Fairy Tales 2010

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Ass Skin

Tatar’s inquiry into Cinderella and Donkeyskin tales really made me think of what I perceive as traditional gender roles in fairy tales. I will admit, as a child, I found myself sucked into the camp of the righteous by design. As Tatar points out, Donkeyskin stories have not persisted in our cultural canon as much as Cinderella stories. Fathers do have a very limited role in fairy tales. Perhaps this is a mild attempt at averting masculinity through fantastical tales. What really struck me was the cited passage from Warner. She explains that fathers marrying daughters hits too close to home for some people. It’s when the tales actually coincide with experience (cultural) that they begin to suffer from censorship. This is the transformative measure that turns the evil gender role in a fairy tale back onto the mother—an attempted violation of forbidden lust. Contemporary audiences should read these tales together because this insistence of evil stepmothers has pervaded far too long. I guess I am jaded and/or cynical, but I feel like I was done a disservice as a child because I didn’t have to confront these horrible scenarios and cautionary fairy tales.

I read the tale “Ass’-Skin” on the Ashliman website. It is basically a retelling of the Grimm’s “All Fur”. Instead of incest, though, the king/girl relationship remains outside the family. The girl is an outsider that had been accused wrongly of robbery and forced to wear an ass skin suit. She then finds a new menial job and with the help of her mistress (surprisingly loving mother figure) gets dressed for the royal ball where the king falls for her. At the end, the main variant is that incest is hinted but never confirmed. The king and girl marry and have kids and then die happily. The king in this instance is violent to Ass Skin when he believes that she keeps running off the beautiful girl her meets at the ball each night. This violence is then counterbalanced by Ass Skin’s mother figure that is benevolent and offers wonderful clothing for the royal balls. After reading this variation, I agree with Tatar that these Donkeyskin stories should be read with the Cinderella stories. I actually found this more compelling than a Cinderella story because the supposed romance and marriage in the end is tainted with a moral gray area. It’s more of a literary tale with stronger ethical dilemmas.

3 comments:

  1. "Perhaps this is a mild attempt at averting masculinity through fantastical tales."

    I never thought about this idea before but it makes a lot of sense. The typical male in a fairy tale is masculine but it's a sort of feminized masculinity. Yes, he's a prince but he's also extremely clean cut, rather soft-spoken, and gentle. Which is funny when we consider how women are portrayed in fairy tales. They tend to either be asexual or overly sexual.

    "I guess I am jaded and/or cynical, but I feel like I was done a disservice as a child because I didn’t have to confront these horrible scenarios and cautionary fairy tales."

    I think it would be interesting to see how people would have turned out had they been exposed to the original versions of fairy tales. Would kids be more sexualized and violent or would kids just be a bunch of pansies? I love reading these versions of the stories now but I'm not sure if I could have handled them or even understood some when I was younger. Maybe if they were reintroduced to me when I was a pre-teen I could have handled them but then again, I probably would have thought I was too cool for them...

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  2. My post is in response to your feeling as though you were “done a disservice as a child because you didn’t have to confront horrible scenarios…”

    Proper censorship is difficult to discern. As children, we have no choice but to receive the materials given to us by our elders that have most likely been censored according to their preferences regarding how we should develop our minds.

    Perhaps it is because today we live in a society that is built upon freedoms that censorship of any sort seems preposterous. There is evidence to suggest that our own culture is struggling to maintain its ideals and order. There is a lot that cannot be controlled but stories and fairytales that are told to children can be monitored. Although censorship may seem immoral on the surface because it prevents an objective truth from being observed censorship also strengthens cultural identities (assuming censorship varies from culture to culture based upon its particular values) that help to make this planet a diverse place.

    A part of the maturation process, at least in our culture, is developing a greater understanding of the world at large and the diverse ways of thinking that comprise it. The versions of fairytales that we were raised on in our own culture are important in developing an understanding of the values of our own culture.

    I do agree with you that Cinderella and Donkeyskin should be read together but on the condition that this is done only once a person has reached an age of maturity where he or she has adequately developed an understanding of their own culture.

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  3. I absolutely agree with what you said. I discussed All Fur in my blog wondering if their was a censored version that did not have the incestuous ending and I read Ass Skin today and then your blog post. In class we discussed how Wilhelm Grimm edited several of the stories with more attention given to the censorship of the sexual themes present within the fairy tales while leaving the violent details relatively unscathed, and I'm surprised that he did not find this positive take on incest to be inappropriate.

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