Abstract

Reading the fairy tales of animal spouses through the lens of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics, this article complements previous researches on aesthetics in folktales a parallel perception of the two aesthetic emotions of the beautiful and the sublime. Respectively, the “microscope” and “telescope” present two aesthetic worlds. When the curtains are drawn, a comedy of fortune and a tragedy of sacrifice, or in other words, the world of contingency and the world of necessity, appear before our eyes. Stepping into these worlds, our judgments are born from the relation between measure and imagination. We judge something as beautiful when our imagination measures it as small, and we judge it as sublime when our imagination measures it as large. Our judgments are contemplative for objects smaller than us because small objects simultaneously make our imagination indifferent and curiously fond. Our judgments are dynamic for objects larger than us because large objects simultaneously violate and attract our imaginations. Each aesthetic world appears with different and opposing gods and laws of reward and punishment. Analyses of beauty and sublimity in the fairy tales of animal spouses give rise to judging subjects - interesting questions: Do we judge the world through a “microscope” or a “telescope”? Do we love the world from the mediation of contempt or respect the world from the mediation of fear?