stereotypes in fairy tales

stereotypes in fairy tales
why are we fascinates by heroes in fairy tales? is there really something so intruiging in their behaviour of do we just compensate our plight in this lacrimarum valle that we are not so succesful as the hero is? on one hand, we admire the hero because he sets something and this he accomplishes. we have the archetype of journey which is perilous but in the end the hero kills the dragon and gets the princes for his wife. one of the stereotypes I see and which seems very strong and vital in the fairy tales is that it teaches young boys to be active and young girls to be passive. basically always the story is about a man who is active and a woman that is passive. man always gets the princess, only rarely is he helped by the princess.
on one hand, we admire the hero, on the other we envy him is feats and maybe in some dark corner of our minds we want to see him fall and fail. maybe the admiration is not so much a genuine interest in his life and story but rather a need to see him fail because then we may not feel so useless because we see that even heroes fail. is the hero really someone so perfect that we should admire him genuinely? does not he have his faults? one thing I noticed is the fact that the antihero-dragon, sorcer, monster or so is usually destroyed by the hero but not by his hand in principle. either the villain kills himself unintentionally – usually when he tries to kill the hero, or the villain kills himself, usually also unintentionally-stepping on something that kills him or stepping on a device he made to kill the hero. another way is that the villain is killed by the nature so that the hero is immaculate although the villain is an archetype of evil. what is evil in its core should be killed. this is what I like about those more comples and and so dogmatic fairy tales. they do not make the hero kill the villain because they know that there is not a dichotomy between good and evil, hero and villain. the hero is a character with more affable traits than the villain. the villain may have suffered or might have been mistread or something like that. some more basic stories show the hero as a perfect good and the villain as a perfect evil. this may be good for little children, to teach them the difference between good and evil, but in the end they will have to learn that there is nothing like a dichotomy between good and evil but that there is a fine line between every such distinction. on the other hand I like the fact the fairy tales show the children teleology of the hero. they see that all he does is done in order to be good, to do good. he gains the princess because it is his destiny, his absolute and ultimate destination and drive that is behind all his motives. he does not consider any other possibility than doing good. this is really benefitial for the little children. they are shown that all their mind should be preocupied with one aim. concretely, the aim may be anything, abstractely and more generally the entelechy of mankind is ultimate good. this is very hard to define yet in fairy tales it is quite clear what good and evil is. on one hand we should look to fairy tales for inspiration what is good and evil, on the other we should not be misled by easy solutions. in reality noone is absolute evil as in fairy tales, noone must be killed, there is no pure evil and no pure good. our motives should be driven by mercy, compassion, solidarity, humbleness, love for others, but are not these terms only empty shells sometimes? it seems to me that the ability to define the above mentioned denotations of ways of life is very subjective. the world is always more complex than the words we use for it. let us not get dismal, let us get inspired because in words there is the potentian for either evil or good. good is what is absolutely beautiful and which is worth looking for, although we should not get blinded by the vision that we may reach it, yet we should strive to do so.

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Používam Rychlý zápisník

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