Fairytales in JELL-O

Remember when we used to sit around campfires telling each other scary stories, or maybe some not so scary stories. Well Jell-o does and they demonstrate it here.

What i would like to point out is the children's reaction to the story...they are scared out of their mind, but they give their treats back. Jell-o is currently airing another commercial similar to this. The mother is telling her children a fairytale about a princess who gets locked away in a dark cave with snakes for the rest of eternity. She then adds the moral "and that's why you don't steal mommies jell-o temptations." The children immediately give the jell-o back. (video not available)

Now i know what your thinking...why is this person going on about jell-o. Well in an essay I read recently Bruno Bettleheim comments on how parents think stories are should only show the good in life and never the bad. As much as children don't need to be overexposed to the violent world we live in, they do need to know some of the bad. Life is not all milk and cookies. In many original fairy tales, the main protagonist must overcome many hardships, or in the case of some will not survive at all. In other stories, someone else swoops in and saves the day. But this isn't how life works. By reading children these type of fairy tales, we are teaching them that the someone else will always be there to clean up their messes.

Fairy tales are a fun, simple way to teach your children certain messages. Not all messages may be happy, but they are necessary. "Little Red Riding Hood" teaches kids not to talk to strangers, particularly in the version by Charles Perrault where Little Red Riding Hood does not survive at all. Sometimes we must scare our children to make the message go through. Fear is a necessary emotion and we can't shelter the world's children from it.

Ulterior Motive?

Ulterior Motive?

Madame d’Aulnoy’s stories were anything but ordinary. Her stories rarely end in marriage, but generally have a “happily-ever-after.” This opinion of marriage is likely to have come from her experience with it.

At the age of sixteen, d’Aulnoy was married off to the forty-six-year-old François de La Motte. La Motte was the estate manager to the Duke of Vendôme. Some believe La Motte and the Duke were lovers as well. The marriage between La Motte and d’Aulnoy failed. After the birth of the couple’s second child, La Motte was framed and arrested for high treason and imprisoned in Bastille for several months in a plot designed by three Normans and d’Aulnoy’s mother. The Norman men were eventually discovered and put to death, but d’Aulnoy’s life crumbled before her. D’Aulnoy’s mother emigrated from France; she is thought to have immigrated to Spain and England. Furthermore La Motte separated from d’Aulnoy and estranged her from his will.

In one of d’Aulnoy’s first novels, Histoire d’Hypolite, comte de Duglas, she alludes to her opinion of marriage. She believed that marriage was “an empty signifier, a mask of false virtue” (Stedman 15).

Another example of d’Aulnoy’s opinion comes from Histoire de Jean de Bourbon, Prince de Carency. The novel’s plot is similar to many other romantic novels; the hero and heroine must fight for their love. The difference is that this novel has no happy ending. At the long awaited wedding of hero and heroine, a rival lover swoops in and stabs the bride in a fit of jealous rage.

In d’Aulnoy’s “The Blue Bird,” the heroes must fight for their love but are constantly thwarted. The prince is turned into a blue bird for turning down one princess for another. The princess he chose was then locked in a tower. She and the bird sang together and fell more deeply in love. Soon the prince was wounded and could not fly to the princess in the tower. The prince is then allowed to be a man to recover, and if he does not change his mind about the first princess and give up his love, he will be turned back. While the prince is a man the princess tries to find him and marry him but is thwarted once again. Eventually the prince and princess were reunited (Wikipedia). In this story love may prevail, but there is no mention of the marriage of the lovers. This is yet another example of d’Aulnoy’s disdain of marriage.

D’Aulnoy obviously believed in the power of love, but not in the power of marriage. Her failed marriage affected the contents of her writings and left those reading them with her opinions written in ink.

Above is a short film based on "The Blue Bird" by Madame d'Aulnoy

Little Red...

         Little Red Riding Hood has been rewritten too many times to count.  Not only has is made excellent reading for children, but certain rewrites are more for the adult reader.  Other versions have been adapted into films, such as Red Riding Hood starring Amanda Seyfried and the animated movie Hoodwinked.  For me one of the most notable rewrites is small and relatively in significant.

         All my life I have watched the hit TV show Charmed, and in one episode the three sisters, Piper, Phoebe, and Paige, have a run-in with fairytales.  Piper, the oldest, tries to find the wicked witch but instead finds a red cloak hanging from a branch; she then realizes how far off the beaten path she is.  She immediately returns home; and soon after gets eaten by the wolf.  However, unlike many of the written stories, she is not cut out of the stomach by a passing woodsman or left to die inside the wolf’s belly.  In this story, she finds her own way out of the tummy.

         This story has always stuck with not just because of my love of the show but also because Piper as “Red Riding Hood” found her own way out, showing that not everyone needs a big, strong man to come save her.

In the below clips of "Charmed" the Little Red Riding Hood tale begins around 6:06.  Unfortunately the conclusion, where Piper uses her exploding power to escape is not featured.