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| Yellow Rose Source: Wikipedia |
This week I read the English Fairy Tales unit. It was a very
interesting unit, to say the least. Going into this unit, I had a few things in
mind, or predictions, as to what the stories in this unit would be like. I
figured there would be stories about princes and princesses, enchanted forests,
fairy godmothers, and the like. Although some of these elements could be found
in the stories, more or less, there were also other elements that made these
fairy tales very different from any I had ever read or been told before.
For example, in the story The Rose Tree, there was a man,
his two children and their stepmother who all lived together. As one might
imagine, the stepmother was very evil and jealous of the man’s daughter, as she
was very beautiful and had lovely hair. In this story, the stepmother sends the
daughter to the store to buy a bundle of candles. However, the daughter does
not ever make it home with the candles. The stepmother was very angry with her,
but deceived her and made her think she was going to console her by brushing
her hair. The stepmother then tricks the daughter into fetching a billet of
wood and an axe, and then decapitates her!!
I was very shocked when this happened in the story. Although
in American fairy tales it is common to have a stepmother or some other type of
character who is jealous of a princess or some other beautiful girl, it is not
at all common for someone to get beheaded! I am all for breaking the cycle of typical
fairy tale princess stories, but this one was a little dramatic.
Despite its blatant violence, I did still enjoy this story.
The main reason I enjoyed this story was because in the end, word got around
that the stepmother had killed the little girl, and then she was killed.
All’s well that ends well.
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