A Mad Tea-Party

My favorite chapter in Alice and Wonderland is Chapter VII, "A Mad Tea-Party." Alice always seems to get angry when a story seems unrealistic, while accepting a bizzare world which she has been meeting talking animals and growing taller and smaller. The chapter begins when alice sees a large table with three characters crowded around one corner of it. They see Alice coming and immediately cry "No room! No room!" When the Hatter speaks, Alice observes that "The Hatter's remark seemed to her to have nor sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English" (107). The Hatter and the March Hare speak of riddles with no answer and speak of time which they find no concern or purpose for. They are afraid of the Queen who threatened to cut of their heads. Of course nothing ever came of it. Alice gets frustrated as she always does in this world of make-believe. The third character at the table, the Dormouse plays a very liminal role considering he spends most of the scene asleep. The imagery is fantastic, and Alice walks out of the scene enraged by such unrealistic animals!

dreams

Last night I had the most odd dream. It was very fairy-tale oriented. The character that stalked my friends and I was a wolf. Right before I went to bed I was reading a hiking book of the greater Los Angeles area. It recommended wonderful hikes, and many involved camping. So in this dream, my friends and I-a large group of about fifteen people went camping up in the San Gabriel mountains. Now in Los Angeles it is rare to camp. Not many people in the metropolitan area treat themselves to such pleasures. We had set up camp around an abandoned building in the woods. My friend Duncan warned us that there was a specific wolf in the area that I nor any of my fellow campers had heard of. While setting up camp it got dark quickly which reflects the shorter days we have been having lately. As soon as the sun settled behind the San Gabriel mountains, Duncan warned us all that we must be quiet. Just as the victims in fairy tales, we ignored this statement and continued to talk excitedly. Soon we heard howling which Duncan identified as the feared and famed wolf. Fear ran through the crowd. We all decided to sleep close together. Duncan told us if we woke up with the wolf next to us the best defense was to run as fast as we could. This would be not easy feat, considering the rough and rocky terrain in the dark. Everybody wanted to be nestled close to another. Nobody wanted to be at the end of the big sleeping mess of people. Why we stayed I do not know. In a dream, looking in and not being able to do anything about the situation happening to you or your close friends, all I could do in my dreaming state was to stick around and find out what happened. Soon as all ran into the house when we saw the huge wolf come along on two feet. There happened to be abandoned kittens strewn around the house and the wolf killed two in front of us. The boys all had shotguns with no ammo. They all took shots anyhow but nothing happened. We all stood, paralyzed in fear. Finally one of the outdoor-oriented males among us took a knife and stabbed the villain to death. I had to go outside in the dream because I couldn't bare the brutality. Everyone in my camping party was unharmed physically, but it caused personal mental discomfort after the terrible event happened.

*My Book and Heart Shall Never Part*

I thouroughly enjoyed My Book and Heart Shall Never Part. Stuart Weber did a wonderful job with the music which was wonderfully incorporated into the content of the movie. It was a wonderful way to contemplate the origin and the purpose of literature for chilren which is also literature for the adults who provide these stories for their impressionable kids. The allusion of reality is shaped by these stories for children. In the little books shown in the movie, people would color in the pictures and decorate the covers. They would mend any rips on the pages, showing the significance these little books had on the family or group of people that read them. The children in the movie did a wonderful job of acting. The main character transformed herself from a girl into a character in the stories she read which brought back fond memories of my childhood. I was in Kindergarden when Disney's The Little Mermaid came out in theatres. I made my mother put salt in my bathtub. I was under the allusion that I was the Little Mermaid. I think my red hair may have had something to do with it. The narration was something that was also pleasing to me. There was a man, a woman, and a child which gave lots of diversity and fun. The movie was a nice break from the busy world us grown-ups live in. It was a nice time to meditate and think of the wonderful stories that have shaped our lives as we know them. For years people have been reading fairytales and have been shaped by these stories. They are all-encompassing in our society whether we recognize them in our adult lives or not. The movie was great. Good job Colin, McWilliams, Stuart Weber, Michael Sexson, Lynda Sexson, and the cast!

The Portal

Alice in Wonderland begins wonderfully. Alice is a small girl who is bored with her sister reading a book. She abandons her sister all together when she sees a rabbit hopping around with a clock. Curiosity leads her to a hole that happens to be big enough for her to enter. Upon entering the whole, she falls down into a land that will bring many incredible adventures. The rabbit hole acts as a portal. Portals are common in fairy tales. In the Little Mermaid, the exit from the ocean onto the land represents a portal. In Jack and the Bean Stalk, the Bean Stalk acts as a portal for Jack. In,Rapunzel, Rapunzel's hair acts as a portal for the prince. Portals are everywhere in fairy tales. It gives children the chance to easily imagine transcendence from the normal world into a world of make-believe. It lets children easily accept abstract ideas once the character has entered the portal into the realm of "the make-believe.

questions for the test

Q. What is the Archetypal woman's name in Finnegan's Wake that we discussed in class?
A. Prank Quean

Q. multilevel world invented by Lewis Carol used by Joyce (combining several meanings in a word)
A. Portmanteau

Q. Privileged #s in fairy-tales
A. 3 & 7

Q. All marriage is _____.
A. Rape

Q. What is misplaced concreteness?
A. Rapunzel's hair, a fallacy

Q. #333 fairytale
A. Little Red Riding Hood

Q. Collective unconcious manifests itself as _______
A. archetypes

Q. "If you're really crafty you'll get them both"
A. Little Red Riding Hood (grandmother and grandaughter)

Q. 3 parts of the universal quest (according to Joseph Cambell)
A. separation/ irritation/ return

Q. Triple Goddess
A. maiden, mother, crone

Q. Why is there no such thing as the original?
A. everything is a displaced myth

Q. one bows or gives recognition to ______
A. to the divine

Q. Genie from Alladin (the Disney version): "I'm not history, I'm___"
A. "...mythology"

Q. Difference of Grimm than Perot's in Cinderella
A. Cinderella's called "Ashgirl" in the Grimm version

Q. Motif index: Hans My Hedgehog, Beauty and the Beast, East of the Sun, West of the Moon.
A. The search for the missing husband, Beast group

Q. Parent's aren't trying to concieve in:
A. Bluebeard

Q. Mythological mother daughter duo
A. Demeter and Persephone

Q. Write a haiku for one of the stories

Q.What is the significance of Blue in Bluebeard's beard
A. All of the above

Q. What causes the transformation of the Beast in Beauty and the Beast?
A. love

Q. Archetype of the talking animal, shown in____.
A. The Golden Ass

Q. Why did Cupid wake up when Psyche was looking at him?
A. one drop of hot oil hits him

Q. What is spoonerism?
A. siste uglies

Q. We aleading know everything there is to know, just a matter of discovering it.
A. Wordsworth

Q. Where did the mythical story of Beauty and the Beast come from?
A. Cupid and Psyche

Q. Who wanted to marry Little Red Riding Hood?
A. Dickens

Q. First novel ever written
A. Don Quixote or The Golden Ass

Q. What phrase begins most fairy-tales?
A. "Once upon a time,..."

Cupid and Physche/Cinderella/Snow White

The story of Cupid and Physche is can be seen as a variety of displaced fairy tales. These stories include Cinderella and Snow White. In Cinderella evil step sisters get in the way of the beautiful maiden and her prince. Physche's sisters tell the girl to go against her husbands wishes which only puts her into a world of trouble. The moral in both stories is never listen to your rotten sisters. In Snow White, the beauties step mother disdains the fact that her step daughter is more beautiful than she. Physche's future mother-in-law Venus is equally jealous of Physche's beauty and wants her killed. The moral of this story is to try and avoid crones that are over the hill and bitter that there is a new and more fair damsel in the land.

Cinderella

In the end of the tale "Cinderlla" in Tatar's book, Cinderella's shoe fits! The prince will now marry the woman who has been identified. Her sisters are shocked and Cinderella, being the nobel, "goody-two-shoes" that everybody hates to love, has a big deciscion to make. Should she forgive her evil step-sisters who have been nothing but cruel to her. If I were Cinderella I would have a hard time justifying a nice way to go about this. I would flee my rags and run for the riches soon to be given to me by the gorgeous and gentle prince. I would leave my step-sisters in the dust. I might make them wait on me hand and foot. I would make them do my laundry and all the other dirty work I could think of. However, Cinderella takes the nobel path and lets her step-sisters live in the palace with her and her prince. I denounce her good-hearted decision which makes every other mortal look bad.
<--Would you really want THEM living in your palace?