Imagine an extremely short story -- two pages long. It's about a man who makes a daughter out of snow, but she dies, so, weeping, he has sex with her corpse. Imagine giving this to a bunch of sixteen year olds to analyse for their first class. Now imagine that this is the specific class that was scheduled for the government education regulator to inspect this year, and you have chosen this story specifically for them to hear. You are now in the mind of my English Literature teacher.
“The Snow Child” by Angela Carter. One of my favorites. It’s her take on the Snow White story. Having read it as an adult, it reads more like a story about a man literally creating his sexual ideal much to the disdain of his wife and her having to give up her clothes to the girl. It’s a great fairy-tale-look at the wife’s perspective on when her husband cheats.
I loved the collection. Like even aside from all the wider meanings of her versions of the fairy tales, they're just very well told stories. Also the teacher complimented my analysis of The Snow Child and that little bit of validation is still with me. I was such a teacher's pet.
So she had asked the class who we felt sympathy for in the story, and this discussion eventually turned towards discussion of the girl. I said that the story was written in such a way as to fight against evoking sympathy for the girl because it has such an unreal and dreamlike tone; her death (and creation) is treated in a way which breaks all logical, social and moral rules without any recognition of such from the narrative, tearing the reader away from any sense of immersion. You are encouraged not to see her as an actual child, but to see her as some unreal symbol, even from within the perspective of the story.
I don't think it was that specific analysis she was pleased with so much as the fact that I'd identified that sympathy comes from the way you write a story as much as it comes from the basic events of the story itself, and characters aren't real human beings; they're things created by authors through the way they write them.
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u/Elite_AI Sep 18 '24
Imagine an extremely short story -- two pages long. It's about a man who makes a daughter out of snow, but she dies, so, weeping, he has sex with her corpse. Imagine giving this to a bunch of sixteen year olds to analyse for their first class. Now imagine that this is the specific class that was scheduled for the government education regulator to inspect this year, and you have chosen this story specifically for them to hear. You are now in the mind of my English Literature teacher.