Annihilating Limitations: The Pragmatical Princess

Thursday, November 10, 2011

The Pragmatical Princess

The Pragmatical Princess was a difficult read for me. Personally, I have a hard time understanding religious themes in depth because I have little understanding of religion as a whole or specific religions as I don't know their individual practices and beliefs. But I did understand The Pragmatical Princess's underlying theme as religion based. What I took from it was that the dragon said he changed his religion to protect his life and to stay and hang out with the princess forever. If he hadn't claimed that he was Muslim, the king would have had him killed.

The more interesting part of the story for me was the relationship between the dragon and the princess. Usually in fairytales, a princess is saved by a prince and they're then supposed to fall in love or whatever. Instead, the dragon falls in love with the princess and changes his religion so that they can stay together. This is relateable to Valente's backwards and upside-down fairytale telling. She focuses on not-so-traditional relationships (e.g. The Marsh King & the Leucrotta, the Leucrotta & the Beast-Maiden). Both authors put an interesting twist on traditional relationships.

7 comments:

HumbertNovember 10, 2011 at 5:44 PM
I don't think the Dragon fell in love with the princess, perhaps because of my definition of love(their relationship consists of 1-2 days) but also because I think the story is an allegory of pragmatic thinking and action and doesn't concern itself with romance.
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LisaNovember 15, 2011 at 10:37 AM
It's interesting to me the different tones of this piece and "Love Might be Too Strong a Word." Both seem to me to be critiquing romantic love, but each uses an entirely different method for making that critique (for example, the critique is much more explicit in LMBTSAW.) I like to think of the Ousmani and Aegyptus as being in (a very non-romantic) love. They seem to me to care for one another and they fly off to make a home together.
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ThedardenNovember 16, 2011 at 12:01 PM
it was also hard for me to read and understand
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jess.putlandNovember 16, 2011 at 6:16 PM
Does the dragon fall in love with the princess? Or does the princess fall in love with the dragon? My understanding was that the princess wanted to stay with the dragon, but the dragon simply wanted to fly to find other dragons to live with.
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TatyNovember 16, 2011 at 10:12 PM
I somewhat agree with Jessica on this one. The way I understood it is that the princess wanted to stay with the dragon so she convinced the dragon to take her with so she could get away from the town. Then again it was really hard for me to understand as well.
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NickDecember 5, 2011 at 9:54 PM
The dragon didn't understand what the princess wanted.
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Troy HeskethDecember 6, 2011 at 10:54 PM
I also think the dragon didnt understand what the princess wanted. because after all it didnt last for 1 or 2 days
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Among other goals, First-year Seminars at Hamline University introduce methods crucial for college success: critical reading, thorough reflection, engaged discussion, and academic writing. We are using this blog as a part of our developing these skills. The course as a whole examines the following question: what does it mean for a story to be queer? We are approaching this question by analyzing literary works (primarily novels and short stories) that not only explore gender and sexuality conventions, but also bend or break the conventions of story-telling. These works encourage us to see ourselves, or world, and reality from new perspectives, at right angles, queerly. In analyzing them, we will also explore how the practice of thinking outside the box is crucial to creativity in scholarship.