"There's someone at the door!" "Is it the pizza boy?" "No, Granny. It's a big, strong woodcutter..."

[odditycollector]

 
So I have a friend who's writing an English essay on how to turn Fairy Tales into porn.

 
Well okay, no. Not quite exactly that, but I'm still disturbed. I mean, does the world really need an essay titled 'Underlying Sexuality in Common Children's Tales'?

[Poll #263904]

He goes on for a while about what Little Red Riding Hood must have really been talking about, when she reported that her Granny had been replaced by a Wolf who wanted to get her into bed and, quote, "eat her up." Uh-huh. And Cinderella? Apparently the only way that story might have been more obvious was if it had been the Prince who had lost his slipper, and Cinderella had gone around to every man in the kingdom checking his, er, fit.

("So, what did you think," said he, grinning madly.
"At least you didn't mention Freud," said I.
"Oh," he said. "Well, I haven't got to Goldilocks yet."
"And the bed was too hard," snickered I.
"Hmm," said he. "Veeery Eenteresting...")

 
My God people! Corrupting childhood memories as a proper University assignment? Have we no shame!

You can think of an answer, and I'll just be over here reading Carebear slash...

Comments

[davek.livejournal.com]

I once re-wrote some nursery rhymes so that they were hip and relevant. I don't remember which ones I did, but I remember there being lots of drive-by shootings, and a pimp or two.

I figured it was what the kids would have wanted.

[odditycollector.livejournal.com]

I figured it was what the kids would have wanted.
*snerk* Oh, indubitably.

Did you make them actually, you know, rhyme?
Little miss Muffet, sat on a tuffet,
snorting some crack cocaine,
when along came a spider, crawling inside her,
and she scratched all her skin away!

When you find them again, you should post them.

[cereta.livejournal.com]

See, this sounds like my kind of class ;).

I routinely spend about half a class period shocking my students with details from the older versions of fairy tales.

[odditycollector.livejournal.com]

I love the old tales. I come across them occasionally in other books, and they always lend an edge of creepy.

Must be a fun thing to do in class. Do your students get very shocked?

[cereta.livejournal.com]

Oh, they do. They just kind of boggle at me ;).

Although one of them had an interesting observation once: the underlying message of many fairy tales is "don't trust your family."

[odditycollector.livejournal.com]

the underlying message of many fairy tales is "don't trust your family."
You know, I like that one better than the feminist reading my English class glanced over, and which is the only LitCrit I've done for fairy tales. (Personally, I was never able to really see "Women with power are teh Evil" as the sole point of the stories, although I was amused at the theory that all the cutting off of pinkie fingers was a weird castration fanstasy...)

[mark356.livejournal.com]

!!!

What's his LJ name??

I would love to read a paper like that.

[odditycollector.livejournal.com]

What's his LJ name??
He, ah, doesn't have one. Or if he does, I've never heard of it. Strange, I know.

I would love to read a paper like that.
Yeah, it was pretty funny. He's doing a sort of Literary Crit. class, and I guess they're being taught to read wacky things into any given material. His second option was something about aliens.