The Cinderella Complex

I agree with what Dowling says as the idea of the "cinderella complex". I think that many woman prepare their entire lives for the sweeping off their feet-type of romance, but moreover for security. While men depend only on themselves, even though i have witnessed some exceptions, women are able to experience their own independence with the backdrop of eventually finding someone to take care of them in essence. I personally do not believe in this, I think I can only truly and happily depend on myself, but I understand the need for the this attachment, because I know people who desire this/who need this, at least thats what they think. Dowling calls this marriage as a "collapse of ambition", which I am not sure I would go that far, but I understand that once you find this security, there is a sense of slowing down, becoming accustom to a life of dependency - no need for a quest/search anymore. 

Class Notes 1/16/09: the rich are really amputated in some fundamental way - literally the stepsisters chop off their feet - Carter's version of Ashputtle- Cinderella is not just dirty, but literally burned; sacrifice for the purpose of pushing  someone into independence "give your own milk next time, I'm dry" - anticlimax for giving her all your milk, blood, claws - "she did alright". 

Turning now to Weight, the retelling of fairytales by artists: (Jeanette Winterson)

In artistic retelling of fairytales, does art counteract ideology (wounded by wishes) - 

- I do not think art so much counteracts the surrounding ideologies of fairytales, moreover gives a deeper notion into the human interactions behind these ideologies, reinterprets these ideologies. For example, I have read Jeanette Winterson's novel "Written on the Body", and I have to say it is my favorite book to date (the only one I never sold back to the bookstore!). In the book she falls madly in love, a love that is so deep, so fairytale, so passionate that it literally consumes the narrator - yet this is not a rag to riches tale, it is just a journey through the emotions of love. Yet the ideology behind fairytales is the happily ever after, that is the essential notion of a fairytale - yet this novel reworks happily ever after. The narrators lover is diagnosed with cancer, and she consequently dies, but the imagination and vigor with which the narrator writes is so poetic, that it is almost as the creation of art is her happily ever after.