Monday, October 15, 2007

Political Fairy Tales






Fairy tales are underused in political writing. I have experimented with that medium in the past, once in a rewrite of the "Little Red Riding-Hood" and once with "The Emperor's New Clothes", but the mythology is so deep and colorful that I could probably do a blog on nothing but fairy tales. Puss-In-The-Boots, anyone? Heh.

Fairy tales are a wonderful field to harvest for the images of what a good woman is and what a bad woman is as well as for those sage pieces of advice which girls were given about how to get on in life. Marry a prince. Wait quietly, tied up in the dragon's lair, and the hero will come and save you. Be good but don't blow your own horn.

Though fairy tales also told about young women who were proactive and had agency! (See how I throw in a few fancy words there.) Who were able to perform three impossible feats in order to save the life of their brothers or who were willing to love the beast to whom they had been promised by a rash father, thus turning the beast into the prince, after all. I'm not sure if the moral of "The Beauty and The Beast" is a healthy one, but at least Beauty had agency. More than today's Democratic Party, at least.