Into The Beautiful North Character Analysis

Have you ever wondered if there were other versions of Cinderella? Well there are, there isn’t just one version of Cinderella. Each version is a little bit different from each story because of the culture behind it. For example the “Cinderella” we know and love and the Ireland version the “Cinderlad”.The two cinderella stories, “Cinderlad” the Irish version and “Cinderella” the French version have both differences and similarities. Using the Motif “Damsel in distress” I can show that they are different & similar because of the culture they originated from and their social necessities.

In A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, Walter Younger wants to be a “real man”. His dream is to become successful in business and make his family rich. However, when all his money is stolen, he becomes very pessimistic, abandoning the ideas of morality and dignity. At the end of the play, his son Travis inspires him to value his family’s pride over materialism. Over the course of the play, Walter’s view of manhood changes from someone wealthy and successful to a person who has pride and believes in human dignity.

This modern fairy tale contains diverse characters but none of them are as important as the grandmother. In fact, through her narration the reader gets the basic

Jimmy knows too well the agonies of abandonment. First, when his mother, Cecilia, ran away with Richard to pursue a better lifestyle. Then, due to his father’s, Damacio Baca, alcoholisms and violent behavior; he also had to leave Jimmy behind. In spite of the drawbacks from abandonment to being a maximum security prisoner in Arizona State Prison, Jimmy preserver’s the darkness of prison by overcoming his illiteracy. However Cecilia and Damacio is not as fortunate as their child; Cecilia is shot by Richard after confronting him for a divorce and Damacio chokes to death after he is released from the detox center(Baca 263). Therefore the most significant event in this section of the memoir, A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca is the death of Jimmy’s parents.

Whether Female antagonists within fairy tales are portrayed in a positive or negative light their roles within the stories are very important if not crucial to the development of the protagonists. Karen Rowe in “Feminist and fairy tales” explains the divide between different female antagonists. Female antagonist come in all forms, Faeries, ogresses, evil queens, and evil witches step mothers and or step sisters. For the most part these characters are often divided between good and evil, or light and dark, but what is often realized, is that there isn’t much of a combination between the two groups in which an antagonist falls in between both categories. In this essay I will lay out the thematic roles of these different types of female antagonist’s portrayed within fairy tales.

In Lorraine's Hansberry A Raisin In The Sun. Walter wants to make money to support his family. He wants money because he thinks it makes him a “man”. How ever when his money is stolen, Walter’s perceptions of manhood shifts from valuing wealth and power to valuing family and pride.

Lori Baker-Sperry and Liz Grauerholz discuss the concept of female empowerment through beauty in their article “The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children’s Fairy Tale.” Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz state that, “women willingly engage in ‘beauty rituals’ and perceive being (or becoming) beautiful as empowering, not oppressive” (712). Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz argue that in children’s fairy tales, the female characters see their beauty as their most useful tool and would undergo “beauty rituals” to attain this beauty. By being beautiful, the Fairy Queen is able to win the attention and loyalty of Lanval. Not only does the Fairy Queen receive power in this bond, but also Lanval himself finds good fortune in the form of physical wealth. To further emphasize the Fairy Queen’s beauty and the power she holds over the court, France uses the series of girls prior to the Fairy Queen’s entrance. This builds a sense of suspense and the fact that the Fairy Queen easily trumps the girls in beauty further emphasizes her superiority. By emphasizing the Fairy Queen’s bodily beauty, France is able to show the power the Fairy Queen has over Lanval and the court.

In the novel True North by Kathryn Lasky a character that truly intrigues and impresses me is Lucy Bradford. Lucy is a 14 year old girl from a wealthy family in the mid-1800s who is brave, loyal , and strong, all qualities that were rare to find in a woman of her time. To begin with, there were many parts in the book were Lucy showed her curiosity. An example of this was when Lucy saw her grandfather leave the wedding party claiming that he was suffering from the gout. When Lucy noticed that her “Pap” was not limping the way he would if his excuse was real she followed him to see why he left.

The characters in this story represent your typical fairy-tale type characters like for example Amira, she is a princess waiting to be rescued by a worthy man who will claim her as his bride. These kinds of characters have been used in fictional stories for centuries.

In the play “A Raisin in the Sun” written by Lorraine Hansberry, she is able to take us to place to see what it was like for an African American family to survive in the mid-twentieth century. The play details how the main characters are going through an evolving social and economic position, as well as the evolving gender roles. Hansberry uses the characterization of Beneatha, Ruth, and Walter in order to show the expectations and assigned gender roles for the characters in the story. In short, Beneatha is depicted as a woman who is challenging gender norms and expectations upheld by her family, whereas Ruth is seen as an example of a submissive housewife fulfilling her expected duties. Using “A Raisin in the Sun,” as well as “Marxists

In A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, the Younger family is trying to achieve the American Dream, which is “the ideals of freedom, equality, and opportunity traditionally held to be available to every American”(cite dictionary.com). The Youngers are a black family living in a poor part of Chicago. They inherit ten thousand dollars because Mama’s husband died. Mama is the matriarch of the Younger family. Each family member has their own idea about how to use this money to fulfill their dreams, and the play uses the decisions of the family members and other characters to show the reader that people’s actions are not always motivated by what they appear to be. Mama wants to use the money to buy a house in a white neighborhood, because she thinks it is a better environment for her family than their current living conditions and will benefit her family. Although there are a number of people in A Raisin in the Sun who appear too want to help the Younger family, Mama shows through her decision to buy the house that she is the only person that is looking out for the best interests of her family.

Authors in many instances use the main elements in the story such as setting and narrative to prove a point in the story. For example, writers often use characters, their actions, and their interaction with other characters to support or prove a theme. In the short story “Our Thirteenth Summer”, Barry Callaghan effectively uses characters to develop the theme that childhood is fragile and easily influenced. One of the ways that Callaghan makes effective use of characters to develop the theme is by describing the tension between Bobbie and his parents. This usage of characters supports the theme because Bobbie’s childhood is no longer free to do what he wishes, but has to bow down to his parents’

Damsels in Address It is clearly evident that many fairy tales of childhood tend to shape the reader. Certain moral codes and ideals are tightly woven into the text of many fairy tales, promoting or denoting a character’s actions. In the Grimm’s fairy tales Cinderella, Brier Rose, and Rapunzel, the heroines of these tales exhibit strong behavioral codes, thus providing opportunity for the young female reader to relate to the damsel, or to model herself to behave in a similar fashion. In accordance with Marcia R. Lieberman’s essay, " ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation Through the Fairy Tale," I agree with the assertion that positive traits in fairy tale indicate reward, while the negative

In Carol Ann Duffy’s “Little Red Cap,” taken from her collection The Worlds Wife, Duffy incorporates her feminist views on life to help develop Red-Cap’s character into an independent woman. In her work, Duffy intends to illuminate for the audience that woman are more powerful than they are perceived by society. In the poem, she writes about a young girl at the peak of her childhood, who is about to enter into the next phase of her life. The young, inexperienced girl describes the beginning of her transformation into adulthood after losing her innocence to “The Wolf.” The loss of her innocence contributes to the realization that she no longer needs an old, no good wolf. She gains the courage and reflects on how her life changes dramatically after her departure from the wolf. The poem “Little Red-Cap," written in The World’s Wife, closely relates to certain aspects of the original fairy tales written by The Grimm Brother and Charles Perrault. Duffy’s version of “Little Red Cap” is a rewrite of the original fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood.” Duffy incorporates her strong feminist views by allowing Red-Cap to initiate her encounter with the wolf and to use him for gaining knowledge for her career and sexual desires. These aspects contribute to the development of Red-Cap’s character into a more independent woman to contradict the oppression of women in the past and present generations, and allowing her to offer suggestions for women in the future.

When someone mentions the name “Cinderella”, the first thing that usually comes to our minds is the fairytale in which the fair maiden who works so hard yet it treated so poorly gains her “fairytale ending” with a wave of a magic wand. However, the fairytale of Cinderella written by the Grimm Brothers has multiple differences in plot from the fairytale we all usually think of. The plot of the Cinderella written by the Grimm Brothers, written in 1812, is that a young female’s mother passes away early in the story, departing with the message to Cinderella to remain “pious and good”. Cinderella remained true to this message given to her by her mother, and she showed this in her work ethic. Because Cinderella had remained pious and good, her mother, in return, watched over her in the form of the birds above her grave that gave Cinderella help and material things that she needed. In the end, Cinderella has her “happily ever after”, for when the prince held a festival to find a new bride, she was chosen due to her insurmountable beauty. The feminist lens critiques how females are commonly represented in texts, and how insufficient these representations are as a categorizing device. These representations of women often include them being passive and emotional—staying back while the men do the work. Cinderella relates to the feminist lens because she fits into the typical representations of women created by men. Feminist criticism is important to recognize because women are often falsely represented as helpless, thus needing a man to come to their rescue. It is common in literature to see helpless women, crying and begging for help instead of being able to work out their own problems and hardships. Others, however, may believe that it is still important to uphold the fundamentals of the feminist lens because it keeps the man in power, which they say is important in keeping the man the head of the household. Cinderella thoroughly represents the feminist lens because it shows how women in literature uphold the representations of passive and emotional, created by the man.