PB1A: Dissecting a Genre’s Rhetorical Features and Conventions – Fairy Tales

            Fairy tales is one of the oldest textual genres, marked out as a genre by writers in the Renaissance period. Fairy tales are meant to be entertaining and thrilling for children, while also teaching children lessons, and morals. For example, in The Tortoise and the Hare, the tortoise and the hare race each other. Since the hare thinks he’s hot stuff, he blows off the tortoise, and thinks the race is going to be an easy victory. The hare runs really fast in the beginning, but before he reaches the finish, he decides to take a nap as he thinks the tortoise would never be able to catch up with him. The moral of The Tortoise and the Hare, is “slow and steady wins the race”. This story teaches children not to underestimate anyone else and to always try your best, and that if you keep trying at something, eventually you’ll be able to reach your goal.

            Fairy tales, or at least Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the Disney remakes of the stories, were never meant for children. When the Grimm brothers first made the book, the book had scholarly feel and tone, with no illustrations in it, and many footnotes. The stories in the book also had many dark themes, like graphic violence, premarital sex, child abuse, and incest. Only after the brothers Grimm received more of a younger audience did they tone down the sex, but continued to have very gruesome scenes in their fairy tales, such as Cinderella’s stepsisters cutting of their toes in order to fit the glass slipper. Now, Disney has remade those classics into a more friendly viewing experience for this era, making them the soft movies loved by parents and children.

            Many of the conventions usually celebrated in fairy tales involve fantasy characters, such as elves, giants, fairies, and witches and also tend to have magic in the stories. They typically begin with “once upon a time” which suggests a time when magic was still in the world. This idea is reinforced by the German starting line, “In the old times when wishing was still effective” Fairy tales also usually have happy endings, a fairy tale ending, where everything goes well, and there is nobody suffering, a true happily ever after.

            A fairy tale is a fairy tale because of its themes and conventions. They are usually stories that have been handed down for generations and generations. They also tend to have many morals in the story, such as The Boy who Cried Wolf and The Tortoise and the Hare, teaching children lessons. They also nearly always start with once upon a time, when the world was still a magical place, and end with “and they lived on happily ever after”.  Fairy tales have changed a lot over time, especially in the past century, but they still contain the same basic themes. Being handed down orally and literally, fairy tales entertain and also teach lessons.