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May. 19th, 2008 11:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
d_aulnoyAaaaaaaaaaand, today, I teach Deerskin. I'm starting us off with a few cultural referents (helloooooooo, Purity Balls!) (also, Marilyn Monroe's "Daddy," of "Let's Make Love" fame: I remember watching that movie as a kid with my father, and thinking, even at age 7, "Okay, I know from daddies, and that? Is creepy") before carrying us into statistics and Terri Windling's astonishing, heart-breaking, beautifully honest essay, "Surviving Childhood." These two works, Deerskin and "Surviving Childhood" are two of the most compelling arguments that I'm aware of for the continuing prevalence of the fairy tale, no matter how many issues I have with Princess Industrial Complex. Here's hoping my students agree ....
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Date: 2008-05-20 06:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-20 05:10 pm (UTC)dracula: kill the vampire, hill his slaves, victorian life is saved.
poe: die at the end, you folly no longer matters, normal society is saved.
later, tolkein: everyone dies or as good as dies to fix the problem-- and this is also where modern thinking starts subverting the deathwish; frodo doesn't die, but is traumatized his whole life and 'goes into the west' which is a kind of death without dying.
modern stuff: lyssar dies and is reborn a new person, but has to symbolicly die again because in the modern world, we know that death itself just leaves the problem for others-- and mckinley's books often do this. aerin was 'no longer quite human', harry all but gave her life. that one based on sleeping beauty (and maybe the other one, which i haven't read yet), but i can't remember the details just now...
modern interpretations of the stories, like in snow white, blood red and the others after it, take the weird ways around death, but it's still there, having to be dealt with, standing as the easy way out of the problem.
movies, too: donnie darko, which isn't really scfi, matrix, which is but functions as fantasy, all the 80's fantasy movies...
my hypothesis is that the deathwish comes from fantasy being so closely associated with the subconscious, the un-logical-- there, away from science and progress, it makes sense to solve the unsolvable problem by killing it or yourself.
it needs work, refinement, but that's it in a sort of big nutshell. a coconut shell.
~:)
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Date: 2008-05-20 07:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-20 07:33 pm (UTC)~;)
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Date: 2008-05-20 07:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-20 09:43 pm (UTC)i was thinking that the longer lifespan of the average person might be the start of the idea that death can be got around... previously, death was everywhere, what with disease and injury and childbirth and so on, so it was innevitable, the natural thing. now, with cures and medicine and stuff, people who wouldn't have lived before continue to live and things that were unstoppable are now prevatable, and everyone everywhere is living longer, so death is more of an inconveniance, something that can be handled and moved beyond and negotiated with. but, it's still a fear, still something down there in the subconscious where all this stuff comes from to begin with, so it still requires dealing with and it's still one of the main drives of the genre...
but you know, the idea is pervasive, too. when i'm writing, i try to NOT give in to the deathwish that i feel there all the time, and it makes for interresting writing, let me tell you!
~;)