Writing a Parody of a Classic
For my FREN 261: The Age of Louis XIV course, I chose to do a creative assignment for my final essay. The assignment? — Write a fairy tale in the style of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, or Hans Christian Andersen. I chose to write a parody of the childhood classic, “Sleeping Beauty,” originally written by Perrault.
In FREN 261, we finished the semester by studying French fables and fairy tales. We even were encouraged to go see La Belle Endormie, a modern adaptation of Sleeping Beauty during which the majority of the movie occurs during the dreams of Sleeping Beauty during her 100 year slumber.
For my final essay, I wrote a parody of the classic in a different way. I decided to take magic out of the fairy tale and teach a different moral. The moral of the original can be described as vague, at best. Perrault basically tells the readers that it is a good idea to wait for your prince to come along, but sometime you can’t.
In my version of Sleeping Beauty, which I titled: The Real Sleeping Beauty, a Scandalous Story, the princess is not loved by her parents. They had wanted to have a boy to inherit the throne, so instead they decide to groom their daughter to be perfectly marriageable by having this widowed masters of the arts teach their daughter how to apply makeup, how to dance, and how to sing, etc. Essentially, these lessons replace the gifts given by fairies in the original story. The evil fairy in my version, is not evil. Instead, she is a master of intelligence who decides not to give the princess a gift to teach her parents a lesson about their sexist ideals. She declares that the princess will most certainly fall victim to the shallow characteristics she will be taught.
And the rest is history…(It’s a little too scandalous to write on this blog).
The assignment was extremely enjoyable. I had an epiphany about what to do and then just sat down for a few hours and composed my final essay!
Hear’s to hoping my professor likes it too!
