Jan 16- Fairy Tales and Weight by Jeannett Winterson

As a culture we idealize perfection and in doing so the strive for perfection can lead to a change for the better yet it can also lead to pain and self sacrifice. For example, A princess or the "ideal woman" seems to be representative of how women would like to know themselves, we as a gender are forced into a submissiveness where we sit back and wait for things to happen, unlike men who are taught to take control. This stereotyping is slowly changing yet still in place. We see women in the workplace who are trying to achieve status in the business world yet when they meet a person who they could potentially marry, they are expected to stop working and stay at home for the family and to keep the house.

Fairy Tales.....they teach children that its okay to be submissive and change yourself for the man you love. In Beauty and the Beast, Belle falls in love with the Beast even though he verbally abuses her and degrades her as a woman. This shows children that it is okay to be in an abusive relationship because the man MAY change into a 'human'. In the Little Mermaid, Ariel has to change who she is to be with the man she loves. She has to give up her family and the life she has known to become human for the man. This teaches children that the female is the one who is supposed to change for the man .

Weight by Jeannett Winterson

In the artistic retelling of fairy tales does art help counteract ideology?

--Winterson states in her introduction to Weight, that the retelling of fairy tales allows for new material to be interjected into the existing text which allows for a new emphasis or bias on the key elements in the story and with the retelling it allows for a different perspective to be told which then allows for different interpretations of the story (xvi). I think that it does help counteract the ideology because of the different perspectives given and the new material interjected into the fairy tales.