Guess what, y’all. That paper I was working on so hard for class turned out awesome.
The Virgin’s Coffin:
Snow White, the Brothers Grimm, and Appropriation
In the tradition of early Christian martyrdom, “virginity could be the equal of any martyr’s death, signalling one of the most persistent themes in female spirituality” (Rubin, 156). All a woman had to do to be considered a martyr was 1- be Christian, 2- be a virgin, and 3- die. Snow white became a martyr when the Brothers Grimm turned her into one. They took fragments of secular and pagan stories passed down through the oral tradition, fused them together with additions of their own invention, and created a seamless narrative of a virgin’s persecution, temptation, death, and resurrection. The story remains so embedded in our cultural consciousness that even two hundred years later we continue to reinvent and reclaim Snow White, taking a passive Christian martyr and re-appropriating her into a secular hero martyr. From the Grimms to Disney to contemporary filmmakers, the way we choose to tell the story of “Snow White” becomes a reflection of our own cultural narrative.
1. The Brothers Grimm
The Brothers Grimm did not, of course, invent the story of Snow White nor any of the others in their collection of fairy tales, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (KHM) or Children’s and Household Tales. Born in 1785 and 1786 respectively, Jacob and Wilhelm were born in the Hesse region of Germany and grew up to study philology, linguistics, law, and folklore. This was a critical time in Germany, which underwent political upheaval in the early nineteenth century with the overthrow of Napoleon’s forces and the struggle for democracy and identity as a new nation-state. This was also the era of the great German thinkers such as Goethe, Schiller, Kant, and Hegel, “that great and formative age for the development of modern German thought, culture, and education: the last four decades of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth” (Smith, 126-7). Romanticism was “a middle-class, pan-European reaction against the ideas of the Enlightenment” (Paradiž, 19) which emphasized a revitalization of the spirit of the past, native language and history, and an idealization of the simple Volk (folk). “Native folklore was to be the ‘healing power’ for the nation, a remedy for spiritual recovery and creative strength” (Kamenetsky, 25). This idealism of the past and the purity of the Volk were a crucial aspect of the Grimms’ personal motivation for the decades of work that went into the KHM. “Broadly speaking, the Grimms sought to preserve all kinds of ancient relics as if they were sacred and precious gems that originated naturally from the soil. In their minds, the tales, myths, songs, fables, legends, epics, riddles, and other narratives that emanated from the voices of the common people contained deeper meanings than so-called educated people realized” (Zipes, xix). The Grimms saw their work as not just a cultural but a spiritual duty.
The majority of Germans belonged to either the Protestant or Reformed Church, and the culture was steeped in the ideals of Martin Luther. In his book The Owl, the Raven & the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales, Ronald G. Murphy examines the personal spirituality of the Grimms in great detail.
The brothers Grimm thought of fairy tales as remnant of ancient faith expressed in poetry. Through all the revisions of their collections of tales, their preface always begins with a description of gleaning, a biblical image recalling the command that the poor are not to be prevented from gathering the remnants that survive the harvest or the storm, nor the grain that has grown unnoticed by the hedgerow or the roadside… The brothers stated that their book consists of stories which are precious crumbs of ancient faith, gleaned wheat, made into bread, and that they wished to place it only into benevolent hands which have the power to bless, hoping that these “breadcrumbs of poetry” will never come to the attention of those who would withhold them from the poor. (Murphy, 3)
The irony here is that the Grimms never actually worked with the Volk in the process of collecting these tales, so any representative voice of the poor is absent in their work. The poor are supposed to be the ones gleaning the forgotten wheat, but the brothers took that responsibility upon themselves, middle-class and educated young men, trying represent the interests of a population to which they did not belong and which they did not include.
Even more popular than the myth of the Grimms as the original authors of the tales “is the long-standing myth of the brothers’ travels through the countryside, village to village, transcribing stories told to them by farmers and peasants,” writes Valerie Paradiž.
Jacob and Wilhelm are themselves responsible, at least in part, for perpetuating that image. Though they never directly claimed to have worked in this fashion, they unwittingly created a romantic conceit about their process by hiding the identities of their most crucial collaborators … These contributors were neither commoners nor peasants … they were educated ladies. (xi)
The Grimms started by writing down the stories they remembered from their own childhoods, then proceeded to collect stories from their family and friends, mainly the ladies of the Wild and Hassenpflug families.
Storytelling was not only a common pastime for these women, but a crucial tool for exploring their place in the world. Folktales told of rites of passage, showed the types of villains one might encounter, and warned what would happen to those who transgress against the rules. “Indeed, many of the Grimms’ fairy tales dole out pedantic lessons in feminine virtue and appropriateness. The means of enforcement are often astonishingly violent” (Paradiž, 53). The story of “Snow White” in particular “silently points to the conditions of women’s socialization, to the cultural context which frames that very process of development, defining and legitimizing it, while simultaneously setting stifling boundaries for it … The Grimm version … is grounded in the nineteenth-century European dominant discourse about women and the bourgeois cult of domesticity” (Bacchilega, 3). Understandably, many modern scholars have interpreted the Grimms’ fairy tales as anti-feminist, but this is a simplistic view that does not take into account the women who were the major proliferators of oral folktales. They used storytelling as a covert instruction manual for behavior in order to survive in patriarchal nineteenth-century Europe.
The contributions of these women, unfortunately, went unsung. “When volume one of the Children’s and Household Fairy Taleswas published in 1812, Jacob and Wilhelm didn’t credit their female sources by name. Instead, they celebrated, in the foreword to the anthology, the nameless, poetic soul of German culture and its legions of ‘simple folk’ who had passed the tales down through the ages” (Paradiž, xiv). In sum, women contributed to the process but received no credit, while the poor Volk received credit but made no contribution.
After collection, the Grimms proceeded to stamp the tales with their own voices, especially Wilhelm, who was chiefly responsible for the editing process. The stories in the KHM underwent vast changes, both from source to manuscript and from the first edition (1812) to the seventh (1857, now considered the standard). The project was inspired by a collaboration with Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, to which the Grimms contributed only a few folk songs.
Although the brothers disapproved of the poetic license Brentano appeared to be taking in his adaptations, they, too, would alter, especially in later editions of the fairy tales, the transcriptions they had collected from their women friends. But though they edited and cultivated the stories, to use Jacob’s words, to suit the tastes of modern, educated readers in the nineteenth century, they nonetheless continued to perpetuate the myth of accurately preserving the past by keeping the narrative style simple and the language folksy. (Paradiž, 61-2)
Some of the stories remained fairly constant from edition to edition with only minor changes. Others, including the tale of Schneewittchen (Snow White), had more drastic alterations. This earned the Grimms serious criticism from some modern folklorists, especially John Ellis in his book One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales. He casts himself in the role of dutiful whistleblower exposing a pair of charlatans. Ellis claims, “It is very hard to imagine that they could have been unaware of the discrepancy between their insistence on authenticity, on the one hand, and their disregard for it in these actions, on the other” (93). Jack Zipes, another Grimms expert and translator of the tales into English, disagrees:
The Grimms thought that the “slight” changes they made in the tales did not make much of a difference … Due to their extensive work as philologists, they firmly believed that they could cobble variants together to bring out the profound essence of the tales … Yet the Grimms were somewhat ingenuous in thinking that their changes did not alter the meanings of the tales, and that their high German could simulate the dialects and reinvigorate the blunt and colorful styles of diverse storytellers. (xxvii)
Zipes concludes that the Grimms could have better defended themselves from critics if they had acknowledged that their stories were actually new tales, continuing the tradition of storytelling through the medium of print.
The wide discrepancy between the Grimms’ ideals and their practice can be explained by the fact that their sense of loyalty to their work was based in what they considered the “essence” of the stories, rather than their exact wording (Kamenetsky, 163). The brothers saw their changes as harmless because there was no author of either oral or written stories who could claim ownership of any tale. “The general public did not distinguish between oral narrator and tale writer and regarded published stories as common property free for anyone to change” (Dégh, 69-70), therefore the Grimms would have felt no qualms about altering their material, even those they took from previously printed sources.
Faith also played a role in the Grimms’ editing process. “The challenge which Wilhelm faced was how to revive the religious feelings in fragmented ancient pagan stories in such a way that they would elicit a religious reaction of the heart of Christian contemporaries” (Murphy, 7), which he happily did. Wilhelm saw the changes he made as not just harmless but necessary.
As previously discussed, strong patriarchal themes were already present in the tales, but the Grimms, whether consciously or not, enhanced them. In Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys; The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales, Ruth Bottigheimer illustrates how “male protagonists usually got away with devious behavior, such as lying, cheating, and stealing (as did Bruder Lustig), yet the female protagonists were caught in their dishonesty and literally ‘ended up in nail-studded barrels.’ She felt that, with few exceptions, the Grimms’ folktales portrayed women as mute and passive victims dominated by circumstance, a perverted one-sided system of justice, or a powerful male figure (king, prince, or father)” (Kamenetsky, 281). The Grimms also used their own moral outlook in widening the disparity of how good and evil characters are treated in the stories: “the innocent are treated more gently, but the evil or guilty are punished even more brutally” (Ellis, 79). Like all artists, the Grimms stamped their work with their own personal and cultural biases.
Despite modern criticisms, many folklorists still praise the Grimms for their innovation and devotion to preserving these relics of the past. In my research, I have come to see the Grimms neither as pure loyalists to tradition nor as unscrupulous frauds but as flawed human men, enthusiastic but oblivious. They are the picture of unexamined privilege: male, white, Christian, middle class, and well educated. It would never have occurred to them to stop and wonder what the implications and long-terms effects of the changes might be. What the Grimms saw as the “essence” of a story may have been completely different than those of the women who supplied the it or the poor Volk whom the Grimms claimed to represent. Nothing is known of how they might have objected to the brothers’ appropriations. For better or worse, the changes were made, the stories were published, and the KHM went on to sell second only to the Bible in the Western world.
2. Snow White
“Snow White” is among the stories in the KHMthat the Grimms changed dramatically from the original sources (Ellis, 74). This is partly because the several variations of the tale that the brothers collected were so disparate that there was no way to select one as “authentic” or “original.” Instead, the Grimms patched together their favorite bits, added some of their own inventions, and ended up with a tidy Christian fable.
One of the major changes the Grimms brought to the final version was the substitution of stepmother for mother. In the first edition, it was Snow White’s biological mother who is envious of her daughter’s beauty, which tells an entirely different thematic story than the one we are used to. Ellis describes it as
a dramatic version of mother-daughter rivalry and sexual jealousy, in which the older woman, at first identifying with the flesh of her flesh, later sees herself eclipsed by a younger woman who is really a separate person and thus a rival. The daughter’s active participation in the rivalry is more than hinted at; for it is at her wedding—the celebration of her own beauty and sexuality—that her mother is put to death in grisly fashion, being forced to dance in red-hot shoes until she drops dead. Thus, she is destroyed at the very celebration of her daughter’s sexual power. (74)
This theme of rivalry is especially true in the first edition, before the change was made, because it is Snow White’s father, not the prince, who rescues her, thus reinforcing the “competition for the affection of the father/husband” (Ellis, 76). By replacing the mother with a stepmother, the Grimms turned the story of a child’s self-actualization to one of Good vs. Evil: “In masculine psychology the stepmother is a symbol of the unconscious in its destructive role—of its disturbing and devouring character” (von Franz, 120). The story of “Hansel and Gretel” suffered an identical change, indicating that the Grimms were bowing to the social pressures of their time and culture, which held motherhood as sacred (Murphy, 124). Turning the wicked mothers into wicked stepmothers provided an acceptable distance between the heroes and their villains.
The story opens with the vivid imagery of three colors: the good queen wishes for a child as red as blood, as white as snow, and as black as ebony. These colors crop up in similar stories of initiation around the world: “Historians of religion and anthropologists tell us that white, red, and black are the colors which accompany initiation, the process of becoming a whole human being, and the child is given the parts of white, red, and black to mark her potential” (Bacchilega, 4). In earlier versions of the story, the Grimms explicitly listed these as physical qualities—lips/cheeks, skin, and eyes/hair. In the seventh edition, these physical traits were not mentioned, the ambiguity indicating that these colors are both literal and metaphorical. They represent the personal qualities that the queen desires in her child: red, warm and loving; white, innocent and faithful; black, humble and connected to the dark earth and mortality (Murphy, 123). The colors become the first indicator that the story has been given a decidedly Christian flavor; Snow White’s true beauty is not in her physical appearance but in her soul.
Snow White is driven out by her vain and jealous stepmother, who tells the huntsman to kill the child and bring back her liver and lungs for the queen to eat (Grimm, 197). Because Snow White is so beautiful (and therefore pure of soul), the huntsman cannot bring himself to kill her. This is another Grimm addition to the story, but “the episode of the huntsman is reminiscent of similar themes of the ‘compassionate executioner’” (Girardot, 289) found not only in other fairy tales but the stories of saints and martyrs. Snow White flees into the forest, the traditional setting in fairy tales for the testing grounds where trials are faced (Murphy, 126). The gatekeepers to this realm are the seven dwarves, monk-like in their compassion, industriousness, hermitic celibacy, and morality (Murphy, 128). They take in Snow White if she agrees to keep house for them, and they serve as the voice of reason in repeatedly warning her to beware of her stepmother.
In a story that is now no longer a coming-of-age but one of Good vs. Evil, the wicked queen has become Lucifer, who fell from Heaven “because of his infatuation with his own beauty and his refusal to accept that anyone else was ‘the most beautiful in the land’ … Lucifer tempts human beings out of jealousy… and he always tempts with some form of the same temptation to self-infatuation to which he himself succumbed” (Murphy, 126). So too does the stepmother tempt Snow White with beauty and vanity: first with colorful corset stays, then with a beautiful comb, and finally with the iconic poisoned apple, which, like Snow White herself, is beautiful and “white with red cheeks” (Grimm, 201). “In the three ordeals the stepmother sequentially attacks the white (breath), black (hair), and red (apple-blood) elements of Snow White’s nature” (Girardot, 291), the virtues of her soul that set her apart from stepmother who sees her own worth as purely physical. There is also the parallel “of the apple with the fruit of earthly desires in the Biblical garden of paradise which brings death into the world but at the same time makes Adam and Eve aware of their sexuality and godlike power to create new life” (292). Snow White’s temptation is not a mere apple, but all the apple represents—beauty and sexuality (and therefore vanity and lust).
Snow White succumbs to temptation in all three trials—not out of perversity or unquenchable female curiosity, like Bluebeard’s wife in another Grimm tale, but out of her naive belief in the goodness of people; the simple peasant woman offering her these gifts could not be evil (Murphy, 127). Because of her innocence and purity of faith, Snow White is not cruelly punished like many fairy tale “bad girls” but merely falls into a sleep-like death that will eventually be lifted.
In further evidence of the religious tone of the story, the dwarfs wash Snow White’s body with water and wine, and all work stops for three days while they mourn (Murphy, 128). Here it is helpful to examine the symbolism present in the illustration (medium unknown, but most likely an etching) by Ludwig Emil Grimm, one of the younger brothers of Jacob and Wilhelm, for the 1825 “Little Edition” of the KHM. The image shows Snow White in the glass coffin that the dwarfs have fashioned for her, placed on top of a mountain, and guarded by one of the dwarfs and three birds: an owl, a raven, and a dove.
Upon her death, Snow White is only seven years old (another detail added by the Grimms). When she begins to display the troubling tendency of giving in to temptation, she is put safely away until the danger is over. “The implication is that as Snow White lay deathlike in the crystal coffin for a ‘long, long time,’ she was of marriageable age at the end of the story—that is, she was around fourteen years old, or seven years beyond the age of seven” (Girardot, 283). If glass is a symbol of virginity (Faur, 27 Oct 2014), Snow White’s identity as a virgin is imposed upon her in the form of the glass coffin. She is trapped—literally by the glass coffin and figuratively by her identity as a virgin—until the dangerous time of adolescence has passed.
In example after example of Christian female martyrs, their “purity” is lauded as their most important virtue: Saint Lucy, Saint Agnes, Saint Agatha, the Virgin of Antioch (no name needed, apparently; her virginity is her identity), Saint Apollonia, Saint Margaret, and Saint Christina. It is a disturbing trend that the purity of these women’s faith is conflated with the purity of their bodies: “that the blessed virgin Lucy possessed the beauty of virginity without trace of corruption; that she radiated charity without any impure love; her progress toward God was straight and without deviation” (de Voragine, 27). So too is Snow White pure in body and soul, remaining true to the colors that define her: red/loving, white/innocent, and black/humble.
In death, Snow White’s body remains whole, pure and beautiful, suffering from no decay, which is consistent with other female Christian martyrs: “By the early modern period, incorruptibility of the whole cadaver or of a part (that is, remaining lifelike, supple, and without decay for decades after burial) was reported for almost every woman proposed for canonization” (Bynum, 70). Because Snow White is a virgin and pure of heart, her body remains whole in order to be ready for resurrection.
The dwarfs take turns watching over the body of Snow White, but she is also guarded by three surprising figures: an owl, a raven, and a dove. The symbolism here is threefold. First, it is a repetition of the three colors that represent the virtues of Snow White’s soul: the reddish-brown owl, the black raven, and the white dove. Second, they are a nod to Wilhelm Grimm’s belief in the universal truths found in pre-Christian religions: the owl for Athena and the classic beliefs, the raven for the old Norse-Germanic beliefs, and the dove for Christianity. Third, they are the ever-present Holy Spirit that stay with Snow White until the arrival of the Son and Father (Murphy, 131).
The final and perhaps most important addition by the Grimms is Snow White’s rescue and resurrection by the prince. Because Walt Disney’s adaptation of the story is so deeply lodged in our minds, most people are surprised to discover that in the Grimms’ final version Snow White is not awoken by the prince’s kiss. When the prince’s servants carry the coffin away, one stumbles, and the bite of poisoned apple falls from Snow White’s mouth. In Disney’s version, the prince and Snow White have already met and fallen in love. In the Grimms’ version, the prince sees Snow White for the first time when she is dead in her coffin; if the prince is merely a mortal man, the story wanders into the dangerously gruesome realm of implied necrophilia. Wilhelm Grimm wanted to stir the hearts, not chill the blood, of his readers. The Christ-like prince finds Snow White preserved in her virginal state, sees the worthiness of her beauty/soul, and enables her resurrection, telling her that he will take her to “my father’s castle” to “be my wife” (Grimm, 204). According to medieval writers, “a death to sexual reproductive life was inverted into a life in Christ as his special bride, and the late medieval authors likened the choice of a life of virginity to a death and rebirth as Christ’s bride” (Rubin, 156). If the prince were an ordinary man, Snow White would not have retained her purity in marriage. Instead, like a nun, she has become the bride of Christ.
Throughout the various editions of the KHM, the manner of the wicked queen’s death in “Snow White” remains the same. At the wedding of Snow White and the prince, the queen is made to put on red-hot iron shoes and “dance until she fell down dead” (Grimm, 204). This “recalls folk practices of destroying a witch through the magic agency of iron. There are also associations of slippers and shoes with the female sexual organs which, as expressive of the egocentric overestimation of the physical dimension of human nature, represent the root of the stepmother’s evil” (Girardot, 297). True to fairy tale style and the Grimms’ polarized views in doling out justice, the villain suffers a grisly death and the heroine claims her Happily Ever After.
3. Beyond the Grimms: Contemporary Re-appropriation
The fairy tale collection of the Brothers Grimm has remained hugely influential in the Western world for the past two hundred years. Adaptations appear in every conceivable medium, and “their success attests that the popular audience has internalized these formulas” (Dégh, 84-5). These retellings, often branching off into various subgenres and straying far from the “original” versions, have prompted certain critics to mourn the loss of the alleged purity of the Grimms’ collection.
In his article “Yours, Mine, or Ours? Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and the Ownership of Fairy Tales,” Donald Haase tackles the question of the ownership of fairy tales, debunking two popular myths in the process: nationalism and universalism. The Grimms’ tales are not purely German, for their sources can be traced back to French, Norse, and other European roots (385-6). The stories also cannot truly be called universal in nature, since the Grimms unconsciously wove in their own moral outlook. What psychologist Bruno Bettelheim (author of the renowned book The Uses of Enchantment) saw as universal truths were in fact the authoritarian, patriarchal values of Europe at the time of the Grimms—very similar, in fact, to Bettelheim’s own personal values (392).
So if the Grimm fairy tales are neither national nor universal, to whom do they belong? “To be blunt: I do. And you do … We claim fairy tales in every individual act of telling and reading” (395). Fairy tales have no pure, original, incorruptible source. They have been undergoing a process of individual appropriation since the words “glass” and “coffin” were first put together. The Grimms’ tales are not holy texts to be preserved from sacrilege. Some scholars have attempted to do so, but this results in a sterile picture devoid of meaning. It is through this process of individual reclamation and appropriation that fairy tales regain their meaning—the meaning we give them.
This is exactly what Western culture has done over and over again. The 1937 film adaptation by Walt Disney might almost be more deeply imbedded in modern American psyches than the Grimm version. Countless advertising and merchandising dollars over the past century ensured that Disney’s version not only became but stayed the new dominant narrative, the ultimate authority on Snow White. But Walt Disney was no less a product of his time than the Grimms. He downplayed the Christian symbolism in the story, but it is still present, especially in the final shot when the prince’s castle appears “not on the horizon as one might expect in a Disney film, but high above and ahead of the prince and his bride, radiant in the sky … like a golden city made of sunlight” (Murphy, 4). Disney gave us the sweetness of a happily ever after romance, a narrative produced and consumed en masse in Depression-era cinema.
Since then, however, we have not been content with Snow White as the docile and demure damsel in distress. Modern feminism demands more of its heroines, as seen in the influx of Snow White retellings in the past few years. In the ABC series Once Upon a Time (2011-present), this new Snow White is “spunky yet vulnerable” (Tatar), armed with a bow and a complicated backstory. Another example is the 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, “reconceived to appeal to an audience partial to high-decibel special effects … Like all fairy-tale adaptations, it also operates like a magnet, picking up relevant bits and pieces of the culture that is recycling the tale” (Tatar). Once again we see a Snow White who is strong and inspiring, who “channels Joan of Arc” (Fricke; Tatar) and leads an army to reclaim her kingdom. A lesser-known version is another film in 2012 called Mirror Mirror, in which Snow White avoids death altogether by seeing through the poisoned-apple trick and outsmarting the wicked queen.
In most contemporary adaptations, the powerful fairy tale images remain—the magic mirror, the poisoned apple, the glass coffin, and the resurrection by true love’s kiss. But Snow White is no longer the Grimms’ one-dimensional archetype nor Disney’s vapid and saccharine maiden. We have given her what the Grimms never did: a personality, a purpose, and a weapon.
The Brothers Grimm were another link in this endless chain, creating their own adaptation for their own purposes. Their failure, however, was in being oblivious to the larger implications of the choices they made. No fairy tale adaptation exists in a vacuum. Every story or piece of art is part of the greater narrative of how we represent martyrs, women, and other oppressed peoples. The artist has a responsibility to the truth as they see it, but the work will inevitably be colored by their own socio-historical context. We can—and should—continue to re-appropriate fairy tales, using old stories to find new meaning, but we must be conscious of our accountability and intentional in our choices. Every martyrdom narrative has consequences, but when the martyr is fictional, her voice is our voice; we use her story to tell our own. Snow White is still our martyr; she can be a martyr for each one of us.
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For other uses, see Ghost Dance (disambiguation).
The Ghost Dance (Caddo: Nanissáanah, also called the Ghost Dance of 1890) was a new religious movement incorporated into numerous American Indian belief systems. According to the teachings of the Northern Paiute spiritual leader Wovoka (renamed Jack Wilson), proper practice of the dance would reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits of the dead to fight on their behalf, make the white colonists leave, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to Native American peoples throughout the region.
The basis for the Ghost Dance, the circle dance, is a traditional form that has been used by many Native American peoples since prehistoric times, but this new ceremony was first practiced among the NevadaPaiute in 1889. The practice swept throughout much of the Western United States, quickly reaching areas of California and Oklahoma. As the Ghost Dance spread from its original source, Indian tribes synthesized selective aspects of the ritual with their own beliefs.
The Ghost Dance was associated with Wilson's (Wovoka's) prophecy of an end to white expansion while preaching goals of clean living, an honest life, and cross-cultural cooperation by Indians. Practice of the Ghost Dance movement was believed to have contributed to Lakota resistance to assimilation under the Dawes Act. In the Wounded Knee Massacre in December 1890, United States Army forces killed at least 153 Miniconjou and Hunkpapa from the Lakota people. The Lakota variation on the Ghost Dance tended towards millenarianism, an innovation that distinguished the Lakota interpretation from Jack Wilson's original teachings. The Caddo still practice the Ghost Dance today.
The Northern Paiutes living in Mason Valley, in what is now the U.S. state of Nevada, were known collectively as the Tövusi-dökadö (Tövusi-: "Cyperus bulb" and dökadö: "eaters") at the time of European contact. The Northern Paiute community at this time was thriving upon a subsistence pattern of fishing, hunting wild game, and foraging for pine nuts and roots such as Cyperus esculentus.
The Tövusi-dökadö during this period lacked any permanent political organisation or officials, and tended to follow various spiritual leaders and community organizers. Community events centered on the observance of seasonal ceremonies such as harvests or hunting. In 1869, Hawthorne Wodziwob, a Paiute man, organized a series of community dances to announce a vision. He spoke of a journey to the land of the dead and of promises made to him by the souls of the recently deceased. They promised to return to their loved ones within a period of three to four years.
Wodziwob's peers accepted this vision, likely due to his reputable status as a healer. He urged the populace to dance the common circle dance as was customary during a time of celebration. He continued preaching this message for three years with the help of a local "weather doctor" named Tavibo, father of Jack Wilson.
Prior to Wodziwob's religious movement, a devastating typhoid fever epidemic struck in 1867. This and other European diseases killed approximately one-tenth of the total population, resulting in widespread psychological and emotional trauma. The disruption brought disorder to the economic system and society. Many families were prevented from continuing their nomadic lifestyle.
Round dance influence
A "round dance" is a circular community dance held, usually around an individual who leads the ceremony. Round dances may be ceremonial or purely social. Usually the dancers are accompanied by a group of singers who may also play hand drums in unison. The dancers join hands to form a large circle. The dancers move to their left with a side-shuffle step to reflect the long-short pattern of the drum beat, bending their knees to emphasize the pattern.
During his studies of the Pacific Northwest tribes the anthropologistLeslie Spier used the term "prophet dances" to describe ceremonial round dances where the participants seek trance, exhortations and prophecy. Spier studied peoples of the Columbia plateau (a region including Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of western Montana). By the time of his studies the only dances he was allowed to witness were social dances or ones that had already incorporated Christian elements, making investigation of the round dance's origin complicated.
Jack Wilson, the prophet otherwise known as Wovoka, was believed to have had a vision during a solar eclipse on January 1, 1889. It was reportedly not his first time experiencing a vision; but as a young adult, he claimed that he was then better equipped, spiritually, to handle this message. Jack had received training from an experienced holy man under his parents' guidance after they realized that he was having difficulty interpreting his previous visions. Jack was also training to be a "weather doctor", following in his father's footsteps. He was known throughout Mason Valley as a gifted and blessed young leader. Preaching a message of universal love, he often presided over circle dances, which symbolized the sun's heavenly path across the sky.
AnthropologistJames Mooney conducted an interview with Wilson prior to 1892. Mooney confirmed that his message matched that given to his fellow Indians. This study compared letters between tribes. According to Mooney, Wilson's letter said he stood before God in heaven and had seen many of his ancestors engaged in their favorite pastimes, and that God showed Wilson a beautiful land filled with wild game and instructed him to return home to tell his people that they must love each other and not fight. He also stated that Jesus was being reincarnated on earth in 1892, that the people must work, not steal or lie, and that they must not engage in the old practices of war or the traditional self-mutilation practices connected with mourning the dead. He said that if his people abided by these rules, they would be united with their friends and family in the other world, and in God's presence, there would be no sickness, disease, or old age.
Mooney writes that Wilson was given the Ghost Dance and commanded to take it back to his people. He preached that if the five-day dance was performed in the proper intervals, the performers would secure their happiness and hasten the reunion of the living and deceased. Wilson said that the Creator gave him powers over the weather and that he would be the deputy in charge of affairs in the western United States, leaving current President Harrison as God's deputy in the East. Jack claims that he was then told to return home and preach God's message.
Jack Wilson claimed to have left the presence of God convinced that if every Indian in the West danced the new dance to "hasten the event", all evil in the world would be swept away, leaving a renewed Earth filled with food, love, and faith. Quickly accepted by his Paiute brethren, the new religion was termed "Dance In A Circle". Because the first European contact with the practice came by way of the Lakota, their expression "Spirit Dance" was adopted as a descriptive title for all such practices. This was subsequently translated as "Ghost Dance".
Spread of the prophet's message
Through Indians and some white settlers, Wilson's message spread across much of the western portion of the United States. Early in the religious movement, many tribes sent members to investigate the self-proclaimed prophet, while other communities sent delegates only to be cordial. Regardless of their initial motivations, many left as believers and returned to their homeland preaching his message. The Ghost Dance was also investigated by many Mormons from Utah, for whom the concepts of the Indian prophet were familiar and often accepted. While many followers of the Ghost Dance believed Wovoka to be a teacher of pacifism and peace, others did not.
An elaboration of the Ghost Dance concept was the development of ghost shirts, which were special clothing that warriors could wear. They were rumored to repel bullets through spiritual power. It is uncertain where this belief originated. Scholars believe that in 1890 chief Kicking Bear introduced the concept to his people, the Lakota, while James Mooney argued that the most likely source is the Mormontemple garment (which Mormons believe protect the pious wearer from evil).
The Lakota interpretation drew from their traditional idea of a "renewed Earth" in which "all evil is washed away". This Lakota interpretation included the removal of all European Americans from their lands.
In February 1890, the United States government broke a Lakota treaty by adjusting the Great Sioux Reservation of South Dakota (an area that formerly encompassed the majority of the state) and breaking it up into five smaller reservations. The government was accommodating white homesteaders from the eastern United States; in addition, it intended to "break up tribal relationships" and "conform Indians to the white man's ways, peaceably if they will, or forcibly if they must". On the reduced reservations, the government allocated family units on 320-acre (1.3 km2) plots for individual households. The Lakota were expected to farm and raise livestock, and to send their children to boarding schools. With the goal of assimilation, the schools taught English and Christianity, as well as American cultural practices. Generally, they forbade inclusion of Indian traditional culture and language.
To help support the Lakota during the period of transition, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was to supplement the Lakota with food and to hire white farmers as teachers for the people. The farming plan failed to take into account the difficulty that Lakota farmers would have in trying to cultivate crops in the semi-arid region of South Dakota. By the end of the 1890 growing season, a time of intense heat and low rainfall, it was clear that the land was unable to produce substantial agricultural yields. Unfortunately, this was also the time when the government's patience with supporting the so-called "lazy Indians" ran out. They cut rations for the Lakota in half. With the bison having been virtually eradicated a few years earlier, the Lakota were at risk of starvation.
The people turned to the Ghost Dance ritual, which frightened the supervising agents of the BIA. Those who had been residing in the area for a long time recognized that the ritual was often held shortly before battle was to occur. Kicking Bear was forced to leave Standing Rock, but when the dances continued unabated, Agent James McLaughlin asked for more troops. He claimed the Hunkpapa spiritual leader Sitting Bull was the real leader of the movement. A former agent, Valentine McGillycuddy, saw nothing extraordinary in the dances and ridiculed the panic that seemed to have overcome the agencies, saying: "The coming of the troops has frightened the Indians. If the Seventh-Day Adventists prepare the ascension robes for the Second Coming of the Savior, the United States Army is not put in motion to prevent them. Why should not the Indians have the same privilege? If the troops remain, trouble is sure to come."
Nonetheless, thousands of additional U.S. Army troops were deployed to the reservation. On December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull was arrested for failing to stop his people from practicing the Ghost Dance. During the incident, one of Sitting Bull's men, Catch the Bear, fired at Lieutenant "Bull Head", striking his right side. He instantly wheeled and shot Sitting Bull, hitting him in the left side, between the tenth and eleventh ribs; this exchange resulted in deaths on both sides, including that of Sitting Bull.
Main articles: Wounded Knee Massacre and Ghost Dance War
December 29, 1890 - Spotted Elk (Lakota: Unpan Glešká – also known as Big Foot) was a Miniconjou leader on the U.S. Army's list of 'trouble-making' Indians. He was stopped while en route to convene with the remaining Lakota chiefs. U.S. Army officers forced him to relocate with his people to a small camp close to the Pine Ridge Agency. Here the soldiers could more closely watch the old chief. That evening, December 28, the small band of Lakota erected their tipis on the banks of Wounded Knee Creek. The following day, during an attempt by the officers to collect weapons from the band, one young, deaf Lakota warrior refused to relinquish his arms. A struggle followed in which somebody's weapon discharged into the air. One U.S. officer gave the command to open fire, and the Lakota responded by taking up previously confiscated weapons; the U.S. forces responded with carbine firearms and several rapid-fire light-artillery (Hotchkiss) guns mounted on the overlooking hill. When the fighting had concluded, 25 U.S. soldiers lay dead, many killed by friendly fire. Among the 153 dead Lakota, most were women and children. Following the massacre, chief Kicking Bear officially surrendered his weapon to General Nelson A. Miles.
Outrage in the eastern United States emerged as the public learned about the murders. The U.S. government had insisted on numerous occasions that the Indian had already been successfully pacified. Many Americans felt the U.S. Army actions were unduly harsh; some related the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek to the "ungentlemanly act of kicking a man when he is already down". Public uproar played a role in the reinstatement of the previous treaty's terms, including full rations and more monetary compensation for lands taken away.
Twenty U.S. soldiers received Medals of Honor for their actions (some sources state the number as 18 or 23). American Indian and human rights activists have referred to these as "Medals of Dis-Honor" and called for the awards to be rescinded, but none of them have ever been revoked.
Following the Wounded Knee Massacre, interest and participation in the Ghost Dance movement dropped dramatically for fear of continued violence against practitioners. Like most Indian ceremonies, it became clandestine rather than dying out completely.
Despite the widespread acceptance of the Ghost Dance movement, Navajo leaders described the Ghost Dance as "worthless words" in 1890. Three years later, James Mooney arrived at the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona during his study of the Ghost Dance movement and found the Navajo never incorporated the ritual into their society.
Kehoe believed the movement did not gain traction with the tribe due to the Navajo's higher levels of social and economic satisfaction at the time. Another factor was cultural norms among the Navajo, which inculcated a fear of ghosts and spirits, based on religious beliefs.
The Ghost Dance today
The Wounded Knee massacre was not the end of the Ghost Dance religious movement. Instead, it went underground. Wovoka continued to spread its message, along with Kicking Bear, Short Bull and other holy men.
During the Wounded Knee incident of 1973, Lakota men and women including Mary Crow Dog, the wife of Leonard Crow Dog, ghost danced on the site where their ancestors had been killed. In her book, Ms. Crow Dog indicated that ghost dances continue as private ceremonies.
Ghost dancing is portrayed in the 1992 film Thunderheart which takes place near the Wounded Knee Memorial. Scriptwriter John Fusco believed it was necessary to show a few seconds of a traditional ghost dance, which protagonist Ray Levoi would perceive as dreams or visions. The 2004 film Hidalgo, also written by Fusco, also portrayed ghost dancers and the Wounded Knee massacre. Fusco consulted Lakota historians and elders and had Ghost Dancers enact the ceremony in both films.
Patti Smith recorded a song, "Ghost Dance", about or inspired by the ceremony on Easter (1978). Rapper Magneto Dayo and The Lakota Medicine Men did a tribute song called "The Journey" referencing the "Ghost Dance" (2016) on the album Royalty of the UnderWorld.
- ^Edmonds, Randlett. Nusht'uhti?ti? Hasinay: Caddo Phrasebook. Richardson, TX: Various Indian Peoples Publishing, 2003: 19. ISBN 1-884655-00-9.
- ^ abcd*Mooney, James. The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee. New York: Dover Publications; 1896
- ^Utley, Robert, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, Yale University Press, 1964
- ^Cross, Phil. "Caddo Songs and Dances"Archived 2010-08-24 at the Wayback Machine.. Caddo Legacy from Caddo People. Retrieved December 9, 2009.
- ^ abKehoe, Alice Beck (1989). The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization. Washington, DC: Thompson Publishing. pp. 32–33.
- ^Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, p. 33.
- ^"Ghost Dance – The Messiah Letter from Wovoka". www.ghostdance.us.
- ^Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, p. 5.
- ^Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, p. 13.
- ^Hittman, Michael, Wovoka and the Ghost Dance, pp. 84-88, University of Nebraska Press, 1997 ISBN 0-8032-7308-8.
- ^Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, p. 15.
- ^Wallace, Anthony F. C. "Revitalization Movements: Some Theoretical Considerations for Their Comparative Study", American Anthropologist n.s. 58(2):264-81. 1956
- ^Boyd, James (1891). Recent Indian Wars. [Philadelphia] Publishers Union.
- ^Brands, H.W. (2002). The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s. University of Chicago Press. p. 18.
- ^Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, p. 20.
- ^"Sitting Bull: Biography". Spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk. Archived from the original on 2012-05-25. Retrieved 2012-05-15.
- ^ abKehoe, The Ghost Dance, p. 24.
- ^ abGreen, Jerry (1994). "The Medals of Wounded Knee"(PDF). Nebraska History. Nebraska State Historical Society. 75: 207. Retrieved September 22, 2011.
- ^"Indian Wars Period". Medal of Honor Recipients. U.S. Army Center of Military History. Retrieved September 22, 2011.
- ^"Support the Action to Revoke the Congressional Medals of Honor to the Soldiers of the 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee"(PDF). National Congress of American Indians. November 30, 2001. Archived from the original(PDF) on March 28, 2012. Retrieved September 22, 2011.
- ^Winter Rabbit (February 9, 2011). "Action: Rescind Wounded Knee Medals of Dis Honor". Daily Kos. Retrieved September 22, 2011.
- ^Paul, Daniel N. (ed.). "Massacre: Wounded Knee, South Dakota, USA, December 29, 1890". We Were Not the Savages: First Nation History. Retrieved September 22, 2011.
- ^Renee Sansom Flood, Lost Bird of Wounded Knee (Scribner, 2014).
- ^Mary Crow Dog with Richard Erdoes, Lakota Woman (Grove Weidenfeld, 1990).
- ^Elizabeth Roetman, Straight From the Horse’s Mouth: Hopkins, Hidalgo, and Hollywood. Quotes from Fusco's interviews where he explained how he located descendants of Wounded Knee survivors to ghost-dance for both films.
- ^Wendell, Eric (2014). Patti Smith: America's Punk Rock Rhapsodist, p.54. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780810886919. "The 'Ghost Dance' in question may refer to the Native American practice, a holy tradition meant to reunite the living with the spirits of the departed."
- ^Johnstone, Nick (2012). Patti Smith: A Biography, unpaginated. Omnibus. ISBN 9780857127785. "The title referred to the Native American Indian ritual of the ghost dance...This was another song about different modes of communicating with God and parallel planes of existence."
- ^Dethier, Brock (2003). From Dylan to Donne: Bridging English and Music, p.38. Boynton/Cook. ISBN 9780867095326. "Patti Smith's 'Ghost Dance', for instance, can spark discussions of cultural appropriation, treatment of the sacred, and of course the genocide of Native Americans."
- Andersson, Rani-Henrik. The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8032-1073-8.
- Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2001. ISBN 978-0-8050-6669-2.
- Du Bois, Cora. The 1870 Ghost Dance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8032-6662-9.
- Kehoe, Alice Beck. The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization. Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, 2006. ISBN 978-1-57766-453-6.
- Osterreich, Shelley Anne. The American Indian Ghost Dance, 1870 and 1890. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. ISBN 978-0-313-27469-5.
- Stannard, David E.American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 978-0-19-508557-0.
For my project, I researched two different Lakota dance rituals, the Ghost dance and the Sun dance. We learned about the Sun dance from Celinda’s article, but I wanted to learn more. The purpose of the sun dance is to reunite and reconnect with the earth and the spirits. It calls for a renewal of life and a prayer for life. A large part of the sun dance is sacrifice. Men are required to partake in “piercing,” when two cuts are made on each side of the dancer’s chest where wooden pegs are inserted. It acts as a form of self-abasement so that the spirits will respond to his sacrifice and give him power and strength to finish the sun dance. Sacrifice also allows for the dancer to give up a piece of his body for this good of his people. The sun dance was outlawed in the 1880s and reintroduced in the 1930s.
Sun Dance (Youtube video)
The Ghost dance was a religious movement that began in 1870 and developed into a pan-Indian movement by 1890. Wovoka spread the movement because of his vision of the dance and preached the qualities of non-violence and a peaceful doctrine along with the dance. The Ghost dance is similar to the Sun dance in that the government intervened because they saw the Ghost dance movement as a largely subversive response to the settlement of Indian lands. The government failed to accept the Ghost dance movement and aggressively intervened with the famous massacre at Wounded Knee. The purpose of the Ghost dance is to reject negative things of the western culture (war, guns, alcohol), and accept the positive things (wage, labor, clothes, tools). The dance is for the regeneration of the earth and allows for the contact with the deceased. The people join hands and dance around in a circle until they fall down and are then able to connect with the spirits of their ancestors.
“The Father had commanded all the world to dance, and we gave the dance to the people as we had been bidden. When they danced they fell dead and went to the spirit-camp and saw those who had died, those whom they had loved…” (Short Bull)
Ghost Dance (Youtube video)
Anela, Haley, and I compared the different dance rituals that we researched and found many common themes between them. The similarities that we found between the Hoop dance, Hawaiian Hula, Maori Poi balls, and the Lakota Ghost and Sun dances were that they all contained the symbol of the circle, consisted of some type of storytelling, conveyed a certain point, acted as a way of passing down information and tradition from generation to generation, and had the mediation of the government at one point in time. Dance can be seen as a ritual in many different ways. It can be tied to a religion of Native tradition, or it can be a ritual of repetition, such as in Martha Graham’s modern dance style. Considering a dance to be ritual or not depends on the individual’s definition of ritual.


Acrostic: A poem or other form of writing in which the first or last letter, syllable or word of each line or paragraph, when arranged one after the other, form a word.
Action: An event or series of events (real or fictional), that make the subject of a literary piece of work. Actions along with dialogs of the character shape the plot of a narrative poem, prose, novel, story or a play.
Allegory: This term acts as an extended metaphor in which, objects, characters or actions are used to denote something other than their literal meaning. They are used to symbolize qualities of social, religious or political significance and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas like charity, kindness, greed or jealousy. In other words, through allegory, authors use elements of the narrative, to stress upon broader ideas that may not be explicitly mentioned in the narrative.
Alliteration: Alliteration is a literary or rhetorical stylistic device in which, consonant sounds are repeated (usually at the beginning) of a number of words in close succession. However, the repetitive sound can come inside the words as well.
Allusion: In literary work, allusion is a reference to some person, place or event in history or in another work of literature. Allusions are often used to convey broad complex ideas with a quick reference to well-known events or characters.
Analogy: Using an instance somewhat similar (not the same) to the one being talked about, in order to highlight the important features of the instance in question, through comparison of the two.
Antagonist: A character in prose or poetry that deceives, frustrates, works against or tries to harm the main character who is known as the protagonist. The antagonist need not be a live character. It could be any quality as well. Also, the antagonist needn’t be always bad. In fact, an antagonist can be a virtue which acts against a protagonist, who in this case would be evil.
Anthology: A collection of poetry, drama or verse.
Assonance: Assonance is the repetition of identical or similar vowels (specially in stressed syllables), in words that occur in close sequence.
Atmosphere or Ambiance: The emotional tone prevalent throughout a literary work or a section of it, that helps the reader to anticipate and relate to the course of events, whether happy or sad. Alternatively, the terms mood or ambiance (French word) are also used for atmosphere.
Autobiography: A non-fictional work by a subject, about his or her own life. Every account of the author’s life is true.
Ballad: A narrative folk song or poem that tells a story and is passed orally through tradition. Ballads cannot be traced to a particular author. Characteristically, ballads are dramatic and impersonal narratives.
Beat: Beat is a heavy stress or accent in a line of poetry. Usually it is the number of syllables in a line. The meter of a line is determined by the number of beats in it.
Biography: A complete account of a particular person’s life that attempts to portray the character, temperament as well as the experiences of the individual.
Blank Verse: A verse in iambic pentameter that does not have any rhyme scheme, hence the name ‘blank’. It was popularly used in verse drama of the sixteenth century by Shakespeare and later by Milton and Wordsworth for poetry.
Catastrophe: Catastrophe refers to the final action that results in the unfolding of the plot in a play, especially in a tragedy.
Character: The embodiment of a person in a drama or narrative through verbal representation or actions. It is the person, or people, or personalities (character can be an animal) in the story. It is who is in the story.
Characterization: Use of description, dialogs, dialect and actions to create the emotional, intellectual and moral dimension of a character is called characterization. Besides enabling the reader to understand the personality of a character, characterization may also give clues about the social, cultural and geographic background of a character as well.
Climax: A point in the play or any form of literary work at which crisis or conflict reaches its maximum intensity and then is resolved.
Close Reading: Bit by bit analysis of every word and literary devices used to understand their significance, inter-relationship and ambiguity (multiple meanings).
Conflict: Depiction of struggle in literary work, be it between two ideas, characters or groups of people. The conflict can also be internal, that is the protagonist struggling with psychological tendencies. Forms include Person versus Self (Internal Conflict), Person versus Person, Person versus Nature, Person versus Society, and Person versus God.
Connotation: While denotation is the main meaning or defintion of a word, connotation means the associated, implied, or secondary significance of a word. Connotation is the understood meaning that is not part of the actual definition.
Crisis: A moment of uncertainty and tension that results from earlier conflicts in a plot. During crisis, it is unclear if a protagonist will fail or succeed in his struggle.
Criticism: Literary criticism is the overall term for study, analysis, defining, interpreting and evaluating works of literature. The different types of criticisms are practical criticism or applied criticism, impressionistic criticism and judicial criticism.
Cynicism: Having a negative view of others and their motivations.
Denotation: The strict meaning or definition of a word as found in the dictionary, without any reference to its implications or associations. The literal meaning. Also see connotation.
Dialog: The lines spoken by characters in a play, novel or essay. It is through dialogs that characters converse with each other. Dialogs help in characterization and helps the plot to advance.
Drama: A composition in prose or verse that is designed to be presented on stage. In this, actors take the role of characters. Through their dialogs and actions, the characters advance the plot. An individual work of drama is called a play.
Dystopia: A work of fiction which presents a very grim picture of the social, political and technological aspects of a society that is characterized by poverty, disease, oppression, war, violence, violation of human rights and widespread unhappiness.
Epic: A genre of classical poetry that is a long narrative verse written on a serious subject, usually about the ideals and cultural values of a race, a nation or a group of people upheld by a hero or a demi God. The exploits of this central character is written in high elevated language. An epic is set over a vast geographical area and involves Gods and supernatural beings taking part in it.
Epilogue: A conclusion (known as the final chapter) written at the end of a novel, play or a long poem. It is usually a long speech, delivered either by the (or one of the) central character or by the writer himself, where the speaker speaks to the audience directly.
Euphemism: The use of a mild and comparatively less negative word instead of a blunt or harsh word.
Extended Metaphor: An extended metaphor or a conceit is a metaphor that extends into the next line. It is also found frequently throughout the work. They are highly applicable or effective in poems and fiction.
Fable: A fable is a short story that essentially has a moral. Fables are written and told to induce certain morals without instructions. There is mostly a use of animals and other imaginary creatures.
Fantasy: Fantasy is also closely related with fancy. However, fantasy is imagination which is vivid and unrestrained. Fantasy is, ordinarily, extravagant and not having any specific relation with reality. It is mostly an exaggerated vision of a desire.
Fiction: Fiction is an aspect of literature that deals with the imagination and the contrafactual events (events that are not true while writing, but may be true in the future). It can also mean to be an imaginary event that has been made to make a certain point clear.
Figurative Language: Figurative language is one that goes beyond its literary meaning to have a deeper, more effective bearing. Figurative language uses figures of speech.
Figure of Speech: Figures of speech are words or phrases that are used to express a meaning that is not confined to its literary meaning. Figures of speech are used very often in prose as well as poetry to make the point clear and apparent.
Flashback: Flashback is remembering or reviewing past events. Flashbacks are often used in dramatics, poetry and prose to allow the reader or the audience to visualize an event that took place in the past.
Foil: Foil is that character in the play (or any other literary work), who brings out/highlights the qualities of the protagonist and also emphasizes on the moral factor of the story. The foil is mostly in contrast to the protagonist.
Folklore: Folklores are the unwritten stories, poetry, phrases and morals of a certain culture. Folklores are, ordinarily, passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth in the form of stories, poems, songs and phrases. Folklore are known to have a major impact on the mindset of the audience.
Folk Tale: Folk tales are stories that are used to show a certain moral. These folk tales are ordinarily unwritten and passed down from parent to child. Folk tales exist in all cultures and play a big role in maintaining the values of the culture.
Foreshadowing: Foreshadowing is a tool used to give the reader or audience a hint of what may happen ahead. It consists of subtle hints that would make the audience “get intuitive” of an event and anticipate it. When that event does occur, the impact is stronger and the feedback is positive.
Free Verse: A free verse is verse or poetry that does not abide by the rules of rhyming. However, it can be interpreted as poetry due to the style it is written in. The general flow of thoughts, use of words and form can help in perceiving it as a poem.
Genre: Genre is a literary term that is, ordinarily, used only with reference to art and literature. Genre means a certain class or category of artistic endeavor having a particular form, content or technique. A few examples would be, genre of story writing or genre of music.
Hero: A hero is an unavoidable aspect of literature. The literary term often refers to the lead character (main protagonist) or the one of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities.
Homily: A homily is a literary term that refers to a commentary that, ordinarily, follows the reading of a scripture. It is often considered synonymous to a sermon.
Hyperbole: Hyperbole is a part of speech that is used, both in prose and poetry, to express a certain emotion by the use of exaggeration.
Idiom: An idiom is a word, phrase or sentence that is specific to a language or culture, but does not have a literal meaning. For instance, the phrase a little birdie told me, does not mean that a bird came and actually told a person something, rather it is used when someone does not want others to know where he/she got the information from.
Imagery: Imagery is one of the most important terms in literary criticism. The term imagery may suggest only visual pictures or images found in a piece of literature. However, on the other hand, it includes all the other human sensations including smell, actions, feelings and tastes. When a poem, novel or play uses descriptive language along with figurative speech to explain things like nature, a particular place or situation, etc., it is said to be a work of imagery, where the reader gets the minutest details of what is exactly happening in the scene.
Implied Meaning: A meaning that has been suggested without ever being explicitly stated. The meaning requires interpretation based on other knowledge not contained in the statements. (What the speaker or writer does.)
Inferred Meaning: A meaning that was arrived at after thought and consideration, because the meaning was not obvious in the statements themselves. (What the reader or listener does.)
Internal Rhyme: Internal rhyme is where a poem has rhyming words in the same sentence. One word would be in the middle of the line while the rhyming word would be at the end of the line. Here is an example of internal rhyming from the poem The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe – While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping.
Irony: Irony is a literary device where the reality is totally different from what is actually portrayed or expected. Sarcasm can also be said to be a form of irony, where it may appear that a person is praising someone, but actually is doing just the opposite. In dramatic irony, though the character does not understand the cause of the situations that he is experiencing, the reader or the audience knows perfectly about why certain situations have taken place. It is often used to describe situations where the outcome is the opposite of what was planned or expected, especially when that unexpected outcome proves to be humorous or meaningful. Examples of Irony
Legend: Legend is often confused with myth, however, both have different meanings. Unlike myth which is based on stories of the supernatural, a legend is a story that tells the tale of a human being and his accomplishments. Though there may not be any proof about the various details mentioned in the legends, the characters and locations surely must have existed in reality.
Literal Meaning: The meaning only as stated without interpretation, based on the face value of exactly what has been said.
Literature: Though works that have scientific as well as technical subject matter can be called literature, most often works that include creative writing are referred to as literature. Drama, novels (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, etc., are part of what is known as literature.
Lyric: Lyric is a short poem written in first person, where a single speaker expresses his emotions and personal feelings. These poems usually do not go beyond sixty lines and can also be sung in the song form. The different forms of lyric include sonnets, elegies, hymns, odes, etc.
Metaphor: Metaphor is a figure of speech where two distinctly different things are compared without using adverbs of comparison, ‘as’, ‘like’, etc. A metaphor is used to lay emphasis and bring out certain qualities of the object or person which may not be noticeable in normal situations. For instance, Shakespeare’s metaphor in the play, As You Like It, all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…. where actually the writer is trying to make the audience understand that there is no difference between life and theater, and human beings are merely playing parts allotted to them, just as the actors are doing on the stage.
Meter: Meter refers to the varying, nevertheless recognizable pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that occur in regular units in the lines of a verse.
Monologue: Monologue refers to long and uninterrupted dialog by a character in the play, where he expresses all his thoughts and emotions in front of the audience or any other character on the stage.
Motivation: What characters want, and the reason for their behavior. It is why characters make the choices they make. It is why the story takes place at all.
Mood: The feeling and emotions associated with a story, poem, or scene. See also Atmosphere.
Myth: The term myth refers to stories that talk about the creation and evolution of the world. Myths are usually attached to religion and have a deep cultural significance too. Most of the mythological stories involve Gods, ancestral heroes, supernatural beings, etc.
Narration: The act of telling a sequence of events to an audience. It also refers to a story that involves situations, characters, action, etc.
Narrator: The speaker or the voice, who is narrating the story.
Near Rhyme: A type of rhyme form, where the rhythmic pattern of the words is similar but not exactly alike. These rhymes either have matching vowel segments or matching consonant segments. These rhymes are also known as inexact rhymes or slant rhymes.
Novel: A long fictional narrative of 50,000 words or more originated in the late seventeenth century. Novels focus on the lives of a few primary complex characters, but also involve several secondary characters
Omniscient Narrator: Also known as third person narrative or outside speaker, it is the literary technique employed, where the story is narrated by a person who is separated from the characters in the story. He is party to all the happenings in the story and different perspectives of the characters in the same.
Onomatopoiea: Words that sound like the sound they are describing. Examples include bang, buzz, and clatter.
Opposition: The stand that is taken against the protagonist in literature.
Oxymoron: A literary device in which two words that contradict each other in meaning are used together to form a paradox. For example, “And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.” from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.
Palindrome: A word or a sentence, that reads the same, when read forwards or backwards. Palindromes date back at least to 79 A.D., as the palindromic Latin word square “Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas” was found as a graffito.
Parable: Parable is a literary term used for a short story or narrative, that uses allegory and real life occurrences, to give out messages about religion, values and morals.
Paradox: A sentence that seems contradictory in the context but if inspected closely makes sense and is a description of a truth.
Paraphrase: A technique in which a writer, rewrites in one’s own words, a part or the whole of a literary work.
Parody: An imitation of the work of an author with the intention of ridiculing the ideas in the work. Usually involves humor.
Personification: A figure of speech in which animals, ideas and inanimate objects are shown to have human traits and characteristics.
Plot: The effect of the structure and relationship of the actions, events and characters in a fictional work. It is what happens in the story.
Poetic License: The freedom that a poet possesses to depart from normalcy, where reality, historical facts and common discourse is concerned, in order to convey a certain idea to the reader.
Poetic Justice: A term coined by Thomas Rhymer in the seventeenth century, according to which, every narrative or drama should end with proper moral resolution for all the characters.
Poetry: A genre which is characterized by the use of rhythm and patterns like meter, rhyme, figures of speech, etc.
Point of View: It is a narrative method which determines the manner in which and the position from where, a story is told. Forms include 1st Person (story told by one of the characters, often the protagonist), 3rd Person Limited (told by someone outside the story who has incomplete information, and can usually only see the mind and/or actions of one character), and 3rd Person Omniscient (outside the story but teller can see the thoughts and/or actions of multiple characters).
Prequel: A literary work which is often written after the success of an author’s work but is set before the occurrence of events in the earlier work. It has the same characters.
Prologue: A section of introductory material, before the start of the main literary work.
Prose: Any literary work that is not written in a rhythmic pattern.
Protagonist: The main character in a literary work, on which a majority of the narrative focuses.
Refrain: Refrain is a line or a set of lines that appear at the end of every stanza in a poem. When refrain appears in the end of the stanzas in a song, it is often referred to as chorus. These lines can either be similar in each stanza or may appear with slight variations.
Rhetoric: Rhetoric can be explained as an art of writing or speaking in a manner that would aid in persuading the reader or the audience. Aristotle in his ‘Rhetorics’ has mentioned the ways in which an orator can persuade the audience in accepting his point of view.
Rhyme: When two similar sounding words are repeated in a stanza of a poem, it is known as a rhyme. Rhymes that appear on the end of the lines are called end rhyme which is the most common type of rhyme in poetry. There is also internal rhyme where rhyming words appear in the same line.
Rhyme Scheme: Rhyme scheme refers to the pattern in which the rhyming words appear in a poem. The rhyme scheme may be similar in all the stanzas throughout the poem, or it may also vary. In the olden days, when poems were passed along as songs, rhyme scheme helped people to memorize the songs. The most commonly used rhyme schemes found in English poetry include aa, bb, cc, dd, ee and abab, cdcd.
Romantic Comedy: Romantic comedy is a literary genre which became popular during the Elizabethan Era. Romantic comedy plays revolve around two young lovers who have to face lot of problems and hardships before they unite at the end of the play. Mistaken identities, misunderstandings, disapproving parents, etc., are some of the themes that can be commonly found in romantic comedy plays.
Saga: In contemporary times, saga refers to a work of literature that narrates the exploits of a hero or the accomplishments of a family through several generations. A good example of a recent saga is Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.
Sarcasm: Sarcasm is another name for verbal irony in which the speaker means something very different from what he speaks. It is usually used to hurt someone, say for example, through false praise. It is often saying the opposite of what you mean for the purpose of humor and criticism.
Satire: Satire is a literary device that is used by an author to express disapproval of vices and imperfections in individuals or human beings in general. He may use ridicule, derision, irony or other methods to meet this end. Although, on the surface a satire seems to be funny, its purpose isn’t to amuse the reader. In fact, the writer cleverly uses wit to criticize follies or shortcomings he doesn’t agree with, with the aim of arousing contempt in the reader.
Setting: Setting refers to the time, place and social circumstances in which a literary work occurs. Dystopia, fantasy world, imaginary world, mythical place, parallel universe, virtual reality and utopia are some of the different types of settings. It is where and when the story takes place.
Short Story: A short story is a fictional narrative that centers around one main event and aims at developing a single character only.
Simile: Simile is a figure of speech in which two objects are compared using adverbs such as “like” and “as”. For example, the courage of an individual can be emphasized by using the simile He was as brave as a lion in the battlefront.
Soliloquy: A literary device most commonly used in drama in which a character reveals his thoughts and feelings, audible only to the audience and not to the other characters in the play.
Stanza: A stanza forms a unit of division of a poem. It may consist from 2 to 8 lines that have a distinct pattern of meter and rhyme. A two line stanza is called a couplet. A stanza consisting of three, four, five, six, seven and eight lines are called tercet, quatrain, quintain, sextain, septet and octet. Ballad stanza, Burns stanza or Scottish stanza and sestet are some other common stanza names.
Static Character: A character that does not undergo any change in personality throughout the course of a narrative is called a static character. In case an author provides little characterization of a static character, such a character is called a flat character. As opposed to static character, a dynamic character evolves in his personality over time.
Stereotype: A stereotype is a character that is so simple and ordinary in its personality that it seems to be a representation of a specific social group or types of people.
Subplot: A subplot is a minor secondary plot that runs simultaneously with the main plot and is auxiliary to it. A subplot involves the deuteragonist or any character other than the protagonist or the antagonist. The subplot may comment directly or indirectly on the main plot or may highlight the idea being projected by the main plot by contrasting with it. Sometimes, there may be more than one subplot in a piece of fiction that may join with the main storyline in time, place or in thematic significance.
Suspense: As a plot progresses, readers or audience establish a bond with the characters and understand the plot. Suspense refers to the anxious anticipation that readers or audience experience with respect to the future course of events or what will happen to the characters in the narrative. The aim of suspense is to maintain the interest of readers throughout its course.
Symbol: A character (symbolic character), object, place, image or event with a deeper, more abstract meaning than the literal one. Symbols help in conveying complex ideas without going into painstakingly elaborate descriptions. Conventional symbols like the Star of David express meaning that is understood throughout a particular culture. However, literary or contextual symbols express meanings that are specific only to the particular piece of literary work. For instance, the white whale in Moby Dick has several symbolic meanings. Use of symbols is referred to as symbolism.
Syntax: Syntax refers to the standard order in which words are arranged so that they form a meaningful sentence.
Tale: A tale is a simple narrative in which the main focus is on the course and outcome of events. Fairy tale, folk tale, fable, tall tale and urban legend are some of the different types of tales.
Theme: Theme denotes the central idea, message or lesson that is conveyed by a piece of literary work. Besides plot, character, style and setting, theme is the other main component of a work of fiction.
Tone: Tone refers to the attitude that a writer takes towards his subject, characters and readers. The words and details used in a piece of literary work denotes its tone.
Tragedy: Tragedy is a serious play in which the protagonist suffers a series of misfortunes that leads to conclusion which is disastrous for the protagonist.
Tragic Flaw: It is the error or mistake in choice of action that a tragic hero commits that leads to his downfall in a tragedy. Aristotle termed this “mistake in judgment” as hamartia.
Tragic Hero: Tragic hero is the protagonist in a tragedy who meets his doom due to the mistakes he makes in his choice of actions.
Understatement: Understatement is a literary device that stands completely opposite to the figure of speech, hyperbole. An understatement is when an issue or situation is expressed in a much lesser magnitude than it actually is. Understatement usually creates an ironic effect and sometimes is also used to create humor.
Unintrusive Narrator: Unintrusive narrator is someone who is completely different to an intrusive narrator. An unintrusive narrator is one who does not give away his opinions or judgments on a character or situation while narrating a novel.
Unreliable Narrator: An unreliable narrator is a narrator who interprets the events in the novel according to his opinions, rather than that of the author. Unreliable narrators are deceptive as they are influenced by personal bias, psychological instability, faulty perception and limited understanding, while narrating a particular event or situation. A novel narrated by an unreliable narrator would have some hints by the author so that the reader recognizes the unreliability of the narrator’s interpretations.
Verbal Irony: Verbal irony is a kind of irony, where the character says something that he actually does not mean, which the reader would understand immediately, but the other character would fail or take time to comprehend.
Verse: Any line, stanza or composition which follows some kind of meter and rhythm is called a verse. Poems can be found in rhymed verse, free verse as well as in blank verse.
Villain: The term ‘villain’ is derived from the old French word, vilein and refers to a character in the play who is evil and performs cruel and malicious deeds on other people. A villain is an antagonist who is pitted against the protagonist or the hero and plots against him.
Voice: Voice refers to a distinct style of the author which reflects in the way he creates a piece of work. The voice of the author is influenced by various factors including his personality, way of thinking, attitude, character, etc. Voice can also be referred to as the persona of the author.