Feminist Criticism Of Cinderella

Set in a patriarchal society, females are represented as passive and submissive. Women are reinforced and constructed to believe that they should be submissive and silent: ‘In the fairy tales, passivity is the most valued and honoured attribute a woman can possess in life’ (Nanda, 248). Women with good heart are innocent, beautiful and usually, saved by princes. Beauty is associated with intelligence, kindness and morality. On the other hand, women who don’t possess the good qualities are portrayed as ugly, evil, ambitious and usually dies in the end. They possessed repulsive traits like powerful, pride and vanity. These fairy tales constructed images of oppressed women and subjects under the patriarchal society. On the contrary, men are represented

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.

In her article, “Cinderella: Not So Morally Superior,” Elisabeth Panttaja illustrates the important role of parents in a childhood. She talks about the importance the mother plays in all versions of Cinderella as well as evidence showing what lack of parenthood does to children. Panttaja claims by way of the Grimms Brothers version of Cinderella and how each mother wants to guarantee a bright and happy future for their daughters by marrying them off to the prince. The similarities between the wanting of Cinderella and the stepsisters married- and doing anything to get it- contradicts the idea that Cinderella and her mother were morally superior, or different at all, from the stepmother and sisters.

In the familiar more traditional version, Cinderella is a poor maid girl that, with the help of fairy godmother, gets a chance to meet prince charming. They fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after, and then what? What is a happily ever after? Is this even a realistic thought? In the dark comedic poem Cinderella, Anne Sexton forces the reader to examine this question. Utilizing literary devices such as tone, imagery, and style, Sexton encourages the reader to think about how silly and unlikely a fairy tale ending actually is.

“Oh, fairytales, where desperate, naïve girls sacrifice everything for their so-called prince charming”. The realities of these childhood classics are controversial, sexist, and dark, yet, it’s also adored by millions of young girls around the world. Cinderella, an often sugar-coated story, is a great example on how sexism and gender stereotypes prevail in literature. The Grimm Brothers touch on a variety of devices, from characterization to symbolism, all revealing the inequality in not only fictional literature but our real-life society as well. A feminist literary critic will interpret these controversial themes and apply their beliefs of equal rights into the study of the Grimm Brother’s Cinderella.

A fairytale that almost everyone knows is Cinderella. Cinderella is about a young girl whose father decides to remarry after her mother dies. The women who he remarries is evil with two evil daughters. As Cinderella's father is out of town for various things the evil step-mom makes Cinderella do all the chores. They treat her like a servant rather than someone apart of the family. Since Cinderella has no friends she becomes friends with animals who help her complete her daily chores. One day they receive an invitation to a ball. Cinderella is allowed to go if she completes a set of chores but Cinderella ends up staying home while her stepmother and stepsisters go to the ball. Cinderella's fairy godmother shows up and makes her beautiful (changes her dress, etc) but says she has to be home at midnight because her beautiful dress will disappear and she'll go back to her old self. She goes to the ball and the prince falls in love with her but she has to leave at the strike of midnight. As she is running out of the ball she loses one of her glass slippers. The prince searches town for Cinderella. He then finally finds her and they live happily ever after.

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.

Society can learn a lot from Cinderella-like movies such as Maid in Manhattan. However, what society learns from these fairy tales is not always that Cinderella meets a prince and lives happily-ever-after. In the movie Maid in Manhattan, directed by Wayne Wang, a hotel maid meets a wealthy politician and lives a Cinderella-like tale after wearing a wealthy guest’s designer outfit. Most people focus on the obvious love story between the maid and the politician. Many overlook the psychological plight of Cinderella herself. In these tales Cinderella loses her mother and often her father too. This has a tremendous effect on the young girl’s self-worth. However, other complex relationships are also revealed, including the mother/daughter relationship. Similarly, the text “Cinderella: Not So Morally Superior,” by Elisabeth Panttaja, discusses the influences of Cinderella’s mother. These sources are worth exploring because they demonstrate how a woman’s self-worth is shaped by her relationship with her mother.

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

In her article "Onceuponatime" feminist writer Andrea Dworkin exhibits the disastrous effects fairy tales has had on both men and women. Women are often given no real backstory and are only there to serve as a prize for the man who would later become the hero. Dworkin believes that these stereotypes are harmful to society because it has a direct impact on the minds of young girls and boys. Without positive female role models, these children will grow up thinking women are meant to follow and obey. Society has much to lose if women succumb to these stereotypes. Women have unique abilities and perspectives that deserve to be seen. The solution is to teach young children that women can be their own hero.

The social structures which shaped the lives of women in 1950s America are highlighted in Joseph Mankiewicz’s film which, as its title suggests, is all about the female condition. Its presentation of the world of the theatre as a metaphor for identity-as-performance is especially relevant to women of the time who, like Margo, would have dealt daily with the spectre of their fates being sealed by their age; who, like Karen, may have had their talents and aspirations subsumed into their roles as ‘happy housewives’; and who, like Eve, may have been cast into the role of heartless villain as a result of their ‘unfeminine’ ambition. Mankiewicz’s presentation of femininity as a performance is further underlined by his use of light, costume and setting

Typical female archetypes in fairy tale literature include the princess, the evil stepmother/witch, the ugly stepsisters, the absent mother, and the magical fairy. For the purposes of this paper, the focus will be the first two roles of women in fairy tales: the beautiful princess and the evil stepmother. The representation of women as either a princess or a wicked stepmother have certain characteristics and attributes attached them as well as implications of these attributes. One traditional fairy tale that perfectly exemplifies the representations of women in these roles is “Snow White” by the Brothers Grimm. Later adaptations of this story expose the controversial messages behind these representations that may not have been obvious in the

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

Elisabeth Panttaja, teacher at Tufts University, analyzes the true morality of Grimm’s well known fairytale, “Cinderella”, in her critique, “Cinderella: Not So Morally Superior.” Cinderella is usually characterized as an innocent and “motherless” girl who is trying to find true love, such as Disney’s version of “Cinderella”. However, Panttaja claims that Cinderella is not motherless and Cinderella is trying to gain power by using magic instead of finding true love (Panttaja 289). Panttaja’s validity throughout her article is at best when describing how Cinderella actually has a power thirsty and magical mother, but her legitimacy begins to lack through her analysis

Fairy tales are one of the most well-read genres, including classic fairy tales such as the Disney version of “Snow White” One of the identifying features of this genre is the use of gender roles and the way it endorses certain values in regards to male and female. However, throughout the years fairy tales have undergone great changes, towards the view of woman representation and gender roles. In the contemporary “Snow White” the values of classical fairy tales have changed offering a new perspective of gender roles and how women are represented.