Anne Sexton Snow White

Cinderella is a childhood fairytale that we all love and remember. It is a tragedy that turns into love and happily ever after in the end. In contrast to this popular story, Anne Sexton's version of Cinderella is a dark and twisted version of the classic fairy tale. It takes on a whole new perspective and is fairly different from the childhood fairytale that most of society knows. The poem takes less of a focus on the happy ever after in Cinderella and makes it into vivid bloody and violent images. She retreats more toward the pain and neglect. The poem is not based off the Disney version of Cinderella, but rather original dark version by Brothers Grimm. Sexton uses a very sarcastic and

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.

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.

As a child, I was told fairytales such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs every night before I went to sleep. Fairytales are an adventurous way to expand a child’s imagination and open their eyes to experience a new perspective. Modernizations of fairytales typically relate to a specific audience, such as adolescence, and put a contemporary spin on the old-aged tale. Instead of using whimsical themes heavily centered in nature, the contemporary poems connect with the reader in a more realistic everyday scenario. Also, many modernizations are written in poetic form to help reconstruct a flow in the piece and to develop or sometimes completely change the meaning from that of the original fairytale. Comparing Grimm’s Fairytale Snow White

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.

Anne Sexton believed that the most interesting poetry was written out of personal experience. Everything she had been through, her hospitalization, her affairs, her insanity, the loss of her parents, and great-aunt, gave her things to write about. She uses poetry as one of her outlet. She writes out her problems. Her writing was a part of her therapy.

Furthermore, Joan D. Vinge considers gender role stereotyping in the The Snow Queen by reacting to typical patriarchal roles through “change[ing] society by changing our stories” (Wulff 9). The author used the traditional fairy tale as a platform to break traditional boundaries often presented in literature and create a vision for an utopian society contrasted with an extreme dystopian society to critique the problems in our world that come from conforming to gender norms.

Clarification of her beauty is there to aid the reader in understanding that she is good and valuable. Furthermore, her hair not only symbolizes beauty but fertility and sexuality; proving that she is an object. Once she loses her hair, it is evident that she also loses what makes her of value to men, which in this case is the innocence of her untouched beauty or her virginity (pg. 35). In addition, the story “Little Snow-White,” presents an initial description about Snow-white centered around her beauty: “as white as snow, and as red as blood, and her hair was as black as ebony” (pg. 124). Because of this description, the reader defines Snow-white’s importance with the base of her pure white skin, passionate red lips, and seductive black hair. These three characteristics show the value of Snow-White to the prince, who begs the dwarfs for her coffin. While persuading the dwarfs to give over Snow-white, he attempts to trade objects to compensate the dwarfs (pg. 130). To young women, values defined in fairy tales depict a horrid, demeaning view of

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

Troubled by the weight of her sins, Snow White indicates desperation to escape, and what better way to escape than “to mount (What else?) [the prince’s] snow-white horse”(36). Nonetheless, this princess was different, “’No poison apple needed for this Princess” (29). The metamorphosis that this Princess experienced transformed her into an independent woman who “reversed and without slowing/ Beat it to St. Anne’s where she took the veil” (39-40). Such actions truly prove her transformation, as she is able to dig her way out of the deep hole we call sin.

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

The queen is so envious of her stepdaughter snow white’s beauty, so she tries to disguise it by making her dress in rags and works as a house cleaner. “Is interpersonally explorative and lack of empathy”. The queen exploits her workers, the huntsman, by ordering that he should kill snow white and prove it by returning her heart to her.

The short story ‘Snow, Glass, Apples’ was written by Neil Gaiman in 1994. The story is a re-telling of the fairy tale Snow White from the step-mother’s perspective. Gaiman is considered a feminist writer and this is shown in ‘Snow, Glass, Apples’ where he brings awareness to the removal of women’s power by men in vampire text. In 1990, third-wave feminism had just begun. This wave involved “eschewing victimization and defining feminine beauty for themselves as subjects, not as objects of a sexist patriarchy” (Rampton 1). This differs from ‘Carmilla’ because LeFanu supports oppression of females while Gaiman is a feminist aiming to expose stereotypes of gender roles.

Within the collection of fairy tales, one of the most prominent is Snow White. The tale conjured up by the Brothers Grimm keeps to what one would expect with fairytale stereotypes. However it also plays the part of ancient myths of Aphrodite. The fairytale is simplistic in reasoning, and holds to the ancient goddess’s petty reasoning. Thus, other authors have taken it upon themselves to rewrite it with different plots, once such author being Angela Carter. In her story, The Snow Child, the queen is transformed into a Hera figure. This change rewrites the story’s meaning as well as one’s view point on the villain.

The story of “The Snow Child” can be analyzed using a feminist lens. In the Grimms’ version, more characters such as the price and the dwarves exist and the Count’s character is not highlighted. However, the characters portrayed in Carter’s version consist only of the Count, the Countess, and the snow child; and out of all three, the Count seems like the most stable and grounded as he calls the shots and dictates what happens and when it happens. Both