Apr 29
Lest the last post be too disparaging about fairy tale ladies in iffy marriage situations, let me bring a seriously rad lady to your attention: SHAHRAZAD, heroine of The Arabian Nights So here’s the deal with The Arabian Nights: it’s one large frame story with several smaller frame stories grouped inside of it. Tales within tales within …
Apr 16
So, Disney Princess movies. I know you have a range of feelings and thoughts conjured by the term. In our culture, whether it’s nostalgia, irritation, boredom, hatred, glee, adoration, or nausea, Disney Princess movies probably mean something to you. And I’ve got to take down everyone’s favorite darling today, my friends. The one that people …
Mar 18
Let me tell you about them. Because, thing is, they are where all the bad-ass women of fairy tales have been hiding all this time. First, the basics: Compiled by Francis James Child in the mid to late 1800s, the full title is actually The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, and it is a collection of …
Mar 10
So I’ve been wrestling with the tale of Bluebeard recently. In case you’re not up on your psychosexual fairy tales, Bluebeard goes something like this: Once upon a time, the youngest daughter in a family gets married off to a vaguely creepy dude because he has a lot of money. He also has a blue …
Jan 26
After exhaustive research, I have come to the following conclusion: swans are creep-ass. I think swans are physically weird. This is a totally personal bias based on me being terrified of geese as a small child. My preschool had a farm right next to it, and geese (and once, a cow) would sometimes escape into …
Jun 21
When I went to undergrad at Colorado College, I was a writing tutor. I remember one day a girl came in with a literary theory paper about The Cat in the Hat. Her assignment was to pick a critical point of view and analyze The Cat in the Hat from said point of view. She’d …