ENG 222 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Parthenogenesis, Industrial Revolution, Project Muse

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: English
• Course: ENG 222
• Professor: Andrew O' Malley

Document Summary

Journal of popular culture: for children"s lit. Perrault"s tale = gone through more extensive recodification: perrault would always put 2 morals at the end, in bluebeard, perrault saw bluebeard as a tale warning against female curiosity (sexual) Probably told by older women to younger women. Name is different in different versions, so it"s meaningless: tale is fundamentally about spinning, job became outsourced and was forgotten, spinning in pre-industrial a huge deal. Benefits to women: economic and marriage prospects: mythology of spinning metaphor for life itself (passage from raw/unformed matter shaped into thread; cut life is over) Forced into bargain (facing death: problem: woman can"t spin straw into gold, rumpelstiltskin tears himself in half. Unmanned in his defeat (flies out on a female cooking instrument) Help that she receives comes from another woman. Tale of female agency and community all based on spinning. Likely product of female spinning circle: rumpelstiltskin. Thread (product of proper spinning) is devalued in favour of gold.