`` Rapunzel `` : The Feminist Revitalization Of Fairy Tales

Anne Sexton was a junior-college dropout who, inspired by emotional distress, became a poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize as well as three honorary doctorates. Her poems usually dealt with intensely personal, often feminist, subject matter due to her tortured relationships with gender roles and the place of women in society. The movies, women’s magazines and even some women’s schools supported the notion that decent women took naturally to homemaking and mothering (Schulman). Like others of her generation, Sexton was frustrated by this fixed feminine role society was encouraging. Her poem “Cinderella” is an example of her views, and it also introduces a new topic of how out of touch with reality fairy tales often are. In “Cinderella”, Anne Sexton uses tone and symbolism to portray her attitude towards traditional gender roles and the unrealistic life of fairy tales.

Byron Howard and Nathan Greno’s Tangled and the Grimm Brother’s “Rapunzel” tell two similar but noticeably different versions of the story about a girl with long hair kept locked away in a tower. While Tangled presents a fairly lighthearted story, with some moments of despair, “Rapunzel” is told in a mostly despondent manner. This paper will attempt to discern the differences in themes by comparing and contrasting the routes taken the stories.

Cinderella has changed so little over time that it seems we’re still in the 1700’s listening to Charles Perrault. And yet it remains of the most popular fairy tales read to children. The role of women continue to be either the cruel, evil one or the good, docile one while the prince continues to be the saving grace of the helpless girl. The skeleton hasn’t changed much as well. A damsel in distress, saved by a knight in shining armor, who falls in love with her and they live happily ever after. Does this sound familiar? This sentence might as well be a fairy tale. We’ve seen this over and over in Cinderella, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White.

Snow White is a fairy-tale known by many generations; it is a beloved Disney movie, and a princess favoured by many kids. But did you know the fairy-tale was made to teach young children, especially little girls, their duties in life? It also values beauty over knowledge, portrays women to be naive and incompetent, and assumes that women cannot understand anything other than common household chores. Throughout this criticism, I will be using the feminist lens to analyze the fairy-tale, Snow White, through the perspective of a feminist.

Every author, poet, playwright has a subtle message that they would like present to their audience. It may be a lifelong struggle that they have put into words, or a multiple page book that took a lifetime to write. A poet by the name of Anne Sexton sought out to challenge society’s views of women by writing “Her Kind”. A poet, a playwright, and an author of children’s books, Anne Sexton writes about the conflicts of a social outcast living in modern times. She voices the hardships she faces through three different speakers in her poem. At the end of the poem, the woman is not ashamed nor afraid of whom she is and is ready to die in peace. In Anne Sexton’s poem “Her Kind”, the main idea the speaker is depicting is the multiple stereotypes placed on a woman, by society. Sexton’s vivid use of imagery paints a picture of the witch, house wife, and mother cliché, while also implying the poem is autobiographical as Sexton went through her own personal struggles during her life.

Fairy tales have always been focused towards children ever since Walt Disney took over the industry of remaking these stories. He took out all of the gore and some of the violence to make it more acceptable for children. With Anne Sexton's version of Cinderella, she brings back the gore and violence to its full capacity just like with the original Brothers Grimm story. Sexton's poetic version of Cinderella gives a humorous and eye-opened twist to this classic fairy tale. What brings all of these stories together is the way they all socialize women to make them naive. With this in mind, fairy tales do humiliate and objectify women to get them to accept violence within society.

The story of Rapunzel is filled with problems. A majority of these problems are either moral, biblical or legal problems. This paper will explain most of those problems, like for example, is what the Witch did in the garden okay? Also is what she did in the tower and what Rapunzel’s father did okay?

In relation to the woman in the poem being shown as a supernatural housewife, the roles of the different personas she takes on meld into one another in a show of how she can be a mix of the three of the personas at times. The personas that Sexton takes on in the poem include; witch, housewife for the worms, and the adulteress. In the poem, Sexton mentions how she “waved [her] nude arm at villagers going by” and in the same stanza refers to where “flames still bite [her] thigh” (16, 18). In the first part of the two statements, Sexton uses the word ‘nude’ to indicate that she is doing something frowned upon. Women showing their arms is usually frowned upon, even now in schools where dress codes forbid women to wear tank

In a society unbridled with double standards and set views about women, one may wonder the origins of such beliefs. It might come as a surprise that these ideals and standards are embedded and have been for centuries in the beloved fairy tales we enjoyed reading as kids. In her analytical essay, “To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tales”, Karen Rowe argues that fairy tales present “cultural norms which exalt passivity, dependency, and self-sacrifice as a female’s cardinal virtues.” Rowe presents an excellent point, which can be supported by versions of the cult classics, “Cinderella” and “Snow White”. Charles Perrault’s “ The Little Glass Slipper” and the Brothers Grimm’s “ Snow White” exemplify the beliefs that

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful girl named Rapunzel. You already know that story, don’t you? This isn't the same heartwarming story you’ve known and loved. I am Mother Gothel, and this is my story. I am the witch that so called “kidnapped” Rapunzel from her parents. Firstly, Rapunzel’s parents were not the king and queen. Secondly, her mother was not dying, she was just selfishly craving my Rapunzel flowers while she was pregnant with her soon-to-be daughter. Thirdly, and most importantly, I never stole Rapunzel, she was traded to me for the flowers her mother craved.

It appeared to the young blonde girl named Rapunzel that the House of Mouse was even more packed than the night before. It was extremely hard for the short, petite girl to make her way through the crowd of people who flocked to the center of the club. What on earth could be causing so many people to want to crowd around the club. She squeezed herself past a few people, dodged a few people who almost danced all over her, all while saying. “Excuse me.” She knew the likelihood that they could actually hear her was slim to none, but still she spoke the words. She was just that type of person, she was never rude to anyone and went out of her way to say apologize, even when she wasn’t at fault.

Rapunzel is seen as a lead character in the movie Tangled as the role is being used to reflect feminist views through being an independent woman who has the ability to fight and defend herself if need. According to Diaz in the version of Rapunzel written by Brothers Grimm, Rapunzel is not seen as a hero of the plot but instead as a maiden in a tower that is helpless and desires to rescue, this, therefore, it portrays her as an object found in the story. The foundation of the storyline consists of Rapunzel being passed around between characters, she does not defend herself as she does not believe she can without help from someone else. Rapunzel's mindset of not knowing that she was allowed to defend herself clearly represents the social stigma of 1812 when the fairy tale was written. Feminist views influence the movie ‘Tangled' immensely as the female and male roles work together to get the desired outcome rather than have a highly male-dominated hero role. Rapunzel and Flynn Rider fall in love in their one day trip as they are both willing to make sacrifices for each other's dream as they are willing to sacrifice their lives for the freedom of the other person (Díaz). The movie ‘Tangled' reverses the traditional fairy tales, and their concept of fate brings a male protagonist to the maiden in a tower. This is seen in the following quote taken from the movie; Rapunzel: "Something brought you here, Flynn Ryder. Call it what you will: fate, destiny…" Flynn: "A horse…" (Tangled. Dir. Nathan Greno Byron Howard. 19 December 2010.) This quote creates comedy from the ‘old fashion' idea of fate and destiny being people

When someone mentions the name “Cinderella”, the first thing that usually comes to our minds is the fairytale in which the fair maiden who works so hard yet it treated so poorly gains her “fairytale ending” with a wave of a magic wand. However, the fairytale of Cinderella written by the Grimm Brothers has multiple differences in plot from the fairytale we all usually think of. The plot of the Cinderella written by the Grimm Brothers, written in 1812, is that a young female’s mother passes away early in the story, departing with the message to Cinderella to remain “pious and good”. Cinderella remained true to this message given to her by her mother, and she showed this in her work ethic. Because Cinderella had remained pious and good, her mother, in return, watched over her in the form of the birds above her grave that gave Cinderella help and material things that she needed. In the end, Cinderella has her “happily ever after”, for when the prince held a festival to find a new bride, she was chosen due to her insurmountable beauty. The feminist lens critiques how females are commonly represented in texts, and how insufficient these representations are as a categorizing device. These representations of women often include them being passive and emotional—staying back while the men do the work. Cinderella relates to the feminist lens because she fits into the typical representations of women created by men. Feminist criticism is important to recognize because women are often falsely represented as helpless, thus needing a man to come to their rescue. It is common in literature to see helpless women, crying and begging for help instead of being able to work out their own problems and hardships. Others, however, may believe that it is still important to uphold the fundamentals of the feminist lens because it keeps the man in power, which they say is important in keeping the man the head of the household. Cinderella thoroughly represents the feminist lens because it shows how women in literature uphold the representations of passive and emotional, created by the man.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away, the society of man created the idea that it was a woman’s job to conform to the ideologies generated in fairy tales. From women depending on their prince charmings all the way to romanticized sexual abuse and lack of consent, stories like Cinderella and Snow White radiate sexism within an array of scenes of the stories and films. Not only does this affect the way that men view women, but it has had a relatively negative effect on the ways that many women view themselves. Many fairy tales have made their way into mainstream culture, and today many young girls and boys grow up hearing and seeing the subliminal messages in fairy tales. As more and more fairy tales make their way onto the big screen, it can be seen that all princesses seem to share a common feature other than their crowns and lack of self worth without a man by their side; their tiny waists. In recent years during the 21st century more and more people in the media have been calling out fairy tales for their anti-feminist attitudes with sexism, body standards as well as societal comments about women being dependent on men.

Children fairy tales are some of the first books we’re introduced to growing up. Typically, the princess is saved by the heroic prince and they lived “happily ever after”. Some may think our life should be like a fairy tales while others don’t. These tales created gender roles in which appeared to be very important. In the Grimm Brothers fairy tale, “Hansel and Gretel”, the parents leave the children in the forest to starve due to not having enough money to buy food in order to sustain life. The children later find a house deep in the woods where an old, evil witch lures them in and tried to eat Hansel and Gretel. They eventually kill the witch and find their way home to their father with no stepmother to be found as she has died while the children were away. In the fairy tale, “Hansel and Gretel” gender and feminist criticism are highlighted throughout the tale by defining characteristics, consequences from their actions, and societal roles and expectations that were both prominent in German history and modern society.