I found the second speaker to be just like the voices in my head when I’m writing something. I see them as a sign of self-doubt that keep me from creating more. When you overanalyze what you’re writing, it’s really hard to move forward when working in a piece. There’s always a better, less prejudice-or-cliche-charged way of putting something down in words. Should we always pay attention to that, though? Wouldn’t that take away the luster of the writing? I definitely think that there should be an effort to insert a language free of prejudice and judgements into contemporary literary pieces. Constant revision while writing something, though, can work against you.

I also see the way Margaret Atwood approached the topic as a form of criticism to how society can be normative. Television and movies are filled with white characters being the focus of most stories, for example. That second speaker, the voice of consciousness, criticizes the need of the author to go down that same path.

Other issues are also brought up, such as how the author mentions the girl’s weight and portrays a mother-in-law as a bad person, adding more to these stigmatized matter. After a while facing the interruptions from this second speaker, I started to think of how there are so many social rules that we have to follow to be politically correct. Coming from a different culture where we don’t pay much attention to that, I used to find that habit overly dramatic. Now I do understand that being careful with how we approach certain topics is always important. If a group of people misinterpret the way you expressed yourself may have a destructive outcome.

0

The short story “There was Once” by Margaret Atwood is humorous.  It attempts to change the stereotypical fairy tale stories that the young girls are so used to hearing.  In today’s society most women recognize being beautiful as being good and reversely being unattractive is being bad.  It also attempts to show what the perfect image for girls to have while they are growing up through fairy tale stories such as Cinderella. The message that is being emphasized on this short story is that of the importance of physical appearance within children stories where the main character is always beautiful and good. The characters in the story seem to be a middle aged man and a critical woman that constantly questions the narrative of the story.

The story starts  with the first speaker telling the story of Cinderella. “There was once a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest.”. Another character in the story criticizes every possible solution proposed by the narrator.  It is important for readers to question a writing to get more depth inside the story.

I really enjoyed reading this short story because it made me smile and think about all those stereotypes that exist in our society today.

0

The short story, “There Was Once,” by Margaret Atwood, shows that fairy tales are not at all like reality and that people need to realize this when reading them. Modernized fairy tales depict an oversimplified world. The story starts with someone beginning to read the story, “Cinderella,” to another person. The reader had just read the first sentence of the story before being stopped by the listener. The listener disagreed with the setting of this story. It took place in a forest, much like many other fairy tales. She wanted to hear a story in a more realistic, updated setting. The reader then changed the sentence to accommodate the listener’s request. However even after changing it, the listener was unhappy with other parts of that one sentence. She then wanted to change the status of wealth, the labels of good and evil, the importance of the physical attractiveness and that it was a stepmother in the story. She even disliked that fact that the sentence mentions the protagonist is a young “girl” even though she marries in the end, and that the story is set in the past, not the present.

The listener tore that sentence apart word by word. Though we are accustomed to seeing this kind of writing in fairy tales, maybe it is right to not accept them blindly. Especially when children hear these stories, they are deceived into believing in them. The listener thought about the falsities she would have to listen to in this story and she decided it needed to be more believable. She is trying to teach us that we should rid this literature of all its clichés and eternal happy endings and hear more truth.

0

In the short story “There was Once” the author Margret Atwood took many risks in the writing of this story. “There was Once” has two speakers in it. The audience is not given a description of them; we are more so just thrown off into the deep end of dialogue. The story starts off with the first speaker telling the story of Cinderella. “There was once a poor girl, as beautiful ash she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest.” This is when we meet speaker two he interrupts the storyteller by asking a bunch of questions. “Forest? Forest is passe, I mean I have had it with all this wilderness stuff. It’s not a right image of our society today. Let’s have some urban for a change.” This brings us to the first change that the speaker prompts the story teller to make. The next change the speaker prompts the storyteller to make is when the storyteller is describing Cinderella as “a middle-class, girl as beautiful as she was good.” The speaker tells the storyteller to cut beautiful because we are dealing with to many intimidating physical role models. Thus leading the storyteller to revise his story to “There was once a girl who was a little overweight and whose front teeth stuck out.” We see that the storyteller has made her out to be the farthest from beautiful.

0