Fairy Tales and Hemmingway




Fairy tales often times use a central message and a happy ending in order to teach a lesson to a younger audience.  Popular fairy tales are usually set up in a way that good actions, and behavior can be easily identified and positive outcomes can be attributed to them.  A satisfying conclusion to a tale however, isn't the only means of enforcing a lesson.  Fairy tales often feature characters that contrast with the main protagonist(s) in nature and often times meet a gruesome end.  These characters are not only meant to "put the fear of God" into children, but to also entertain adults and or more sadistic audiences indulging in the oral tale.  This is similar in a way, to having adult humor in children shows.  They introduce setups and jokes children don't fully understand, but can keep older audiences entertained.
Fairy tales were passed on orally and stories generally kept similar details, characters, and outcomes through different cultures.  Some classic tales have variations that diverge far from the originally stories.  For example, there is a variation of Snow white and the Seven Dwarves in which the Dwarves are the focus of the story and the princess snow white is absent. The dwarves instead encounter a peasant who they allow to stay the night. In the end, the girl is accused of prostitution and the dwarves are killed.  Whether or not this story is a response to the story of Snow White, a continuation of the tale, a drastically different retelling or a new story altogether is difficult to determine.  You might be able to conclude  that the audience intended to hear "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" and the audience who enjoyed "Death of the Seven Dwarves" were completely different.  One story highlights a character's beauty and kindness and rewards them greatly, while the other condemns seven innocent people to death for a good deed.  If you  were to tell a child these two stories in succession what lesson would they get from it? Maybe there was a need to highlight that a woman living  with seven strange men was a condemnable act, or maybe a crowd yearned to hear a tale in which these outcasts were brutally murdered.

snow white tales

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0709.html

death of the seven dwarves

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/dwarfs.html

I've only read Hills Like White Elephants by Hemmingway
however, this is  an interesting article I've read about his views on good writing.

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/dwarfs.html

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