Fairy Tales 2010

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Parents Just Don't Understand

Parents must play a role in the beauty and the beast stories just as much as any tale about courtship. In the Pig King, the mothers play a larger role in getting their children together than do the fathers or even the children themselves. This speaks a lot for how women were seen as matchmakers when these fairytales were written/ told.
In The Tiger Bride, the woman's gambling father, for all intensive purposes, sells her to the beast. This seems like an unconventional form of the arranged marriage, but weren't most arranged marriages made for some kind of personal or financial gain?
It's interesting to consider how all of these parents had some sort of material gain by allowing their children to be paired with the monstrous beings. Do they truly love their children as much as they claim to or is the siren call of material gain more appealing than guarding their daughters and sons? And would modern parents do the same thing?

2 comments:

  1. I find your point about mothers playing the role of matchmaker (as in The Pig King) very interesting. To compare the role of this parent, with that of the father of Beauty in Beauty and the Beast sheds light, perhaps, on a gender difference-- more specifically, the difference between mother and father. Beauty's father ultimately is the reason that she meets the beast with whom she falls in love, but he does this in a passive manner. While the mother takes on an aggressive position, actively searching to find a spouse for her child, the father's (and subsequently Beauty's) situation accidentally befalls him. However, the basis of this difference may be more legitimately explained as due to the condition of the children: the child for whom the mother seeks a spouse is an ugly creature, whereas the father who does not concern himself with the issue of marriage has a beautiful, virtuous child, sure to marry eventually.

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  2. I agree that the parents of the ugly creature play more of an aggressive role in trying to marry off their child and that Beauty's parents in some way accidentally give her to the beast. But what I also found interesting is that in the Pig King, it is the mother who is desperately seeking a wife for her son. Whereas, in the stories focused on Beauty it is the father that is forced to promise his daughter to the beast. Does this, perhaps, show some underlying father-daughter / mother-son dynamic?

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