Folk and Fairy Tales

In class on Tuesday, we had the pleasure of having guest speaker Dr. Ochieng’ K’Olewe! I was very excited when I realized he was going to be telling us stories from his own culture. My favorite story he told happened to be the one where the monkey was throwing the mangoes and coconuts in the water only to make friends with a shark. Kenyan folk and fairy tales are unique because they all (at least the ones he told) were surrounded by nature and animals) instead of princesses and other royalty. Furthermore, the different types of nature and animals were used to teach lessons to the people listening—a lot of times regarding being selfless, kind, and accepting. Dr. Ochieng' K'Olewe said that African orature is a part of people’s ecology, which conveys their communities, origin, and social foundation. He compared folklores/tales to a “fabric” because you cannot unweave the folktale from the culture’s history, geography, music, and religion; they are all intertwined and connec...

In Hollywood’s romantic-comedy, Pretty Woman , a wealthy business man named Edward Lewis is (of course) dumped rather predictably over the phone—the same phone call he asked her to be his escort during his business trip. His ex was tired of being his “beck and call girl” so Edward goes out and accidentally meets Vivian Ward, who happens to be a prostitute. The tale continues, but eventually leads to Edward asking her to be his escort on the trip, offering to pay her 3,000 dollars and a new, fashionable wardrobe for her. Vivian finds herself falling in love with Edward, but when he offers to put her up in an apartment, so she doesn’t have to live on the streets, she refuses and admits this is not the fairy tale she dreamt of as a kid, where a knight on a white horse rescues her. Edward decides he wants to shift the goal of the company and his partner Phillip is furious—and believing it is all Vivian’s fault, attempts to rape her. Fast forward, Edward arrives, punches him, Phillip leav...

While all three works of art—“Sonne” by Rammstein, Basile’s “The Young Slave,” and the Grimm Brothers’ “Snow White”—include the figure that is Snow White, they all wildly differ from one another. For example, “Sonne” the music video was in a completely different language than Basile or the Grimm Brothers’ tales, but that’s just a basic level. This video also included the seven dwarfs featured in the Grimm Brothers’ tales but took a dark twist where Snow White was the dwarf’s masters. In short, in Basile’s “The Young Slave,” a girl named Lilla and her friends were all jumping over a rose. Lilla jumped all the way over the rose and after, one leaf fell. Afterwards, Lilla finds herself pregnant and falls into a deep grief, where it brings her to her grave. While the Grimm Brothers’ tale is the fairy tale we think of when we think Disney: the three drops of blood falling, the seven dwarfs, the awakening of Snow White by a prince. Overall, I liked the Grimm Brother’s tale the most since...