Thursday, November 5, 2009

No More Happily Ever After

All of my blogs this week will be about our "Fables Legends in Exile" book because I thought the class discussion about it would be great and it was. It's so interesting to hear the views and varying ideas of people in our class. One thing that amazed me was the ease with which many of the students accepted the "Fables" story line as being normal, realistic, too much like everyday life. One student even said it was "boring" because it was too similar to real life. The "Fables" illustrated novel is a murder mystery that includes blood and gore, adultery, jealousy, divorce, objectification of women, greed, foul language, and violence. Now, I definitely don't live in a fairy tale and have had my share of all those things listed above, but the students in class are young and it's sad that they think this is part of everyday life. The media may be a big cause of people thinking crime and hate is normal, because the news mainly shows horrible things that happen to people. I've often heard that this is done for the shock value. They can get better ratings if they show shocking stories. Some of the things in our "Fables" book do happen everyday, but hopefully not all and not all to one person.
I think we all agreed that "No more happily ever after" makes sense in the real world, because the phrase "they lived happily ever after" suggests that they were happy every day and never had any problems. Here is another important point about fairy tales: they don't teach us how to cope in the real world. What if we don't live happily ever after? What if we catch "Prince Charming" lying to us? What if we women get tired of singing and cleaning and decide to take a month off? Fairy tales are fantasy because they do make life seem simple and fair. If you are good, you will get a handsome prince and always be happy. However, life is not usually that simple or that fair. I did love hearing the people in class say something to the effect of, "I've been with my boyfriend for three years and we're still having fun...", and other such praises of being together two or three whole years. Three years is a long way from "ever after." I've been with my "boyfriend" for over twenty years and we have fun sometimes, but staying together for a long time takes a lot of work and a lot of patience! I was going to say something about long relationships in class but I didn't want to bum anybody out...let them have a romantic fairy-tale-like view for awhile.
Finishing up with another look at the "Fables" novel, I think it does present a more realistic look at our world than the original fairy tales. We don't have these strange magical characters in our world of course, but we do have many of the problems that they portray. Sadly, the illustrated novel does not give us any guidance or coping skills either, but I guess they were meant for entertainment to a particular audience. Next time I'll talk about who that audience might be and my feminist's view of the content.

No comments:

Post a Comment