The short-film “Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty” was recently nominated for an Oscar. What I personally like so much about this 6-minute film is that it clearly demonstrates how oral fairy tales can reveal a lot about the person telling them. By listening to what aspects of the story they emphasize, leave out, or change you can understand more about that person’s feelings and beliefs. The short film starts out with an ordinary enough situation; a grandmother telling her grandchild a fairy tale before bed. It quickly becomes evident that Granny has some repressed issues, which are apparent in her retelling of “Sleeping Beauty.” Through her retelling of the story, you can tell that Granny has a lot of bitterness towards a society that idolizes beauty and youth while marginalizing the elderly.
Initially Granny is reading the story out of a book and everything seems very normal. There is the birth of a beautiful princess named Beauty and all the young lovely fairies are invited to the christening party. Granny identifies with the old fairy that was not invited to Beauty’s christening party. It is when this character appears that the grandmother sets the book aside and takes the story into her own hands. Her version of the story revolves around the elderly fairy; Beauty never gets past her christening party. Instead, most of the story consists of the grandmother ranting about how the elderly fairy was not invited to the party because others think of her as old and repulsive. She goes into great detail about how others look down on the elderly fairy. Granny’s version ends with the elderly fairy exacting revenge by putting a curse on everyone so that they will die as soon as they fall asleep. Then the grandmother calmly walks out of the room telling her grandchild to sleep well.
With lines in the story such as, “And she was very beautiful, so they called her beauty. Beauty was indeed very beautiful,” it is not hard to understand Granny’s bitter feelings. It makes me wonder if such stories are perhaps just as responsible for young girls’ lack of self-esteem and poor body images as all of the magazines and other media with pictures of skinny, young, beautiful models. After all, these are the stories that are read to children when they are most influential and just starting to figure out what is important in life. With stories constantly describing main characters and good characters as beautiful first and foremost, it is no wonder that our society is obsessed with youth and beauty. That’s why my favorite retellings of fairy tales are ones where other virtues, such as intelligence or courage, are prominent characteristics of the protagonists (like in “Ever After” or “The Princess and the Frog”). As Granny points out, “when it comes to the harsher lessons of this life, beauty is not going to get you very far, very far, very far…”
Here's the video:
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Two excellent points here! 1) How much does any given storyteller manipulate a story, given their own agenda? 2) How much responsibility do fairy tales bear in the "beauty myth," or the pressure to conform to an idealized concept of female beauty? If we look at any individual fairy tale, we might find the princess described as beautiful - but what makes her so beautiful? Are her features actually described, or do we map our society's current ideal onto the princess?
ReplyDeleteNow that I think about it, the fairy tales generally don't say what exactly makes the princess beautiful. The only thing I could think of is that Snow White is described as having skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood/a rose, and hair as black as a window sill/coal, but you really can't picture exactly what she looks like from this description. So yes, I think that we map our society's current ideal of beauty onto the princess. So it is society that puts constraints on what exactly beauty is. But even though fairy tales don't give an exact definition of beauty, I definitely think that fairy tales frequently imply that beauty is the most important attribute of women and even men sometimes.
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