Sahil Patel - Assignment for 1/13/09

I personally find Robert Darnton’s “Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose” more productive in helping me to think about fairy tales as more than entertainment for children. Darnton explores different versions of classic fairy tales and the method of oral tradition that led to these tales. The entire essay is more of an anthropological discussion. He examines these stories as a way to understand and analyze peasant traditions and culture from where these stories come from. These stories are no longer just tales to entertain children, but a means to examine the mentality and culture of the speaker who would have passed this story on orally. What would bring a speaker to tell a version of “Little Red Riding Hood” that features cannibalism, striptease, and a disastrously negative ending for the protagonist? Unlike other articles that use the text itself to determine the mental condition of the writers during this time period, Darnton instead focuses on the culture of the time that would have allowed for such a grim and dark tale to be fodder for entertainment. Because Darnton chooses to look at these tales through an anthropological lens, they become less of a children's story that could be psychoanalyzed, and more of a text that could be used to understand illiterate and poor cultures centuries ago. For me, it immediately validates these stories’ usefulness as texts as historical documents deserved to be studied and analyzed.

- Sahil Patel