The Cinderella Myth Essay Example for Free

The Cinderella Myth Essay The tale of Cinderella is encoded as a text of patriarchal moral instruction in which a sense of female agency will always by definition be absent. In this folk tale, which is also a fairytale, female character is positioned in terms of what it is not: not dominant, not powerful, not male. Cinderella herself, non-hero of a dubious tale, evinces more depth than most archetypes. She is capable of developing relationships, meting forgiveness, manipulating her own destiny, even of attracting magical help. This latter suggests a divine personage, with whom ancient myth is rife, but in fact there is never any indication that Cinderella is inhuman. On the contrary, her essential humanity is her salvation. These qualities on their own make Cinderella an anomaly among fairytale principals: she is given no journey, no quest, no troll to enrage or woo, but permitted to stay at home (albeit in a life of unrelieved drudgery). Although one of three sisters, she does not best them in riddles or games of strength or chance; even the sewing for which she is punished is not her own. Cinderella does not return from the party with a prize but (as I will show, I will shout) the opposite: she comes home missing what she had when she set out. Cinderella does not experience any perceivable growth or transformation with the exception of the tangible one directed by her magic guide—one which is also undone. We can read Cinderella as a mythical character only because of what she means to us as women. But that is enough. By virtue of what Cinderella represents to contemporary women, the character of Cinderella passed from her fairytale origins to mythical proportions. Cinderella has escaped the bounds of her own story. Cinderella defines girls first choice for a romantic partner, the strictures of friendship and obedience that girls are trained to uphold, unconditional family love and, not least, ideals of personal appearance and deportment. Cinderella demonstrates the potential of even the least socially advantaged female to achieve public success, the ability of the meek to triumph over the (female) competition, the trick of appearing to be what one is not. These are important techniques in the battle for male approval. If we have impressed Cinderella into service as a myth, it is because we need to look up and forward to a figure who has successfully navigated the obstacles on the distinctly female journey. Cinderellas rags-to-riches story inspires females to prevail against improbable odds. We do not believe  in myths because of some inherent truth in them, but because they substantiate what we most wish to be true: Cinderella is a falsehood painted as possibility. What we worship in her is not what she is but what she gets; by subscribing to the myth of Cinderella, we sustain our collective female belief in wealth, beauty, and revenge. New Origins Folktales had their origins in oral accounts, stories told by people before the advent of writing, or before someone determined them worthy of literary transcription. Grimm Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm did not, in an original creative act, write the tales published under their names, but went out as folklorists (before there was such a profession) into the countryside, like anthropologists in their wilds, and listened. What they brought back they then edited, like the good ethical binary German men they were: anything that didnt suit their Christian standards simply disappeared. I have read transcriptions and abstracts of their notes and wondered at the absence of certain types of tales. Stories about children surviving on their own, or women leaving the husbands who beat them, somehow never made it to press; concurrently, stories about Jews being robbed and hung in thorn trees, or torn apart by dogs while (mendacious) villagers laughed, stayed in. The Grimms were very careful not to let what they heard get in the way of what they wrote. Charles Perrault held the same view, concerned lest women and other children go astray. Both Perrault and the Brothers Grimm published these folktales as if they were their own—under their own professionally upstanding names, and not as anthropological records but as literary fictions. The performance of meaning for fairy tales becomes both an intratextual and an extratextual matter, one enacted by (re)writers of the tale, who rescript stories passed on to them, and by its readers, who collaborate with the (re)writers to negotiate yet another production of textual meaning (Tatar 277). Although old wives may have originally imparted the stories we read today, the power and authority of writing sat fast in the hands of male scholars; publication, moreover, was granted to the wealthy. For each fairy tale, Kindermà ¤rche, folk legend and myth with which we are now familiar, there are possibly thousands for which there is no record. Folk legend, like history, is selective. Cinderella was similarly written (or transcribed) from oral accounts as a piece of moral instruction.  A Cinderella by any other name exists in a variety of languages and cultures,1 with many culturally-revealing alterations to the basic storyline, most telling us of a poor but beautiful girl who, by going to a party on the hill, wins the attention of a wealthy man. Look what the right pair of shoes will do for you. Cinderellas story is a curious one. Many of us know this tale in its modern extensions but cannot say how we know it—whether we read it in a childs picture-book, watched Disneys animated version, saw a movie with human actors unanimated by comparison, or fell in love with the ash-girl in her other forms (including in Dickens revival). Indeed, Cinderella is legion: as Barbie in diversely perfect incarnations, the heroine of almost any romance novel, new and sometimes relevant literary concepts (for instance, the Cinderella complex, the whore with a heart of gold). 2 Bernard Shaws drama Pygmalion presents another instance of male bonding conducted through the service of a woman, in this case one who believes that she can only win by trying, as she has started with nothing. To his credit, Shaw allows the character to shove off at the end, bearing her body away, but to have true love and devotion this Cinderella must give up all pretenses to education. Education therefore becomes a pretense. Further transformed as the Lerner and Lowe musical My Fair Lady,3 the music ends with a new-made woman who newly makes man: Eliza converts her creators. The underlying message is one Mary Shelley crafted a hundred years earlier: Frankenstein has no loyalty. But in this case the monster manages to marry one of the scientists. Both Pygmalion stories are commercial perversions of an ancient Greek myth that performed a service for its culture. In the original, a male artist falls in love with his own sculpture, surely an intriguing commentary on the power of art to seduce even its own creator, and a warning to gaze on verisimilitude with suspicion. This brings us to Hollywoods contemporary Pretty Woman and another Disneyized threat, The Little Mermaid (if there is a hell, then Hans Christian Anderson is now in it). In these movies Cinderella transforms from foul and fish into a lady that only proves how far women will go to change for their men. As Oedipus provides a model for the male (kill Daddy, bed Mommy), so Cinderella serves the female, directing us to similarly anti-social behaviors and antipathetic familial relations: to hate and compete with other females, suffer in silence, and seek rapport with males  through the mysteries of flirtation, fashion and marital fitness. Fortunately for women, this involves only virtuous activities, easily enough acquired in the observance of girlhood duties: cleaning, cooking, sewing, nurturing and displaying ourselves publicly, all the while taking up little space. Taken to its logical conclusion, woman herself at last disappears from view. This is true in the story of Cinderella, as we shall see. Absence Let it be known that the ballerina is not a woman dancing; that, within those juxtaposed motifs, she is not a woman, but a metaphor that summarizes one of the elemental aspects of our form, sword, goblet, etc., and that she is not dancing, suggesting, by the wonder of ellipses or bounds, with a corporeal writing, that which would take entire paragraphs of dialogued as well as descriptive prose to express in written composition: a poem detached from all instruments of the scribe (Mallarmà ©, Oeuvres Completes4). One of the first absences in the text occurs in translation of Cinderella from an earlier publication in French5 to English—the absence of a word. It is a simple word and a little loss that heralds an enormous and important one: exchange of the French velours (velvet) for verre (glass). In the centrality of the image conjured by its sign, this Word reads as Logos for the remaining popularized text. It is an understandable mistake given the hardships of transcribing in the field (from which Charles Perrault, at least, copied out his manuscripts), of hearing and absorbing frank orality and then transforming it to arid print. The terminological difference, however, leaves women literally walking on glass, each step a faux pas. How does one navigate on such a fragile basis? This may be interesting to women who wonder how Cinderella got through the night in those shoes. Cinderellas new shoes are truly, clearly, invisible, her feet naked to all eyes. But worse —she must dance in an unforgiving shoe (dancing for the first time in public, mind you)—which at any moment threatens to break, replace her barefoot, bloody, and utterly helpless. How carefully she must step. A good thing the Prince has learned to dance. To comprehend the magnitude of this error—estrangement of the word and actions of our young charwoman—we are forced to retrace the steps of that perilous slipper, magicked into being with the rest of Cinderellas fancy outfit. There is no honest explanation for why the slipper remains as testimony—why, if the shoe fits, it drops. Moments earlier, we are told, the young woman was gaily dancing in this very shoe; surely it would have fallen off then, in the endless (and, as dancers know) breathlessly swift rounds of the older Austrian waltz. But after a night of aerobics indoors, the woman rushes outside and immediately loses a shoe. This mistranslation points us towards understanding the slipper as a prominent signifier, rather than towards seeing some more substantial object: glass operates as a red flag, leading us to a fanciful but ultimately unnecessary correction of an image. Glass breaks, it is true (although in the story it does not, at least overtly). But in the French source material the shoes were velvet. Velvet, a word strongly associated with skin (more so than glass), tears. It is strong, soft, stretchy and pliable. A velvet slipper can be left on the road and retrieved and can still be worn in a ragged condition. Not so glass. So while glass attracts our attention, velvet rubs us better. Something velvet has been lost. And found. If the slippers loss signifies another loss, the slipper signifies another slip. It is troubling that only one item retains its shape (the shape of magic) after the ball, when everything else has returned to its poor normalcy, right down to the golden pumpkin. If everything is magical, then the slippers exclusion makes no logical sense in the story. But without the slipper as a calling card, a sort of invitation to be stepped on, the Prince may never find Cinderella in the sea of women vying for his notice. Conversely, it is not clear to me now why the Prince has to find her. The story dazzles us with finery, which we all too readily see as refinement. In the spell of the lost slipper, we overlook the more obvious intrusion of the Prince himself, and in the absence of honest cogitation conclude that he must be the one for Cinderella. (Its true he is the only one, but in modern times that is not as good a reason as it once was.) Having had no time to know Cinderella as a woman apart from her unpleasant family, we have certainly failed to meet the Prince, and know nothing of this man except that he is extraordinarily superficial, a late bloomer, and wholly dependent upon his parents. In the remainder of the tale he develops as a foot fetishist. At no point in the story are we logically convinced that these two should be together, that the Prince is worthy of our supposed heroine, or heroic himself. Cinderella is not particularly romantic, even after the finding of the slipper that initiates a sordid (wo)manhunt. The  objective of this search is a stranger who clearly wants to hide; otherwise she would have answered the call. (Her sequestration at home in a locked house is far from likely, given that a principal domestic duty is emptying the char outside, and her name signifies her as that domestic.) And despite his hunting, there is no reason to think that a prince is going to be excited to end up with a poor ragged girl with ashes on her hands—never mind the in-laws. On the face of it, what Cinderella lost at the ball is a shoe, but we do her an injustice if we look only at her instructions (particularly as she has already ignored those of her stepmother) and neglect her feelings at the moment of flight. Cinderella is now in a palace, a place of possible refuge, safe from her family. The Prince likes her. But at the striking of the clock—no, the calling of the watchman or ringing of the bells—she gets scared and runs away. Modern detectives would phrase this differently: Cinderella exits the party late, leaving behind material evidence of her existence. (Without this the Prince might have thought that Cinderella was a fantasy.) She runs as fast as she can in an effort to beat time and find a way home. (If shed had a mother she would have known better than to go to a party where she doesnt know anyone: anything can happen at a party.) Then Cinderella loses her velvet, and the Prince gets it. (You decide what went on at that party.) And there is another ending, suggested by what is not stated in the story: Cinderella disappears from the party, last seen in the company of a prince. Passers-by report having seen a poor woman in tattered clothes, sitting in the middle of the carriage-track massaging her feet. This is the last either woman was seen. Police are now searching for this beggar whom, they believe, may have murdered a foreign princess as she left the party, probably for money. Anyone knowing the whereabouts of (but what is her name?) an anonymous princess, please contact this writer. Presentation of any story results in commission of at least two versions—the story that is told and the one we hear. I propose a tertiary rendition, that of the story we do not hear because it is not told—not, that is, forcefully sounded. Were we to listen to the spaces, as artists from Aaron Copland to Noah Ben Shea have reminded us, we would hear those speaking parts. The heard Cinderella is, despite its magic and fantasy, the authoritative edition; the unheard Cinderella is the practical, plodding story that might bring us to furious tears rather than ecstasy. A moment ago I suggested how  Cinderella might seem to an outsider, one not as privy to events as she. Underlying that suggestion is another one, that the writer or teller of the well-known Cinderella is either Cinderella herself or a close companion, as indicated by the naï ¿ ½ve credulity of the story itself. But that quality we have come to accept in the folktale genre, one which causes us to reflect upon the medieval notion of story-telling and which tells us much about religious tradition of belief in that period. Now I wish to produce something different: a case history of poor Cinderella, the pieces and bits of her life which may have been discarded by her original creator/story-tellers. Again this is an unheard story, but now it is also unspeakable. I speak as a caseworker in the Womens Shelter: Cinderella gave Intake the following story: Her mother died when Cinderella was perhaps five. Her father remarried a year later. Two older stepsisters were at the wedding, aged between eight and twelve; the stepmothers first husband died when a nearby witchs cottage burned down suspicion of arson. Almost immediately, and for the next twelve years, Cinderella was beaten regularly by her stepmother; she showed us an early scar, located on the upper left thigh, from a fire poker. Cinderellas father fell ill probably Plague and died date uncertain. The sisters began to kick, taunt, pull her hair and feed her bugs. When Cin began her menses, she was locked in a closet for? some extended time. There seems to have been a change in the familys finances at this point; the last remaining servant was let go, or left, and Cin took over all chores. She was probably eleven years old when she was first sexually assaulted, by the eldest stepsister. The abuse was repeated periodically until this day. Cin believes that her stepmother does not know of this, but C- does not dare tell her. C- sneaked off to watch the Grand Ball and, once in the estate and aided by strong drink says she had a bout with a stableboy she made it upstairs disguised as a maid, entered a room and borrowed a gown. She then appeared in the ballroom. The Prince danced with her, drew her into a private room, and seduced her not rape? C- wont say the word then returned to the party. C- fled wearing only underclothing and carrying her shoes in her hands. Outside she dropped a shoe without noticing until she got home; the other shoe is in her garret. We have all received, of course, the Royal  Proclamation, and know that Prince Ode is hunting for the owner of something in his possession. Cinderella came to the Shelter because she believes that he means to find her, take her away, and kill her. The case above, common enough in the lives of women, is not what we know as Cinderella but, given the circumstances of the folktale, its bizarre elements and strange silences, it could have been. In re-telling it I invite the reader to think how reading that as a child might have influenced her life, her love for housework, her attitudes towards men, and her desire to marry early. My Cinderella Confession A current trend in scholarship, at least printed scholarship, is self-reflexivity. The speaker is expected to identify herself, admitting her biases (as if the reader could not detect them) so as not to hide behind the formality of academic writing. In this vein I step forward and make confession, presenting some personal limitations regarding the story of Cinderella. Despite all I know about Cinderella, regardless of all that currently annoys me in the story, I confess that as a child I did identify with Cinderella. I liked animals. I liked pumpkin. I lived in a small room. When I went to parties I had a curfew —and it was unreasonable. I couldnt sew, and needed help in home economics. I went barefoot most of the time. It seems I never got dessert, possibly because I often lost things on the way home. I had to do such hard chores that I investigated child labor laws. I had two older sisters and, although they are regular sisters rather than stepsisters, they often seemed very wicked indeed. So what if they werent ugly, my feet were much smaller than theirs. (Then.) Because of them I wore hand-me-downs. (Then.) You see how it all fits. So although I was not a beautiful golden-haired orphan (my natural color is sun-bleached brunette), kept in a dungeon or an attic (I adored my aunts basement), forced to clean ashes from the hearth (we had a wall furnace) and befriended only by mice (we had large dogs), I did think that eventually someone would come and take me away from all this. I even learned to waltz. But I didnt meet any princes. The Conventions of Class Cinderella begins with Cinderellas primary absence: her mother. In fairytales, motherlessness indicates an absence of quality attention and the  necessity (given the staggering amount of handiwork done at home) for men to remarry. Their second wives are invariably brutish, and fathers die off like flies. Female children raised by these monstrous women are lucky to be married, while still children, to ugly old men —thus escaping beatings, beheadings, being poisoned, cooked, frozen, sold, or accidentally left somewhere awful. Male children with stepmothers tend to seek their fortunes at an early age, so as to find their own women to punish. The next absence in Cinderellas life is a father. Is it only that absent parents are common to the childhood fairytales which govern our memories and learning patterns, thus wending their way into our literary texts, or does this trope stand for more a founding absence, like the founding murder Oedipus is said to represent? The next absences we hear about in Cinderella are, in order: clothes, shelter, appropriate work, friends, and opportunities to socialize (with humans). It is at this point in the story that Cinderella encounters magic, something generally absent beyond fairytales. Or does she merely recognize the magic in her life? For it seems as if the Fairy Godmother were always there, available, like Glinda the Good Witch, to drop in when you needed direction. From that point on it is apparent what else Cinderella lacks: transportation, a formal dress and decent shoes. The final absence is Time. Even her Fairy Godmother gives her very little— as we find out later, just enough. After Cinderella loses the shoe in escaping (too late) from the party, she is plunged back into the animal world she dominates, shorn of finery, reduced to essentials. She returns to the level of minimal survival. Thank goodness the Prince is already searching, his spies canvassing for little feet. Cinderella will soon be lifted up, placed on a horse or in a carriage, and transported to a world of wealth and satisfaction with a big house and a good family. (I hope I didnt ruin the story for you.) On a basic moral level the instructions are clear as glass: good triumphs over bad, beauty over its repulsive opposite. Cinderella is intimately associated with nature, as we are told several times: through the animals which, like she, become domesticated; through her beauty which, in the tradition of the Aesthetic experience, demonstrates its superiority over homeliness. (Homeliness? What is homely, really, but housewifely, comfortable, and familiar —and therefore contemptible?) From our perspective of identification with Cinderella (wed hardly choose to identify with ugly,  nasty women) these females, older than she and more mature, are females prepared to party, women rather than girls, and not real (biologically real) sisters. Partly because of the brevity of the story and paucity of detail, this suggests that they, mere step-sisters, are somehow unnatural. Beyond the natural beauty that testifies to Cinderellas (yet unrealized) status, her elevation over this unconnected family is physically represented by spatial signifiers: imprisonment in an attic, conveyance in a horse-drawn coach, and finally marriage into a royal family. Above all, Cinderellas most natural gift is magic: the girls beauty and (its) charm shine brightly through mere rags. This is so apparent that it is noticed immediately by a prince—a man born into an entirely different milieu, to wealthy and indulgent parents. The story asks us, among other things, to anticipate that such a wedding of opposites will work. In fact, fairy tale happenstance and happily-ever-afters aside it just might, and because of Cinderellas nature. The Prince, culturally her Other, is the aesthetic brother of Cinderella. The kinkiness is just beginning. We customarily avoid class in reading and rewriting folklore, but Cinderella affords a remarkable discussion. Before the Prince lays eyes on her, Cinderella does not exist in the legal and economic awareness of her country. She pops into being at a party, relatively mature, decorated, and provocatively displayed. It is not a party for poor people; poverty is absent from the ball. But that in itself is an absurd notion: naturally the castle is full of servants, and most are penniless; one can only say that no poor people are present because poor people are beneath the notice of the wealthy population, invisible. This fact has not changed. Cinderella gets the invitation because it goes to the house in which she lives, a place where she is kept captive by her poverty. She seems not to have been born into the lower class (otherwise she would never have been able to get through the castle gates, let alone waltz), but fell into deprivation through the death of her parents. Who can really blame the stepmother for not wanting to take care of a girl with whom she had no real relation? Biology speaks: woman must protect her own offspring—particularly if the physical attractiveness of another female threatens their own reproductive success. The absence of Cinderellas own mother is unremarkable, superficial, unless one regards it as a fundamental absence, the one upon which the half-orphans  rags-to-riches story is initially built: through the fathers emotional absence, Cinderellas mother is replaced by a non blood-relation whose own issues of reproductive success create class strife and difference within the family; the girl is faced with rival kin; and finally a mystical figure intrudes from the other world, faintly identifiable as her mother (the magic helper styles herself a Fairy Godmother) but granting no more than material assistance. Transformation of animals into human servants,6 and their disappearance at midnight, symbolically expresses the absence of the lower classes, which serve the upper class as if animals. When we observe how Walt Disney attempted to fill in the absences in the text with additional animal habitation, this concept becomes clearer. Disney explains Cinderellas primary absence by the increased presence of animals that evidently take the place of a mother. With the appearance of the stepmother and two daughters the animals are replaced, and abandoned as Cinderella had been. An absence of family acknowledgement is discernible in Cinderella herself who, regaining the humble form of a scullery maid, becomes unrecognizable—virtually invisible—to her own family. The means by which Cinderella will eventually succeed is over-determined by class: she must physically impress her Prince and lord at court, and later fit his image of the perfect (small) woman at home. Still she requires a bit of magic. The story presents an array of questionable absences, none of them textually answered. Why is there a ball? Only because of the Princes failure to get a date on his own. His folks have to arrange something, to find women for him. Cinderella attends a party meant not for her but the beautiful people associated with money and fame. We privately know that Cinderella really belongs to this group; therefore we suspend our disbelief at the unlikelihood of her ever getting there. At the moment of Cinderellas entry, a representative of the poor actually becomes visible to rich people. But she is not really poor, is she? The tale does not end with Cinderella speaking in the public square, peasants invited up to the castle for lunch—in short with the French Revolution. (If it did, Cinderellas own head would roll.) She ascends, making aliyah; the rest of the lower-class remains in galut (the Diaspora). In fact, in the hands of Disney, Cinderella turns into a girl (few of Disneys female heroines are women)7 who sings as she is dressed—oh, those happy peasants!—in accordance with the tradition of  musical theatre to sing instead of enjoying a useful discussion. Everything stops while we listen to the same few lines being repeated. The formula recurs in nearly every Disney movie: when animals, peasants and racial minorities show up its time for a song.8 Do children want a story interrupted with a song? As a child I hated that sort of thing. Surely we must question for whom these stories, and their cinematic adaptations, are truly meant, written, animated, shown and sold. Jacqueline Rose points to the impossibility of childrens literature as a genre ostensibly for children, but written by adults, while in the marketplace it is adults who (because of their economic position) are the true consumers. It is even the adult who reads the book (aloud) to the children. Thus it is an adults version of the childs world which is manufactured through the aegis of childrens literature. Childrens fiction, says Rose, sets up a world in which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver) (Rose 1-2). So what is it that adults want children to understand from the story of Cinderella? Female Relationships One of the horrors of Cinderellas tale is the moment when she flees the castle and its famous ball. She is running, running, running away from the bright lights, the fun, the food, the nice guy, running to keep a date imposed by the Good Witch. This is a moment of horror not because she has to leave the party: shes pretty young, high time she went home. (Anyway she wouldnt want the Prince to think she was easy.) No, it is horrible because of the Fear of Public Exposure. If there is one thing that would compel me to leave a good party it would be the fear that my clothing would disappear. She runs out the door, the gate, goes down those steps, shes just off the grounds, and poof! there it goes. Fortunately she is not standing there naked, but we couldnt be sure of that beforehand. For a child to imagine being naked in public is terrible; so what if only the animals can see? There is no good explanation why the Fairy Godmother add this potential punishment to the assistance she gives Cinderella, there is no point. In my mind, something is missing from the story, something vitally important. Why is she set up in this way? What we do see in Cinderella is a tale of perfidy and female treachery. The bad characters are all female. How can one speak of a female absence in Cinderella, when it would seem that almost all of the  characters are female? But these people consist of a good but romantically stupid girl who prefers to accept the ill treatment of her step-family rather than to pack up the mice and leave; two step-sisters, ugly mean and very ugly, who are indistinguishable from the other, except through Disneys putrid use of color; an evil step-mother, also ugly; a strange woman who shows up once in a lifetime, twice if you subscribe to the Disney account. (Where was she the previous sixteen years? Thanks a lot, Mother.) Female hatred. Female sabotage. Female jealousy. These are all shown us repeatedly in Cinderella as is. We discover that the way to win a prince is over the ugly bodies of our competitors, who are similarly trying to cut our throats. Beauty on its own is not enough: you have to be seen by the right people. You must triumph over those who would hide your beauty. You must outdo them. No wonder female friendships are so problematic, when this is how we are trained to see our relationships with other women. Hatred, sabotage and jealousy are also present in earlier tellings of the story which, though present in the current Disneyized version, is absent at its end, when Cinderella rides off into the horizon and the bad family vanishes from sight and mind. In Aschenputtel, the Grimm version of Cinderella, birds attack the evil stepsisters and bite out their eyes. But in many other accounts Cinderellas goodness is almost saintly: she forgives her stepsisters horrible behavior and sometimes even manages to match them up at court. This is certainly not what I would do—but I also have an opportunity to rewrite this story at the point of my retelling it. I have already reinterpreted the story for you using a metaphoric polemic on absence. In my story, what is most important about Cinderella is the shoe. Ways of Seeing This article concerns metaphors and ways of seeing, particularly ways of seeing what others are not looking at. The logical assumption is that a non-subject is therefore trivial, unworthy of serious study. Conversely, my response was and is to question why these are non-subjects, to investigate decisions made by others about what is likely to be important to me or to anyone else. So my work begins with a rejection—of the canon, of the politics of literature and its publication, of academic appropriateness, of the legislation of opinion. One of the ways that academics seem to operate is through the posing of binary or structural opposites. It is comforting to  know that if a thing is not this it must be that; what is not cold is hot. Never mind that we are capable of thinking about and experiencing an enormous range of temperatures, that heat is a relative term as is cold; structural opposition (Là ©vi-Straussian construction) enforces binary coding, usually with the additional motivation of fixing, or affixing, moral values. Because one is already conditioned to look at things as this or that, cold or hot, the value indicators are similarly binary: negative and positive. We need both, of course, and not only in our flashlights: polarity is a dependent relationship. But because of this tendency towards a tension of opposites, we end up limiting our transactions, our thinking, to bad and good. This is the outcome—if not the point—of childrens literature: it conditions us to distinguish bad and good, and to make a number of other associations with these terms; that which is considered good is that which beautiful, smart, nice, polite, fair or even white, obedient, tall, slim, quiet, and so forth. In fairy tales, the basis of what we now call childrens literature, a persons inner qualities are instantly discernible from external attributes. Good and bad are physiologically, physiognomically manifest: the dark little crooked old woman in black with the wart on her nose is not going to be the hero. Thus a good person is also pleasant to look at and (as we know from television) has clean clothes, fresh breath, and carefully styled hair. I have gone into an extended discussion of binarisms and ethics because I invite you to suspend binary judgements, to move beyond an evaluation of absence as the opposite of presence, and to consider absence in a different way: as something present—but not. That which is not not present is absent. When something present is not looked at, not recognized, not seen, it acquires a certain invisibility—in part, what I call absence. Absence is what is always there but overlooked, or there but unheard, or seen and heard but never mentioned. We do not immolate the story in reconsidering what it conceals. We literally unveil nothing of her, nothing that in the final account does not leave her intact, virginal (he loves only that), undecipherable, impassively tacit, in a word, sheltered from the cinder that there is and that she is (Derrida 41). 9 Those characteristics of Cinderella left un-addressed support this view of absence: somewhere behind the story sits another story, the one we are not meant to hear. Were we to hear it we would walk away with an entirely  different perception of the poor beaten Cinderella—or several different perceptions.10 We might be inspired to question the value of the hidden features, to wonder where issues of class, aesthetics, nature, superstition, parenting, hunger or politics fit in our founding myths, to wonder at the importance of such a myth as Cinderella in our female lives. We might be sufficiently moved to overturn the patriarchal texts, insert others in their place (Nature filling its vacuum). Not, that is, to rewrite Cinderella, but instead to find a more feasible model for contemporary female behavior. Perhaps even to acknowledge that there can be no models except those we embrace through personal experience. Absence is something more than its frail partner presence—a location for the political, for what is challenging for societies and social conditions, for what must not be looked at, not seen, not noted, not touched. Not presented. Absence is dangerous. To locate absence is to chart life, history, sociology, in a specific way. The Cinderella story presents an array of questionable absences, textually unanswered because unquestioned. This discussion does not pretend to provide closure, but rather to enjoin readers to ask questions of their own. Unlike other ways of seeing, this strategy does not limit or eliminate the text, but it does subvert it. By examining our essential stories, those we encountered at the knee, and those we teach to children, we begin to see in other ways, to discover culture as a tool for moral education, sexual regulation and female containment, and to locate female absence very close to home. 1I do not wish to repeat the excellent extensive historical scholarship on Cinderellas origins here. Cinderellas lengthy and interesting histories, irrelevant in this discussion, can be found in the following brief bibliography: Bruno Betelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976); Alan Dundes, ed., Cinderelle: A Folklore Casebook (New York: Garland Pub., 1982); Walt Disney, Cinderella [Videorecording], (Burbank: Walt Disney, 1949); Nai-Tung Ting, The Cinderella Cycle in China and Indo-China (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1974). [ Return to the article ] 2A cursory review reveals these addenda: Colette Dowling, The Cinderella Complex: Womens Hidden Fear of Independence (New York: Summit Books, 1981); Barbara Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender, and Womens Movements in East Central Europe (London: Verso, 1993); Eugene Paul Nassar, The Rape of Cinderella: Essays In Literary Continuity (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1970); a curious history of something entirely other—D. C. M. (Desmond Christopher St. Martin) Platt, The Cinderella Service: British Consuls Since 1825 (Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1971); Cinderella considered as an anti-fairy tale in Robert Walser, Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses, ed. Mark Harman (Hanover, NH: Published For Dartmouth College by University Press of New England, 1985); Margarita Xanthakou, Cendrillon Et Les Soeurs Cannibales: De La Stakhtobouta Maniote (Grece) A Lapproche Comparative De Lanthropophagie Intraparentale Imaginaire (Paris: Editions De Lecole Des Hautes Etudes En Sciences Sociales, 1988). For a subversive and extensive recovery of what cinder (cendre) is (or to what cinder is reduced/reducible), see Jacques Derrida, Cinders, ed. and trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). [ Return to the article ] 3Rodgers and Hammersteins music backed a movie produced as a musical in the same year: Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Cinderella [Videorecording] (Hollywood: Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1964). [ Return to the article ] 4Mallarmà ©, Oeuvres Completes, Plà ©iade edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1945) 3-4. [ Return to the article ] 5It would be difficult to ascertain where the fable had its first expression, as scholars trace it to Germany, France and even China; a student tells me of the Hungarian version, in which the young woman is named Hamupipoke, and her shoes, curiously enough, are made of white diamonds. The symbolism could not be clearer. On form and structure, see also Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale. Translated by Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). [ Return to the article ] 6This is given greater consideration in my article Travesty, Peterhood, The Flight of a Lost Girl, New England Review, forthcoming (August 1988). James M. Barrie also wrote a play named Cinderella not very surprising in view of the fairytale quality of Peter Pan and many of his other writings. [ Return to the article ] 7One of the few exceptions is Mary Poppins, who is also depicted as an aberrant, desexualized creature. For one thing, she is a woman without children of her own, who literally takes, and seduces, other peoples children. Here again is a magical woman, a witch, dressed in black, like a widow; appropriately,  her boyfriend is also a witch of sorts, having the luck of the chimneysweeps. Does it not seem curious to anyone that he is able to impart good fortune through physical contact—and is this not somehow frightening? (As parents wouldnt you tell your children, Just say no?) Marys relationship with Bert does not stray from what we expect, even demand, of her class—her boyfriend (neither is married, nor do they discuss it, at least onscreen) is also a working-class Victorian London stiff (which is to say that he is also poor), with the robust happiness we need to ascribe to poor people, as well as a tendency to copulate below stairs; still we never see or are even permitted to imagine the content of their romantic holidays, interrupted by a song or some bit of magic. Because of her magic, and an understanding of what children really need that surpasses the ordinary, Mary is cleverly depicted as being able to breach the class zone: here her magic characteristics are essential for an explanation of this otherwise scandalous, and (in terms of class distinctions) uncomfortable flexibility. She doesnt know her place—the moral that the childrens father ends in teaching, as he rescues his children from the unsavoriness of their relationship with this queerly unmarried woman and her odd friend. Marys ability to tread between classes, however, elevates her even from Berts league: we know that she will leave him too, and are secretly satisfied. He is, for one thing, truly from the lowest class, as his mangled Cockney accent tells us, while Marys impossibly perfect speech distinguishes her as something quite different (though this is never really acknowledged); Bert is also, if only figuratively, black, while Mary is, however trenchantly, white. [ Return to the article ] 8The modern movie Ace Ventura, Pet Detective contains a wonderful quotation of a scene from Disneys Snow White. Actor Jim Carrey stands in the center of a room and the animals fly, run, walk, creep and slither to him as he belts out a high note. [ Return to the article ] 9I have re-rendered the parenthetical phrase (only), which Ned Lukacher translates as thats the only thing he loves, because of its (increased) ambiguity in the context of a feminist reading. [ Return to the article ] 10In her book Cinderella on the Ball: Fairytales for Feminists (Dublin: Attic Press, 1991), editor Margaret Neylon offers re-readings of the classic folktales. In the Cinderella story, it is the two sisters who emerge supreme: ugliness is a cover for intelligence and political feminism. [ Return to the article ]

Peter Paul Rubens :: essays research papers

Peter Paul Rubens was the painter of the first part of the 17th Century in Catholic Europe. How he became so is an interesting story.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Rubens was educated to be a humanist but like all great artists choose his profession for himself. The combination of first-rate classical education with an innate visual genius made for an unprecedented combination in an artist.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   It has been said that no artist has ever been as well educated as Rubens. After training with three minor artists in Antwerp. Rubens set off for Italy to complete his education; a position at the court of the Duke of Mantua was quickly accepted and he stayed in Italy for eight years. His job was to travel to all the major artistic collections, especially Rome and Venice painting copies of famous works of art, especially paintings of beautiful women, for the Duke's collection. He was also sent to Spain where he had an opportunity to study the enormous collection of Titian masterworks in the Royal Collection in Madrid. Copying the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance especially and the recently unearthed sculptures of classical antiquity, Rubens sketched and painted and encompassed all that was best in Italian and Classical art. Rubens combined the lessons of Antique Sculpture with the vaunting ambition of the High Renaissance giants in an unprecedented way. He used the plastic less ons of sculpture as a composition model but insisted that flesh should look like flesh in a painting thus developing his breakthrough approach to the naked body. In this he never forgot the earthy luminous realism of the old Netherlandish tradition of the 15th and 16th century (Van Eyck, Van Weyden, Breughel). You won't appreciate Rubens the master of the female nude until you consider that he was the greatest influence on French painting from the 18th to the 20th century: Watteau, Fragonard, Delacroix, and Renoir were his among his loyal followers.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Rubens was to develop a phenomenal ability to analyze the different styles of painting and sculpture and then synthesis them into whatever his clients wanted. His clients included just about every Catholic monarch, as well as Catholic leaning Protestants like King Charles I of England, and every major religious order in Western Europe. Not to mention every wealthy connoisseur of painting. To satisfy an ever growing demand Rubens opened the largest art workshop Europe has ever seen: he would paint an small initial oil sketch which when approved and contracted for would be given over to one or more of his students to paint the full length canvas, finally Rubens would add the finishing touches and sign it.

Detrimental Effects of Teenage in the Philippines

Maderazo, Shelah Abigail S. A42 ORT: Detrimental Effects of Teenage in the Philippines Teenage pregnancy is one of the major problems in the whole world. Like in other countries, Philippines also suffer this kind of problem. According to survey, teenagers from 15-24 years old are suffering teenage pregnancy. Here in the Philippines, 16. 5 million teenagers suffer unwanted pregnancy. Because of this problem according to statistics, every year at least 64,000 teenagers have abortions because of the unwanted pregnancy that they are experiencing.Also according to Statistics, 20 to 25% of mothers are in their teenage years. There are so many factors why teenagers are suffering from early pregnancy. One of them is premarital sex. Premarital sex is an intercourse between young couples or primarily sex before marriage. Secondly, is the effect of mass media in the lives of the youth. Every day they are bombarded with premarital sex through television, movies, billboards with naked models, ind ecent magazines, etc. Thirdly, is wrong concept of â€Å"love†. For them love is the main base for relationship.This is the reason why many teenagers do this to show and prove their love to their mates. Girls are more affected with this practice because they move and act according to their emotion. Many times, girls do this out of pressure of their boyfriends to show and prove their love to them. Another factor according to studies is peer pressure. Friends are very important to teenagers. They value friendship so much. They want to fit in to their group of friends. Teenagers suffer on wrong concept of virginity. You are not in if you have no experience on sex.Virginity for them is thing of the past. Another factor is lack of sex education from parents, from the church and the school. This is the result of our thinking from the past that sex is dirty and immoral. Lastly is curiosity. Because they are curious, they get involved in it without their parents consent and sometimes lead to multiple sex experience. There are many detrimental effects of premarital sex in the lives of teenagers One of them is that teenagers will not finish their studies. Instead of attending schools, they are busy taking care of their babies.Secondly, young experience of pregnancy is dangerous for their health. Young pregnancy will lead to many illness and complications among women. Young women that aborted the baby, according to studies are very harmful to our body. Once you experience abortion, there are chances that you will have a hard time on your pregnancy. The hold of the baby in your womb will be weak this can turn to miscarriage. The worst consequence of premarital sex is you might get harmful and deadly diseases such as AIDS and HIV virus that eventually lead to early death.Thirdly, many lives and families suffer because teenagers who became pregnant at young age usually lack of experience on how to raise their own family. Later, what they did, will also do of their ch ildren. This is the main reason why there are so many broken and dysfunctional families of today. Lastly and the worst of all, teen pregnancy will lead to abortion. I say, it is the worst consequence, because abortion is killing lives. One popular case nowadays that we always see and hear in the news is about fetuses are left in churches, in the street, in the garbage and recently in airplane.Teenagers commit abortion, because, they are ashamed what other people will think of them. Many times, they are afraid to their parents. Seeing all the detrimental effects of teen pregnancy, teenagers should flee from this act. Teenagers should and must avoid premarital sex. Teenagers should think first of their future and the consequence they will face when they will indulge with it. Our government should tackle this sensitive issue with much planning and studying. They should think of ways to prevent teenage pregnancy and even abortion.I do believe sex education should be included in the scho ol curriculum to teach students about premarital sex, teenage pregnancy and its consequences. To conclude, teen pregnancy usually ruins the lives of many teenagers. Most of them become delinquent, involve to crimes, killing, become liabilities to society, and sometimes lead to early death. We know that mostly the end- result of teenage pregnancy is abortion. Abortion is immoral and illegal here in the Philippines. Since we a Christian country, committing premarital sex is committing mortal sin.

History on the Middle East Essay

Middle East Conflicts Question’s 1. The zionest is a movement founded in the 1890’s to promote the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine 2. The 1917 Balfour Declaration declared that the British favored a Jewish homeland in Palestine 3. Divide palestine into two states one for the palestinians and one for the jews. The jews supported it but the palestinians did not. 4. The Israeli Declaration of Independence was read out on Friday, the 14th of May 1948 by David Ben Gurion, who then became the first Prime Minister of the new state. 5. The Arab-Isreali conflicts broke out when five arab nations invaded Isreal. 6. In 1956 the isrealies attacked the suez canal,Israel held the Gaza Strip and had advanced as far as Sharm al-Sheikh along the Red Sea. 7. The Six-Day War took place in June 1967. Arab countries attacked isreal, and Isreal gained control of old city Jersalem, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan heights, and the West bank. 8. On October 6, 1973, hoping to win back territory lost to Israel during the third Arab-Israeli war, in 1967, Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a coordinated attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Taking the Israeli Defense Forces by surprise, Egyptian troops swept deep into the Sinai Peninsula, while Syria struggled to throw occupying Israeli troops out of the Golan Heights. Israel counterattacked and recaptured the Golan Heights. A cease-fire went into effect on October 25, 1973. 9. The Palestine Liberation Organization it was formed in 1964 the laeder ofthe group was Yasir Arafat. 10. On september 17, Egypt and Isreal signed two agreements, the leader of Egypt was Anwar Sadat and the prime minister Menachem begin. 11. Egypt recognized Isreal as a state, and Isreal returned the Sinai Pennisula to Egypt. 12. President Anwar Sadat angered arabs and was assinated in 1981. 13. The intifadas were unarmed teenagers who attacked Isrealie soldiers. 14. The people involved in the Oslo Peace Records were Isreal(yitzhak Rabin) and palestine(Arafat) 15. Isreal, under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin agreed to grant the palestinians self-rule in the gaza strip and the west bank. 16. Yitzak was assainated by a right-wing jewish extremist who opposed concessions to the palestinians.

Third Grade Christmas Word Problems

Third Grade Christmas Word Problems Word problems and  problem-solving  questions  help  students to put the computations into authentic practice. Select questions that require a higher level thinking. Its also helpful to use questions that have more than one strategy available to solve them. Let students think about the way they solve their questions and let them draw pictures or use manipulatives to support their own thinking and logic. Try these Christmas-themed word  problems for third graders to stay in the spirit of things in class: 1. Ivan is putting bulbs on the Christmas tree. He has already put 74 bulbs on the tree but he has 225. How many more bulbs does he have to put on the tree? 2. Amber has 36 candy canes to share among herself and 3 friends. How many candy canes will each of them get? 3. Ken’s new advent calendar has 1 chocolate for the 1st day, 2 chocolates on the 2nd day, 3 chocolates on the 3rd day, 4 chocolates on the 4th day and so on. How many chocolates will he have eaten by the 12th day? 4. It takes 90 days to save enough money to do some Christmas shopping. Estimate how many months that is. 5. Your string of Christmas lights has 12 bulbs on it, but 1/4 of the bulbs don’t work. How many bulbs do you have to buy to replace the ones that don’t work? 6. For your Christmas party, you have 5 mini pizzas to share with 4 friends. You’re cutting the pizzas in half, how much will each friend get? How can you make sure the leftovers get shared equally? Print the PDF:   Christmas Word Problems Worksheet

Ugenics Revisited - Genetic Engineering Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Ugenics Revisited - Genetic Engineering - Essay Example Initially Galton presented the eugenics concept but later many of the scientists worked on it just because of its importance. Like many other unique concepts, eugenics also faced criticism for many other expert scientists and public. At the top of the list, the critics claim the concept and practices of eugenics as unethical and immoral practice for the society. According to their opinion, the practices of eugenics are misused and misunderstood by different people. In addition to these opinions, many other expert scientists are of the opinion that the eugenics practices may give rise to many of the genetically diseases. These diseases are severe and thus cause problems in the entire future generation of the mating people. Due to the increase in the likelihood of these diseases caused by eugenics practices, there is a possibility that the gene variation may get disturbed. The concept of natural selection and genetic engineering is same i.e. the acquiring of the most desired set of traits and characteristics. The only difference is that natural selection is a nature’s ultimate process while the genetic engineering is an optional and artificial process, which anyone can choose on his own opinion (Bradshaw, 2006). For this reason, it is said that selective breeding is different from the natural breeding, though the basic aim or purpose is same behind both these tools or we can say practices. Genetic engineering is very vast field as it includes many of the gene mutations e.g. a human gene inserted in the goat or sheep, a monkey or frog gene inserted in the shrubs and herbs, a spider gene inserted in the goat and a tree gene inserted in the banana fruit. All of these gene mutations come under the head of genetic engineering, which is different from natural selection in this regard. In addition to this genetic engineering can benefit many other are as of life e.g. the growth of such crops, which do not need fertilizers and can bear the heat of

Critical Assessment of Sustainability Policy of EURAC Convention Research Paper

Critical Assessment of Sustainability Policy of EURAC Convention Centre - Research Paper Example Its sustainable mission is to combine the meeting offers with attractive tourist experience that meets international market standards.     The current sustainable policy of the organization requires amendments related reflecting the current changes in lifestyle and technology to guarantee continued advancement. European Academy (EURAC) Convention Centre (ECC) is located at the heart of unspoiled dolomites in one of the most eco-crucial regions of Europe. The facility was designed to curtail the negative environmental impact resulting from events held in the region. ECC is located in a strategic location i.e. city center that can be accessed through eco-friendly transport means such as bikes or through walking. The facility is designed to be a professional conference and seminary facility in local, national or international functions. The 1,250 square meters covered by the facility contains an auditorium with 320 seats, conference hall, five seminar rooms, two foyers, and a computer room. ECC boasts of the highly qualified management team that contributes to the innovativeness; enhances delivery of services. The current growth in the event and leisure industry is due to the enhanced globalization. Industry globalization has led to increased income, intensive use of communication technology and newly developed cheaper means of transport (Paschinger, 2007). Organizational growth and enhanced competitiveness in the event and leisure industry requires the application of enhanced technology and innovativeness. The organization has adopted an effective sustainable policy based on technological innovativeness and focus on environmental improvement.