Fairy Tale Icons in Morrisons Tar Baby and Monteros Te Tratare como a

Deconstructing Fairy Tale Icons in Toni Morrisons Tar Baby and Rosa Monteros Te Tratare como a una reinaABSTRACT In this correction I will examine how, from a feminist perspective, both Toni Morrisons fourth African-American novel, Tar Baby (1981), and Rosa Monteros third post-Franco Spanish novel, Te tratar como a una reina (1983), explore the problems that arise when women believe that they are the stereotypes permeating literature. Both women writers employ similar techniques that subvert and deconstruct the stereotypical roles of men and women, unveiling the fairy chronicle icons of the heroine and the hero that have been masquerading as real people.ESSAYDay and night are mingled in our gazesIf we divide light from night, we give upthe lightness of our concoction We putourselves into water tight compartments,break ourselves up into parts, cut ourselvesin two we are always one and the other,at the same time. -Luce Irigaray1 In 1975 the end of Franco and forty years of dictatorship and censorship offered Spanish women the freedom to reexamine their identity and question their role in a patriarchal society. At the same time on another continent, African-American women are also struggling to find their identity among the numerous American literary images that, until the 20th-century, had not realistically be their gender or race. Notwithstanding the different histories, geographies, and ethnicities between African-American and Spanish women, a common thread that appears to bind them is their inheritance of a legacy of manage against the internalization of controlling patriarchal perceptions and images of women that lead them to believe that they are, indeed, the stereoty... ...997.Montero, Rosa. Te tratar como a una reina. 1983. Barcelona Seix Barral. 1990.Morrison, Toni. Tar Baby. 1981.New York Plume, 1982.NOTES1 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1985) 217.2 Critics have tell that what I call m ultiple interpretations and binary oppositions are characteristic of Morrisons works.3 Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore The Novels of Toni Morrison (Knoxville U of Tennessee P, 1991) 116.4 On the Sea Bird II he thinks of women (6), later with the same contextual references he thinks of fat black ladies (119).5 This and all subsequent translations are mine.6 Racial stereotyping, also defined in fairy tale motifs, suggest that Son is a frog when his African-American hair is in its natural state and a prince when he conforms to the grooming norms of the egg white culture.