Traditional and yet non traditional fairy tale

I found myself fascinated with The Bloody Chamber. I enjoy that whole genre of rewrites of fairy tales. The original fairy tales as written by the Grimm Brothers are not really pleasant stories that we because of Disney tend to think of when the term fairy tale comes to mind. Angela Carter’s version of the Bloody Chamber in many ways bridged the gap between the two styles to me. There was still a lot of negative non fairy tale elements. The reason that she wanted to marry Bluebeard was never because she loved him. She completely avoided that question when her mom asked her before she was married. There was the discovery of the horrible chamber with all the dead corpses of his past brides. Yet there was the piano turner that was basically her prince. He loved her, but was unable to do anything to protect her. He was completely helpless to do anything but to sit back and let her die. Yet a very traditional fairy tale element is evident – the happy ending. She gets to live comfortably with the man that she loves ---happily ever after. I really like that the one to save her is her mother. There was no male that had to come in to save the day, it was another woman. She was still very much helpless which is the thing that is most annoying about fairy tale princesses, the fact that they are unable to anything for themselves; they sit around and wait for their prince to rescue them. I really enjoyed this story.

Novel Love

Rushdi sees the novel as pretty much the best thing out there. His line saying that it feels the god shaped holes makes it seem like he has replaced religion with novels. I love a good novel so I get where he is coming from to some extent. There is something wonderful about a well written novel. The ability to enter another world through someone else’s eyes can teach lessons in ways that are impossible to learn through your own eyes.

The point that he makes that we discussed in class about because the interpretation and understanding of the novel happen within the mind is a little bit of a slippery concept for me. I understand it and agree at the same time I feel like I need to disagree with him a little bit. It is true that the formation of the novel is within the writers head and that affords all kinds of freedom that isn’t possible in many other ways, and you will have different people read the exact same novel and have different interpretations and understandings because it was processed in their own brain. Even the same person reading the same novel at different times can get something new and great out of it the second time around. However it is not an impermeable paradise that Rushdie seems to think it is. What we think is influenced by the world around us and the people we are in contact with. Still it’s a cool thing to think about that we get to interact with the novel solely on our own terms.