Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

Bio: Laurence Talairach-Vielmas is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Literary criticism. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 13 citations.

Beautiful Maidens, Hideous Suitors: Victorian Fairy Tales and the Process of Civilization

Abstract: [Y]ou were destined to marry a savage wild beast. - Apuleius In many a folktale and fairy tale, women encounter monstrous creatures. Hairy wolves and bears, slimy snakes and frogs, or even ogres partake of the heroines' confrontations with the - male - Other. Following Bruno Bettelheim, psychoanalytical analyses generally posit that beasts function as veiled symbols representing sexuality that children must initially experience as disgusting before they reach maturity and discover its beauty In contrast to such views, Jack Zipes argues that children's instinctual drives are "conditioned and largely determined through interaction and interplay with the social environment" (Fairy Tales 32-33). As a consequence, fairy tales are inevitably shaped by the historical period in which they are published and must be viewed through a sociopolitical lens. Indeed, many historians and literary critics envisage fairy tales as documents marked by social and economic conditions. As Marina Warner argues, fairy tales are permeated with "evidence of conditions from past social and economic arrangements" (xix). For Betsy Hearne, each new version reflects, in addition, "new variations of culture and creativity" (I).1 Zipes's exploration of the changes made to the tales convincingly brings to light how social pressures and norms, which may vary with time, weigh on fairy tales. His analysis of Perrault's, the Brothers Grimm's, or Hans Christian Andersen's literary fairy tales underlines how the revisions of oral folktales through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries are fueled by social and cultural references. Thus, hints at bourgeois mores and manners transfigure the discourse of the folktales in order to suit and to strengthen the rising power of the bourgeoisie. Moreover, such revised tales impose standards for sexual and social conduct that hinge on "inhibiting forms of socialization" (Zipes, Fairy Tales 33). In Zipes's view, throughout the centuries, competition and wealth become keywords, and patriarchal interests increasingly orchestrate the tales, stressing male domination and feminine subjection. Zipes's interpretation of fairy tales is invaluable to any reader or scholar examining Victorian fairy tales. Unlike in France or Germany - and with the possible exceptions of tales by Charles Perrault and Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy - fairy tales were not generally approved and accepted in England before the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially for children.2 Despite the fact that the classical fairy tales by Perrault had been translated into English in 1729, it was not before the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century that chapbook versions of Perrault's tales appeared in a format designed to appeal to children. In 1823 and 1826, selections from the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales were translated into English by Edgar Taylor and illustrated by George Cruikshank. Andersen's Wonderful Stories for Children, published in England in 1846 and translated by Mary Howitt, because of their overt Christian principles and their suffering (and often mutilated) characters, paved the way for a wider acceptance of fairy tales as suitable literature for children (see Zipes, Victorian xvii-xviii). Interestingly, just as fairy tales were making their way into the nursery, they very quickly became a means to question social, political, and cultural issues. Indeed, though mid-Victorian fairy tales undoubtedly represented middle-class settings, protagonists, and codes of conduct, some of them also debunked the bourgeois ideology. Not all literary fairy tales were subversive, however, and many of them seemed to both affirm and denounce the fairy tale's patriarchal discourse, especially when written - or rewritten - by women. In fact, in order to challenge traditional roles, women had to work within cultural paradigms. As shall be seen, the significant aspect of most of them is the transformation and adaptation of the classical fairy tales to the social and cultural environment of mid- Victorian England. …

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

Abstract: Bruno Bettelheim has spent his lifetime working on behalf of children and their secure upbringing. Having survived two concentration camps, he came to the United States and created a new therapeutic environment to help psychotic children survive their illnesses. He has frequently written about that experience; now he turns to a seemingly different subject, the fairy tale. He perceives an underlying continuity in his work, maintaining that the familiar fairy tale is, in fact, an art form, delineating the ultimate goal of child and man alike, a life with meaning. He indicates why other children's stories fail to attain this goal, and at the same time, why fairy tales themselves have fallen into disuse. In discussing their virtues, the author employs his extensive clinical experience, his engaging style, and, of course, the fairy tales themselves. Psychoanalytic assumptions constitute the organizing principle of his book, its consistency, and its occasional shortcomings;

Jane Eyre And Her Transatlantic Literary Descendants: The Heroic Female Bildungsroman And Constructions Of National Identity

Abstract: ________________________________________________________________ 214 Autobiographical Statement _________________________________________________ 218

Race, Species, and the Other: “Beauty and the Beast” in Victorian Pantomime and Children's Literature

Abstract: The nineteenth century saw the embrace of the fairy tale for children in Britain, where their importation from Europe had previously been resisted by what Jack Zipes describes as the “anti-fairytal...

De Beaumont's Beauty and the Beast: A feminist analysis

Abstract: Emphasising the part these tales played in the moral education of their readers. The ideals included in the tales are those which the writer deems essential in inculcating societal values. Jeanne-Marie LePrince De Beaumont’s Beauty and the Beast initially titled La Belle et la Bête (1757) was published with the idea to educate her readership. Turning to the fairy tale genre, she believed that it was through this form of storytelling that she could best educate her young reader about, as Korneeva (2014:234) states, ‘the conduct of courtship, marriage, and family relationships’ without them realising it. Korneeva (2014:235) states that ‘this intention to provide her female readership with practical guidance for worldly life brings the tale close to the tradition of conduct manuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’. Conduct manuals, such as The Gentlewoman’s Companion; or A Guide to the Female Sex (1675) by Woolly and An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797) by Gisborne, were popular literature which included ideas of how men and women were expected to behave within the society in which they lived. Zipes (2006:53) argues that De Beaumont’s tale is an educational commentary on the expected and acceptable manners, morals and social expectations of men and women.

Letty garth's little red book: “rumpelstiltskin,” realism, and middlemarch

Abstract: Letty Garth's “favourite red volume” makes its appearance in Middlemarch at the beginning of Book 7, at the Vincy's New Year's Day party that draws most of the Middlemarch town characters together. It is a small passage that can easily go unnoticed – or, if registered at all, glossed as simply part of the fabric of dense, inconsequential details that realist texts deploy to produce verisimilitude. Roland Barthes describes such details as potentially “scandalous” from the point of view of structure in that they seem to amount to “a kind of narrative luxury,” likely to threaten structural coherence, recoverable at best as “filling” or as giving “some index of character or atmosphere” (141). Such details might be said to reinforce the vices of nineteenth-century realism, including closing the gap between words and things: “we are the real,” these details say, producing “the referential illusion” (148). They amount to bad narrative housekeeping, “increasing the cost of narrative information” (141). Since the detail of Letty's book involves a young child it is doubly likely, in a novel so clearly dedicated to the adult world of compromise and doubtful success, to be set aside as mere local colour. The potentially trivializing function of the paradox of small instances of excess is reflected in Barthes’ descriptive phrases for them: “useless details,” “insignificant notation” (142).