The Stereotypes Of Fairy Tales

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Fairy tales are often pictured as the stories parents would be reading at bedtime to their children before going to sleep. Mostly made of extraordinary features and starting with the famous “Once Upon a Time” are the stereotypes of fairy tales. Actually, the term fairy tales comes directly from French that is literally translated from contes de fées. In 1698, Countess Aulnoy initiated the use of the term “Contes de Fées” for the title of a book, and others writers started using the same term right away even if the stories did not contain any fairies in it (Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale 24). Another milestone of the development of fairy tales was the Grimm brothers’ book, originally called Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Some of the most famous …show more content…
As Martin notices, at the beginning of the writings, the violence was quite random and abundant in the stories but the audience was shocked and confused, which made the Grimm brothers edit the stories and link most of the punishments to a specific misbehavior (131). However, it created some unequal consequences. Like Tatar mentions, if a child see the world that ferociously punished even for a slight misbehavior, it is likely that the child will not understand the value of justice and proportion. (51). In addition, many retributions are discriminatory and the girls are punished more brutally than boys in the Grimm’s stories. (Martin 131). Bottingheimer shows how a girl is expected to be quieter, more well-behaved and more compliant (116). In the story “The Huckster Chatterbox” from the Grimm brothers, Bottingheimer points out that the ultimate punishment for too much talking was to be burned at the stake. Those details raises the question of knowing if the violence in the books interfere with the behavior of children. By reading, or hearing those stories, a boy child might find normal to hurt for no apparent reason, or to see a girl as …show more content…
As Roberts mentions, about a hundred years after the fairy tales’ first publication, the National Socialists political party used the stories to demonstrate their ethical values about racial differences. Later on the Nazis actually donated a copy of the fairy tales to children, supporting the violence found in the stories such as “The Jew in the Thorn Bush”. Every school used the Grimm brothers’ tales in their educational program and every family were required to possess at least one copy at home (32). The nationalism feeling that the Grimm were looking for to unite a German-speaking nation in the nineteenth century, got used against them, against their will, to unite and explains Germans the violence and hatred against others. After war, the Grimm fairy tales got associated to the Nazi literature and sometimes even got found partly responsible for the atrocity caused during the war and the utmost racial discrimination (32). Yet some crucial dates are crucial to take into consideration, before blaming the brothers for those horrific actions. Out of the two brothers, Wilhelm was the first to passed away in 1859 and Jacob followed him in 1863. Therefore the brothers did not write their book, for the purpose of the anti semitism that the Nazi spread out in the WWII. However

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