The Quest in Literature
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Scholars often contend that there is only one story that has ever been told and that all of our epics, sonnets, tabloids, novels, and fairytales are simply a variation on this single theme, which is the story of the quest. While one might argue that such reductionism is a little extreme. this quest story - that is, the story of something that has been lost and must be found and of the dangers and difficulties faced by the one who is on the quest - is arguably a fundamental element of all of the most successful and long-running tales. Fairytales must be counted among such successful stories, for while we might be inclined to dismiss them as merely kidstuff, as something that we once listened to but forgot long before puberty, fairytales are in fact important elements of our culture. Fairytales are one of the most significant and effective tools that parents have in passing on the values of a society to the next generation, and so if we wish to understand the central values of a culture we should never ignore the stories that parents tell to their children and the specific types of quests engaged in those tales (Propp 41).The story of Cinderella - which has versions in scores of cultures and languages and historical periods - is what might well be considered a "perfect" fairytale; its widespread popularity across so many different cultures suggests that this is indeed the case. This popularity with both children and adults (for if it were not popular with adults as well they
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t the immediately obvious moral or goal of Cinderella, it is because we are so used to thinking of fairytales as unimportant, as belonging only to the realm of childhood and not to the realm of politics and culture and society. In fact, they belong to both, as a number of scholars of folklore in general and fairytales in particular have argued, as Vaz da Silva summarizes below. Fairytales only appear to be simple:
After summarizing virtually all preceding scholarship on fairy tales, the Danish author proposes a comprehensive theory the basis for which is the clear assessment that all problems in the realm of "oral verbal art" have "to be seen as being dependent upon that of meaning" (8). After Holbek's magnum opus it is simply not possible to disregard the symbolic aspect of fairy tales. I thus concur with Alan Dundes in seeing in Interpretation of Fairy Tales "a seminal work, a veritable landmark" (203). Now this entails, for those of us who would profit from this heritage, an obligation of close readings (Vaz da Silva, 2000).
Cinderella is an important fairytale not simply because it entertains children or even primarily for this reason. Rather, it is an important story because it reinforces the core values of so many cultur
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Approximate Word count = 1443
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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