My latest *Plato's Nightmare / Aesop's Dream" post is now up:

[capri0mni]

http://platosnightmare-aesopsdream.blogspot.com/2012/03/goose-girl-at-well-feelings-of-distrust.html

I meant for this to be a February post, but instead, February passed without a single blog entry. This is my failing.

I also wanted to write up my own retelling, because I love the story enough to want to get inside it like that. But every time I sat down to translate Google auto-'bot translation into Actual English, my energy and attention would flag every three sentences, or so. So I ended up just reposting translation from a Good Victorian Lady, instead.

If I had done that to start with, it would have been a February post.

BTW, I chose my Mother Goose icon for this entry, because it's my personal belief that the "Witch" ("Wise Woman" -- Potato, Potahto) is a prototype character for M. Goose.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Also exceptionally well drawn. * clicks off to Plato to get edumacted *

[capri0mni]

ha. Well, this is one illustration I did not draw myself. I cropped the main image from a public domain, nineteenth century book illustration, and then added the text and fiddled with the sizing to make it a square...

[smw]

Leaving a comment here, because Blogspot fights with me:

While I have often encountered these individual motifs, their combination here makes for a solid folktale — which, as ever, leaves me feeling more bummed than entertained. Just once I’d like to see the young man judged for his unwillingness rather than his abilities, and— Well. Your notes at the end sum up what’s wrong with it all.

Related thought: the obverse of “I am suspicious because you could do this yesterday” would be “I’m suspicious because you COULDN’T do this yesterday”. I cannot number the times when, on a good day, I expressed the fact that I could go about some physical task, and met with opposition from my loved ones. Now, when it’s something like “I can make that walk to where you want to go”, and thus it’s convenient to listen to me...

[capri0mni]

*nod-nod*

Somewhere, in the back of my mind I have this idea that, after this blog has been around for a while, to collect a portion of the stories and polish them up into an anthology of sorts, with extended commentary (verging more into memoir and even more "politics" than I do here), and self-publish it as an e-text, maybe...

And in the Introduction to said collection, I would say something like this:

We often romanticize the "Wisdom of the Common Folk." But when it comes the subject of Disability,* our grandparents and great-grandparents were often as foolish and bigoted as we are, today.

I present these tales not because they show us a Truth we should follow, but because they reveal that our current policies toward people in our own society are based, not upon reason, but fears handed down to us through fairy tales.

(That would need to run through about six or seven drafts to be what I want, but that's the idea).

And yes, I totally agree with you about the Count. If he rejected the princess when she was inside her "ugly skin," how is he going to feel about her when she's really an old woman?

And this is why I cringe, inwardly, when I hear the phrase "fairy tale romance." Anyone who's actually read or heard authentic fairy tales would not see this as a happy thing (unless they really do want their in-laws and/or stepparents to die horrible, painful deaths at their wedding).

*and Race and Religious difference, and...

[smw]

I can't help but think that this is something I'd want to see on the open market -- sitting next to the Brave Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters type anthologies that already exist.

[capri0mni]

Thanks! In my current thinking-about-it mode I'm wondering what the proverbial parentheses should be for this anthology. Giving it exactly the same scope as the current blog (A few lines from Shakespeare, a paragraph or two of Jane Austen, Aesop fables, Grimms', etc) seems a little amorphous.

So I'm thinking of limiting it to a collection of those "Children's and Household Tales" from Jacob and Wilhelm... or maybe "European Fairy Tales," so I can include some tales from Britain and Scandinavia.

There are some really good tales about blindness and lameness from various cultures on the African continent. But my Euro-Centric education has left me unprepared to speak confidently of their themes and motifs.