Wonder Women Made me Wonder

At the beginning of the article by Zipes he starts us off with a, I assume, true story about Albert Einstein. When we was asked by a mother what books to read to her child to help him to become a successful scientist Al, if we can all him that, not only repose with fairy tales but when see asks what else he continues to advocate fairy tales. Zipes does not, and perhaps cannot go into Einstein’s reasoning. I venture to guess that maybe Einstein just felt bad for the boy, and did not want him to be deprived of a childhood because all he would ever be read are collage level science books. Or maybe, and for me this is easier to believe, Einstein knew that a fairy tale could excite the mind in a way that no textbook ever could. If you can make a child wonder about animals talking, time travel, and perhaps teleportation, in a world with characters that he can love and connect with, then that child may stop at to find the scientific answer to the mystery.

There is something about fairy tales that captures our hearts in a way that other thing just can’t. This is why the messages and morals in fairy tales can be more powerful then governments, superpowers, and armies. This is why Zipes mentions that fairy tales can have the power in them of revolution or emancipation. He says that “insofar as they have tended to project other and better worlds, they . . . have provided the critical measure of how far we are from talking history into our own hands and creating more just societies.”

This is why fairy tales, or in the case of Wonder Women, super hero stories, change over time to, perhaps, explain the current situation in society and even give and answer as to what we should do. This give the person telling the story quit a bit of power, and different people will want different solutions to the problems facing society. One example of this is when Wonder Woman gives up her super powers and becomes a weak and helpless woman. Many people are often powerless to realize that we can change fair tales and make them our own. I love how the Woman in the documentary saw this and realized that there was something she could do, she called up the comic book producers and said, “we want Wonder Woman’s powers back.” Wonder Woman in many ways was their only female super hero and she gave little girls something to become someday, not necessarily fly and beat up men, but be strong and stand up for herself.

Another point that Zipes makes while discussing Beauty and the Beast is that before the technology of printing fairy tales, Beauty and the Beast included, were simply hear, and retold. Each time a person would tell the story they were able to tell it in their own way and make it their own. But with the tale becoming a book, there was one way to tell the story, the book’s way. Zipes says that we loose the realization that we can make stories our own. I believe that he is right in many ways. As I said before, many of us except the books we read and the movies that we see as set in stone, but I still remember as a child, much like the lady in the documentary who called up the comic book company, I made the story my own. I remember playing Batman and the adventures and stories that he had were my own. Maybe children are becoming more prone to just watch and listen instead of pretend and play, but I do believe that we can make still make these wonderful stories our own.

I will close with my last little bit of evidence that we still, regardless of our technologies, have the power, as long as we realize it and encourage it, to change our stories and other stories to make them our own. The most poignant part for me of Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines, was at the very end during the credits. There is a women who tales her own super hero tale, and it is made by the director to look like it’s own comic book, and in this tale the women in the star skirt actually becomes someone’s hero. I know that we can change our fairy tales and our own real tales to become what we want them to be.