Gender Stereotypes In Fairy Tales

However, her true beauty lies within her skin, as Perrault’s interprets Cinderella as “a hundred times more handsome than her sisters”. He aims to focus more on female recognition and self-fulfillment, rather than provide a base for all readers to understand fully (Hühn). At an elementary level, this may not influence children to an extent, but other stories that reproduce this same structure of plot elements could possibly influence children in the future. For instance, she was not the hero of the story. The Prince isn’t the hero until he discovers her lost possession, a glass slipper, and searched for the person that fits. As told by Perrault, “he had done nothing but look at her all the time, and that most certainly he was very much in love with the beautiful owner of the glass slipper.” This enforces the fact that her beauty prevails over her actual personality but not behavior, and the appearance and mannerisms surely impressed the Prince.

Lori Baker-Sperry and Liz Grauerholz discuss the concept of female empowerment through beauty in their article “The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children’s Fairy Tale.” Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz state that, “women willingly engage in ‘beauty rituals’ and perceive being (or becoming) beautiful as empowering, not oppressive” (712). Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz argue that in children’s fairy tales, the female characters see their beauty as their most useful tool and would undergo “beauty rituals” to attain this beauty. By being beautiful, the Fairy Queen is able to win the attention and loyalty of Lanval. Not only does the Fairy Queen receive power in this bond, but also Lanval himself finds good fortune in the form of physical wealth. To further emphasize the Fairy Queen’s beauty and the power she holds over the court, France uses the series of girls prior to the Fairy Queen’s entrance. This builds a sense of suspense and the fact that the Fairy Queen easily trumps the girls in beauty further emphasizes her superiority. By emphasizing the Fairy Queen’s bodily beauty, France is able to show the power the Fairy Queen has over Lanval and the court.

Today's culture is one dominated by the media. People, especially young, impressionable females, are bombarded with images of “beautiful” and “desirable” women; these “sexy” women are lacking modest clothing, wearing copious amounts of make up, and are content to be viewed as objects, particularly by members of the opposite gender. In a society where the vision of true beauty has been distorted to such an extreme, fairytales serve as a reminder of the value of a beautiful

Margaret Atwood’s satirical poem, “There Was Once”, aims to disrupt the generic conventions of a traditional fairy tale. Atwood begins with the traditional opening of a fairy tale by writing, “there once was a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest” (Atwood 406). Atwood begins to dissect the aspects of a fairy tale by first calling out the normal backdrop, which is a forest. Then, she points out that the girl in the story was never poor to begin with since she lived in a house. Atwood questions why the protagonist must always be beautiful, pointing out the current problems surrounding women and body image. Atwood also complains about the fact that all of the female leads in fairy tales are white, possibly alluding to Hollywood’s constant whitewashing of films. She attacks the idea that the “evil stepmother” must always be evil and be a female, pointing out that if the stepmother had to be

Reading fairy tales or seeing them represented has become part of an everyday routine for children. As Baker-Sperry states, “Through interaction that occurs within everyday routines (Corsaro 1997), children are able to learn the rules of the social group in which they are a part” (Baker-Sperry 717-718). For example, through Red Riding Hood, children learn to listen to their parents and to be wary of strangers. Some of these messages are harmful though; not all girls have to be naive and weak while boys are predacious wolves. Not everyone has to play the role that society assigns them.

Whether Female antagonists within fairy tales are portrayed in a positive or negative light their roles within the stories are very important if not crucial to the development of the protagonists. Karen Rowe in “Feminist and fairy tales” explains the divide between different female antagonists. Female antagonist come in all forms, Faeries, ogresses, evil queens, and evil witches step mothers and or step sisters. For the most part these characters are often divided between good and evil, or light and dark, but what is often realized, is that there isn’t much of a combination between the two groups in which an antagonist falls in between both categories. In this essay I will lay out the thematic roles of these different types of female antagonist’s portrayed within fairy tales.

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

While Snow White’s dream is to marry Prince Charming, the film contains scenes that expose her delicate characteristics in which only females undergo. In Disney’s 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the directors present outdated female stereotypes of a woman who is expected to fulfill the needs of a man to conform to their patriarchal society. These clichéd values are concealed by the conventional romance exhibited while emphasizing the traditional notion of love. Snow White gracefully tends to her daily chores but immediately exposes her fragility when Prince Charming tries to interact with her.

In fairy tales, female characters are objects, and their value centers around their attractiveness to men. Since fairy tales rely on cultural values and societal norms to teach morals or lessons, it is evident that fairy tales define a woman’s value in a superficial way. Fairy tales teach that, typically, beauty equates to being valuable to men because of their fertility and purity; whereas, ugliness equates to being worthless and evil, including being ruined because of their lack of virginity. Descriptions readers see from fairy tales like “Rapunzel,” and “Little Snow-White” revolve around the women’s, or girl’s, physical appearance, and both stories play out to where the women remain in a state of objectification. In addition, they are damsels

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

From reading Snow White, I noticed a lot of traits from the other Fairy Tales I've read. In Snow White, the queen wished for a daughter who white as snow and red as blood and that’s what the mother said in The Juniper Tree, when she was trying to wish for a child. Most of the Fairy Tales are about evil step mothers, absentee father and witches house in the woods, or some type of civilization in the wilderness. In this story, what I found hysterical on how jealous the stepmother was over Snow White and her beauty. She was overcome with jealousy and rage that she even considering killing her stepdaughter, just so her mirror can say that she’s beautiful.So when the mirror told her that Snow White was still alive and she was living with seven

Overall, the emphasis that fairy tales place on physical appearance can be very detrimental to a child (particularly a girl’s) development and ideas of reality. To add, fairy tales, although perhaps unintentionally, depict that attractiveness determines who is good and who is evil. The protagonist is often the princess, who is described as the prettiest in the land. The antagonist on the other hand is often less attractive and more than likely labeled ugly (Schussler). Because fairy tales often depict good conquering evil and evil succumbing to its immorality, this therefore shows the reader that ugly people are punished (Schussler). This also can influence a girl’s self-esteem, considering that the created sense of beauty is impossible, thus they may feel inferior (Danish). Grauerholz hypothesizes that “[t]hese powerful messages that say women need to be beautiful may compel some women to seek beauty at the expense of other pursuits, such as careers or education” (Grauerholz). The exaggerated emphasis on beauty has potential to be a very limiting

Most of today’s media has awash society with idealistic representations of gender, often leading both men and women craving for unattainable perfection. Likewise, reality is frequently perceived as a poor substitute for the enchanted world, where good always thwarts evil and with characters living “Happily Ever After.” When most children or adults think of the great classical fairy tales today, the first thought that usually comes to mind is Disney. Their representations of classic fairy tale texts are so powerful that a vast majority has formed mental images of the princesses and other characters depicted in fairy tales, whether it be from classic books to popular media, the unchanged variable for any woman is beauty (Wohlend 60); usually presented with a flawless and virtuous female protagonist, who encounters obstacles that are vital to overcome in order to live happily in the end. Thus the Disney Corporation plays an important role in shaping the self-esteem of young girls, by playing a persuasive role as producers of culture in the, “construction of knowledge…with a limited worldview, skewed and dominated by corporate interests” (Garofalo). By doing so, Disney and other media sources alike, create a challenge for society to compete with these unrealistic representations and anticipated identities that are projected for society and that are regimented by design practices deemed by manufacturing media (Wohlend 59). Disney’s princesses emanate with, “excesses of

Upon being told she was not the most desirable, ordered a huntsman to kill Snow-White and bring her entrails back (Grimm). This was the case because to satisfy the Queen’s egotistical nature she once again had to be the fairest in the land. In the end the Queen “danced until she fell down dead” (Grimm), serving proper justice or so the audience is led to believe. This superiority complex ultimately leads to her downfall as in traditional fairy tales evil never prevails. Gaiman on the other hand depicted the Queen to be wise (Gaiman 57), shifting the enter tone of the narrative. To put emphasis on these contrasting characteristics, critical plot outcomes remained the same. For example, the Queen was still brought Snow White’s heart, but it “continued to beat and pulse” (Gaiman 59). This showed that the Queen was much more humane that her Brothers’ Grimm doppelganger as she did not devour the heart. Once again this holds true in the ending as the Queen gives up her body, but rather dies with her soul and story (Gaiman 66). By altering minute details in a story, the context can severely be reformed, but the fact that Gaiman keep the plot similar really brought fourth his revelations on gender roles in traditional fairy tales. Due to these contrasting altercations, the norm is really challenged by saying that even the most malevolent of people can still have good redeeming qualities depending on

Subtle sex discrimination, which is one of the forms of sex discrimination, is hidden and not easy to noticed in our daily life since most people have internalized it as natural and as something matters little. (Benokraitis, 1997) Startlingly, it is found that subtle sex discrimination appears in fairy tale either. The story of prince and princess deliver the hidden message of subtle sex discrimination unintentionally. It is worth writing because the fairy tales could bring huge impacts on girls’ growth stage and children may internalize the subtle sexist behaviour as “normal” or acceptable. I have divided my essay into three parts. First, I would like to summarize the sociology reading written by Benokraitis, “How subtle sex discrimination work”. Second, I will take “Snow White” as