Tales, continued

Structuralism:
    Recall that Propp said, in reaction to Aarne and Thompson’s Tale Types, that it did not matter who fulfilled a Function in a tale, just as long as the action was done. The most important thing was the frame, not the study structure within frame of culture. A French anthropologist, Claude Levi Strauss, rejected this view. To him, studying a story in a vacuum, separate from the culture that produced it was counterproductive and flawed. He wanted to clarify the function of a story in a society, e.g., what it says to those hearing it. Therefore, one needs particularly to look at the details Propp ignored to understand a culture and its values. That is precisely what Radin did. Structuralism is characterized by an interest in the actual structure of the tales and other narratives, focusing on binary/complementary oppositions. What is significant here in contrast to Propp's formalism is that structuralism is situated within a cultural system. A later form of structuralism is less concerned with such structural oppositions and more with the cultural structures revealed in stories of all kinds (we will focus on tale) and also the functions of the stories in revealing these structures and how people learn/use from the stories. Functional structuralism has been attacked for being too narrow or limited by various specialists that followed, for ignoring performance context (audience/teller interaction), for not considering the complexity of culture (which is not simply a set of binary categories), for being too limited in the functions that folklore was said to address. We will discuss structuralism and other approaches to the tale (and oral literature generally) that emerged from and in opposition to the functional-structuralist school with particular emphasis on intersectionality and
    We are going to apply structualist methods to a Russian tale and to a French-American tale. Your job for class is: reread Finist the Bright Falcon and compare it to Cinderella (retold in the original version below). You should determine how the tales are the same,  and how they differ. These differences are most important for our class discussion. Try to determine what these differences tell us about the two cultures’ values, and what a child is learning from these tales to be a socialized adult.

Cinderella is the daughter of a wonderful man and woman. Her mother dies, and he father decides that he must remarry to have someone to take care of him and his daughter. He marries a woman with two daughters. Instead of taking care of her, the evil stepmother and sisters force Cinderella to do all the work, while they relax. Cinderella has no decent clothes, while her stepmother and sister are always wearing beautiful gowns. Finally the prince invites all the women in the kingdom to a ball, so that he can find a bride (his lack). The stepmother and sisters refuse to take Cinderella, because they say she has no clothes and is too ugly for the prince to care about. However, Cinderella’s fairy godmother, her real mother, comes to her and arranges for her to go to the ball, with a magic coach and clothes. No one recognizes this beautiful, charming woman, but the prince falls in love with her. Cinderella leaves at midnight, but loses her shoe as she goes. The prince goes to every home in the kingdom to find the woman the shoe fits, so that he can marry her. When he arrives at Cinderella’s house, the stepsisters try on the shoe, but their feet are too big. They cut off their toes, but the shoe still will not fit them. Finally he asks the charmaid, Cinderella, to try on the shoe, despite the fact that her stepmother and sisters protest. The shoe fits, Cinderella turns into a princess and tells the prince about what her stepmother and sisters have done to her. He kills the three evil women and marries her.