The Friar's Tale

Cinderella Fairy tales are not what most of the world thinks they are. Quite a few of them are horrifying and gruesome but all of the stories have a specific meaning to them just like any other. In more ways than one, “The fairy tale demonstrates what it meant to be beautiful and heroic and how to achieve “royal” status with the help of grace and good fortune”(Zipes 4). Many of these stories have stood up against the test of time due to ethnic groups using storytelling to recover history and…

The way power is utilized, can change of life discomforting one state of life. In society, many struggle to remember their past and to keep their language alive in order to resist the desire and pressure to forget. Similarly, Offred in, The Handmaids Tale struggles to forget her past no matter how much she efforts to. The fact that Offred is unable to forget her past is further clarified through Offred’s flashbacks, her state of mind causing her to imagine components and revising times of her…

is a fairy tale! Claire Battershill’s “Two-Man Luge” displays strong evidence towards the famously known fairy tale, Cinderella. Two-Man Luge possesses a similar structure and several factors that give readers’ thoughts just as fairy tales would, like the famous “happily ever after”. Throughout the centuries Fairy Tales have provided a specific design for authors to follow and for audiences to react. “Two-Man Luge” is an unintentional Fairy Tale that does just that. What’s a fairy tale without…

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales in 1392. The tales are a collection of stories from many different members of Chaucer’s society who went on a pilgrimage and traveled to the Canterbury Cathedral in England. Some people believe that the stories and characters in Chaucer’s tales are mirror images of people in present-day society. In fact, the Canterbury Tales are very relevant to current society. The morals and characters represented in the tales reflect normal everyday people and…

The Garden, The Machine, and the American Voice Perhaps one of the more discernable conflicts in art and literature is that which takes place between appreciating nature and expanding society. Many writers and philosophers, from Aristotle to Shakespeare, have naturally gravitated towards this fundamental dilemma, and shared their sentiments through art, poems, and literary works. Such tendencies did not escape the realm of American literature in the mid-nineteenth century. Up until then, before…

Oates crafts a powerful commentary on the psychologically tenuous sliver of time between youth and the harsh reality of adulthood when the dangers of the real world are met with the storybook mindset of a child. The emphasis of our childhood fairy tales is on the predestined conquering of conflict, on the princess meets prince charming, on true love and perfection. Evil is overcome and love prevails. Because these are often the stories we are exposed to from a very early age, they are also the…

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s collections of stories, The Canterbury Tales, a group of pilgrims traveling to the shrine of St. Thomas Beckett tell each other stories containing different moral connotations. One such fable, The Pardoner’s Tale, is narrated by a licensed pardoner, who explains the evils of one of his main faults: greed; a vice that has indeed made him wealthy, but has done so at the expense of others. The story, although directed towards greed, is also important as a warning against any…

Rotten Tomatoes, a respected website devoted to film reviews, gave Shrek a high rating of 88% while Mean Girls received a slightly lower rating of 83%, respectively. IMDb, another website that consists of information related to films, also gave Shrek a higher rating than Mean Girls, with Shrek garnering a rating of 7.9 compared to a Mean Girls rating of 7.0. Although the margin between the two movies is small, it gives Shrek the upper hand as the better satirical movie. Statistics aside, is…

Beast is enchanted with some sort of magic that aids the objects to move. But, before this occurs, what causes her to lead this fate is a rose. A rose could be seen as a motif in this film, yet it is not one of the motifs seen in the other fairy tales in the course. An additional motif in the film is the magic powers in the castle of the Beast and the magic powers the Beast has. Even though the Beast was not an original magic being himself, magic was a great part of the story in the film.…

folktale is “a tale or legend originating and traditional among a people or folk, especially one forming part of the oral tradition of the common people” (Dictionary.com). The tale can and often begins with “Once upon a time” or “Long, long ago” and has a lesson or meaning behind each one. Each country often has its own set of folk tales, others share the same basic idea but change in some ways to fit their country and ways of life. The story of Rapunzel is one of these such folk tales. The…