Tell Me A Story: How The Patriarchy Influences Fairytales
I Vignette of the Participant: What Are Fairy Tales Really About?
“I think it’s really interesting what happens when you change the lens and a woman tells another woman’s story.” — Nikita Gill: Author, Poet, Playwrite, Feminist
Ever since the birth of spoken language, people have used stories to convey messages to one another. Such messages include teaching morals or explaining the world, providing an education for others, and even telling stories as a form of entertainment. Fairy tales can fall into all three of these categories without fail, like how teaching children about staying away from strangers through Little Red Riding Hood can be both educational and moral. Or how the whimsical tale of Fear-not and his otherworldly adventures in trying to figure out what fear is, is nothing but a funny story to keep a group entertained. But why is it that fairy tales are as prevalent today as they were when first written down many centuries ago? This continued infatuation we have with old fairy tales is caused by the steady and covert enforcement of the patriarchal ideals found throughout them. One such ideal is that of control over women. In nearly every popular fairy tale that has a female protagonist, her gender roles, and even her gender itself, have been used as surface level representations for what a woman should be: A beautiful young woman who marries her husband and lives with him “Happily Ever After”. This caricature of a young woman is prevalent throughout many popular fairy tales, so much so that it can be a detriment to young women everywhere. In order to explore this idea further, we must examine what a fairy tale is, who the authors/adaptors behind the most famous fairy tales were, and the impact that these stories have on today’s female audience.
II Definition of the Trend: What Makes A Fairy Tale?
In order to fully analyze the tropes of a fairy tale, we must first understand what a fairy tale is, along with the factors that allow gender roles to persist. According to psychology student Linda McAndrew in her academic dissertation Deconstructing Gender in Revised Feminist Fairy Tales, fairy tales originated as “wonder tales,” which can be defined as being “…characterized by characters, settings, and themes that induce a sense of wonder in the reader…the reader is encouraged to marvel about and imagine a world where anything is possible and logic is irrelevant” (McAndrew, pg 20–21). As one can imagine, this definition could be represented by a number of different stories and publications. Everything from children’s books about Egyptian mythology to The Matrix films could apply. To narrow this down, let’s focus only on fairy tales written by the authors Charles Perrault, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and Andrew Lang. The reason why the focus is on these fairy tales is because those stories are the ones that permeate pop-culture the furthest. In fact, the most well known and widely adapted fairy tales, such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves or Beauty and the Beast, both have origins connected to Perrault and the Grimms (McAndrew).
In order to further classify these tales, let’s also take a page out of Lisa Rettl’s essay, Fairy Tales Re-visited: Gender Concepts in Traditional and Feminist Fairy Tales, in saying that linearity is the greatest defining factor in most fairy tales. Linearity is defined as a plot that “embodies a simple, straight, ongoing line of action that starts with the information of the hero’s goal” (Rettl). This means that there’s no background information about the characters or world in the story other than what directly affects the plot. This means that it doesn’t matter who the princess is, where she comes from, or what she likes to do. It only matters that she is kind, submissive, beautiful, and in the end she learns that her happily ever after is to be married to a prince. This in turn leads to the perpetuation of gender roles within fairy tales, focusing mostly on the fact that the roles of women should have less impact and power than the roles of men.
That being said, what exactly are these roles? Within our modern day and age, it can generally be agreed upon that gender is a fluid social construct. In order to be female-identifying, one does not have to conform to overtly feminine characteristics. The same applies for a male-identifying individual. But it is shown within Kiran Mirchandani’s dissertation, And They Lived Happily Ever After?: A Female’s Identification with a Disney Princess and Her Assumed Gender Role and Romantic Beliefs, that
“the feminine characteristics coded [in fairy tales] were …“physically weak,” “submissive,” “shows emotion,” “affectionate,” “nurturing,” “sensitive,” …“troublesome,” “fearful,” “ashamed,” …and “victim.” On the flip side, “the masculine characteristics coded were …“physically strong,” “assertive,” “unemotional,” “independent,”…“inspires fear,” “brave,”…and “leader”.
As one can see, these characteristics tend to be opposites of one another. They interact with one another in a binary. Physically weak is opposed to physically strong, and the same can be said for the rest; submissive/assertive, shows emotion/unemotional, and fearful/inspires fear. This concept of opposites based on gender can be considered “patriarchal dualism” (Rettl). This means that men’s roles are generalized as having more power/being of more substance when compared to women’s roles. Think about it, when was the last time you read a centuries old story about a strong, independent princess who does not need saving from a handsome prince, or maybe even a tale about a prince needing to be rescued by a princess? It is unheard of because in order for patriarchal views to live on, women’s roles cannot be equal to or above those of men.
Just like the dualism between men and women’s roles, women’s roles have an in-fighting aspect to them as well. When you’re a woman in a classic fairy tale, you can be only one of three types of characters; the young protagonist who is saved and lives happily ever after, the unruly family member, or the extraordinarily helpful (as well as convenient) fairy godmother. For example, think of the humble, beautiful, and submissive homemaker illustrated by Cinderella. She is opposed to our villains, the wicked stepmother and her ugly, obnoxious stepsisters, because she conforms to her role as a woman and allows herself to be saved by the prince. The fairy godmother is opposed to Cinderella and her step family because she is otherworldly. She doesn’t need a happily ever after because her role is to provide the happily ever after for our heroine.
Another concept that had repeatedly been brought up by Rettl was that gender roles are learned as a child and enforced by the society the child lives in. This concept is formally called gender schema theory (Rettl). Author Leilani Visiko Knox-Johnson says it best in her paper, The Positive Impacts of Fairy Tales for Children,
“…girls who hear fairy tale classics such as Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast when they are children are more likely to stay in destructive relationships as adults…these characters provide them with a template for future submissive behavior. [She] interviewed domestic violence victims…who repeatedly told her that they believe “if their love is strong enough they can change their partner’s behavior” and many of them also identify with the characters…”
These binary views on the characteristics of feminine versus masculine, as well as the concept of “true love saving all”, are directly related to the patriarchal messages behind fairy tales; only the women who are submissive and serve the men in their life well will be rewarded with their happily ever after of being married to a perfect prince.
III and IV Generalized Knowledge/History of the Trend: Our Authors and Their Audience
In order to understand more clearly the patriarchal themes behind the fairytales, one must know who the stories are told to and who the authors of the stories were. Nowadays, classic fairy tales are generally reserved for young children, as well as for the entertainment of their families. Think about all of the classic Disney Princess films along with the dress-up clothes, dolls, makeup kits, accessories, clothing, Halloween costumes and theme parks that follow closely behind them. But ‘fun for the whole family’ wasn’t a phrase that was often used to describe fairy tales.
Some of the most famous modern adaptations of fairy tales were taken from either French author Charles Perrault or the German literary duo Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (Rettl). Both are known for their dark endings of their stories, such as Little Red Riding Hood ending with the girl being devoured and killed by the wolf or Snow White having her wicked stepmother dance until she dies while wearing white-hot iron shoes (Lang). Nonetheless, the genre first made its debut as entertainment exclusively for French nobility during the late 17th century (McAndrew). Charles Perrault was one of many authors to popularize and write fairy tales and presented them solely to those who frequented French salons from approximately 1690 to the 1770’s. (McAndrew). Some of his most compelling stories were Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella or The Little Glass Slipper. Both of these stories involve a young, submissive girl who must be saved and/or rewarded with marriage by a man at the end. Beauty discovers the Beast’s true identity after falling in love with him. She is rewarded by becoming his wife and living in his castle happily ever after. Cinderella escapes her abusive family and marries the prince she met at the ball. As her reward, she too lives happily ever after in his castle.
Following in Perrault’s footsteps, brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm garnered fame in the early 1800’s by translating fairytales of foreign origin to German for the common public to read. They translated everything from country folktales to the stories Perrault first presented to his noble audiences. As Jack Zipes says in his analysis What Makes a Repulsive Frog so Appealing: Memetics and Fairy Tales, “Wilhelm Grimm wrote down [The Frog Prince] after hearing it from one of the female members of the Wild family…Wilhelm labored over embellishing this tale for almost forty years. It communicated a moral message that advocated for the restoration of the patriarchal word and world order to which young women were to subscribe.” In addition to this, the goal of the Grimm’s fairy tales were to impose purity and morality amongst women “by eliminating any sexual elements that would be offensive to the morality of the day, adding Christian elements and expressions, and accentuating male-dominated gender role models for the protagonists in the tales.” (McAndrew) Based on these two accounts, we can see first-hand how the Grimm brothers took a woman’s story and molded it to serve their own purpose of preserving their patriarchal viewpoints.
After the Grimm brothers’ success came Scottish author Andrew Lang. He wrote a fairy tale collection titled The Blue Fairy Book. The stories in this book were collected, adapted and published during the late 1880’s (McAndrew). Just like the three authors before him, Lang’s book features stories that were adapted from many different cultures and authors, including adaptations of Perrault’s Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper, and Beauty and the Beast, although no authors are credited. Much like Perrault and the Grimms, Lang took it upon himself to collect stories and translate them into his own language in order to spread them, as well as his personal viewpoints, throughout the world. In fact, the majority of the stories in this collection revolve around female protagonists who either suffer greatly at the hands of a man (such as Princess Miranda at the hands of her father in The Wonderful Sheep) or are rewarded by marrying a man for serving him (much like the girls in Snow White and Rose Red).
V Why Does This Trend Still Exist?: Disney is the Powerhouse of the Cell
Although these men lived upwards of three-hundred years ago, their legacy of adaptation and patriarchal enforcement still lives on through the work of modern day collectors and storytellers. One such storyteller was Walt Disney through his ever flourishing company the Walt Disney Animation Studio. But how can this be? Isn’t Disney positively renowned for his work on the classic Disney Princesses, the inspirations and role models of little girls worldwide? While many people have grown up watching Disney films, from great grandmothers to young children, we mustn’t forget the inspiration behind Disney’s films. Disney’s first major motion picture, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, was an adaptation created during the height of the Great Depression (Mirchandani). Originally a dark tale about betrayal and revenge, Disney recognized that a completely faithful transition from text to film simply wouldn’t do. As Mirchandani recalls,
“Many people at this time…wanted to view stories about triumph and subsequent happiness rather than stories that emphasized the pain and struggle that was being experienced…Walt Disney recognized this need and adapted his tales accordingly, both to meet the desires of his viewers and to make the fairytale more marketable.”
Notice how Disney focused more on marketability rather than retelling a story as it was originally told. What the audience wants is what the audience gets. And as a result, Snow White’s character was defined by her good nature and pension for creating happiness wherever she went. At the end of the film, the princess is once again rewarded for her kindness and submissiveness towards the dwarves, by getting married to a prince that she had very little interaction with throughout the entire film. Much like the creators before him, his interests were more about the preservation of the same patriarchal ideologies, but in a more digestible manner. He enforced gender roles through the fairy tale by showing female audiences that a happily ever after will come their way if they can remain ever-cheerful through times of doubt and scarcity.
VI Counter trends/criticism: Princesses and Psychology
To some, this trend may come across as a stretch. Certainly not all fairytales have overtly patriarchal connotations to them. What more, if the target audience for fairy tales are now children, why should older people pay such incredible attention to the stories at all? To some extent, one may agree with this argument. After all, we were all young children who were told the same tales, once upon a time. It can be easy to look back on fairy tales with fond memories of childhood, along with creating new memories when telling the same stories to the young ones in our lives. Along with this comes the factor of self expression and healing through identification with fairy tale characters.
In one experiment, a psychological study was done on young teenagers who had developed eating disorders. These teens were asked who their favorite fairytale character was and why. According to this experiment, “…one eating-disordered client stated that Cinderella was her favorite fairy tale because Cinderella overcame her social status…this response would indicate that the client needed to overcome her sense of having an inferior status.” (Visiko Knox-Johnson).
VII and VIII Prediction for future of the trend/Conclusion: The Feminist Fairy Tale — What Needs To Happen
Because the patient was able to project her views onto an established fairytale, she was able to express herself more clearly and in a comfortable way. In addition to this, the patient hadn’t added to or taken anything away from the story to suit her needs as Perrault, the Grimm Brothers, and Lang had done for their stories. In order to make a fairy tale powerful, one does not need to rewrite it to suit their own needs. Perhaps what needs to happen is a change in lens, not in the story itself. Scarlett Curtis, author of the social science book Feminists Don’t Wear Pink (And Other Lies), goes into great detail about how “We need to represent the diversity of what a woman can be to girls when they’re that young…I think it’s basically just asking that women be able to watch more diverse stories that were actually written by women.” Luckily for Curtis, and women and girls across the globe, now is a time of free expression and radical change within the world of fiction and fairy tales. Now women can tell their own fairy tales, or stories loosely based on pre-existing fairy tales, using a multitude of different mediums.
One popular web comic about being a princess is The Cursed Princess Club, written and drawn by LambCat. This comic is all about Princess Gwendolyn learning to love herself with the help of the Cursed Princess Club. Every princess in that club has a curse, ranging from spitting up frogs whenever one speaks to transforming into a were-spider during menstruation. This comic also makes a point to break gender roles, what with Gwendolyn’s brother, Jamie, being the most beautiful and effeminate person in the family, and multiple characters being of different ethnicities, sexualities, and kingdoms.
Another fairytale that breaks fairy tale expectation is the 2003 YA novel The Frog Princess by E.D. Baker. This story is loosely based on The Frog Prince. When Princess Emma kisses Eadric the frog, the spell bounces back onto her, turning her into a frog as well. When the pair transforms back into humans at the end of the story, Emma makes the decision to train as a witch under her Aunt Grassina, as well as to not marry Eadric right away. Even Disney is turning it’s narrative around to include stories about family love as opposed to romantic love, as seen in the Frozen films and the 2012 film Brave, and 2017’s smash hit Moana.
Although this movement towards more positive and diverse representations of women in modern fairytales is fantastic, work still needs to be done when it comes to gender roles and regulation. Is it necessarily pivotal to the plot of a story if the heroine of the tale is a princess or becomes a princess? Does the heroine need to be overly masculine in order to be progressive/interesting? If a heroine does conform to traditional gender roles, such as being timid or shy, does that make her a regressive character? Nikita Gill asks herself similar questions when examining the roles of women in fairy tales and she always comes to the same conclusion; “I give them permission to disobey and be themselves.” In the modern day, it does not matter if the heroine conforms to gender roles or not. What matters is that she is herself and no one can tell her how to be otherwise. It can only get better from here.
Bibliography
GMB. “Should Fairy Tales Be Rewritten to Reflect Modern Women? | Good Morning Britain.” YouTube, YouTube, 22 Oct. 2018,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ1Jbzmx_WQ.
This video is a segment from the talk show Good Morning Britain. In this excerpt, literary editor Scarlett Curtis provides her opinion on how to rewrite classic fairy tales without completely eradicating the original compositions. Curtis was the editor and author of the book “Feminists Don’t Wear Pink and Other Lies.” What she attempts to discuss within the short interview are the topics of consent, eurocentrism, heteronormativity, and the importance of putting fairytales into perspective for older children through stories like Snow White and Cinderella. However, Curtis is interrupted many times by her interviewers. She takes a step back and allows them to talk over her but is never given the chance to rebut her opinions. This source had shown me that women’s voices in the realm of fantasy and fairy tales need to be amplified, especially so because the most popular fairy tales involve princesses and other heroines.
TEDxTalks, Gill, Nikita. “Why I’d Rather Be the Wicked Witch than Snow White | Nikita Gill | TEDxLondonWomen.” YouTube, YouTube, 6 Jan. 2020,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxs5krfzTkU.
Nikita Gill is an author, playwrite, and poet who specializes in reimagining and writing-up “difficult women” characters from ancient myths and fairytales. The duration of her TEDTalk focuses on the archetype of the difficult, evil, one-dimensional female characters and how readers can reimagine their characters in order to give them depth. A new sense of understanding is brought about by Gill’s enchanting language and the use of multiple character lenses. This source will help me with my predictions for the future of fairytales and my hopes for what fantasy will look like many, many years from now.
Lang, Andrew. The Blue Fairy Book. Barnes & Noble, Inc., 2012.
Andrew Lang was a Scottish poet, author, and literary critic who garnered fame through collecting and translating old fairy tales into English volumes. The Blue Fairy Book is among one of his most famous works, being that it was the first of 25 volumes. This book contains classic stories such as Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Snow White and Rose Red, and many other well-known tales. Lang’s methodology was to compile as many stories as possible from different parts of Europe for children to read in English. No sources are given as to where he found these stories, but they do follow most other publications, such as the Grimm Brothers’ version of Cinderella. This is the book that really immersed me into literary fairy tales after years of watching Disney films. This text will also give me a platform to stand on for less child-friendly stories to apply to my argument that fairy tales can be applied throughout the different stages of someone’s life.
McAndrew, Linda. “Deconstructing Gender In Revised Feminist Fairy Tales.” Deconstructing Gender in Revised Feminist Fairy Tales, Fordham University,
The main topic of this text is the presentation of male and female gender roles within reconstructed feminist fairytales. McAndrew’s argument is that the characters in these new fairy tales may either benefit and/or are hindered by the power their genders possess, as well as using CMA (critical multicultural analysis) to uncover the argument farther. What makes the dissertation credible is the fact that she is a college student specializing in the research of fairy tales and the impact such stories have on children. The author’s use of summary and deconstruction also aides in this credibility. For each new fairytale to be deconstructed, she provides a summary of the story then breaks down the power dynamics of each character in relation to themselves and each other. This dissertation provides many examples of what the modern day fairy tale should be, a story that disrupts genders norms and gender based power dynamics while still being entertaining and exciting in a traditional sense. This paper goes along with my prediction that modern day fairy tales will be more inclusive and fluid within what identity is/should be.
Mirchandani, Kiran. “And They Lived Happily Ever After?: A Female’s Identification with a Disney Princess and Her Assumed Gender Role and Romantic Beliefs.”
The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, ProQuest LLC, 2017, pp. 16–90.
This paper focuses solely on the adaption, popularity, and infatuation the global public has with Disney princesses. Along with this, the author focuses on what effects this overexposure to such media has on young girls and how the “lessons” taught in the films follow girls through adulthood. Mirchandi, at the time of this paper’s publication, was a student at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Her argument is convincing because she backs up her own personal experiences and opinions by citing the work of psychologists and professors who specialize in childhood development and psychology. Her methodology is to slowly incorporate an adult’s perspective throughout the paper — beginning with how the Grimm’s adaptations of fairy and folktales were re-adapted into the Disney films we know today to topics such as sexual and domestic violence and societal expectations brought about by the exposure to Disney films.This paper is most helpful to me because it discusses a topic most everyone can relate to. This will help me to hone in on my own subject, as well as support my claims with incredibly viable evidence.
Rettl, Lisa. “Fairy Tales Re-Visited Gender Concepts in Traditional and Feminist Fairy Tales.” AAA: Arbeiten Aus Anglistik Und Amerikanistik, vol. 26, no. 2, 2001,
pp. 181–198. JSTOR, www.jstor.org.ezp3.lib.umn.edu/stable/43025615. Accessed
3 Mar. 2021.
This paper focuses on the unfair villinization of women characters in traditional fairy tales and why the majority of these “villains” are rooted in misogynistic values. To present this argument, Rettl compares less kid-friendly fairy tales, such as Bluebeard and the Yellow Dwarf, to the story of Prince Amelic and the Red-Haired princess (a surprisingly light-hearted and carefully crafted tale about unexpected and unplanned love). I find that Rettl’s argument is particularly convincing because of the fact that she interweaves the Prince Amelic story flawlessly into her argument, slowly breaking the story down piece by piece to come to the conclusion that “Feminist fairy tales…are a pathway to the authentic self.” While the concept of my own paper is going to be more about the negative impact of fairy tales on women and girls, this paper has a much more light hearted tone. Rettl shows the reader that, when one grows older, they should begin to take fairy tales with a grain of salt, because by then they would have realized real life is much more complicated.
Zipes, Jack. “What Makes a Repulsive Frog so Appealing: Memetics and Fairy Tales.” Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 45, no. 2, 2008, pp. 109–143. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org.ezp3.lib.umn.edu/stable/40206971. Accessed 3 Mar. 2021.
Zipes uses the several adaptations of the Grimm brothers’ “The Frog King/The Frog Prince” to explain the societal, sexual, and strategic aspects of dating and marriage. He explains how the Grimms revamped certain aspects of The Frog prince to make it applicable to children (such as cutting out the original theme that the Frog Prince’s entire goal was to have sex with the Princess from the beginning). Zipes’ methodology was to create a more conversational, easy-to-digest piece of writing. In addition to that, he focuses on both the roles of men and women in fairy tales with much depth. The information present within Zipes’ paper can definitely be applied to my own, what with the bit I plan to do on over-sexualization and idealistic romantic tendencies, the societal aspects of this piece will be most helpful.
Photo citations
“Charles Perrault | Literawiki | Fandom.” Literawiki, https://literature.fandom.com/wiki/Charles_Perrault. Accessed 30 Mar. 2021.
Contributors to Wikimedia projects. “Andrew Lang — Wikipedia.” — Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 31 Oct. 2002, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lang.
“Brothers Grimm — Wikipedia.” — Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 26 Feb. 2002, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_Grimm.
“Cursed Princess Club | Webtoon Comics, Webtoon, Princess.” Pinterest, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/680958406140690160/. Accessed 30 Mar. 2021.
Isu, Calli. “Fashion Inspiration: Walt Disney’s Snow White — College Fashion.” College Fashion, http://www.facebook.com/collegefashion, 11 June 2010, https://www.collegefashion.net/inspiration/fashion-inspiration-walt-disneys-snow-white/.
“The Frog Princess Book — Google Search.” Google, https://www.google.com/search?q=the+frog+princess+book&tbm=isch&hl=en-US&chips=q:the+frog+princess+book,g_1:cover&prmd=isvn&rlz=1C9BKJA_enUS897US897&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiq-rCr3tfvAhUIF6wKHQkUDMQQ4lYoAHoECAEQBA&biw=1024&bih=659#imgrc=ZHEScTgg6r-lnM. Accessed 30 Mar. 2021.