Gender Theory In The Juniper Tree By Brothers Grimm

Cinderella goes to her mother’s grave and cries about how poorly and inhumanely she is getting treated, she tries satisfying her wicked step-mother, but she is never successful. The Grimm brothers had a different audience to satisfy so their story tone is darker and deeper. Their main concern was for the audience to sympathize with Cinderella and emotionally connect with her.

“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.

In Alice Munro’s short story “Boys and Girls,” our narrator is a young farm girl on the verge of puberty who is learning what it means to be a “girl.” The story shows the differing gender roles of boys and girls – specifically that women are the weaker, more emotional sex – by showing how the adults of the story expect the children to grow into their respective roles as a girl and a boy, and how the children grow up and ultimately begin to fulfill these roles, making the transition from being “children” to being “young adults.”

In the Grimm version, there is also extra punishment for the stepmother as well. The stepmother now has to tend to her daughters and provide special care for them now because they cannot walk. She talked her daughters into cutting parts of their feet off because “ When you are queen you will no longer have to go on foot” (Grimm.) Therefore, they cannot walk anymore and

The Grimm Brothers version of Cinderella is a written down oral story that people passed down from generation to generation, meant to teach a lesson about piety and good behavior. Before the Grimm Brothers ever wrote it down, the story had been told several times by memory. It is thus not surprising that the descriptions of certain events in the story, such as the way Cinderella went to the Ball, are lacking in details. It is obvious that these parts of the story are unimportant to the overall message of the story. Instead, it focuses on the piety of Cinderella and the wickedness of the step-sisters. Through the events of the story, it becomes obvious that the goodness of Cinderella is justly rewarded, and that

In the Disney tale, her father is depicted as a loving and caring man whose most sacred is his daughter Cinderella. In Grimm’s version the two stepsisters are not ugly but actually beautiful with evil inside them. The step-sisters continuously abuse and mistreat Cinderella and her father doesn’t die but instead turns a blind eye to the situation and lets it continue. As the story continues it is clear that Cinderella’s father abandons her.

The premise of social class and the various impacts one's social status has on their life is a prevailing theme in all three versions of this classic story, and the ways in which this theme is recounted also highlights the cultural differences evident in all three stories. Generally speaking, the way in which social class is set up and maintained plays an extremely important role in how society functions, and how people live their lives. This is often reflected in the manner in which stories are told, especially as it relates to the cultural context of the specific historical moment. This is evident in all three versions of the timeless story of Cinderella. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's adaptation titled "Aschenputtel", first published in Germany

In Alice Munro’s short story, Boys and Girls, the underlying theme displayed throughout the entirety of the story is conforming and defying to society’s gender expectations. This is shown through the literary device, symbolism. Symbolism is seen through Flora the horse and the protagonist’s mother.

betrayal, and violence. His father abandoned him seeking to find a life less confrontational to a

One of the main themes that I noticed when I was reading through the fairy tale texts was the theme of stereotypes. Firstly, what are stereotypes? Stereotypes are essentially an offensive generalization or an over exaggerated view that is used to categorize a group of people. I noticed that in two of the three texts that I have selected for this paper, the authors, Jakob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, tend to portray women as being very dependent on men. In addition, to being depicted as being very dependent, they were also shown to be weak and very naïve. My goal in this paper is to highlight the numerous accounts of stereotypes that are cast mainly upon women and sometimes men as well, whether it be fictional or

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.

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

Despite gender, living conditions or cultural backgrounds most people grow up reading or hearing stories of heroism and damsel in distress scenarios. Anne Sexton turns stereotypes on their head in her satirical poems of classic fairy tales, including Snow White and The Seven Dwarves and Cinderella. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves tells the tale of a young princess with hair as black as coal and skin as pale as snow, whose life is thrown into turmoil at the hands of her overbearing stepmother. Cinderella tells the story of a young girl who she spends her life is yearning for the prince’s ball, and similar to Snow White, Cinderella’s stepmother is influencing her life, however she is a positive character throughout the story. This sheds light on the stepmother in Snow White’s piece as despite the fact that Snow White’s stepmother clearly does inherently evil things, a re-reading demands a re-examination of why. It is throughout these tales’ where stepmothers are only trying to protect their children from the world around them, however in Snow White an outside motive, the beauty provided by the mirror and the pride manifested by poison, creates a barrier between the queen and her stepdaughter, thus giving her the title “Evil”.

First sentence: “Once upon a time in a land not so far away, man created the idea that it was a woman’s job to conform to the ideologies generated in fairy tales.”

Alice Munro's short story, "Boys and Girls," explores the different roles of men and women in society through a young girl's discovery of what it means to be a girl. A close examination of the elements of a short story as they are used in "Boys and Girls" helps us to understand the meaning of the story.