#Berta Vidal de Battini

[starberry-cupcake]

For the fairy tale ask, 3 & 13, I'll bring popcorn

Hi!! Thank you for sending some! 

3. What is one of your favourite non-romantic fairy tales?

Actually, my favorite fairy tale in general is non-romantic: The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen.

Andersen had, I think, a very good handle of relationship dynamics that weren't plain or just archetypal, for the genre and the time in which he published. Maybe because he was writing in a place of self fulfillment and poetic intent rather than educational, moral or linguistic pursuit, maybe because he wasn't hetero or allosexual, maybe because he was born at a time in which he could and wanted to deconstruct what he didn't agree with in other stories (especially classism), his relationships don't tend to ever be simple or clear cut, and sometimes are not even endgame.

Not only the main motivator for the story is Gerda trying to save her friend Kai, Gerda also finds friends along the way, like the tough but sensitive Little Robber Girl who turns to care for her very dearly, or the Princess who is in search for a Prince who'd be, more than anything, a good companion for conversation and shared interests.

There is a lot of strength in love without romance in The Snow Queen. Which is probably why it always confused me that people at large thought that Frozen was somewhat doing something revolutionary.

13. Do you have a folklore rant you're holding in? (Let It Out)

I've mentioned this before but it still bothers me greatly: it angers me when people think that, in order to strive for diversity and representation in fairy tales and folklore, they have to slap Eurocentric stories into non European cultures. That's colonialism.

Taking a European story like Snow White or Little Red Riding Hood and stamping on some other culture into it for more diversity is to shoehorn a lot of folkloric remnants of culture, beliefs, religion, social categories of a time and place to people who not only don't hold them but who also have our own stories to share.

To name just one example of the culture I'm most familiar with because it's my own, Berta Elena Vidal de Battini, in the early to mid 20th Century, compiled 3152 texts throughout the territory of Argentina, annotated, cataloged and accompanied by a study of the diverse language changes of all territories and the cultural influences that combined in day to day life of the territory, both the native peoples foundations and the immigration influences.

3152 texts. Stories, fairy tales, fables, rhymes, cryptid encounters, poems, native peoples narrative, popular characters, etc.

Differently from the Grimms, Laura Gonzenbach and other compilers that set to do a similar job, Vidal de Battini preserved, as much as she was able, the linguistic variety of the story tellers, bending Spanish (from Spain) grammar to adapt to the regional vernacular and pointing out why some of these cases occurred and what influence did these things have linguistically.

And that's just one example. There's so much richness in folklore and stories of every culture, because every culture has stories.

I think that what Disney is trying to do lately, of creating new fairy tales that are conceptualized on more diverse cultural foundations, is a step forward, especially since most often there are, as of late, at least partially own voices in the crew. Disney became, whether we like it or not, the biggest platform for fairy tale distribution in the world. When people think of Cinderella, most people think of a light blue dress and a blonde updo. Still, they are a US based company with a capitalist nature and a majority of white folks in positions of power, and that ends up constructing filters and problematic situations, as well as it creates a landscape in which your story needs to pass through those filters in order to be listened to, which implies, it being a US based company, that the story becomes a monetized intellectual property.

I think it's just time to pass the microphone. If you want more diversity in stories, let those people you want to know more about tell their stories. If you are from a culture that doesn't get represented often and are more familiar with Hansel and Gretel than you are with your own folklore, or your first instinct is to re-write a European story to fit you, look around and search, because I assure you there's a lot of stuff there for you to discover and it's more wonderful than what you expect.

Thank you for sending some questions @demigodinmybed ♥ 

[gvtnoticias]

¡Feliz día, mi pago puntano!

#SanLuis: 423 años de #Puntanidad. El triunfo mismo de la #JusticiaSocial.

Hoy cumple 423 años nuestra querida provincia puntana. La del “Bufalo” Funes, el “mono” Gatica y Facundo Quiroga. La Esteban Agüero, el algarrobo abuelo y las poesías cuyanas.

La de Juan Pascual Pringles y su valentía independentista. La de las cartas de San Martín que él supo resguardar.

Plaza Pringles, San Luis -Capital

La de Mauricio López y los inicios de la vida universitaria. La de Berta…

[elbiotipo]

Acá encontré el mapa que siempre me pareció errado porque ponía a todos los dialectos del litoral en el mismo "guaranítico", pero aparentemente lo actualizaron y ahora separa al Chaco y al norte de Santa Fe y los coloca en un "litoraleño" con lo cual estaría de acuerdo, la tonada chaqueña es mucho más "rioplatense"... aunque de vuelta, depende también si hablás con alguien de la capital o del interior.

No sé cuando editaron este mapa, la fuente citada es "Vidal de Battini, Berta: El español de la Argentina, Buenos Aires: Consejo Nacional de Educación, 1964." pero no tengo link para comprobarlo o saber como llegaron a esa conclusión. Me gustaría pegarle una leída a un estudio más actualizado.

Las tonadas chaqueñas y correntinas son muy parecidas pero tienen sus diferencias. En "entonación" son más o menos parecidas, pero la tonada chaqueña, dependiendo de con quién hables, tiene un poco más de "porteño" que la correntina, que es un poco más "cantada" por así decirlo.

En cuanto a las palabras, tengo una demostración gráfica:

(este es un artefacto linguistico fenomenal y tiene que ser preservado)

Los correntinos se destacan por el famoso "naé" que siempre pensé que era una abrevación de "nada que ver" pero ahora se me hace que puede tener origen portugués en "nao é". El "nicó" es una palabra parecida pero la usa más bien gente del interior.

Una cosa en la que hay MUCHA diferencia es que el dialecto correntino tiene muchísimas palabras prestadas del guaraní, y mucha gente sobre todo del interior es bilingue en castellano y guaraní. En el dialecto chaqueño casi no hay palabras prestadas de los pueblos originarios de la zona (ñeri o nieri podría ser una, pero está en enterna discusión). Eso es más que nada por las diferencias en la historia y la colonización de ambas provincias, pero eso es para otro post.

Si uno ve un mapa dialectal del Cono Sur, todo lo que es Paraguay, Formosa, Corrientes, Chaco y Misiones corresponde al "castellano guaranítico". Tengo que decir que eso por experiencia no es así. Hay muchísima diferencia entre los dialectos del norte de Argentina y los de Paraguay, aunque con muchas cosas compartidas. Este es un mapa un poco más apropiado, me parece que la denominación "español austral" es mucho mejor:

Lo que ahí se llama "nordestino argentino" sería el dialecto que se habla acá en el norte, y pese a que tiene muchas diferencias con el rioplatense, es MUY diferente del castellano paraguayo en entonación, palabras, expresiones, etc. EN MI EXPERIENCIA PERSONAL, es como un espectro, el castellano "nordestino" se parece más al rioplatense en Chaco y Corrientes y es casi idéntico (pero aún diferente) al Paraguayo en Formosa. También hay muchísimas variaciones entre las ciudades y el interior. En mi experiencia, de vuelta, los habitantes de las ciudades de Resistencia y Corrientes tienen un dialecto compartido diferente del interior de sus provincias.

[starberry-cupcake]

One of the important things you need to keep in mind with fairy tales, in my opinion, is that colonization is a huge factor to take into account when trying to place a fairy tale variant and its actual cultural “source”. 

I was looking up reviews online about a book/deck created by Yoshi Yoshitani last year which use folk stories and fairy tales (it looks very nice and there is a lot of work put into it, none of this is to shade). In a commendable choice to include diverse origins, there are versions in this particular work that sometimes create confusion for readers. Some are easily understandable for me as someone who studies/teaches them (like why The Nightingale says both Chinese and Danish), but without sources of where the stories were adapted from, people who don’t know have commented here and there that they were understandably confused with some choices. 

Beauty and the Beast is included and the origin threw me off. The depiction is very expected for the story, with the Beast more similar to the Disney version than the Villenueve version, but the origin given is Chinese. And that opens a whole can of worms that is more difficult to unpack than just The Nightingale  → Hans Christian Andersen. 

You see, there is a variant of Beauty and the Beast that is considered to be Chinese of origin. And I say “considered” because, again, colonization and evangelization play a huge part in the printed versions of these stories sometimes. 

The popular “Chinese version” of Beauty and the Beast was compiled in the late 1800s by Adele M. Fielde. Sources vary on which book exactly, but editions of Chinese Nights Entertainments from the early 1900s that are openly available have the story in them, and there are sources claiming that the earliest edition is from 1893. That story is called The Fairy Serpent. 

Some people theorize that said story could have been influenced by a story in the The Panchatantra called The Enchanted Brahman's Son, which many consider one of the first known written versions of an Animal Bridegroom category story. 

But here’s the thing. It’s very likely that upon publication of her book, Fielde edited a Chinese story to be more like the western Beauty and the Beast that, by that time, was already popular and had been adapted several times. 

It could, of course, also be that the Chinese interviewees that Fielde compiled stories from had been influenced by any of the previous versions. It is not uncommon, the same happened to Berta Elena Vidal de Battini in Argentina and to Laura Gonzenbach in Sicily. The difference is that Vidal de Battini and Gonzenbach were interested in linguistics and culture, whereas Fielde was a missionary. 

It is known of Fielde that, and I quote: “she initiated Bible women’s work, training native women to go out as evangelists and Bible teachers. During her 20-year tenure in China she established schools, wrote curriculum, and trained some 500 Bible women”. Considering the way in which she writes about the people who told her the tales, how she claimed that they “could not read” and that she had chosen her stories from a bigger number picking out those that were “less intelligible to those who are unfamiliar with the beliefs and customs of The Middle Kingdom”, I think it’s safe to say she edited her versions, much like Andrew Lang and others. 

So, basically, what is most often advertised as the “Chinese version” of Beauty and the Beast (and the one Yoshitani adapted, if we compare the two) isn’t actually a written Chinese variant (a different case would be, for example, Ye Xian and Cinderella) but the adaptation of a missionary of a story she claims was told to her by unnamed people from Guangdong. 

Considering that, by the time this was published, Villenueve’s and Beaumont’s versions had been published and adapted for 100+ years, I don’t think it’d be remiss to be cautious when calling this a “predecessor”. I’m not saying there aren’t Chinese folktales that could be, but the one named and quoted, as it is, is dubious. This is particularly complicated for a work that is, with a lot of care, putting together a compilation that is meant to be diverse in origin. 

Furthermore, Yoshitani’s adaptation removes the serpent altogether (what previously tied that version to Panchatantra and adaptations of Cupid and Psyche like d’Aulnoy’s The Green Serpent) and also changes aspects to make it more similar to the popularized Beaumont version. 

For example, in the translated version of Panchatantra that is most available (a double translation from German to English, which also means potential trouble), the way in which the serpent becomes a man is like the way it happens in Villenueve’s version, as well as in later stories, but the bride of the serpent never leaves his side and acts dutifully towards him throughout. 

Villenueve involves the promise that Beauty makes for her return and the Beast in danger of dying as a consequence of the broken promise, something that comes directly from Cupid and Psyche (The Green Serpent also has it). 

Beaumont removes Beauty’s responsibility, her father is sick because of her departure and her sisters are the ones trying to keep Beauty in the house, breaking the promise.  

Fielde’s version, however, has the girl going on an errand to find water far away and upon returning, finding the serpent dying of thirst, throws it in the water and then he’s transformed. 

Yoshitani combines Beaumont’s with Fielde’s: the girl goes back to her father who’s sick and, upon returning, finds the serpent dying of both loneliness and thirst, throws it into the water and is transformed. 

So, basically, someone could read the 2020 version and say “this Chinese version seems like The Original, Villenueve must have used this” but there are layers upon layers of edition over them, some influenced by colonization, others by publishing appeal, others by combining what the compiler knew with what they want to represent, etc. 

The problem is that a lot of things that we might find to be little details could be a sign of the imposition of Euro-centric symbols upon other cultures. In our example (which is one of many things), we should think about how this idea of Beauty leaving the serpent to return to her father, as a simplification of the myth Villenueve was working with, influences a story that didn’t have this idea of the repenting bride in the first place. 

ANYWAY. Be mindful when you quote fairy tale “origins”, is what I’m getting at. If you are going for native folk stories, try to find where the version you have was compiled in and if there is a written trace to its culture of origin. I applaud people who want to include stories from other origins than just Europe, but be mindful of not imposing over them Euro-centirc perspectives, symbols and values. 

I’ve already had enough with YA authors playing the re-telling game to last me a lifetime. Let’s be more careful than that. 

[starberry-cupcake]

wait, can you tell me more about D'Aulnoy being inspired by midwives and nurses? one thing that stands out a lot to me when reading her stories is how much more classism, racism and ableism her stories contain, so hearing about the working class influence on them would be interesting

I am going to apologize beforehand for the length of this response, I hope that at least some of this is interesting :/ 

To put it out there from the get-go, she was a high class woman in the late 17th century/very early 18th century who had the means to publish so yes, her stories are problematic. I think the classism continues pretty unquestioned all the way until HCA in European fairy tales, but the racism and ableism don’t stop there. Some of that is even carried out to fairy tales of the European colonies, later independent countries, in which the class system remains the same, albeit the figures of heroes tend to come most frequently from low class workers (the figure of “peones de campo” in Latin American stories, who win fights against Kings, for example). 

But, back to Madame d’Aulnoy, the presence of midwives and nurses in d’Aulnoy’s life, and pretty much across the conteuses of the time, was what is said to have actually influenced the early presence of fairy “godmothers”, which would later be known as one of the “donor” archetypes. She had several stories with fairies in baptisms who cursed or blessed children, depending on the parents’ behavior, and some of them were present through their entire lives. The presence of fairies in births is said to come, at least partially, from midwives and nurses. 

Madame d’Aulnoy was given in marriage to a 45 year old man when she was 15 years old, 4 of her children were born when she was a teenager (it is said one of them might have died when she was imprisoned). Her husband was a known unlikable character with political influence and has been described also as a “libertine” and “depraved” by scholars (her imprisonment was actually because she tried to get him arrested for treason and it backfired on her). Basically, she was not in a healthy marriage and she had 4 children when she herself was a child. 

Because of this, the figure of midwives and nurses was very present during her life, some academics say that the fact that they were present during birth and in several instances of the development of children was important for her and the other women telling stories in salons, and that carried into the figure of the fairies. 

The conteuses tended to have conflicting relationships with men in their lives and many shared these sort of experiences with d’Aulnoy (it is said that she aided Angélique Ticquet, for example). So many of them had this same experience, when it comes to the relying on these other figures for the birth and care of their children. 

The uses of fairies, witches and goddesses as prominent characters was also derived from folklore and paganism as a way to establish a separation with the patriarchal figures of the court and the King, and many of those figures related to both art accessible to the high classes (opera, Greek and Roman myths) and the stories these working women were known to tell (many of the aspects of pagan beliefs were carried as memes— in the academic use of the word, although it’s similar to the current use of it— to the fairies in stories).  

d’Aulnoy is said to have coined the term “fairy tale”, in her stories and those of her contemporaries the presence of fairies was used as an expression of female empowerment (for the women of that class at that time), but they carried memetically beliefs, stories and characteristics of women who had been around in their lives, especially midwives and nurses. 

Now, when Perrault published his book of fairy tales (under the name of his son, because he wanted to distance himself from them), he also took these ideas, both from the stories the nurses told his children and from the way in which the archetype of fairy had developed in the salons where women narrated and then published their stories. The main difference between him and the women in salons, which would I believe influence the genre from then onward and establish the classism more deeply, is that he had a more morally-charged intent to educate through them, “translating” the stories to what people of his own class would appreciate and giving lessons and morals (especially to young women). The salonniers were more into their own depiction and their own enjoyment, even if morals or ideals were carried in their stories, Perrault was the one who coined the whole moral at the end of the story to educate society as a whole. Or, the part of society he cared about.  

It’s important to note that most women storytellers of this time and further down the line continued with the classism, even if the inspiration of some working women was there. I think a distinct point of change from widely known fairy tales might have been, in the mid 18th century, when Beaumont adapted Villeneuve’s Beauty and the Beast and made her Beauty of common descent rather than a princess. Still, Beaumont’s intent was to have young girls with enough means to “marry well” and get an education in different languages to settle with a convenient high class husband, so even if it’s a distinctive point, it’s still classist. 

Later on, compilers like Laura Gonzenbach with her Sicilian compilation, for example, would be more respectful of the class depiction of women and kept the narrator voices as faithful as possible, but there was still a type of editing from a higher class woman into another language (she published them in German, for reasons long to explain here), which created still a sort of barrier, as much as she tried to respect the source. In the early 20th century, Berta Elena Vidal de Battini did a similar but larger work in Argentina and kept the entire voice of the narrators without editing their speech, jargon, pronunciation or any of the words that came from languages like Quechua, Mapuche, Guaraní, etc., with extensive notes. There is still the separation of class between interviewer and source, but the focus to keep true and respectful to the source became more and more important. 

I really hope this is interesting or at least helps understand the context of my tags! 

[starberry-cupcake]

So, yesterday I saw a post about fairy tales and whether or not they’re “gruesome”. I wanted to expand on that in the tags, because a) I’m coincidentally finishing the preparation of the fairy tale history part of my workshop and b) I think there’s a huge part played by the intent of the writer/compiler and the audience it was aimed that, and that’s also very interesting to me; but then decided against adding it. 

Still, @akallabeth-joie and @aurora-australis-tumbles wanted to know what I had to say, but tumblr ate half of my response last night. Here it is again, on read more not to bother those who don’t care about this. 

The original post mentioned how some fairy tales aren’t really as “gruesome” as they’re made up to be and how that varies, in op’s opinion, due to culture or historical time frame. It’s actually not only that, because some very different versions come from the same countries, same time frames and sometimes even the same people.

A big difference in the content, construction and symbology of fairy tales has to do with the intended audience as well as the ideological mindset of the writer/compiler individually and the work the compilation was inscribed in.  

In the post, one of the examples mentioned was Beauty and the Beast, which is one of the best examples of different audiences for the same tale in the same country and similar time frames. 

Villeneuve’s version of the tale was influenced by the French salonnières, like Madame d’Aulnoy, so it was intended mostly to women of the aristocracy to entertain themselves. The part about them being aristocrats is very important, because class was an inherent part of the story, in Villeneuve’s version for example Beauty is secretly a princess, making her the right class to marry a prince.

Beaumont’s version, which is more widely known, was published in a magasin for young women who were getting an education and learning languages, which makes sense because Beaumont was a governess. As a result, a lot of the story is framed into marrying well and putting up with whatever husband you got, basically, but it’s also framed in a different more naive way, if you will. 

A clear difference between the two is the “sexual content”, for example, Villeneuve’s Beast asks Beauty to sleep with him whereas Beaumont’s asks her to marry him, and Villeneuve’s reason for the prince to be turned is because a fairy wanted to force herself onto him and he refused. 

Perrault was put in the post as an example of “not gruesome” because his Cinderella, as opposed to the Grimms’ Cinderella, doesn’t end in anyone being physically punished. Violently so, in the Grimm version, there’s bloodied feet and eyes getting gauged out. That doesn’t mean that Perrault was devoid of gruesome content, though, his Blue Beard is to me the scariest fairy tale ever because it excuses physical abuse towards women, something male translators were absolutely ok with until Angela Carter came in and said “what the actual fuck?”. 

But, in any case, Perrault’s Cinderella doesn’t have a punishment for the stepsisters (the stepmother disappears halfway through) because Cinderella being forgiving and kind and showing the poise to not only forgive her bullies but get them to marry well was proof of her feminine virtue. Because Perrault was writing for the French aristocracy, mostly young women, since he was contemporary to d’Aulnoy but was compiling stories with an entirely different mindset (and hiding the fact that it was him who was doing so). And again, this was for aristocrats, Cinderella was not in Perrault a story from rags to riches, she was born with enough rank to attend that ball, she wasn’t poor. 

The Grimms, on the other hand, were working differently. They were intending to build a compilation of tales to represent German tradition and identity, in a time in which they were lacking it (which is strange to think of now, but even the language was being threatened by the French influence). Their interest was in historical and traditional recuperation originally but the first edition of their selection did poorly and didn’t have much acceptance. 

Their second edition, which they made for children, took off like crazy. The Grimms were publishing in the early 1800s, and it was in the mid 1800s when the concept of childhood as we know it started to take shape. They got to live through the first steps of children being seen as independent beings, the start of a public education and literacy and working rights, albeit shitty ones. So, the kids’ edition needed morals and teachings that would focus on them. They gave Little Red Riding Hood a mother and turned her into a kid, they turned some mother characters into step mothers and they put punishments to showcase how you Shouldn’t Be Bad.

And yes, the punishments were gruesome and violent, but this is the same place that thought, in the mid 1800s, that Der Struwwelpeter was kid friendly fun, so what do I know about anything. 

Of course, like op said, some of this is dependent on history and culture, but also it’s super important to note that, when it comes to collected fairy tales and folk stories, the background, ideology, education and intent of the person writing or compiling the stories plays a big role in what they edit in them.

After the Grimms you’ll have people who are, like them, interested in recuperating stories of a specific place but with a much bigger philological intent which would take them to organize their stuff differently, like Afanasyev in Russia, Laura Gonzenbach in Sicily, Berta Elena Vidal de Battini in Argentina and so on.

Afanasyev compiled over 600 tales and added different versions of the same stories, to show all the variants one archetype could have, which derived into the immortal conservation of super important characters like Baba Yaga. 

Laura Gonzenbach, who spoke 4 languages, interviewed women with little means and collected over 90 stories from Sicilian oral tradition, and translated them while respecting their representations and ideas, as well as the cathartic need of expressing the violence and abuse they had suffered.  

Vidal de Battini had a very big interest on language and tradition, she worked for several decades, traveling over 100 times throughout Argentina and compiled over 3000 texts, including traditional stories, native peoples stories, legends, encounters with cryptids, jokes and tales about famous characters. She included a lot of notes and grammatical representations of dialect variations and explained how sometimes it overlayed with languages such as quechua, mapuche and other native tongues.

This also happened with writers, like Hans Christian Andersen, who was born in a low class, hated aristocracy and was also Very Much Not Straight, so his books and Perrault’s books might fist fight in my bookshelf when I’m not looking.

Anyway, fairy tales and folk stories are, to me, alongside legends, cryptids, horror tales and urban legends, one of the most representative forms of cultural identity. Still, the part that each person responsible for their collection played is also something that sheds light on many elements concerning their conception. It doesn’t taint them, it adds another layer that is fascinating to analyze, but doesn’t necessarily represent what one would think at first sight. 

These people took the stories from the popular imagination and gave them back transformed, and those new versions still keep being transformed within popular imagination again and again. 

[starberry-cupcake]

I’m gonna be posting photos of the books I end up using for each class of my workshop as I go, because why not. 

Class I will be about fairy tales and folk stories, and these have been the books I’ve used to work my way through planning so far: Maria Tatar’s annotated fairy tales (crucial), Jack Zipes’s The irresistible fairy tale, Madame D’Aulnoy’s Le cabinet des fées, Victorian fairy tales (the Siruela edition), Hans Christian Andersen (3 editions, aside from the Tatar book: the Wordsworth one, Zorro Rojo’s with Harry Clarke’s illustrations and Iberlibro’s), Grimm and Perrault from Iberlibro (but I’ll use only Tatar’s translations), Cuentos y leyendas populares de la Argentina by Berta Elena Vidal de Battini, Vasilissa the Beautiful by Afanasyev, De la narrativa oral a la literatura para niños from Catalejo, Como por encanto by Mirta Gloria Fernández & team, and the unconditional help of SurLaLune. 

Fairy tales which will be featured in the class, in chronological order: The Green Serpent by Madame D’Aulnoy, Cinderella or The Little Glass Slipper by Charles Perrault, Beauty and the Beast by by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Snow White by the Grimms, The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen, Vasilissa the Beautiful by Alexander Afanasyev, Goblin Market by Christina Rosetti, The Snake Who Bore Witness for a Maiden by Laura Gonzenbach and Juan Pumpeño by Berta Elena Vidal de Battini. The “by” also means “adapted by”, depending on the author. 

Illustrators included in this class: Clément-Pierre Marillier, Edmund Dulac, Jennie Harbour, Eleanor Vere Boyle, Walter Crane, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Kay Nielsen, Margaret Tarrant, Harry Clarke and Arthur Rackham. 

Next time I’ll post the Disney bibliography for class II. 

[starberry-cupcake]

I’m having some Issues reducing the content of my fairy tales class for my workshop but here’s the thing. 

I made it so that I could include the same amount of female writers/compilers (that go from the late 1600s to the mid 1900s) than male writers/compilers. And some stories, especially those of the female writers, don’t have many illustrations (or any, in some cases). Which is why I decided to double the illustrations on the fairy tales that have a lot of them, and I thought that every one with a pair would add on a female illustrator (from the 1800s or early 1900s). 

I didn’t have to and maybe even shouldn’t have added more content to an already packed program, but every time I was researching one of these ladies (because, in the books I have, none of them are included, so I had to do extra research) there’s always some bullshit like “she wasn’t allowed to sell her art or host exhibitions because she was not only a woman but also of low class” or “she wasn’t allowed to attend an art school with nude models like male artists were” or “she was relegated to illustrating postcards until someone gave her a fairy tale illustrating gig” and I NEED TO PUT THEM IN HERE. If nobody’s gonna talk about them, if the countless books I have on the matter don’t include them, it’s more reason to do my part for these ladies. 

Long story short, I was able to add Eleanor Vere Boyle, Margaret Tarrant, Jessie Wilcox Smith and Jennie Harbour, I wasn’t able to find an illustration by Kate Greenaway that fit enough to add her but I may mention her in passing, at least when talking about D’Aulnoy. 

As for female storytellers I have Madame D’Aulnoy, the Villeneuve/Beaumont pair, Laura Gonzenbach, Christina Rossetti and Berta Elena Vidal de Battini.

But I don’t think I’ll be able to fit all this in 1 class, especially when there’s gonna be a lot of interaction with people. And my dad told me that maybe I shouldn’t include things I’m interested in if people aren’t interested too but HOW WOULD THEY KNOW IF THEY’RE INTERESTED IF PEOPLE DON’T KNOW THESE WOMEN. 

I don’t even know, I’ll do my best to figure it out and be able to do them right.  

[starberry-cupcake]

Preparing the fairy tale bit of my workshop is difficult, mostly because one thing is the selection I want and another the one I can do considering the translations I have available and how reliable they are (for all but one of the authors I chose which is in my native language). 

Fairy tale translations are a mess, not only because of dialect changes and specificity but also because every translator adapts them, to some extent. I’m relying mostly on academic translations, which are the closest I can get, and those are most often in Spanish from Spain, which is the best I can do all things considered, even if not ideal. 

I have a collection of different editions and I’ll provide copies of the fairy tales I choose to work with to those who attend my classes, so they don’t have to purchase anything if they don’t want to, but I wanted to have suggestions of editions they can access to if they want, and you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find decent translations in editions that aren’t expensive or difficult to find, even from the Grimms. And when I say “decent” I mean translations that aren’t changing the text to adhere to a certain type of content, like religious or of certain ideology or beliefs. I have some online sources that are very good, but most in English, so that isn’t ideal for them. 

In any case, I chose to work with 10 authors/compilers, 5 male and 5 female (well, 11 and 6 male because the Grimms are two, but you get the idea), in chronological order I chose: Madame D’Aulnoy, Charles Perrault, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Alexander Afanasyev, Christina Rossetti, Laura Gonzenbach, Giuseppe Pitrè & Berta Elena Vidal de Battini. 

I’m picking one text of each, with the exception of Grimm, because class 2 of this module is about Disney adaptations and I’m choosing 2 movies that have Grimm bases so they’re gonna have to read both. When it comes to which version of the tale I chose, sometimes it was due to necessities of what I’m talking about and sometimes due to availability. All in all, yeah, one would think that stuff on the public domain would be easier to access but nope.