Folkestale interpretation

This is from the instructor’s Web site for the text:

Folktales interpret the experience of tellers and audience. While motifs endure from century to century and culture to culture, details and emphases vary with group experience and individual talent. Indeed, the art of the tale is to adapt the traditional motif to particular circumstances. Most African-American tales are about power relations, but as power relations are contextual, so are interpretations of the tales. Students familiar with slavery and willing to take metaphoric leaps will be able to read the John and Old Marster tales and the animal stories as critiques of slavery and, more generally, a racist society. But it is important, too, to think of the range of meanings the tales might hold for tellers and listeners in various social positions at various historical moments.

The ongoing conflict between John and Old Marster dramatizes the contradiction between humanity and slavery. The John tales turn on the paradox that John is a man and yet a slave, Old Marster’s colleague/confidant and yet his chattel. John keeps trying to close the gap between his status and that of Old Marster. When he succeeds–in, for example, claiming a right to the chickens he’s raised–he in effect achieves freedom, an interpretation John Blackamore makes explicit at the end of “Old Boss Wants into Heaven.” Even when John fails or appears foolish, the tale still skewers slavery by its use of metaphor. In “Ole Massa and John Who Wanted to Go to Heaven,” for example, Ole Massa’s impersonation of the Lord represents, and ridicules, the slave master’s assumption of godlike control over the slave’s life–and death. There is little evidence, however, that these tales were told during slavery, and the slave-master relationship they depict, between two individual men, for all its metaphoric power, is narrow and relatively genial. Another way to think of the tales would be as an interpretation of race relations under “freedom” as slavery.

Unlike the John tales, the animal tales, which were told during slavery, do not distinguish neatly between unjust and justified antagonists. They can, however, be seen as a pointed refutation of the romantic myth of the old plantation that developed in the 1830s and may be most popularly represented in Gone with the Wind. On the plantation of myth, status is based on virtue, and human relations are governed by honor, pride, justice, and benevolence. In the recognizably human society of the animal tales, status is based on power, honor is absent, pride is a liability, justice is anything you can get away with, and benevolence is stupidity. Animal characters provide not only camouflage for social criticism but the essential metaphor of society as jungle.

Folktales might be said to have three audiences, all of them in some sense “original”: The people who hear and help create the oral tales; folklorists who persuade story-tellers to perform their tales for publication; and readers of the published collections. It can be difficult for students to grasp that the tales were not “written” by a single “author” but are the product of a historically and politically mediated collaboration. Some of the stylistic features of the tales are conventional–the reproduction of animal sounds in dialogue, for example, and the retort that concludes the tales of John “stealing” Old Marster’s livestock.

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The repetition of plot elements in a number of short texts makes folktales good subjects for analytic papers. Write your own folktales following a traditional pattern. The terms of a creative assignment should be quite specific so that writing your own tale helps you see the structure, implications, and limitations of the traditional form.

So:

Write a John tale in which John transgresses against slavery in some way not represented in the tales we’ve read (learns to read, dances with Old Marster’s daughter), or the slave is not John but Johnetta, or the two protagonists are not slave and master but representatives of some other relationship of unequal power (student-teacher, worker-boss). In any case, establish at the beginning that the dominant character trusts and depends on the subordinate and conclude the tale with a retort that undermines the principle of the unequal power relationship that has been transgressed.

OR

Write an animal tale, remembering: “In the recognizably human society of the animal tales, status is based on power, honor is absent, pride is a liability, justice is anything you can get away with, and benevolence is stupidity. Animal characters provide not only camouflage for social criticism but the essential metaphor of society as jungle.”

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The details:

The tale needs to be as long as you need it to be get the point of the story across.
Of course, double space it and submit it as a Word document.
After you write the tale, analyze the tale: who the audience is; how it mimics the traditional form; what meaning you are trying to get across to the reader.
The explanation needs to be a minimum of 750 words.

Again, the explanation needs to be a minimum of 750 words.

Submit the exam as a Word attachment here.
The tale (Part 1) needs to be as long as you need to convey the story/lesson involved.
The analysis of the tale (Part 2) must be a minimum of 750 words.