Fairy tales tend to illustrate how a parent 's actions can affect their children’s life a great deal, either good or bad. This is shown in the stories “Beauty and the Beast”, “Hansel and Grethel”, “The Twelve Brothers”, “Little Red Cap”, “Rapunzel”, “Rumpelstiltskin”, “Cinderella”, “Snow White”, “Li Chi Slays The Serpent”, and “The Maiden Without Hands.” These fairy tales show that good treatment from the parent results in the child being superb and doing good deeds. However, parents abandoning, neglecting, or giving up the children results in the child making bad decisions and suffering from hardships throughout their life. The way the parents treat the children in these stories determine the life the child will live, the quality of the decisions
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In “Rapunzel,” Rapunzel is given away at a young age, because her parents are greedy and want to have all the radishes they want for themselves, which causes Rapunzel to be locked in a tower with no doors or stairs for years (Grimm 66). After being locked up in the tower for years, when the king asks for her hand in marriage she says, “Any one may have me, rather than this old woman” (Grimm 68). Had her parents never given her up, Rapunzel could live a happy life and marry a man who she actually loved, but since she was given up, she spent a long portion of her life trapped in a tower and ends up making the wrong decision of marrying a man, not out of love, but just to get her out of the tower and away from the witch her parents had left her with. In “Rumpelstiltskin,” the miller lies to the King telling him that his beautiful daughter is able to spin straw into gold, in order to seem like he is not just some poor miller. The King finds this very impressive, so the miller gives his daughter up to go do a deed that she actually cannot do. This could have caused his daughter 's death, and does cause her to be miserable and to give up all she has to Rumplestiltskin, who spins the straw for her. The miller put his daughter in a very tough position only because he was being selfish and wants the King to view him as a more significant person (Grimm 192-194). In the story “Cinderella,” Cinderella’s father does not bother to stop how terribly she was treated; “She was obliged to work hard from morning to night, and to go out early to fetch water, make the fire, and cook and scour. The sisters treated her with every possible insult, derided her, and shook the peas and beans into the ashes, so that she had to pick them out again. At night, when she was tired, she had no bed to lie on, but was
In “Rapunzel,” Rapunzel is given away at a young age, because her parents are greedy and want to have all the radishes they want for themselves, which causes Rapunzel to be locked in a tower with no doors or stairs for years (Grimm 66). After being locked up in the tower for years, when the king asks for her hand in marriage she says, “Any one may have me, rather than this old woman” (Grimm 68). Had her parents never given her up, Rapunzel could live a happy life and marry a man who she actually loved, but since she was given up, she spent a long portion of her life trapped in a tower and ends up making the wrong decision of marrying a man, not out of love, but just to get her out of the tower and away from the witch her parents had left her with. In “Rumpelstiltskin,” the miller lies to the King telling him that his beautiful daughter is able to spin straw into gold, in order to seem like he is not just some poor miller. The King finds this very impressive, so the miller gives his daughter up to go do a deed that she actually cannot do. This could have caused his daughter 's death, and does cause her to be miserable and to give up all she has to Rumplestiltskin, who spins the straw for her. The miller put his daughter in a very tough position only because he was being selfish and wants the King to view him as a more significant person (Grimm 192-194). In the story “Cinderella,” Cinderella’s father does not bother to stop how terribly she was treated; “She was obliged to work hard from morning to night, and to go out early to fetch water, make the fire, and cook and scour. The sisters treated her with every possible insult, derided her, and shook the peas and beans into the ashes, so that she had to pick them out again. At night, when she was tired, she had no bed to lie on, but was