Emily Vanatsky
Mrs. Carlson
Advanced Composition
13 February 2015
Critique Paper
Catherine Orenstien tells the reader how reality television shows, like “The
Bachelor” and “Joe Millionaire”, are all drafted the way they are to make it look like real love and a fairy tale, but they have nothing to do with love now: Money is the real reason to wed. Orenstien tells throughout her article, about how love is not a factor in marriage and why this ‘fairytale’ is an idea in today’s society. In Catherine
Orenstein’s “Fairy Tales and a Dose of Reality”, Orenstien tells the reader about how the fairy tale everyone craves, is not a true thing as much as it is a thought.
Orenstien talks about how fairy tales are just an idea throughout her article.
She talks about how people in today’s society is after this taste of real love and the fairytale with everything going right and perfect in their life. Hollywood has given people a false sense of how fairytales really end. Orenstien tells how the way that these fairytales do end is very close to the way some people’s reality is. Because problems arise and things go wrong in the original fairytales taking away the feeling of perfection that society has put on the word ‘fairytale’. Orenstien summarizes the story of the original Sleeping Beauty and how Aurora, the princess in the fairytale, is actually impregnated by the prince, and not how Disney puts it as she is woken by a kiss from her real true love (285).
Vanatsky 2
Orenstien tells many times throughout her article how this fairytale idea is just that, an idea. She tells how in the original fairytales are not all happy endings and true love. Orenstien tells us how in the cartoon fairytale versions, the stories have been altered to make the end seem perfect. She talks about how money and th the fame are the reason people “fall in love” today and explains how in the 17
century, people who were married often barely knew each other (285). This assumption that Orenstien makes, forces the reader to see that fairytales are not the real ‘fairytale’ idea that everyone has in their head, but a totally twisted story that is far from this idea. Orenstein makes the reader focus how the fairytale should really end up, and how magic will not fix everything and make it better.
Orenstien also talks about how in today’s marriages money prevails over love. She tells that money is more important than the idea of love, and they assumed that the more money they received, the more opt the marriage was to succeed
(285). That people today just look for money and think they will be happy if they can buy everything they ever wanted; People today think they can buy this idea of a fairytale. But how much of this “fairytale” can they really buy? The Hollywood films show the side of the fairytales that is about money and how the higher class does not want to marry the lower class, but they also give
