Portela’s short story took me by surprise, as I did not expect a fairy tale inspired story to emerge in the context of this class, but it left me wondering much about the cultural context of fairy stories. In the story, the fairy tale seems to serve a few purposes. First, it is an easy way to subvert an expectation – by priming the reader with Cinderella, the darkness and reality of the story feel much more vivid. Second, it allows the story to do something interesting with narration. Though the revelation that the narrator is a character in the story is surprising regardless of genre if done right, the fairy tale genre is unique in its rigidity for narration. In a given work of literary fiction, one can expect the narrator to do pretty much anything, but in a fairy tale, the narrator is quite narrowly expected to either be omniscient, or to be retelling the story orally from a point further in time than the tale. In Portela’s work, Regan’s narration feels jarring because a fairy tale is meant to be an act of story-telling, not something real and personal. Third, though further research is needed to verify this point, it seems that using the fairy tale alludes to a western, and perhaps Disney-specific “violent innocence”. Cinderella is something one might heavily associate with Disney and America, and though the story itself is innocent and harmless, the culture it represents can be seen to be quite violent. Using this story in such a way thus infiltrates this genre and reveals the violence within it. The story takes something supposedly innocent from an imperialistic culture, and infiltrates it with the violent reality of its own culture.

Though I’m quite confident of the relationship between the story and its genre, I find myself wondering about the ideology of fairy tales. Though associating them with Disney makes the answer easy, seeing them in their wider context makes it much more complex. The European-ness of fairy tales somehow does not feel very harmful, but rather quite whimsical, like one might see a lederhosen or a Scottish quilt. On the other hand, they can be very dark, and they hold within some very western tropes. I would be interested to learn more of how fairy tales fit into the picture of modern ideology, because I have difficulty making sense of what they now represent.