“Fairy tales speak to children in the language of symbols and not that of everyday reality. The fairy tale conveys intangible facts, persons, and places… a deliberate vagueness that does not pertain to the here and now” (78). So, Bruno Bettelheim presents his analysis of the way that authors of fairy tales permeate reality and work with these stories to delight, to entertain, and also to instruct. In addition to entertaining young and impressionable minds, the fairy tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm touch upon various aspects of institutionalized society such as courtship, romantic love, marriage, childbirth, familial affairs, and the successes and failures of various types of characters. Because of the immense social scope of their content, these tales create a framework that becomes a sort of acculturation process; the Grimm tales become doctrines of social and behavioural structures that are embedded as a collection of established perspectives in the malleable minds of their intended readers.
It is precisely this codification of social conduct and practice that Anne Sexton works against in her collection of revisionist poems, Transformations. Sexton aligns each poem in this collection with a Grimm tale, and transforms it into a modern reworking of such aforementioned social ideologies. Sexton has been credited with “transform[ing] 17 tales from the Brothers Grimm into highly personal modern anecdotes, stressing the horror and wonder of that ancient world, but bringing home a universal application” and has been recognized for taking these tales “out of the dark Germanic woods and reinstating [them] in the well-lit but equally dark places at the heart of American consumer culture” (Root 49). In her reworking of each fairy tale, Sexton parallels her verse with the traditional Grimm story, symbolically highlights the faults she finds therein, and modifies the original tale while maintaining its general context in a way that is quite revolutionary; through her use of rhetoric devices such as simile, stark irony, hyperbole, allusion, and a complete denunciation of the idea of “happily ever after”, Sexton modernizes each tale in her poem, thus, not only reinventing the genre but also attempting to overcome the ideological constraints that fairy tales indirectly impose on their readers. I will argue that the characters in her poems are a symbolic manifestation of the consequences of these ideological constraints and that the poems themselves fail to overcome these constraints. While she writes with a stark self-awareness and a denigrating attitude towards traditional fairy-tale content, her implicitly drawn conclusions offer no escape and no means of self-redemption through transformational change or through breaking away from long-established fairy-tale ideologies. Her Transformations thereby suggests that perhaps once these ideas are embedded in the mind, no real growth or maturation can occur. I will suggest that Sexton places her poems on the threshold between the Grimms’ traditional fairy-tale ideologies and contemporary views of family, marriage, and other institutionalized units and practices. I will also prove that Sexton's poems suggest happy endings in fairy tales to be artificial and ignorant of the realm of practical and actual experience. Because these poems stem, in structure as well as content, from fairy-tale material, despite her attempts to break them away from old-fashioned dogma and conventional beliefs, her characters are trapped in their eternal misery and do not find happiness or self-fulfillment. Her writing therefore becomes a provocative tool in terms of breaking down these ideologies, although the characters in her poems do not succeed in that respect. The greater aim of these poems is to reclaim the right of an author, and of any one person, to create their own ideals and visions that correspond to personal experiences. Not only does Sexton transform these fairy tales into contemporary re-workings that break down their innocent and fantastic elements, but, through the structure and assertive voice of her retelling, she also implies that it is necessary to overcome codified and formularized fairy-tale boundaries, and to use our own experiences to form the views with which we analyze, shape, and experience the world.

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quote:

Originally posted by Slylee oh well, different strokes different vaginas

Some dance to remember ~ Some dance to forget

first two pages of my honours thesis

lol i was such a pretentious little slut

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quote:

Originally posted by Slylee oh well, different strokes different vaginas

Some dance to remember ~ Some dance to forget

Well, now you ain't little anymore.

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Then stop coloring and visit Meat187's mix archive!

you're right

my e-penis is massive

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quote:

Originally posted by Slylee oh well, different strokes different vaginas

Some dance to remember ~ Some dance to forget

I have always felt as though the bridge between fiction and religion was a tenuous one, at best. Fantastic stories, no matter the genre, serve the express purpose of eliciting images, symbols, and patterns - of a more convoluted sort than a road-side sign, of course - which in turn transmit at least some iota of cultural significance. When these bits of culture are verifiable by an authority or at least some consensus, this transmission process is called 'history'. But when the facts are not agreed upon as verifiable, or are expressly given as fiction, we have made art; we have created something that relies either on belief or the suspension of disbelief in order to have value.

Fiction, I feel, has largely lost its faith - it's belief. An entire sub-culture has erupted that calls into being all sort of mythical creatures and existences that can be accepted just as readily as the news - indeed, we seem far more willing to deny what we see on media networks than what we read in the last Harry Potter book (or whatever). Religion, however, still clings to faith and the inference of belief - it's as though its rituals are the new fantasy.

In the case of Anne Sexton however, I would posit that she is not exactly going against the grain merely to bring about some sort of rebirth. In fact, it is the very transition in the acceptance of transmission that would even give meaning to such a renaissance in the first place - after all, in order to renew something, we must have some sort of basis for comparison. In the end, no artist seizes their medium truly - they can only derive from the very transmission they seek to change, and this is what seperates art from media.

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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

quote:

Originally posted by Ania_xox you're right my e-penis is massive

e- call me.

quote:

Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On That's because it's totally true you fucking retard.

how am i a fucking retard if i was stating a fact? you fucking retard

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My soliloquy may be hard for some to swallow, but so is cod liver oil.

quote:

Originally posted by notelfreak man i can't believe i tried to come off as responsible in that other thread, i am so full of shit just don't tell anyone

i wonder what it feels like to eat a vagina

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quote:

Originally posted by Slylee oh well, different strokes different vaginas

Some dance to remember ~ Some dance to forget

quote:

Originally posted by Ania_xox i wonder what it feels like to eat a vagina

not as good as getting your vagina eaten, that's for sure.



PS-Call me

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My soliloquy may be hard for some to swallow, but so is cod liver oil.

quote:

Originally posted by notelfreak man i can't believe i tried to come off as responsible in that other thread, i am so full of shit just don't tell anyone

Vagina is such a clinical term. Cunt. Cunt is better imo.

vaginas are kinda ugly to be honest. i mean i was flipping through a playboy and they're all like meh...the only super hot vaginas you see are on porn stars and 9 out of 10 times they've had surgery on their vag to make it look like a 15 year old's again. lol i read a big article about that and how it's the new trend.

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My soliloquy may be hard for some to swallow, but so is cod liver oil.

quote:

Originally posted by notelfreak man i can't believe i tried to come off as responsible in that other thread, i am so full of shit just don't tell anyone