Dec 28, 2009

Memoirs of a Geisha | The Classic Fairy Tale Motif

Covintree is a graduate student and expository writing instructor at Emerson College. In this essay, Covintree explores Golden’s novel in relation to classic fairy tale motif of Cinderella.

Fairy tales and folklore have contributed a great deal to the development of people and their understanding of their place in the world. As Maria Tatar points out in the preface to her book The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm “transformed the fables, yarns, and anecdotes of an oral storytelling tradition into literary texts destined to have a powerful influence on cultures the world over.” The literary and critical community continue to return to their stories because the tales are filled with violence, sex, transformation, retribution, and...