girls learn that they are the helpless princesses, meant to be forever passive.

You have to read the right fairy-tales. "East of the Sun, West of the Moon" and "The Black Bull of Norroway" both have active heroines who wind up rescuing the prince.

You have to read the right fairy-tales. "East of the Sun, West of the Moon" and "The Black Bull of Norroway" both have active heroines who wind up rescuing the prince.

I know such stories exist, but what are the ones that the majority of kids hear? Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty (which has such an icky sexual subtext that it needs a therapist). Rapunzel. Snow White.

Bah.

Sleeping Beauty

You know in the original she's pregnant with twins immediately after waking up, right?

Steph, I think you're reacting as much to the Disney versions of those stories, which are heavily sanitized, as to the actual stories, which are dark and terrifying and full of Justice.

Steph, I think you're reacting as much to the Disney versions of those stories

Yeah, but those are still the ones that get told most often.

How many people know how the Grimms' original version of Rumplestiltskin ended? Dude ripped himself in HALF. While I love it, in all its bloodthirstiness, people just don't know that's how it was written.

My heart sinks a little when I read a post saying the poster doesn't like one of my favorite authors. I don't know why, and it's cool everybody's got different tastes.

I just find my reaction odd.

Uh, maybe some of y'all should take another look at what I wrote.

I was pretty clearly disparaging the tendency which some people show hereabouts to write off a work of literature because it's difficult or unpleasant. Did I name names? No.

Did I say, "Steph, you read it and didn't like it, so SHAME SHAME SHAME! Now your opinion means nothing."? No. Did I say "Canon is set in stone, and you must all read it and enjoy it or you're dumb."? No. Hell, I hated Middlemarch, too (although I understand why I had to read it), and I don't know what would make me not like Steph. And I would hate to think that in 20 years, any literate person will continue to think that Brett Easton Ellis has created great literature.

Anyway, everytime I express this opinion in here (which is, to be clear, that Great Books are Great Books for a reason, a general opinion to be sure, which may or may not hold true for any particular work of art), the same backlash happens against my ever-so-mean point-of-view, so I'm kinda done with this thread.

Well, and even those -- Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, in a weird way Snow White -- are stories that have ambiguity in them. I mean, sure, on a first pass, Evil Stepmother/fairy bad, innocent twidget good...

But I think of Rapunzel's stepmother's loneliness, that she would demand a child from her neighbors rather than any other price. She locked Rapunzel up in a tower to protect her, after all; and Rapunzel pretty well disobeyed her parental figure and had sex on the sly by hook and by crook. And, after some hardship, got away with it! It was the boyfriend that was punished.

With Sleeping Beauty, I always wondered why making everyone sleep for 100 years was a gift. So it seemed like cruelty on cruelty, and the nicest thing the prince could have done, on arriving inside the castle, would be some kind of time-travel spell to send them all back 100 years. Or, you know, kill them all and put them out of their time-warp misery.

Snow White is hugely ambiguous, because the evil stepmother was so helpless in the grip of her obsession. It reminded me of that Bathory woman who was rumored to have bathed in the blood of virgins, desperately attempting to retain her youth. When I acquired a picture-book version of SW, it was the image of the stepmother I cut out and kept.

I read a lot of myth and old-style folk tales as a kid, and a lot of them were kind of WTF the first time I read them. But when I come back to them now, I find all sorts of contradictions in them, and I'm glad that [the originals, not the Disney versions] are chock full of the ambiguities and confusions of which their cultures are made.

PC do you have an edition/translation of Crime and Punishment you'd recommend. I've been trying to read it but I didn't get far in my first attempt and then later I found an older translation and discovered the first translation was so passive and that's why I hated it. I did a sentence by sentence comparison of Translation 1 vs Translation 2 and the first took paragraphs to say what the second said in a few sentences. I threw out the first book because no one needs to be subjected to that.

I was pretty clearly disparaging the tendency which some people show hereabouts to write off a work of literature because it's difficult or unpleasant. Did I name names? No.

You know, it doesn't really matter if you "name names" because if you describe behavior, self-aware people can tell if they've done the behavior or not. ANd paranoid people assume you're talking to them, whether or not they've done the behavior. And oblivious people don't care either way, so you might as well not bother.

IJS.

I read Middlemarch last summer and really enjoyed it. I can't get into Jane Austen though. And a few months ago I gave To the Lighthouse one last shot and for whatever reason it just clicked and I ended up staying up way too late reading it out loud.