Gender And Gender Roles In The Film Cinderella

Our culture is full of fairy tales. Girls are taught at a young age about Prince Charming and happy endings while boys are taught to be the girls’ heroes. They are taught these dreams and desires through fairytales and movies. These fairy tales started out as entertaining stories, but as they were handed down from one generation to the next, they slowly became more than that. They became bedtime stories for children, and as such, they have great importance because they teach children how to be in the world. One such fairy tale I want to focus on is Cinderella.

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.

Throughout the story, the characterization is heavily influenced by gender roles and sexist stereotypes. The role of the stepmother and stepsisters is to solely use their power as a source of evil in order to bring down Cinderella, while Cinderella is depicted to be beautiful yet weak and

The story of Cinderella is well-known by most people, however, there are several versions of this beloved tale. There is the one told by the Grimm Brothers, depicting a world where moral choices can affect your life in extreme ways, but it is Walt Disney’s 1950 cartoon version of Cinderella that most children think of when the story is mentioned. This version leaves behind both the question of morality and the bloody punishments, allowing children to enjoy an eye-catching, G-rated film. Both of these versions use their respective mediums to emphasize what the creator deems to be most important: a lesson about piety and goodness in the Grimm tale and the entertainment factor in the Disney cartoon. These are each shown in different ways, according to the medium used.

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

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.

What people see is not necessarily all they get; there are more significant aspects that encompass what people use, hear, or see, besides the obvious messages employed throughout popular culture. It is not uncommon to find hidden messages within our culture today, especially in the context of movies. One movie in particular, the newest Cinderella, is full of these hidden messages. Besides the common message that is employed throughout Cinderella over and over again, the message to “have courage and be kind”, there are several hidden meanings that are often not discovered by viewers. These messages include “being a light” when surrounded on all sides by darkness, believing in the unbelievable, recognizing the fact that parent’s greatly influence their children, and seeing that it is okay to want a happily ever after kind of love.

Adults realize that despite Cinderella’s charismatic traits, Cinderella’s behaviour in Perrault’s tale is not acceptable for today’s modern western woman.

The story that most of us know as “Cinderella” actually has a lot of different versions. These different versions contain several elements that are similar, but yet even more elements that differ from one another. The three main difference between all the different versions of this story are the characters, how others treat the main character, and the setting in which these stories take place.

These two renditions of Cinderella present a story that exposes the social expectations for women as empowered or meek: one asserting self-empowerment, and one accepting the gender role, in the end demonstrating that obedience pays off with a “reward.”

The first article I reviewed was called “ The Production Of Meaning Through Peer Interaction: Children And Walt Disney's Cinderella” by Lori Baker Sperry. The main idea of this article is that Walt Disney's Cinderella is mainly geared to girls and creates gender roles. She explains how Disney geared this story to girls and created gender roles that in this day are not good. Typically girls are willing to take on a masculine character but a boy will not take on a feminine character. She notes that other scholars have identified fairy tales as a force of gender messages and forms a “prescriptive literature for children”(Sperry pg.718).

Each person in the world has heard of Cinderella, no matter what kind of version it may be. Cinderella is the one fairy tale story that has been popular and will always be the one tale that has to be told to children. Words and story lines might be twist and turn, but in the end the knowledge of the story will be learned in similar ways. As we all know when one story is told another is created, when one is at its best then another is at its worse. One version will always be better than another, but no matter what version it might be the story will be told.

Cinderella is a fairytale for children that displayed love, loss and miracles; however, when it is further analyzed, it has a deeper meaning. Cinderella is a story about a young girl who became a servant in her own home after her father remarried a malicious woman with two spoiled daughters. She was humiliated and abused yet she remained gentle and kind. She received help from her fairy godmother to go to the prince’s ball after her stepmother rejected her proposal. Cinderella and the Prince fell madly in love but she had to leave at twelve o’clock and forgot to tell him her name but she left her glass slipper behind. He sent his servants to find her and Cinderella was the only maiden in the kingdom to fit into the shoes. She

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.

“There is nothing more rare, nor more beautiful than an unapologetic women being herself: comfortable in her own perfect imperfection. To me that is the true essence of beauty”-Steve Maraboli. In an ideal society every women should believe that she is beautiful in her own unique way. However, the media portrays a women of unattainable standards. The media industry presents to the public their idealized perfect women who in essence is fake and unrealistic In addition, to the majority of the male population women are a mere object hence the term “trophy wife”. However, this notion, is not a new but rather the underlying message of the age-old fairy tale, “Cinderella”. The story of “Cinderella” illustrates these