Deconstructing the Canon: A Critical Analysis of Select Politically Correct Bedtime Stories

Abstract

Political correctness has turned out to be a serious concern of postmodern society when it comes to the domain of linguistic application. Language, from its very birth itself, is believed to have retained its influence and social consent by suppressing the ‘other.’ In philosophical dimension this suppression but attains a positive-relational property called differentiation, which is a quintessential aspect for constructing a binary form at the phonemic all the way up to complex sentence structures. Political correctness is often perceived as a set of semantically engineered novel words for identifying and replacing the existing derogatory and non-parliamentary words in a language. Since, shift in cultural sensibility, facilitated by various external factors, is what one should identify as the cause for this innovative move, literature and especially canons can never be free from its critical-zone. Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, is a collection of ‘politically correct’ versions of canonical fairy-tales which facilitate a chance for aesthetic humility rather than an insensible criticism, thereby enhancing the participation of readers in the meaning making process. My rationale for the choice of “Cinderella” and “Little Red Riding Hood” from this collection is to analyze the gender stereotyping mechanism operating in these age-old canonical fairy-tales.

Keywords: deconstruction; canon; gender stereotype; political correctness; narratology