A Fairy Tales ' Economic Length And Straightforward Messages

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.

Children often learn about their society’s ideals of love and relationships from fairy tales. Told from a female perspective, the poem Puce Fairy Book by Alice Major challenges and disproves the unfeasible and degrading expectations that women are held to, specifically by men in relationships. The motivation of the speaker, addressing a male counterpart, is to say that she does not care for other’s opinions of her faults and does not desire such unaccepting people in her life. Major’s use of fairy tale allusions and metaphors play an important role in establishing the central message that is the “perfect” ideological image that society has created for women to conform to are unrealistic and

In the folktale “The Blue Beard” written by Charles Perrault, conforms to both Dworkin’s and Lurie’s representations of fairy tale heroines. Perrault states, “The fatal effects of curiosity, particularly female curiosity, have of course long seen the subject of report” (133). Andrea Dworkin author of “Women Hating” and Alison Lurie author of “Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups” explain their different views regarding the heroines in fairy tales.

Triumphant reward in spite of unjust punishment is a universal sentiment that transcends languages and cultures. There are thousands of folktales and fairy tales that are firmly rooted in individual cultures, yet the tale of Cinderella has been told through many centuries and throughout the far corners of the world. With thousands of versions of this classic tale in print worldwide, the tale is believed to have originated with the story of Rhodopis, a Greek slave girl who is married to an Egyptian King. The story of Rhodopis, which means rosy-cheeks, dates back to 7 BC and is attributed to a Greek geographer named Strabo. The Chinese variation of this fairy tale is named Yeh-hsien. The Chinese version is traceable to the year 860 and appears in Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang by Duan Chengshi. Yeh-hsien is a young girl, motherless and in the control of her stepmother, who befriends a treasured fish. The jealous step-mother kills the fish, but it’s bones provide Yeh-hsien with magical powers, eventually enabling Yeh-hsien to escape the control of her step-mother for a royal life. The Story of the Black Cow which is found within the pages of Folk Tales from the Himalayas by John Murray, published in 1906, the child who is mistreated by a stepmother is a male and the role of savior is portrayed by a snake, with a cow serving as the moral of the story, faithfulness. These two versions of Cinderella carry many common threads that are

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.

The folk tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” has numerous variations and interpretations depending on what recorded version is being read or analyzed. “Little Red Cap,” by the Grimm Brothers, and “The Grandmother,” as collected by Achille Millien, are different in numerous ways: the depth of the narrative structure, characters involved, length – yet, the moral lesson is largely unchanged between the two versions. One of the more glaring differences between the two versions is the way that the narrator and the actions of the characters are used to describe the young girl, female, and the wolf, male. Being either female or male are matters of biological makeup. The characteristics of femininity and masculinity that are associated with being

Original fairy tales restrict the opportunities of female protagonists, allowing their fate to be controlled by male characters and society’s restrictive expectations of women. Authors such as Perrault of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ were quick to provide advice to their suggestible female readers in moral that girls should not try to drift from the path that society has laid out for them. Thus they became ‘parables of instruction’ (Carter) to indoctrinate the next generation in the values of a patriarchal society. Fairy tales of this time consistently remind us that those of the female sex will not prosper if they choose to ignore and defy the social constructs. Pre 1900s, the roles of women were entirely predetermined. A clear female dichotomy was established portraying them as either ‘the virgin’ or ‘the whore’. Stereotypical perceptions of women reduced them to biological functions and stated that they should acquire the role of wife and mother – objectified to such an extent where they were essentially their male counterpart’s possession. Both authors scorn the importance placed on domesticity and conformity, stressing the vital nature of being able to choose and uncover the consequences of societal ignorance. Carter highlights to her literary audience a passive generation of women who face the inability to vocalise their thoughts and opinions in the context of oppressive patriarchy. Within her work ‘The Company of Wolves’ “The

When imaging the ideal audience of fairytales, children are quick to come to mind, although, our perception of Little Red Riding Hood as an innocent fable is far from the truth. Alternatively, the origins of this story are derived from Italo Calvino’s “The False Grandmother”, a story immersed in symbolism and metaphorical symbols intended strictly for a mature audience. The preceding tale was “Little Red Cap “written by Charles Perrault and then later the “Little Red Riding” written by the Brothers Grimm. Although the details of these tales vary, they all maintain similar storylines. The stories revolve around the young female character Little Red Riding Hood who is sent off on a mission to bring her grandmother a basket of goods. During her adventure she encounters a wolf who engages in a hot pursuit to eat both the Grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood, only to succeed in the earlier rendition of the story. In this essay I will prove that when the Grimm’s Brothers and Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood stories are critically analyzed, it becomes evident that they are inappropriate tales for children as they exemplify the consequences of a minor transgression by Little Red Riding Hood as being the misleading cause of the violence and seduction that occurs thereafter.

One distinctive thing about the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales is the fact that there are oftentimes no happy ending to the tale. When there is a happy ending, it is due to the death or punishment of the antagonist. It is easy to relate this with the need for an element of reality being needed to help ground the mind but this also creates a rift when the main antagonist is question is a woman. This paper will focus on the gender roles and stereotypes associated with women and how they are perpetuated in some Grimm fairy tales, dividing them into four sections: daughter, mother, and wife, with emphasis on the dichotomy of good and evil.

Whether Female antagonists within fairy tales are portrayed in a positive or negative light their roles within the stories are very important if not crucial to the development of the protagonists. Karen Rowe in “Feminist and fairy tales” explains the divide between different female antagonists. Female antagonist come in all forms, Faeries, ogresses, evil queens, and evil witches step mothers and or step sisters. For the most part these characters are often divided between good and evil, or light and dark, but what is often realized, is that there isn’t much of a combination between the two groups in which an antagonist falls in between both categories. In this essay I will lay out the thematic roles of these different types of female antagonist’s portrayed within fairy tales.

Folktales are a way to represent situations analyzing different prospects about gender, through the stories that contribute with the reality of the culture in which they develop while these provide ideas about the behavior and roles of a specific sex building a culture of womanhood, manhood and childhood. This is what the stories of Little Red Riding Hood of Charles Perrault (1697) and Little Red-Cap of the Grimm Brothers (1812) show. This essay will describe some ideas about gender in different ways. First, the use of symbolic characters allows getting general ideas about the environment in the society rather than individuals. Second, it is possible to identify ideas about gender from the plot from the applied vocabulary providing a

In well-known fairy tales the males and females characters are often portrayed in the same light. The male characters are often described as the hero with strong masculine traits while the female characters are portrayed as the damsel in distress. Throughout the years fairytales have been casting the same stereotypes for their characters. In the story Beauty and the Beast the author de beaumont depiction of what an ideal woman is lays in Beauty. She is meant to embody the role of a feminine, humble caretaker, lover, and savior. The author depicts males as provider’s, however, it is clear that the men in the story are dependent on a positive female figure for life. Beauty’s disappearance threatens both her father and beast with death, symbolizing

Folktales has created men as the most powerful character in most stories but that does not mean always as there’s a difference in Grandmother’s tale and Little Red Riding hood. Different genders have different expectations according to their characteristics. The Red Riding Hood and Grandmother’s tale has produced ideas such as how a girl’s life is looked upon in the past and how the male has the upper hand in most situations according to the stories. This essay will argue about how the girl’s gender played a major role in the context of the story and how the wolf is represented by a male character and why the male is not always the most powerful character in all stories and the comparison

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

In Carol Ann Duffy’s “Little Red Cap,” taken from her collection The Worlds Wife, Duffy incorporates her feminist views on life to help develop Red-Cap’s character into an independent woman. In her work, Duffy intends to illuminate for the audience that woman are more powerful than they are perceived by society. In the poem, she writes about a young girl at the peak of her childhood, who is about to enter into the next phase of her life. The young, inexperienced girl describes the beginning of her transformation into adulthood after losing her innocence to “The Wolf.” The loss of her innocence contributes to the realization that she no longer needs an old, no good wolf. She gains the courage and reflects on how her life changes dramatically after her departure from the wolf. The poem “Little Red-Cap," written in The World’s Wife, closely relates to certain aspects of the original fairy tales written by The Grimm Brother and Charles Perrault. Duffy’s version of “Little Red Cap” is a rewrite of the original fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood.” Duffy incorporates her strong feminist views by allowing Red-Cap to initiate her encounter with the wolf and to use him for gaining knowledge for her career and sexual desires. These aspects contribute to the development of Red-Cap’s character into a more independent woman to contradict the oppression of women in the past and present generations, and allowing her to offer suggestions for women in the future.