Rhonda Does Research: Cinderella

Showing posts with label Cinderella. Show all posts

Sunday, February 22, 2015

"CinderBella": Sara Buttsworth's Take on Twilight

The Vampire Deutsch: Der Vampir
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Rather than a stand-alone essay, this is excerpted from a book, and it covers first the male vampires of the "saga" in relation to the myth of the American Dream before turning to the females, mostly just Bella. According to Buttsworth, Cinderella is the version of the American Dream that applies to women. A lot of what she says rings true, but I decided to go to an expert for another opinion.

My expert is my sister Rebbie, who is kind of a vampire scholar/hobbyist (last year, she spent what I thought was an outrageous amount of money on the complete DVD set of Dark Shadows. It came in a coffin. Need I say more?). She once told me that "Bella is me-- when I was twelve years old!" Now (ten years later) she says that she agrees that Stephanie Meyer is working the Cinderella story in the Twilight books, but she says that's a problem, because what Bella wants are all childish things: "She wants to stay young and beautiful (which I don't think she is. Definitely not in the movies), marry a rich guy, and get her own way. She is unbelievably selfish, and doesn't have any interest in anything but herself." (my response: "Don't hold back. Tell me what you really think.)

Rebbie did grow out of her vampire fantasies by the time she was about sixteen, when, she says, "I began to realize that there were a lot of important things I should be worrying about, and the last thing I wanted to do was depend on someone else to give my life meaning." I should point out that she doesn't usually talk like this. I think she was trying to be the big sister when she said it. My take on her Goth years is that the black eyeliner kept irritating her eyes, which sort of took the romance out of it all.

Monday, December 10, 2012

The Final Exam is TOMORROW (cue the ominous music)

Like I said last time, I already had two finals last week. They weren't too bad, and only one (political science) had any essay questions. I answered the one about systems and chose fascism to discuss, because I really remembered the class we spent on it. The interesting thing about the English exam is that it's on two different days; we're doing the essay question tomorrow, and our study guide actually gave us the entire question that will be on the test.

The last unit of the course was on writing exam essays, so giving us the question made sense, but I'm thinking now that it was kind of diabolical, too. All weekend long I was obsessing about it. According to the prof, the verb in the question is the key to answering it, and the verb in our question is "analyze," which, as it turns out, is the most difficult one. Actually, what we're going to do is sort of a mini version of a critical analysis. She gave us a three-page handout by Bruno Bettelheim about what fairy tales do in terms of childhood development and showed us a couple of fairy tales on video. We also read the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, which was a real surprise -- no fairy godmother, three balls, and her father is STILL ALIVE through the whole thing. That was the thing that convinced me that Bettelheim was right when he said that it's a story about sibling rivalry. The father goes along with whatever the stepmother and stepsisters choose to do to Cinderella.

The problem I'm having here, though, isn't with Cinderella, since that's not the story being used for the exam. I never even heard of the story on the test. It's The Three Ravens, and it's about a princess who swears not to speak for three years, three months, and three days in order to break the spell her evil stepmother put on her brothers (she turned them into ravens). A lot of things happen during the three years that test her ability to keep to her vow, but she doesn't give up and eventually breaks the spell (just as she's about to be burned at the stake for being a witch!). I can't make up my mind about what to do with this story, but I'll have to decide before noon tomorrow.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

So far, so good

Image via Wikipedia

I made it through the essay part of the exam (the objective part is tomorrow), and I think that I did okay, but today I want to talk about fairy tales. I can't believe I never heard of The Storyteller before. I rented it, but now it's on my wish list. I watched it with my brother, the Rossmonster. Ross is seven (yeah, and I'm 18. I know! What were they thinking?), and he liked Hans My Hedgehog best. I actually got 10 extra credit points thanks to Ross (I knew he had to be good for something). I read him the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella and wrote a page about how he reacted. It was pretty funny. He said that he liked it much better than the Disney movie, and he wanted to know why the movie didn't have the stepsisters getting their eyes pecked out. Yeah, that would have worked.
Anyway, I'm taking a psych class in childhood development over the summer, and I think I might use fairy tales for my research paper. We'll see. For now, back to studying.