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This chapter is about Into the Woods (1987) which features three interlocking fairytales; it appears to be the richest and most integrated work of the Sondheim-Lapine era. It consists of a juxtaposition of a number fairytales: Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and The Baker and His Wife.

Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel, Wives and Daughters (1865), is a critical anomaly. Only Coral Lansbury and Patricia Spacks see that the structure of families and the socialisation of girls is its central, and important, subject matter. The novel for the first time makes central what had earlier been an unacknowledged problem; the education of daughters by wives to be wives. It begins at the beginning, with ‘the old rigmarole of childhood’, and the first two chapters are full of references to fairytales. Just as many fairytales suggest rites of passage or initiation tests by which girls and boys become women and men, so Wives and Daughters begins with motherless Molly Gibson at the age of twelve. In spite of a certain relish for the ‘levelling’ effects of sexuality in Wives and Daughters, Gaskell was in no doubt that uninhibited sexuality was a danger rather than a freedom.

This chapter is not concerned with the recoveries of the repressed to expose cannibalism and the near obsession the mass culture during the twentieth century. This chapter rather looks at James Joyce's tales and images of cannibalism within the cultural preoccupation of the literal and figurative anthropophagy. Cannibalism and the illustrations that represent such a concept were already pervasive in the late nineteenth century. And like many children, James Joyce was introduced to anthropophagy in the form of folklore and fairytales which are a genre invested in cannibalism. This chapter looks at the subtext of cannibalism present in Joyce's literature and works, from his Dubliners to hisFinnegans Wake wherein Joyce's psychic origins of his conception of art and artist can be examined and traced.

This chapter analyzes selected courtship scenes in mid-Heian poem tales (uta monogatari), fabricated tales (tsukuri monogatari), random notes (zuihitsu), and diaries (nikki). It also briefly discusses the sole instance of a visual taboo in the fairytale world of Taketori monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter). Although Genji is indisputably the classic example of courtship in the Heian period, the chapter contends that it is useful to explore courtship in earlier as well as contemporary literary expressions. Hence, the chapter's main focus here is on the early tenth-century Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise), the most inspiring literary precursor of the Genji, and on Sei Shōnagon's Makura no sōshi (The Pillow Book), the fullest contemporary account of courtship at the height of the Heian period.

Chapter 7 explores Evelyn’s series of Symbolist paintings based on Hans Christian Andersen’s popular fairytale ‘The Little Mermaid’ in relation to early and more recent feminism, and shows how she employed the metamorphic mermaid as a model for socio-political transformation from captivity to liberty. Her paintings are compared with contemporary literary and visual texts in order to show how her work, often positioned in relation to male Pre-Raphaelite artists, dialogised with early feminist iconography. Chapters 6 and 7 reveal George Watts’s and Evelyn De Morgan’s statuses as suffragist poet-painters and/or narrative painters who re-presented women to promote socio-political reform.

This film marks Truffaut’s encounter with Catherine Deneuve and the beginning of a relationship that will be imprinted in most of the subsequent films. The different components of this idealized feminine figure are reviewed in this chapter as well as the coded inscription of sexuality in the narrative. Shot-by-shot analysis: The long dialogue by the fire where the hero played by Jean-Paul Belmondo declares his passionate love to the star.