Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making

Fan fiction alternate universe stories (AUs) that combine Game of Thrones characters and settings with fairy tale elements construct a dialogue between realism and wonder. Realism performs a number of functions in various genres, but becomes a particularly tricky concept to tie down in fantasy. Deployments of realism in “quality TV” series like Game of Thrones often reinforce social stigmatization of feminine genres like the romance, melodrama, and fairy tale. The happily-ever-after ending receives significant feminist criticism partly because it falls within a larger framework of utopian politics and poetics, which are frequently accused of essentialism and authoritarianism. However, because fan fiction cultures place all stories in dialogue with numerous other equally plausible versions, the fairy tale happy ending can serve unexpected purposes. By examining several case studies in fairy tale AU fan fiction based on Game of Thrones characters, situations, and settings, this paper demonstrates the genre’s ability to construct surprising critiques of real social and historical situations through strategic deployment of impossible wishes made manifest through the magic of fan creativity.

"They All Lived Happily Ever After. Obviously.": Realism and Utopia in Game of Thrones-Based Alternate Universe Fairy Tale Fan Fiction

This paper excavates the figure of the "monstrous queer" in some familiar fairytales and considers how queer writers working in the fairytale genre might rewrite such fairytales in pleasurable ways. The paper focuses on the moment of narrative closure in which the monster or villain of the tale is routinely killed or punished. The paper argues that the homocide of the queer monster is necessary foreplay to the heterosexual union which is the ultimate goal of much fairytale fiction.

Monstrous fairytales: towards an Écriture Queer

The end of the 20th century witnessed a rewriting of traditional tales for children in English. In 1997, Irish writer Emma Donoghue published Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins, a sequence of re-imagined fairy tales that was shortlisted for the James L. Tiptree Award. In 1994, American writer James Finn Garner had also re-written many well-known stories for children and had them compiled in a single volume: Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. These new versions of Cinderella incorporate formal, structural and ideological alterations that subvert the traditional fairy tale genre. Using intersectionality as a theoretical research framework, the analysis of these works demonstrates that when the matrix of social power is dissected, the existing networks of oppression are exposed. While both versions are centred around gender, Donoghue and Garner employ different strategies, namely queer alliances and parodic scenes respectively, with the aim of overcoming the same structural obstacles. The resulting characters are rebellious and successful women who challenge tradition and open new horizons for female empowerment through the reinvention of the fairy tale genre.

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Emma Dononghue’s and James Finn Garner’s Rebellious Cinderellas: Feminism and Satire for Empowerment in Contemporary Fairy Tales

Once theatre aims at children, who are the citizens and decision makers of the future, it can influence the course of society through the values and worldviews that it promotes. The exceptional capacity of this medium in engaging the audience, along with children’s receptiveness, necessitates a meticulous study of the ideologies embedded in plays. This study unravels how these ideological factors can hamper the theatre’s main purpose which is to encourage the audience to form individual fantasies. Accordingly, Žižek’s theories are drawn upon for their hints on ideology, fantasy, reality, and subjectivity. Taking his psychoanalytic views into account, four Persian plays are examined to determine what ideologies underlie these plays’ motifs and instructions, as well as what may justify their presence in plays. On close inspection, it becomes evident that these plays are loaded with conscious manipulative ideologies which are intended to train homogeneous social members rather than present objective glimpses of real life.

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A Psychoanalytic Reading of Selected Persian Children’s Plays

Make your once-upon-a-time dreams come true and dine in the one and only Cinderella Castle. Cinderella invites you into the glorious private dining hall of her castle for a storybook meal. Meet characters from Disney's Royal Family at the all-you-care-to-eat Once Upon a Time Breakfast or the customized prix fixe menu offered at the Fairytale Lunch. For the non-character side to this delicious dining experience, be sure to visit Cinderella's Royal Table. -"Cinderella's Royal Table" "Cinderella" continues to be tempting fare. Now we can literally feast with the fairy-tale heroine at Disney's Magic Kingdom, maybe even drinking orange juice from a glass slipper during the Once Upon a Time Breakfast or savoring "oranges and citrons" (Perrault 452) at the Fairytale Lunch. Cinderella's table is certainly "royal." And, of course, we can consume the variety of popular culture adaptations of her story that provides lucrative royalties to the Walt Disney Corporation, which also satiates our desire for products connected to faene: a Cinderella camera and scrapbook set, a Cinderella hair-styling play set, a Cinderella thermal henley, or a Cinderella snowglobe, just to mention a small selection. Cinderella has also been gracing the silver screen for many years, from the classic Cinderella (Disney 1950), the musical Cinderella (Rogers and Hammerstein 1964), to the live-action updated A Cinderella Story (2004). Disney, as one might expect, features the heroine prominently in its Disney Princess Series, most notably in Cinderella U: Dreams Come True and Cinderella III: A Twist in Time. Recently, Cinderella has spread her magic to the popular movie Enchanted (2007). Entertainment Weekly says of Princess Giselle, the movie's heroine, that "the resourceful heroine is soul sister to Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White" (Schwarzbaum). Manohla Dargis, writing in a New York Times review of Enchanted, which received a New York Times Critics' Pick, admits that fairy-tale "movies like to promise girls and women a happily ever after, but it's unusual that one delivers an ending that makes you feel unsullied and uncompromised, that doesn't make you want to reach for your Simone de Beauvoir or a Taser" ("Someday"). The reference to Simone de Beauvoir is significant, for fairy tales have been connected with women's issues, it seems, since they were first written down and published. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," writes Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (267). Cinderella's popularity could have led Beauvoir to modify her claim: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a princess." Maria Tatar suggests that Cinderella's character is so elastic that she "has been reinvented by so many different cultures that it is hardly surprising to find that she is sometimes cruel and vindictive, at other times compassionate and kind" and agrees, in spirit, with Jane Yolen's assessment that "the shrewd, resourceful heroine of folktales from earlier centuries has been supplanted by a 'passive princess' waiting for Prince Charming to rescue her" (Tatar 102). Cinderella's elasticity, however, has also led to more contemporary reinventions that rehabilitate her - that is, some have reinterpreted Cinderella as a strong, independent woman. Three recent and illustrative recastings of Cinderella include Barbara Walker's version in Feminist Fairy Tales (1996), Emma Donoghue's in Kissing the Witch (1997), and Francesca Lia Block's in The Rose and the Beast (2000). These versions attempt to counteract the image of Cinderella as a beautiful but passive, docile young woman that is often perpetuated in popular culture and, ironically, in the classic versions of the fairy tale that have been handed down through the ages, primarily those by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Walker, Donoghue, and Block suggest that Cinderella was not born a passive woman, but rather became one. Indeed, she has been drawn that way throughout the ages and seems in need of gender refashioning. …

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Karlyn Crowley

Papers

Feminist Frauds on the Fairies?: Didacticism and Liberation in Recent Retellings of "Cinderella"