Telling tales: Dying for a happy ending

Telling Tales: Dying for a Happy Ending draws on theories of feminism, cultural studies and psychoanalysis to analyze the presence and function of violence in the fairy tale, particularly violence against women and children. In the fairy tale children frequently function as objects to be beaten, eaten, traded and tossed out at will. The initial two chapters concentrate on the role of fairy tales in constructing gender and shaping female imagination. The central chapters examine the fairy tale's vilification of women and victimization of the child. The latter chapters trace the positioning of the child as the victim of abuse and as the object of desire.;Chapter 1 examines the interplay between the fairy tale and cultural attitudes toward marriage and romance. The second chapter offers a feminist critique of the fairy tale as essentially misogynist and "problem creating," through an analysis of Russalka or The Seacoast of Bohemia, Joanna Russ's revision of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid." The third chapter traces the positioning of the child as an object of desire and economic exchange in "Snow White." The fourth chapter explores the concatenation of innocence and sexuality, appetite and desire in "Hansel and Gretel." The fifth chapter offers a close reading of "Little Red Riding Hood." Sometimes eaten, sometimes saved, Little Red Riding Hood always departs from the path and thus represents an alternative to the "good girl" of the fairy tale Half child, half woman, she opens up a whole range of possible behaviors for the female heroine.;Popular conception of the fairy tale marks it as literature for children, but very often the fairy tale deals with the problem of children: how to get them, how to get rid of them, how to teach them, and how to punish them when that teaching fails. The ultimate chapter turns from the fairy tale to the cautionary tale and to the tension in the cautionary tale between pedophobia and pedophilia: between adult resentment of, and adult desire for the child.