Cinderella Stereotypes

Boxing is a sport where the will to win is just as important as the strength to win. James J. Braddock had this will to win which is expertly portrayed by Russell Crow in Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man. Braddock symbolized the nation’s unwillingness to give in to the terrible times during The Great Depression and its fight to remain standing.

I argue that the movie, A Cinderella Story shows one of the kinds of stereotypes that many black women face in using the mammy figure that Melissa Harris-Perry discussed broadly in her book. A Cinderella story does this by having a black woman character named Rhonda who acts as the caretaker and worker under the main character, who is a wealthy white woman. Ultimately, A Cinderella Story creates this mammy figure by having Rhonda work underneath a rich white woman and her three daughters. Melissa Harris-Perry says, “Unlike the bad black woman who was aggressively sexual, Mammy had no personal needs or desires. She was a trusted adviser and confidante whose skills were used exclusively in the service of the white families to which she was

But in fact we use the stories that we tell children, and especially those that we tell over and over, to instill messages, to teach cultural norms, to establish the roots of what we hope will be proper behavior as the children grow up. Fairytales are a form of propaganda. The traditional fairytale almost always reflects (and therefore works to reproduce) the power relations of patriarchy; its rigid sexual patterns teach that fear and masochism are tenets of femininity and all of the symbolic inversions that occur are not chances to upset the standard patriarchal hierarchy but are instead ways of maintaining it (Bacchilega, 1997, pp. 50-1).

Disney makes over $3 billion on their Disney Princess products every year and now have over 25,000 items in their princess collection (Orenstein 2). Disney has played a big role in shaping not only societal viewpoints on what young girls should like, but also what little girls believe they should enjoy as well. Gender stereotypes have been around for a long time, but now with technology advancements, such as media in western society is able to play a bigger than ever role in influencing people’s perspectives. Not only do we see gender roles and stereotypes in television shows, but also in advertisements and in children’s toys. Although many readers of Peggy Orenstein’s “What’s wrong with Cinderella” have argued that the princess culture is corrupting today’s young girls and making them more dependent on men, a closer examination shows that many girls grow out of the princess phase with no negative repercussions and choose whatever passions they want.

Aside from how Disney Princess films portray femininity, the mindset that Disney princesses are created with negatively impacts young American girls as well. The need to always display femininity is not the only gender role stereotype that females experience. In fact, there is stereotype that says that women should be inferior to men, and it is represented throughout several Disney Princess films. For instance, Princess Ariel loses her voice after the evil witch, Ursula, takes it away from her. The only method that works to retrieve her voice back is to get the prince to kiss her.

In the movie Cinderella, the valued based on appearance is prevalent throughout the film and is the catalyst for love the at first glance. Love at first glace implies that men and women fall in love based solely on each other’s appearance. The movie completely mistakes lust for love, and boys and girls learn that love is based on appearance. Therefore, the stereotype implemented is if a girl wants to marry a guy; she needs to be physically attractive. The physical attributes of Cinderella are: strawberry blonde hair, blue eyes, and a perfect figure that allows her to differ from all other women in the film. Prince Charming selects a bride because she prettier than any other women in the film. The glass heel is a metaphor for how men are to

Over time people have started to talk about disney's underlying themes, and how they are ruining our kids at a young age. I Believe they do not. In fact I would like to think the opposite is true. But let's go and understand both sides. Disney has made numerous “princess” movie where they focus on a female character, facing a problem.

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.

This is especially the case in Disney’s 1950 film Cinderella. The film follows a beautiful, young servant girl who is kept alienated in order to serve her evil stepmother and step sisters (Disney, 1950). Cinderella’s personality is weak - her vulnerability and fragility are glorified as desirable traits. In the end, Cinderella is rescued by a prince who marries her and ends all her miseries. This is an echo of the idea that women are weaker, dependable individuals who need someone, mostly men, to rescue them from the slave-like lifestyle.

The men in “Cinderella” also value women for their beauty. The prince has a ball for all the maidens in the land to find his future wife, which “amounts to a beauty contest” (Lieberman 386) for a new trophy wife. While some argue that Cinderella’s rebellion of going against her stepmother’s instructions of staying home shows that the story has feminist qualities, the prince weakens her achievement when he chooses her only because of her beauty as “girls win the prize if they are the fairest of them all” (Lieberman 385). Her need for independence is transformed into the prince’s need for a pretty wife, making her again an object in her family. Once integrated into the prince’s family, Cinderella goes from the maid of her family to the smiling porcelain doll next to the prince as the “first job of a fairy tale princess is to be beautiful” (Röhrich 110). This gives the impression that the only way

Disney princesses have always been seen in the public eye as dependent on their prince charming. When thinking about the very first princesses Disney put on the screen, such as Snow white, Cinderella, sleeping beauty and so on, they have never been thought of as very strong or independent women. In most of the early Disney princess movies, the underlying theme is that the princess is always in search of or waiting to be rescued by the male character. With, this is one of the most prominent reasons why Orenstein did not want her daughter listening to the snow-white tale. She did not want to expose her daughter to thinking that the traits or characteristics that the princesses display were how women should act or be represented.

Remarkably throughout all of history, females have encountered the issue of oppression while any form of power is ripped away from them. The concept is plainly indicated within countless fairytales, much like Cinderella as it is narrated from the female perspective. When examining and using the feminist lens for the folk tale of Cinderella, numerous power relationships were clearly viewed. In other words, the relationships correspond with both gender, and how the individual is portrayed. At the beginning of the story’s context, the power connection between Cinderella and her step-mother is rather obvious. In addition, the constant power relationships among male and females within the general public greatly influences Cinderella. Therefore every

First of all, a rather sexist view of women has emerged from the evolution of a variety fairy tales. In older versions of many fairy tales, on can see the female dominant, matriarchal societies through the strong female protagonists. For example, as Yolen reminds, “Cinderella until lately has never been a passive dreamer….The forerunners of the Ash-girl have been hardy, active heroines” (33). One of the earlier Cinderellas belonged to a hunting community where “most important is the function of a female. She was at the center of this society and maintained a nurturing element” (194). As time went by Zipes concludes, women lost their supremacy and “fairy tales…reinforced the patriarchal symbolic order based on rigid notions of sexuality and gender” (qtd. in Tatar 338). As Zipes explains, “the heroines in these fairy tales remain pathetic , passive, and pale in comparison to the more active characters”, usually the men, when compared to those of the first generation of fairy

When I started analyzing Cinderella I noticed some gender roles/stereotypes that are brought to light. One of them being how women are the ones who stay home and perform household chores. They are “housewives” who depend on a man. The father is briefly in the beginning and afterwards we do not hear of him, initiating that he is off working, or on a business trip while the mom and daughters are home. We also see through Cinderella (who is forced to do all the chores) how their are consequences if she (or women) don’t complete or do the chores that are expected of them (like not being able to go to a ball in Cinderella's case). Another theme that is consistent in Cinderella as it is in other princess stories is the value of being beautiful. We see this when the fairy godmother shows up and makes Cinderella beautiful. She transforms her house clothes into a gown and so forth showing us that beauty is in the way you look or your appearance. If we pursue this theme further we see that the prince falls in love with Cinderella based on how she looks (love at first

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.