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Fairy Tale Feminist Criticism

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Majority of the childhood fairy tales one may have read growing up presents the readers with male dominated plots and content. This was, in many instances, due to the culture and time period in which these fairy tales were written in. In chapter one of Fairy Tales and Feminism entitled “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship”, Donald Haase presents many concerns to the field of feminist scholars on fairy tales. Two concerns from Haase’s work that I will be applying to James Garner’s, Charles Perrault’s, and Jacob and Wihelm Grimm’s fairy tales are the use of gender and socialization, and editing and the female image. Garner’s, Perrault’s, and Grimm’s versions of the same fairy tale raise concerns of gender and socialization in the field of feminist scholars, especially with “the representation of females and the effects of these representations on the gender identity and behavior of children” (Haase 3). All three of these fairy tales represent females as the “wicked, beautiful, or passive” (Haase 3) and men as “good, active, and heroic” …show more content…

Specifically with the Grimm Brothers’ tale, Haase states that “[Heinz] Rolleke helped debunk the persistent myth that the [Grimm] brothers’ transcriptions were authentic...that they had undertaken significant editorial interventions” (Haase 10). The fairy tales one has come to love from their childhood is one that has been “reappropriated for a gender-specific identity”. The purpose of fairy tales in a cultural sense was to demonstrate the status quo to society. This was done effectively by editing the female voice out of the fairy tales entirely. Even though “females were among the most important of the brothers’ informants and their the source for many of their important tales” (Haase 14), they were able to be cut out from fairy tales because it was a social norm of the

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