In Randi Zuckerberg’s world of satirical fairytales, “happily ever after” is not a guarantee.
On Friday, Zuckerberg and her longtime business associate Natasha Lewin announced the launch of a silly, yet surprisingly dark, family-friendly podcast call…
Category: Fairy Tales
This Instagram poet is rewriting fairy tales with modern gender roles
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Think about what you learned from the fairy tales you heard growing up. Scratch beneath the surface of those grand tales of bravery and everlasting love and you’ll see the gender stereotypes, moral lessons, and a very black and white worldview.
Nikita Gill wants nothing to do with any of that. Instead, the Instagram poet and author wants you to reexamine the fairy tales you grew up hearing and reading.
That’s the point of her new book — Fierce Fairytales: Poems & Stories to Stir your Soul — in which she dismantles the gender dynamics and stereotypes in the childhood fables that have, for centuries, gone unchallenged. When Gill revisited stories she’d loved watching on Disney VHS tapes like a “proper ’90s kid” — stories like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Hansel and Gretel — and read them through the lens of adulthood, she was disappointed. Read more…
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View More This Instagram poet is rewriting fairy tales with modern gender rolesDaniel Mallory Ortberg’s ‘The Merry Spinster’ puts horrific twists on your favorite fairy tales
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Everyone knows how classic fairytales are supposed to go: they start with “Once upon a time” and end with a “happily ever after.”
But for Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s story collection The Merry Spinster, “happily ever after” comes with a heavy price.
The Merry Spinster is a collection of short stories, each that riff off of the classic fairy tales you read as kids. In Ortberg’s retellings, The Little Mermaid becomes “The Daughter Cells,” a story that seems, at first, ambivalent at best about its protagonist (“Daughters are as good a thing as any to populate a kingdom with — if you’ve got them on hand.”) before descending in incredible violence. Meanwhile, Cinderella is merged with Shakespeare’s King Lear and the Bible‘s book of Psalms to become The Thankless Child. Read more…
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