Introduction
This dissertation examines three fairy tales by Carmen Martín Gaite with the objective to show how the author has contributed to reform the fairy tale genre from the point of view of a child. Since most fairy tales have been written and interpreted from an adult’s superior standpoint, the child’s psychological and emotional evolution has never been fully analyzed. Martín Gaite, through this genre, focuses in depth on a child’s learning processes when growing up, and how it is impacted by external factors such as parents and societal conventions.
In Chapter 1 I give a brief autobiographical background into the author’s childhood and her main concerns and difficulties as a child. These contextual predicaments are transformed and manipulated into themes which are developed …show more content…
Translated versions of these tales arrived in France between 1560 and 1580, and in Germany in 1791 (Zipes, 2006: 59). In France, rich and educated women recited them in aristocratic salons and towards the end of the 1600s, Madame d’Aulnoy, who was a rich French baroness, began to write numerous fairy tale collections, inspired by salon tales but imbued with a ‘proto-feminist-spirit’. Perhaps more known today, Charles Perrault (1628-1703) is often perceived to be the father of fairy tales, yet when the genre arrived in France, he ‘refined and polished it according to his own taste and the conventions of French high society in King Louis XIV’s time’ (Zipes, 2006: 33). In the beginning of the 1800s, these tales impacted German writers. Ludwig Tieck’s ‘The Life and Death of Little Red Riding Hood: A Tragedy’ (1800) resonates Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. The familiar Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a collection of children’s tales first published in 1812, aimed at reforming children into desirable adults based on collected stories from aristocrats, intelligent young girls and their
This dissertation examines three fairy tales by Carmen Martín Gaite with the objective to show how the author has contributed to reform the fairy tale genre from the point of view of a child. Since most fairy tales have been written and interpreted from an adult’s superior standpoint, the child’s psychological and emotional evolution has never been fully analyzed. Martín Gaite, through this genre, focuses in depth on a child’s learning processes when growing up, and how it is impacted by external factors such as parents and societal conventions.
In Chapter 1 I give a brief autobiographical background into the author’s childhood and her main concerns and difficulties as a child. These contextual predicaments are transformed and manipulated into themes which are developed …show more content…
Translated versions of these tales arrived in France between 1560 and 1580, and in Germany in 1791 (Zipes, 2006: 59). In France, rich and educated women recited them in aristocratic salons and towards the end of the 1600s, Madame d’Aulnoy, who was a rich French baroness, began to write numerous fairy tale collections, inspired by salon tales but imbued with a ‘proto-feminist-spirit’. Perhaps more known today, Charles Perrault (1628-1703) is often perceived to be the father of fairy tales, yet when the genre arrived in France, he ‘refined and polished it according to his own taste and the conventions of French high society in King Louis XIV’s time’ (Zipes, 2006: 33). In the beginning of the 1800s, these tales impacted German writers. Ludwig Tieck’s ‘The Life and Death of Little Red Riding Hood: A Tragedy’ (1800) resonates Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. The familiar Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a collection of children’s tales first published in 1812, aimed at reforming children into desirable adults based on collected stories from aristocrats, intelligent young girls and their