Temitayo Adewusi Period 7 11/21/22 Modern Mythology 2022

 Literacy & Learning

When I was younger I really enjoyed reading Rick Riordan’s books. So I signed up for the class thinking we’d talk about Percy Jackson and Camp Half-Blood, but I was wrong. What the class actually is, is us reading different texts and being able to analyze and connect them into our own lives. So when we started on fairy tales I was a little confused, and quite frankly didn’t want to read any of them. However, upon further reading I saw that fairy tales are actually kind of cool. First off, fairy tales (in their original state) usually have a deeper meaning. When reading the Cinderella stories we saw the common theme of the princess being kicked out of her hometown, going through trials and tribulations, then meeting the prince and getting married and they live happily ever after blah blah blah. But when asked to view the stories through a different lens (critical theory), we saw the stories in a different light. My group took the story of Lin Lan and related it to Critical Disability Studies. People with disabilities are not seen in the same light as those without them because people will never see them as capable as able bodied people. When they take their medicine or use prosthetics to become somewhat “normal”, they are still treated differently.  In Lin Lan, Beauty used the yellow cow to help her complete the impossible tasks her stepmother gave her. Her mother refuses to accept this and continues to treat her worse. When she discovers that Beauty was using the cow, she kills it and continues to belittle Beauty. In Donkeyskin, Cinderella descended from royalty to the working class. At the end of the story she was able to marry the prince and ultimately go back to her original royal status. That is a marxist criticism. Only those who already have wealth are able to move around to whatever class they want, while the working class is unable to advance in society. Other groups even saw Colonialism and Critical Race theories in the other stories and explained their views to the class. These different lenses definitely altered my perception of not just the Cinderella stories, but of fairy tales themselves. It got me thinking about whether or not ALL fairy tales have a deeper meaning to them that we have to really sit down and look at in order to see.

Now how did these impact me? Well it made me take a look at things through a different lens. In life you need to be very open-minded in order to understand things around you and learn. When meeting new people and interacting with new cultures, it often seems odd. There’s a little voice in the back of your head saying, “This is weird, get away from it.” While instead that voice should be saying, “This isn’t what I’m used to, maybe I should give it a shot.” Being open minded to the world, I believe, is what connects people and allows us to come closer together.