What do Fairies Tell Us, Really? UPDATE: WALK THROUGH TIERGARTEN

UPDATE: The weather on the following Saturday looks nice, so let's meet up at S-Bahnhof Tiergarten and have a casual walk while we talk. We can end up at Café am Neuen See or at the Schleusenkrug, or some random place on the periphery. If the weather forecast turns foul we can always revert to the Motel One as a backup.

Recently, Jordan Peterson published a reading and discussion of Snow White, which can be viewed on YouTube or listened to via Spotify. Over the course of about an hour and twenty minutes he recounts the story and provides a fairly deep but still eminently approachable symbolic analysis of the text, along with a bit of cutting commentary over the recent film which purports to be a modern-day rendition of the original Disney animation.

Peterson's analysis specifically identifies:

• The Evil Queen as a "devouring mother" figure in intrasexual competition with her own daughter, and also an avatar of the unwinnable battle of age against youth on the field of physical beauty
• The Princess as an allegory of uncorrupted, even naive femininity put at risk from the forces typified by the Evil Queen
• The Dwarves as stand-ins for "ordinary men" and their oderly lives as indicative of a "common social patriarchy" as traditionally enforced by fathers and brothers, in which the Princess takes imperfect, temporary refuge from the Evil Queen's depredations
• The Prince representing a kind of solid masculinity and a specific sort of patriarchy, instantiated by the role of husband, who is ultimately charged with protecting the Princess from falling prey to the Evil Queen (and also from eventually becoming one, herself)

I have long been interested in European fairytales of the kind collected by the Brothers Grimm, and especially interested in how many of those stories have been preserved and reinterpreted by modern cultural institutions as a sort of "cultural appropriation of the past", and double-especially an Americanisation and commercialisation of ancient European folktales. Peterson's discussion of Snow White gives the perfect opportunity to explore these themes further.

I propose we meet to discuss some or all of the following topics:

• Peterson's analysis of Snow White specifically -- it is bound to be controversial, given its pro-patriarchal standpoint, and could be quite productive ground for discourse
• What can we learn from ancient fairytales, in general? Notably, many of the works collected by the Grimms are quite famously, well, grim. They reflect both timeless archetypical social structures and the very particular social and economic conditions of Medieval and Early Modern Europe
• What do modern retellings of these ancient tales say about us? Do you have a preferred movie or recent literary adaptation? (For example, have you seen The Huntsman and do you have anything to say about how it compares to either the classic or modern Disney films?) How does it feel to see the wealthiest entertainment company in history "reinterpret" classic European stories to suit modern sensibilities, when its retellings of many of these stories made it so wealthy in the first place?
• Do you have a favourite Grimm or related tale? How would you analyse it in the way Peterson has done with Snow White?

If any of these questions interest you, I'd love to speak with you about them.