative perspective – Anne Sexton uses “I” & identifies herself as a middle age witch
She critiqued patriarchy – spoke to a contemporary New England audience
New issues/theme – she spoke to a contemporary audience, she tells her tales in modern form applying them to today’s society
Angela Carter
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
Rewrote some of the Bluebeard tales
She wanted to focus on the desires/thoughts of women
Believed women could show they had power
Not romantic (as opposed to Anne Sexton who was more romantic)
Wrote “Tiger’s Bride” based on the Beauty and the Beast and Tigers Bride (merged stories)
Her Version of Tiger’s Bride
Narrative perspective: included thoughts of characters
Characters
Bride – coming of age
Father – bad father, gambles everything away
Tiger – beast figure – not sure what hes like on the inside
Father sells her in a game of cards, beast just wants to see her naked
He shows her his stuff and there are sexual encounters (because shes turned on by the animal inside him and he brought out the animal in her)
Themes of the story: social restrictions, confinement, code of honor that restricted women, rejecting patriarchal society, liberation of women (feminism), she doesn’t go to save her father
Regular version of Tiger’s Bride
Feminism
Enemy of patriarchy
Patriarchy
Ideals of the submissive wife
Western Tradition
Wives submit themselves to heir husband, husband is the head of the wife and savior of her body
Russian folk
The man is the head but the woman is the neck, the head will follow the neck where it turns
Less patriarchal than western society
Wish Tales, all the Wives tales promote patriarchal society
Women’s desires are irrational
Female threats to patriarchy
Pride (shrewishness)
Insatiable and irrational desire
Disobedience
Women are always doing the opposite of what should be done
Memento mori
Reminder put into paintings that you will eventually die
Ex: a feast, everyone is having fun, in a painting, and a skull or crossbones as a reminder you are going to die
Death tales – reminders of death
Deaths messengers
Mourning
A natural process, just grief in general
Have some sort of ceremony where we can externalize the grief
Monument
Tale: the Mustard Seed
Melancholy
Internalization of grief
Don’t get rid of it
Tale: The Place Where There Are No Graves
Ate the dead bodies – literally internalized death
Parody
Humorous/satirical imitation
Blatant discrepancies
Criticizes original
Shrek
Objects of Parody
Disney
Moral structure, technology, family structures, Americanization
Fairy Tales
Ideals of Beauty
Methods of Parody
Pop culture references
Irrelevant and crude humor
Problems with Parody
No alternative offered
Must rely on what it ridicules
Walt Disney
American Dream
Used music and color for the first time
Made propaganda during WWII for the US
Disney’s Reworking of Fairy Tales
Challenges:
Length
Objectionable subject matter
Moral murkiness
Its hard to turn a fairy tale into a film because the fairy tales are short, there’s not enough material, unclear at times and some things are inappropriate
Disney Formula
Disney took oral tales
Clear structure of good and evil
Heightened romance
Omits a lot of the violence
Romance replaces sex
Clear defined value system
Gender roles are traditional
Cultural stereotypes
Technology and form
Technology as a subject: magic
Visual elements vs. the text
Genre
Hollywood musical
Characterization
Formulaic 19th Century Melodrama
Innocent Heroine
Gallant Hero
Evil Villan
Minor Characters
Secondary wives, animals, dwarves, sidekicks for common relief
Family Structures
Absent mothers
Absent or inept fathers
Americanization
Democratic
Protagonists are all teens
Ideals of Beauty
Domestic/submissive role of women
Rags to riches with personal ingenuity
Made fun of nobility – very much American
No direct violence between humans – instead inanimate objects (candles) or animals
Sublimation of Violence Irony
Cinderella – violence between animals instead of humans
Roald Dahl
Skipping background and analysis due to time constraints
Differences from original tales
Verse form
Plot somewhat different than original but still similar
Modern details not from ancient past – fit into modern society
Tales linked together in a fairy tale world
Objects of Parody
Fairy tale audience – what children want to hear, didn’t take out much of the violence or crude stuff
Woman as a victim – making fun of this and gives his tale a feminist twist, women have a sense of power
Techniques of parody
Form and style – rhyme with adult type of humor, uses a lot of slang, emphasizes the difference between tales then and now
Characters and plot make us see the inconsistences in the original tale
Know his version of Little Red riding Hood
Gilles de Rais
A bluebeard figure
Murdered children
Cunmar the Accursed
Historical basis for the bluebeard character
Murdered several of his previous wives and his fourth wife found the body chamber
Real event
Fourth wife was Saint Tryphine
Saint Tryphine (see above)
Jane Campion (the Piano)
Had a blue filter on her piano
The woman was mute and only used the piano as a means to communicate
Her husband (a bluebeard character) chopped off her fingers so she could not communicate
Margaret of Navarre (the Heptameron)
Queen of Navarre
Defender of well known humanists and some authors in her writing
Important figure in her time
Story represents husband forgiving her
Reinaissance culture
The Heptameron
Adulters punishment
Pretty high up in French nobility
Progressive for her day
Giovanni Boccaccio (The Decameron)
Volkspoesie
Poetry of the people
Everyday people are close to nature and the events in the past than the upper class
Simplicity and authenticity
Tales are something organic
Monogenesis
One origin of the stories and then variations arose from that one version
Polygenesis
Multiple origins of the same type of tale because the same people are going through similar experiences in different places
Carol Jung - Archetypes
Symbolic forms that make up dreams and fairytales
Show us ways to transformation and development
Genres of Folktale Literature
Legend: has historical grounding, is unspecific
Ex: Johnny Appleseed
Fairy Tales: rely on magic to provide fantasy solutions to overcome problems
Myths: narrative projection formed into a story, relationship deeper with the universe
Fable: moral, usually explicit, personification, very short stories, always have animals who talk, not like fairytales were they can talk through magical power but no magic is needed for them to talk
Everyday life situations
Protagonists are animals
Moral truth
NOT magic
Animals give
Didactic function
The Jataka Tales
The Panchatantra
Function of Folktales
Explanatory
Traditional (accompany rituals)
Social (help bring people together)
Schools of Folklore Inquiry
Origin
Form
Meaning
Style
Origins: Early Stages
Distribution and dissemination of folktales
Grimms
Fredrich Max Muller
Scholar of Sanskrit
Solar mythology: doesn’t have anything to do with the sun, but the natural world
Folktales are explanations of natural phenomenon
Muller
Theodor Benfey
German orientalist
Studied Eastern cultures
Argued that tales began in India
Folktales traveled through three major avenues:
Oral traditions from merchants
Arabic and Persian Translations
Contact between Muslim and European
Origins: Historical and geographical method
Reconstruct the history of a particular tale – look at versions and triangulate what the common origin is
Methodology: assemble all the known variants of a tale; from Germany, Italy, etc
Basic units of a folktale
Motif: reoccurring theme, each element in a table
Type: a bunch of motifs strung together, a traditional tale that has a unique ordering the motifs
Form
Two major schools
Formalist
Vladimir Propp
Functions
Actions that are taken by characters, how do these action move the tale, slow it down, or influence the overall structure of the tale
Ex: LRRH meeting the wolf? What function does this have?
Functions happen in a certain order
31 possible functions, sequential, but not all functions appear in all tales
Structuralist
Levi-Strauss
Myths reflect the logical structure of the human mind
Binary opposition: two things in nature that are opposed
Vladimir Propp
See formalist and functions above
Believed folklore is a special form of verbal art
Works of folklore and literature have different morphologies that folklore has specific structures
Literary works have an author, folklore works never have an author
Literature is constant, folklore changes independently of people’s will
Morphology: a description of the tale according to its component part and the relationship of these components to each other and to the whole
Max Luthi & Style
Stylistic Analysis
Four Features of Folklore
One Dimensionality
Coexistence of a real and enchanted world
Happen to walk from a real world into an enchanted one
Depthlessness
Absence of character motivation
Don’t need to know the character history to know their motivations
Often found in fairy tales
Lack of psychological depth
Abstraction
Extremes and conventions contrasts
Ex: troll eats an ox bc hes so hungry
Fixed formulas: man living alone at top of a mountain, obviously is a troll
Isolation and Universal connection
Lack of sustained relationship between characters
On the other hand, everyone is connected to and affects everyone else
Relationships either do not matter or you cannot escape them
Style: Performance Centered Approaches
Focus of studies from social context to creative process of storytelling
Looking at the tales as a type of performance themselves
Changeling
Definition: a child who is exchanged by a supernatural being for a good human child
Nonhumans take the good baby and leave evil offspring behdin
Why do these stories arise?
Attempt to explain natural problems, physical deformities
Usually in the form of a legend
Luther believed in changelings
Bettelheim
Prefers fairy tales to other kinds of children’s literature
Can learn about the inner problems of human beings
Children can better understand herself and complex world
Fairy tales differ from children’s literature
Parents impact the children most, then cultural heritage
Hansel and Gretel
Anxieties a child must overcome
Oral fixations
Mother=source of food to children, fail to meet oral demands
Witch=personification of the destructive aspects of orality
Gingerbread house=oral greediness and giving into primitive satisfactions
Jewels=children transcend their oral anxiety and free themselves of relying on oral satisfaction for security, and can free themselves of the image of the threatening mother (witch)
Birds=all white, divine intervention, guidance
Breadcrumbs=starvation, anxiety
Expanse of water=Christian allegory, symbolizes the way they have changed, maturity, baptism
Teaches the lesson to explore your imagination, work together, and mothers are important
Bluebeards
Interpreted Bluebeard tales as patriarchal power with violence, yet women can see through the power of men and come on top with their sight
Little Red Riding Hood
She is not yet ready for sexuality
People say he only picked certain parts of the fairy tale to prove his argument
Promotes themes of sexuality
Cinderella
split of mother helps a child to preserve an internal all good mother while the mother is not good at all, but permits anger with bad stepmother as a different person to protect child from being overwhelmed
Jack and the Beanstalk
Transition out of the oral phase into the phallic phase
Why? Boy is forced to sell cow bc it stops giving milk
Beanstalk episode is Jack’s dream, growth represents growth of sexual power
Giants are Oedipal projections, father is rival and has to fight with his father to take his place
Resolution of Oedipal conflict in the end
Sleeping Beauty
Undine
Female virgin water spirit
Defined by having to marry a man on earth to become a human
Mermaid tales – The Mermaid Wife
St. George / Dragon Slayers
Ideals of chivalry
Emblem includes red cross
Symbol of England
Golden Legend – Jacques de Vorgaine
Frau Holle
Frega
Collected by Grimms
Didactic function: teaches hard work and respect for higher being
Typical: woman loses distaff, goes underground and meets Frau Holle who tests willingness to work
Folk Hero
People identify with
See virtue embodied in them
Teach lessons to those in power
Ridicule those in power
Disney (Beauty and the Beast) vs. the Tale
Rose in both stories, but in VfP, the male picks a rose from the beast’s estate, but in the Disney film, the rose is a different symbol
Different family structure in film and VfP – only child in Disney, in the book there are three daughters and sons
Message is similar in both: looks can be deceptive, don’t judge by appearances
Simpleton
Stupid boy, youngest of all sons
Ex: The Flying Ship and The Rabbit herd
Overcomes impossible tasks to marry king’s daughter, gets help from an older mentor (pro-social side)
Motif of three tasks to overcome
The tasks usually involve the boy having a confrontation with the king (finding place in patriarchal society)
Animal Brides
The skin: different identity, gender roles, type of person you are, antisocial identity, sexuality can be linked to independence or freedom, put ring on finger which is the symbol of a chain, skin as protection for women
Men trying to take the skin: personal violation, controlling women
Incompatibility of two worlds, social classes, etc
Animal Bridegrooms
Morals: keep promises
Arranged marriages and coming to terms with an arranged marriage
Wild Man
Origins: India, Roman Empire, Grimm in Medieval Christian Europe
Wild Man represents the natural, wild aggressive tendencies of boys and the boy must rely on the aggressive/courageous tendencies of wild man and rules of society to have coming of age
Promote pro-social and antisocial tendencies to have coming of age
Frame Narrative
Story within a story
1001 Arabian Nights: someone is telling a story in the story
Jataka Tales
Tales of Buddha
Reincarnation, Buddha in different times and places
Characterized by humor and imagination
Jean de la Fontaine
Author of best selling fables
Political
Unmask corruption and dishonesty of the court
Used animals not humans
Criticism of political figures without using names
The Panchatantra
The Bidpai
Mostly about animals
Had morals
Quick thinking
Oldest collection of tales in Sanskrit
Nobility
Teach young princes how to act
Vampire
Between fairy tale and legend
Definition: corpse rise from the grave at night, get blood from humans
Similar to today’s zombies
In Christian legends were souls of pain, not baptized, referred to as sorcerers
Souls from purgatory
Eastern European source: Aleksandr Afanasyev
Socio-historical Reasons for Vampire Lore in Eastern Europe
Improper decomp
Christianization of Eastern Europe
Bubonic plague
Vlad Tepes Dracula
Romanian Prince
Historical Vampire figure
Elizabeth (Erzsebet) Bathory
Slovak Countess
Took virgin’s blood, drank it, took a both in it, preserve youth
She wasn’t executed because she was a royal, but was locked in the castle the rest of her life
Jeanne-Marie le Prince de Beaumont
Taught in schools for all social classes
Wanted to teach proper conduct for young women
Friedrich Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals)
Good and Bad / Good and Evil
Talked about power in the Catholic church
Nietzsche said the Catholic church gains power by telling people they should be weak and submissive

Freud – Stages of Sexual Development
Oral: as a baby, you get pleasure through “oral” things, such as sucking on thumbs
Sadistic/anal: little kids find pleasure in making bowel movements
Phallic
Genital: you want pleasure via genital contact of the opposite sex and same age
Latency
Time between phallic and genital phases
Period of sleep
Oedipal complex
Bang your mom, kill your dad
Fools vs. Tricksters
Fools teach lessons by making themselves a fool
Tricksters teach lessons by making you a fool

Recitation Readings
Donald Haase: “Yours, Mine, or Ours? Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Ownership of Fairy Tales”
Nationalistic ownership results in stereotyping
Universalistic
Belongs to everyone, but is wrong bc were all products of different stuff
We should individually own them – not owned by Disney or a corporation
Zohar Shavit: “The Concept of Childhood and Children’s Folktales: Test Case – ‘Little Red Riding Hood’”
Jack Zipes: “Breaking the Disney Spell”
Folklore body is a communal effort – we all own it together
Marxist
Corporate ownership of what should be communal

The Morals/Themes of the Tales
The Shrewish Wives
Manipulating the women by threatening to go back to her fathers place
Public humiliation
Haaken Grizzlebeard
Humiliation
Sexual = he made her pregnant
Social = marrying a beggar
Financial = marrying a beggar (previously a princess)
Morally/ethically = makes her steal and get caught
Women Who Rule Their Husbands
Show the danger of letting women be in charge
Wish Tales
Plot Structure
Wish(es) granted
Asks wife for advice
Wastes wish
Woman tells man what to do with the wishes, which is a mistake
Disaster results from weak husbands
Talkative Wives
Motif: wife who talks too much
Lesson: women are chatterboxes, talk too much
Foolish Wives
Another female character flaw: foolishness
Linked to other flaws
Laziness
Gullibility
Financial irresponsibility
Greed
Women do not understand the complexity of the world
Visitors from Beyond
Motif: women have a one dimensional understanding of the world
Foolish wife, or a foolish couple
Division of Labor
Ability to complete certain type of work is a natural ability
Bird wants to change things up and everyone dies
Moral: tasks are assigned by gender
Value of domestic labor
Conservative function: strict division of labor along gender lines
Be happy with the role allotted to you
Adultery
Usually the woman commits adultery – the man just commits a property crime
Features of these tales
Usually the woman not the man
Often conclude with the punishment for the adulteress
Margaret of Navarre
From husband’s point of view
Motif of revenge
Relation of power to sexual transgression
Virtuous Women
Counterparts (not opposites)
Point of view: patriarchal power structure
Happy ending?
Husband tests wife’s loyalty
Virtues of women
Obedience
Loyalty
Intelligence
Old Age
“The Cycle of Life”
Views on aging
Ours vs our ancestors
Fear of becoming useless
Age and the parent/child relationship
Gratitude for Parents
Punishments for ungrateful/selfish children
Political
Parental deception
Magic
Shame
Perspectives on Death
Death is inevitable
Untimliness of Death
Sigmund Freud on Loss/Death
Mourning vs melancholy