Thank you so much, @jayna. Your comment on thin post means a lot to me.
In my country, being a teacher is not easy; it’s demanding—but only if you want to do a good job—and saying that it’s not well paid is a nicely put understatement (I could say a lot on that matter, but, like Bartleby the Scrivener, “I’d prefer not to”), and in the last two decades it’s also been 100% deprived of success. I write on these topics because I need to remember how things used to be for me, so I think I may sound like a teacher once too often.
Analyzing stories has become a pastime for me, indeed, and I hope that writing about those analyses can be useful for somebody, preferably some true reader or a teacher. I think life is also a set of stories that can be analyzed, and when you think you understand some of these stories, then you can probably write some decent fiction that hopefully somebody will like (and better, they’ll tell you so).
Fairy tales have evolved along with the societies they live in; this is how they thrive, otherwise they die out—or linger like a ghost with an unfinished business, struggling to remember what it was about—. The world used to be a more violent place, apparently, and although an argument on paradigms could prove this impression wrong, all of us can see that things are at least a lot, lot, different than they used to be two hundred or a thousand years ago. A story like the one I’ve written about is full of gore and hostility that we can hardly appreciate because our mental encyclopedias are now so much wider and full of Hollywood FX and SciFi.
I totally agree with you when you say that it can be hard for fiction to represent real life if the go easy on it; I think that the understanding of this issue has led us to Reality TV (which I think I might hate a little). But I can see that trying to connect reality and fiction and do something to better the world out of it totally make sense: The Grimm brothers tried to reinforce social and family values of their time in their versions of fairy tales; and a century and a half later, Bettelheim (accused of plagiarism and all) would tell us that children who had undergone traumatic experiences (e.g. war) could resolve their conflicts vicariously by reading fairy tales (because their heroes and heroines overcame impossible obstacles; if they could, why couldn’t they).
Thanks for visiting my blog and for taking the time to read and comment on my post. I did put much love in writing it :)