GhostontheNet (post: 1393271) wrote:Right, answer me with the image of the deadly chalice that kills everyone but the prince-hero. That's a great way to disprove a claim to archetypal imagery.
It appears that you have, once again, anachronistically over-examined something to the point of missing the author's intent entirely. Let me be more direct.
I like literary analysis. I can talk about it for hours. It seems that you love it too, and that's great! However, there are two problems with the type of post that you made here:
1) First, and most importantly, CAA isn't really the place for linking sexual meanings to classic stories. It's certainly not against the rules, but it just isn't the type of thing that is generally appropriate to talk about here. When making a post on any forum, it's best to take the community into account. I certainly wouldn't want to be the one responsible for any 13 year olds who decided to google search some of the things referenced in your post.
2) Perhaps I am of an older tradition of thought, but it seems to me that your analysis tends to over-examine things for the sake of over-examination. Getting at the literary meanings of things is great, but sometimes it's easy to look into them so far as to start shoehorning meanings in where there were none meant to be found.
3) Literary analysis of fairy tales is especially tricky, given that each fairy tale has many variations, in which none are identical, and many times the things we think are symbolic are no longer even present in the tales. I'd be very wary of using any kind of Freudian psychological analysis, as these symbols are often less important in fairy tales than they are in other, more authoritatively written storytelling mediums.
EDIT:
GhostontheNet (post: 1393283) wrote:My apologies if everyone was sleeping through their fairy tales, or through their lives and education for that matter, but the whole purpose of a fairy tale is to communicate some layer of symbolic meaning normally hidden from view.
You know, I was hoping that this could be a civil conversation, but you just took it out of that territory. I'm sorry if my image response felt aggressive and ignorant to you, that was not the intent. I don't have anything to say in response to this, other than that it saddens me to see this.
And with that:
[font="Tahoma"][SIZE="2"]"It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things."
-Terry Pratchett[/SIZE][/font]