Urban Fairy Tale
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One urban fairy tale that is told in different versions across the country served as the oral story to be transcribed. This story is the one about the supposedly escaped killer with a hook roaming the countryside when a couple parks on a lover's lane one night. They hear a noise and become frightened, and they drive away quickly. In the morning, as the story usually goes, they find a hook hanging from the door handle, or the bumper, or embedded in the soft top, or somewhere about the car. There are a number of versions of this story, and anyone hearing it in two different places will also hear different details about the killer and how he ravaged the local area many years before. They will also hear different locales for this story--the local lovers' lane becomes the site of the tale. Some people tell the story in a shortened form, almost like a joke, and others have a much longer and embellished version, always with the same chill at the end.Writing this story down has a number of effects, and the act of writing it down changes the story in subtle ways. For one thing, the story becomes "set" by the act of writing it down. That is, it is no longer in language that seems to be spontaneous and that may indeed be spontaneous as far as specifics are concerned--those telling the story do so conversationally, as if they were remembering real events. Writing the story down sets the details and eliminates that sense of creating a story right now based on real facts known t
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that becoming a wife is the ultimate goal and that obeying the husband as the king is the way to be successful. Molly is the character who serves both as a heroine and a traditional role model, and her experience is enhanced by comparison with her passive sisters on the one hand and the wife of the giant on the other. Molly may vanquish the wife of the giant, but in the end she takes a role that is much the same as that woman's.
A Marxist analysis of "Jack and the Beanstalk" and "Molly Whuppie" emphasizes the class distinctions that are evident in the stories. The time period for the story of Jack is a little less certain, but the era for Molly must be the feudal era that Marx wrote about as involving class distinctions between those who were landed and those who worked the land but did not own it. Both Jack and Molly come from peasant stock, and in each case the main character in the story is set against a giant that can be seen as representative of the landed class, the developing bourgeoisie standing between the peasantry and the aristocracy. This fact is made more explicit in "Molly Whuppie" where there is a king instigating the actions Molly takes against the giant.
Consider first the story of "Jack and the Beanstalk
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 4178
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page)
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