Le Salon Literary Discussions

In this special episode of the Le Salon Literary Discussions podcast I am joined by the intelligent, funny, and feminist Jennifer of Literary Love 123. Jennifer has a master’s degree where she focused on her love of the horror genre, and during my master’s degree I focussed on Gothic literature, so we’re well suited to bring you today’s discussion on Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera!

Many of you may know the musical, but Andrew Lloyd Webber was inspired by a nearly forgotten French novel. You’ll hear what true stories from the Paris Opera House are in the novel, problematic aspects of the plot, how the novel is different from the musical, and how the novel fits into the literary tradition of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Greek mythology and more!

 Follow Jennifer:

• @literarylove123 on Instagram / YouTube / Threads
• Check out what she’s teaching next on Out School

 More bookish resources for you:

• Join the book club you’ve been looking for!
• Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads.
• Visit my website.

Books mentioned in this episode:

• By Ann Radcliffe: Mysteries of Udolpho; A Sicilian Romance
• Hades and Persephone in Greek mythology
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
• By Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher; Ligeia; The Raven; Annabel Lee; The Mask of the Red Death.
• What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
• By Stephen King: Gerald’s Game; Doctor Sleep; The Life of Chuck
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
• By Laura Purcell: The Whispering Muse; The Silent Companions

Alterations to the Grimm collected fairy tales have been ongoing since, well, the brothers began editing them in the early 1800s! The short tales lend themselves to a kind of metamorphosis that keeps them present across time and borders. In this episode we look at modern retellings of these established stories in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that reimagine and reintroduce elements—creating new fairy tales for us to remember!

[5:09] “A stark contrast to Grimm characters who had these traits of heroism and courage baked into their personality because they are male.”

[13:11] “This allows us to wonder: what if the step-mother didn’t want to be in the mother role at all? Maybe she just doesn’t connect with children.”

[17:27] “Some scholars claim that stories we are exposed to before our teenage years have a lasting impact on us, we absorb them in a way we don’t with stories read later in life.”

Books mentioned in this episode:

• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
• The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
• Bluebeard’s Egg by Margaret Atwood
• The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
• Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
• My Mother, She Killed Me My Father, He Ate Me [anthology]
• Uprooted by Naomi Novik
• Hunted by Meaghan Spooner
• Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi's
• How to Be Eaten by Maria Adelmann
• Rouge by Mona Awad

More resources for you:

• Join the book club you’ve been looking for!
• Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads.
• Visit my website.

This is going to be one of those episodes where once you hear about the patterns, you won’t be able to unsee them as you read the Grimm’s collected tales!

In this episode we examine common symbols in fairy tales and tease out what they mean. What is so interesting is that these symbols—the rule of three, clothing, the forest, roses—create a subtext or language all their own in the stories making them incredibly interesting to analyze. {Here is the link to the Fashion Institute of Technology exhibit on fairy tale fashion.}

[11:28] “While we might find fun sitting back and watching, there is undoubtedly a power dynamic and class consciousness aspect going on here with fashion at the centre.”

[15:21] “There is also something inherently magical about this wildness. It is a place of death and rebirth, decay and beauty.”

[22:14] “I believe it is this aspect that has kept works like the 1812 fairy and folk tales collected by the Grimm brothers interesting to readers and scholars alike.”

More resources for you:

• Join the book club you’ve been looking for!
• Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads.
• Visit my website.

From Germany to Japan, Chile to Iceland! In this episode we’ll be looking at how the tales collected by the brothers Grimm in Children’s and Household Tales have corresponding stories in other locations around the world. We’ll look specifically at fairy tales “Hansel and Gretel” and “Snow White” to demonstrate how the kernel of a story is mirrored in different countries.

[7:59] “Turning our mind east, we can’t ignore the parallels between ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and the often-present fairy tale witch in Russian tales called Baba Yaga.”

[20:42] “And it isn’t a group of dwarves, but Bedouin, who actually teach Rimonah to ride a horse and use a sword. She becomes renown, not for her beauty, but for her swordsmanship…”

[23:28] “The stories from Children’s and Household Tales entered the public domain before the turn of the twentieth century, making them widely available for reproduction—for more than 100 years now.”

More resources for you:

• Join the book club you’ve been looking for!
• Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads.
• Visit my website.

In today’s episode we’re looking at the daddy of all patriarchal systems (pun intended!), the church and its teachings and how they are reflected in the Grimm fairy tales. After a quick refresher on Lutheranism, we dive into how Eve’s curiosity in the Garden of Eden becomes problematic, marriage as the only happily-ever-after, and Old Testament justice.

Further reading:

• The Truth About Stories by Thomas King
• The Owl, The Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms' Magic Fairy Tales by G. Ronald Murphy.

[7:45] “So even though we get fairy tales, like The Frog Prince or Beauty and the Beast, that propose marriage between a woman and a creature, the animal is generally gendered to be masculine.”

[11:11] “In fact, early editions of the story point to the wife’s curiosity, her disobedience, and her gaining of knowledge as worse transgressions than Bluebeard’s murderous ways.”

[13:22] “In this story, not only do we see religious figures but the emphasis on the redemption found in confession.”

More resources for you:

• Join the book club you’ve been looking for!
• Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads.
• Visit my website.

From women storytellers to male writers, hear how sexism and the patriarchy were woven into the Grimm fairy tales. In this second episode in the series, we’ll trace how the brothers Grimm crafted competition between female protagonists and antagonists (centered on beauty and youth) and made physical labour around the home a way to show marriageability to princes and kings.

And these 19th century Grimm fairy tales aren’t entirely dated. You’ll hear about a study from the 1990s that demonstrate gender bias in these types of stories and we’ll examine the evolution of Disney’s take on the fairy tale princess—from Cinderella to Aladdin, Mulan to Brave.

[4:38] “…telling these stories among women, in spaces that were mostly exclusively female, was a way to offer caution around subjects that still to this day make victims feel shame.”

[6:29] “These edits not only wiped out the female experience we can infer from the original oral tale, but also begins to pit woman-versus-woman and demonstrate ‘desired’ female traits.”

[13:24] “Based on this, female readers come to understand that they must remain industrious to get and keep a husband—there is no room for laziness or complaints.”

More resources for you:

• Join the book club you’ve been looking for!
• Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads.
• Visit my website.

Welcome to this new Le Salon Literary Discussions podcast series about the brothers Grimm. You’ve probably heard the name before and can identify some of the fairy tales they collected, but in this series, we’re going to tease out themes from the tales to take a closer look at them—and I think you’re going to be surprised what we find!

In this episode we’ll explore who the brothers were, how they collected and published their most famous work Kinder-Und Hausmärchen, which translates to Children’s and Household Tales, and which stories were included in the first edition.

[2:45] “I promise you this series is going to give you something new to think about regarding these very old tales.”

[10:01] “And while ‘children’ might appear in the title, at first the brothers didn’t even consider what might attract children as readers to their stories.”

[15:08] “But this tradition on paper must begin somewhere, and without the collection from the Grimm brothers we wouldn’t have them to reimagine and reshape as our sensibilities and values evolve. That is the beauty of these stories.”

More resources for you:

• Join the book club you’ve been looking for!
• Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads.
• Visit my website.

For our final episode in this series, we’re looking at what might have been the last play Shakespeare wrote: The Tempest. This play has marriage, magic, betrayal, and a happy ending—all things you’ve come to expect from the Bard. But what you might not expect is the commentary in the play on Indigenous vs. colonizer conflict. I’ll walk you through the ideas in The Tempest, who’s who, given you an act-by-act summary, and end with an explanation of the epilogue.

[5:12] “You’ll notice already that we’re getting a theme of the double: two brothers, two actions to shift power.”

[13:57] “And here, in Act IV, do we begin to get only one scene a piece. That means these separated groups will begin to come together.”

[18:54] “Some scholars have also argued that this 20-line epilogue was a way for Shakespeare himself to say goodbye to his audience.”

More resources for you:

• See what books are on the virtual literary salon schedule.
• Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads.
• Visit my website.

The Winter’s Tale is a changeling play: we can see where it switches from tragedy to romantic comedy making it seem like Shakespeare was trying to connect two stories. And it has an ending that is up for your interpretation (even as it sets everything to rights). Not only will you get a summary of the play in this episode, you’ll also hear about what the title means, if Shakespeare stole the story from another writer, and learn about one of the funniest deaths in a Shakespeare play. All in less than 25 minutes!

[1:54] “This change makes The Winter’s Tale one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, meaning it doesn’t fit nicely into the First Folio categories of history, tragedy, or comedy.”

[6:41] “… you’ll notice early one we’re getting jealousy and suspicion, some serious themes we’ve seen in well-known Shakespeare plays like King Lear or Hamlet.

[19:11] “What I find interesting is the feminist twist with Hermione at the end.”

More resources for you:

• See what books are on the virtual literary salon schedule.
• Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads.
• Visit my website.

There’s no place for Shakespeare to hide in this 20-minute episode! Not only does this episode give you an act-by-act breakdown of what is happening in Love’s Labour’s Lost, so you can better understand the action in the play, I also tell you when it was written, what might have inspired it, and what is the key theme you need to know about.

[1:01] “Unlike other plays, we don’t have, or aren’t conclusively sure, of a primary source that Shakespeare was inspired by.”

[7:17] “… as always in Shakespearean comedy the women are cleverer and wittier than the men.”

[14:39] “It’s like the Spider-Man meme where they are all pointing at each other—The King, Longavilla, and Dumaine.”

[18:35] “But did Shakespeare intend to come back to these couples? There is a play lost to us modern readers called, Love’s Labour’s Won.”

More resources for you:

• See what books are on the virtual literary salon schedule.
• Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads.
• Visit my website.