A common theme for this week's stories includes the notion that to become a man, a boy must be fearless. This is not all that uncommon in modern stories either; characters are often proving themselves to win the girl, fame, riches, etc. However, the character from our studied fairy tales often develop this fearlessness through naivety or outright stupidity. It isn't so much that they learn to be brave, but rather that they are just placed in trying or scary situations and driven by their own ignorance to the situation. The characters that are undergoing this "masculine transformation" in each of theses stories have a varying amount of success both in what they learn and what they are rewarded with, yet none of these stories seems to have a clear-cut moral for young boys seeking to become men. The point is simply that if you act on instinct rather than analyzing the situation, you will be successful (for the most part).
I found this vaguely similar to the feminine education that we've read about in previous stories this semester. Many of the protagonists survived or came out on top simply because they were a) beautiful and b) righteous and pure. Hardly any of these stories directly addressed how to outsmart a witch or charm a prince that wasn't interested in you using your own given talents; instead, some amount of magic and dumb luck was necessary in addition to the natural beauty and purity of the young girl. Like the early versions of LRRH in which the girl outsmarts the wolf in order to save her life, the stories of male growth that involve some failure or actual cleverness tended to give way to stories about successful protagonists with no real talents other than the uncanny knack of survival.
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I think that the stories portraying a hapless and somewhat clumsy/stupid young boy protagonist are partly for the fact that they apply to a greater percentage of the population. A much smaller proportion of young boys are smart and talented so by dumbing down their main character the increase the audience to which their lessons (as is often the goal of fairy tales) can apply.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think it is interesting that women are often told to act more like men in modern society to achieve equal stature and prestige. But, if you look at the male vs. female protagonists in the stories we read, often it would be better for the men to act more like woman who are often depicted as clever and cunning.
It seems strange, especially in olden times, that women were essentially being taught to use their brains and men were essentially being taught to operate on instinct and bumble around.
You make a good point that the fairy tales do not really give good concrete advice for men or women on how to win the guy/girl/kingdom. They all sort of blindly manage to escape death and stupidly survive. Perhaps it is some sort of early indication of natural selection - they are not stupid but innately genius, and the ones who have this insight are our kings and queens - but the telling of the stories does not betray any wisdom in these characters.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the people wanted to believe their kings and queens wound up in those positions simply by dumb luck?