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Who's the Fairest of Them All? Defining and Subverting the Female Beauty Ideal in Fairy Tale Narratives and Films through Grotesque Aesthetics

Leah Persaud
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TLDR
In this paper, the authors present a survey of women in the field of psychoanalytic psychology, focusing on the effects of gender on women's ability to cope with violence.
Abstract
............................................................................................................................................. ii Acknowledgments ....................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures .............................................................................................................................. viii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................................ 20 1 How History, Typology and Psychoanalytic Scholarship Have Maintained the Beauty Ideal as a Dominant Presence in Female Relationships in Fairy Tales ...... 20 1.1 The Medieval Basis for the Dominant Presence of the Beauty Ideal for Women in Literary Fairy Tales ......................................................................................................................... 22 1.1.1 How the Written Tales Were Influenced by a Medieval Association between Beauty and Good Morality ................................................................................................................................................ 22 1.1.2 The Historic Reality of Death in Childbirth and its Influence in Creating the Cruel, Envious Stepmother ............................................................................................................................................ 25 1.1.3 How the Medieval Approach to Marriage and Beauty Establishes a Power Hierarchy for Women in Fairy Tales ............................................................................................................ 26 1.1.4 How a Combination of the Medieval Beauty Ideal, Physical Reward and Punishment, and Marriage Enforce Violent Female Relationships in Versions of “Cinderella” ............................................................................................................................................................. 27 1.1.5 The Lack of Correlation in Male Characters between Appearance, Violence and Morality ..................................................................................................................................................................... 30 1.2 How the Archetype of the Mother and the Typology of a Tale Encourage Envy and Conflict Centered around the Beauty Ideal .......................................................................... 32 1.2.1 Exploring the Mother Archetype and its Influence on the Moral and Aesthetic Splitting of Female Characters into Two Extremes ............................................................................... 33 1.2.2 How Envy and Violence Based on the “Snow White” Typology Reinforce Beauty as the Source of Power and Center of Conflict in Female Relationships ............................................ 35 1.3 How the Perceived Audience of the Tales and Psychoanalytic Scholarship Have Legitimized the Use of Violence and Punishment of Female Envy over Beauty ............... 42

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Citations
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Rabelais and His World.

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

TL;DR: Bruno Bettelheim 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.
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Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales

David Cross
- 20 Mar 1981 - 
TL;DR: For example, the authors argues that fairy tales may be more effective as instruments of social control than one would think, and that the study of these tales is too important to be left to folklore aficionados or specialists in children's literature.
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Fairy tales transformed? Twenty-first-century adaptations and the politics of wonder

TL;DR: Bacchilega, Cristina as discussed by the authors, transformed fairy tales transformed? Twenty-first century adaptations and the politics of wonder, 2013, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013.

Claiming Knowledge, Claiming Lives: Decolonial Feminist Pedagogy and the Experiences of Low-Income Women Undergraduates in Community College

TL;DR: In this article, the experiences of low-income women undergraduates in a community college classroom anchored in decolonial feminist pedagogy are explored, and an analysis of in-depth interviews, student writings, and questionnaires are offered to further understand the impact of decolonomic feminist education on their experiences and learning outcomes.
References
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Book

Morphology of the folktale

TL;DR: The Tale as a Whole describes the ways in which Stories are Combined and the Attributes of Dramatis Personae and their Significance, as well as some other Elements of the Tale.
Journal ArticleDOI

On 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema'

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors look back at Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (VP&NC) itself (Laura Mulvey 1975), and the theoretical and political context in which it app...
Book

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

TL;DR: In this article, Bettelheim presents a thought provoking and stimulating exploration of the best-known fairy stories and reveals the true content of the stories and shows how children can use them to cope with their baffling emotions and anxieties.
Journal ArticleDOI

Rabelais and His World.

Book

Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion

TL;DR: The authors argue against vague interpretations of fantasy as mere escapism and seek to define it as a distinct kind of narrative, emphasizing the importance of the writings of Freud and subsequent theorists when analysing recurrent themes, such as doubling or multiplying selves, mirror images, metamorphosis and bodily disintegration.