week 10

During my growth, I read through an entire book of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. When I was young, I would ponder whether I would make the same decisions as the protagonists in the fairy tales or have evil thoughts like the villains. This week, we read the original text of Snow White in class, and my feeling is that most of the story content is the same as the fairy tales I read when I was young, but the ending and the details in the story are not as harmonious as the Disney version of Snow White. In the original text, Snow White’s stepmother, out of jealousy, is eventually forced by the prince to wear red-hot shoes to death. I think when I was reading fairy tales as a child, I would never think about why the stepmother wanted to kill Snow White because of jealousy over beauty, but now that I think about it carefully, this story is after all from several centuries ago, in the context of that era, the expectations and goals for women were to marry into a noble family or to achieve a better life through their beauty, and the fairy tale itself was meant for children to watch and read, as a way of educating children that beauty is not the only way out, and the real world will not always end in harmony, and that evil people should be severely punished.