Tucker describes Bruno Bettelheim's take on Grimm's tales: "the horrors of wicked witches and candy houses allow children to process their darkest fears and greatest desires. Here, Freud's theories take center stage: Cinderella's shoe transforms into a symbol of female sexuality that, when lost, spells the end of virginity." Author Maria Tatar, meanwhile, has a feminist perspective on the fairy tale from the 16th century to the present. Tucker says,

She argues that the fairy-tale fear factor is less about cautioning children and more about the need to control the young adults that they become. Women in particular are meant to take notice. Gluttony, infidelity and arrogance are, she charges, all part of a "pantheon of female sins" that must be reined in at all costs. Fairy tales, according to Tatar, teach girls to accept their miserable fate so that they will become docile wives and mothers.

Jack Zipes, meanwhile, makes the hard-to-dispute claim "that fairy tales are above all products of specific cultural moments and have always been used to reinforce social norms as well as to subvert them." As these dueling analyses make clear, fairy tales have become something of an interpretive football in the past few decades, and remain so today — especially around Halloween. I've always been amused by the Freudian angle. The little mermaid's loss of her voice, for instance, is supposed to be a metaphor for castration, and when I lost my voice earlier this week, that felt pretty accurate (I also lost my keys, so I was doubly impotent). Of course, that very same tale is in a way a caution against female overreaching, since in the Hans Christian Andersen version she has to turn into a "spirit" while somebody else marries the prince. But neither Bettelheim's nor Tatar's interpretive lens quite jibes with my experience of fairy tales.

As a kid, I was obsessed with both Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre and Andrew Lang's Fairy Books. The former, for the unfamiliar, was a series of slightly wacked-out takes on popular Grimm and non-Grimm stories. One favorite of mine was "The Princess Who Never Laughed," which included a minor character named "Phlegmatic Jack." Another was the incredibly creepy "Rapunzel," starring Duvall herself, and, I'm pretty sure, a horrifying screaming radish. The Fairy Books, meanwhile, contained all the standard tales, but my favorites were somewhat off the beaten path. I remember trying to convince my dad that it was a Christmas "tradition" that he read me a story called "The Castle Kerglass," which was extremely long and involved (if memory serves) a mysterious gatekeeper holding a giant shot-put. Yelling vegetables and mystical shot-putters pretty much exemplify what fairy tales are about for me: how fucking weird the world is.

Yes, sometimes fairy tales reinforce social norms — but they almost always do it in a way that's bizarre. Outsized punishments are meted out for small sins. Fruits and vegetables are both weapons and vehicles. Lovers turn monsters and frogs into lovers. In their original versions, many fairy tales are downright terrifying, but I like them that way. Too often, contemporary children's books are meant to reassure or to teach kids an orderly view of the universe. But if there's anything I learned from Shelley Duvall and her demon-radishes, it's that the universe is disorderly and often batshit insane. No story can fully prepare you for life's disasters, heartbreaks, swine flu epidemics, and gradual pileup of family secrets and broken glassware, but fairy tales do a better job than most. So go ahead, scare your kids with the Grimms' Cinderella this Halloween. There's more where that came from.

Academic Studies Of Fairy Tales [Wall Street Journal]

According to the blogger at Sociological Images, these items look like magazines, but they're not. They're framed images meant to be hung on the walls of a girl's room. They blend the tabloidy, ladymag celebrity culture with the Disney brand into the ultimate mindscramble of a fantastical dreamland with no basis in reality pretending to be real.

Ariel, with her impossibly narrow waist, is next to a "cover line" which reads "swimsuits that fit every shape." It's meant to be amusing, but "dress for your shape" stories are often an epic fail in women's magazines. Do little girls need Disney's help in looking forward to that? One of Snow White's cover lines, "Stepmothers: Evil Or Just Misunderstood?" is supposed to be a joke, but what if you're a kid who has a stepmom? Don't even get me started on Sleeping Beauty's line, "Find Your Prince."

The blogger writes:

The product suggests that while it is all well and good to be a princess, you should aim to be a famous princess. In addition to occupying castles and fantasy forests, you should grace the covers of magazines. You should aspire to inspire the lust and admiration of the masses, not just your prince.

Aren't little girls who think that tabloid popularity and a man will make everything better little girls with unrealistic expectations? Can't they wait until theyre older for this kind of brainwashing? When they watch Carrie Bradshaw get the man who buys her a shoe closet, everything will seem quite clear.

Modernizing The Fairytale [Sociological Images]
Earlier: Vogue Swimwear
In Which We Explore The Ridiculousness Of "Dressing For Your Shape"
Lucky's "Best" Swimsuits Also The Smallest, Least Supportive
Having Conquered Girls, Disney Moves On To Boys

[New York, February 25. Image via Splash.]

The last time I watched The Little Mermaid was about a year ago, with my then 4-year old niece. She adored it, and why wouldn't she? It's a colorful, sing-songy tale about a mermaid who makes her dreams come true. And though I was a huge fan of the film as a child, I was pretty horrified with the story unfolding on screen.

Our heroine, Ariel, all decked out in a shell-bra ensemble that would make Bai Ling blush, rapidly changes as the film progresses: when the story begins, she is a bold adventurer, defying her father's rules to satisfy her own desire to learn and explore. As soon as she meets Prince Eric, however, Ariel becomes another woman entirely, someone who is willing to give up everything she knows, everything she is, and perhaps most strikingly, her own voice and body to be with the man she loves.

Voiceless and barely able to stand on her new legs, Ariel pursues her Prince using only her bashful grins and some wacky trickery whipped up by her friends, a crab named Sebastian and a fish named Flounder. She has no voice of her own: that was the trade off, remember, and so she must rely on appearances to get what she wants. Not so good, Disney. Not so good.

And who is the villain in this story? Why, it's Ursula, of course, a single, powerful woman who lives in a cave below the sea. Ursula despises love, but recognizes that she can get what she wants from those who are in it. Ursula is overweight, unattractive, and bitter. Because any woman who has power, lives alone, and is a threat to the king of the sea is probably an ugly old sea witch, yeah?

In the end, Ariel gets what she wants: Ursula is defeated, Ariel's voice is restored, her father allows her to continue living as a human by giving her the gift of legs, and she lives happily ever after. Of course, she has to leave her identity, her home, her family, and her friends behind in order to do this, but hey, she got the Prince, right? And really, isn't that what matters?

Am I over-thinking this film? Most likely. Is The Little Mermaid harmless? Probably. I watched it a million times as a kid, and I certainly don't consider myself to be a brainwashed Disney Princess. But it's hard to deny that there are some messages in these films that don't feel quite right. I highly doubt any 4 year old is going to stand up and yell, "Sexist bullcorn!" at the screen as Ariel sails off into the sunset, but in a culture where 5 year olds, 15 year olds, and yes, even 35 year olds are walking around wearing Princess t-shirts, it might be worth questioning how detrimental princess tales are to little girls.

Again, as Sadie noted, we need to give little girls a little credit- they know the difference between fantasy and reality. But it's also important to ensure that they have other heroes in their lives, girls who do not seek a prince or a crown or a spell to save them, but a voice of their own, a voice that, under any circumstance, they will never choose to give up.

Loved the shoes. Loathed the show .O.K., I exaggerate. I didn't like the shoes all that much. But the wheel-heeled footwear known as merblades, which allow stage-bound dancers to simulate gliding underwater, provides the only remotely graceful elements in the musical blunderbuss called "Disney's The Little Mermaid"...The whole enterprise is soaked in that sparkly garishness that only a very young child — or possibly a tackiness-worshiping drag queen — might find pretty....Come to think of it, the motto of this production...could be, "You can never go broke underestimating the taste of preschoolers."

You won't see water. In fact, you won't even imagine water—which, in a fish story like this one, is an ominous sign...I had to keep reminding myself to pay attention. The big scenic flourishes and bland storytelling never got my imagination firing—never persuaded me to think that the actors scooting around on their Heelys really were mermaids or evil eels or any other freaky aquatic beasts.

There are lots of questions to ponder while being otherwise unengaged by Disney's new stage version of "The Little Mermaid." How can a merman and a squid be brother and sister?...If the sea witch is so powerful, how is she so easily dispatched? How does King Triton maintain those abs?...And while we're on that track, did no one at any point worry that the designs for this show are just plain ugly?...In a musical for which children are the primary audience, clarity of representation is fundamental. But...we often require explanation to know what we're looking at...What's surprising is how underwhelming the movie's most delightful numbers are here. The joyous calypso frolic "Under the Sea" and gloriously romantic "Kiss the Girl" are wonderful songs but [director Francesca] Zambello has compromised both with chaotic presentation, not helped by Stephen Mear's uninteresting choreography.

Somewhere out there in the choppy foam...the creators...let the compass slip overboard. In director Francesca Zambello's confused production — a morass of mechanical characters, syrupy new songs and gaudily irrelevant set pieces — all the warmth and charm of the film manages to get away. The bloated, 2 1/2 -hour show — an hour longer than the 1989 movie — represents a low watermark for the Disney-on-Broadway franchise...."Mermaid" ends up feeling less like a product meant for Broadway than for another sphere of entertainment: Disney on Ice.

[W]ith...breathtaking vulgarity and equally breathtaking confidence...this "Little Mermaid" [has] a certain...almost calculated mediocrity....Underneath all this baroque ornamentation was a tiny, tinny little musical struggling for its life.... There isn't much I can say of the cast - all swimming upstream with a kind of grinning gallantry. Sierra Boggess was sweet enough as the beached Mermaid; Sean Palmer wasn't quite sweet enough as the bleached-out Prince Eric... Sherie Rene Scott, with a Medusa wig and enough tentacles to make an octopus demand a recount, was an appropriately bitchy Witch Ursula, even if she overdid the drag-queen-in-drag bit. And the clowns - Eddie Korbich, Tituss Burgess (as the crab Sebastian), Jonathan Freeman and John Treacy Egan - clowned their hearts away to the audience's content. And, well, I think that's it, as Shakespeare said when he buried the last body in "Hamlet."

You try singing and dancing while wearing a tail. More than a little difficult. Yet "The Little Mermaid" — tail intact — amiably swims along on good cheer and charm....his musical, buoyed by one of the best Disney film scores and a delightful new leading lady, succeeds as enjoyable family entertainment. And, yes, the sets are big, but then, so is the ocean.