Female Gender Roles in Fairy Tales

The last century saw the feminist movement in full throttle, and we women reap many benefits of it today. Even so, popular culture continues to objectify women. Clothes have become skimpier, sizes have drastically shrunk and runway models, increasingly skinnier. It seems the world still looks up to plastic Barbies when it comes to defining beautiful women. The article Gender Roles and Degrading Women In America discusses this in greater detail. I will, on the other hand, point my finger on another vessel of female desecration that many people simply overlook or deem to be too trivial: fairy tales.

Fairy tales are those innocuous, requisite before-bedtime stories that have practically become ingrained in American culture from one generation to another. Who hasn't heard of Cinderella or Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, after all? We've become so used to these stories and characters that we've practically become desensitized to the actual values they convey. Every mention of them ushers in a deluge of warm childhood memories that we fail to really think through these stories twice before telling them to our own kids as well. Even a cursory moment of introspection would reveal some surprising lessons.

Think back at the most beloved fairy tales you know: Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, even Hansel and Gretel. On the surface, they seem to be innocent narrative of childlike fancy. But what we actually get from the bookstores today are highly sanitized versions of the fairy tales. Most of these actually originated as European folk tales, which were, like the Grimm brothers famously did, transcribed by writers and retold to wider audiences. As time passed, some of the most gruesome and "socially unacceptable" elements of these stories were edited out by the publishers to make the material kid-friendly.

What your teacher or mom didn't point out to you was how the female almost always played the central figure in these stories and the stereotypical roles they played out. If she were the heroine, like Cinderella, she was a weak character, who constantly submitted to other's wishes and did good. Everyday, she would look out of her window to the castle in the distance, constantly dreaming of her day of reward and pining for her Prince Charming to come and whisk her away. She was the epitome of the sacrificial lamb-a very unrealistic and helpless one at that. At the end of the day, she just got lucky. Really lucky.

And then there's the feminine evil on the other end of the personality spectrum. There seems to be plenty more of these than heroines, in fact. Villains were almost always certainly female. Think Cinderella's stepmother and stepsisters. Kids always have that notion but the funny thing is, in real life, stepmothers and stepsisters aren't always evil. Evil witches and ogresses are female too, just like the one that wanted to eat Hansel and Gretel. There's also the evil fairy who cursed Sleeping Beauty. Just about everywhere, you can almost always be certain that the bad guys are…bad girls.

The classic story that portrays the weak heroine and the feminine evil is Snow White. In the Disney version, they had her singing "Someday My Prince Will Come", with that sweet voice brainwashing kids all over to blindly accept the values being conveyed. She lived with the dwarves because her evil stepmother sent a hunter to have her killed, and the guy has enough compassion to just let her run away instead. This is the sanitized version. In the real version that the Grimms got from the rural folk of old who told the story, it was in fact her real, biological mother who wanted her killed. And the guys have all the fun of rescuing the damsel in distress and slaying the obdurate matriarch. Below is a brief synopsis of the real story, which includes an brief segment on Prince Charming, who turns out not to be so charming after all.

Snow White

Oh, who would kill for beauty! The Grimms were too nice when they recounted their horrific tale of bloodthirsty envy. The real thing would never have made it to the publishers anyway. In it was a deranged mother-NOT a stepmother like we were made to believe, but a biological mother-so envious that she ordered her own daughter's lungs and liver on her dinner plate to settle the score once and for all. This narcissistic woman knew that if she was going to be the most beautiful woman in the world, any threat to that prized title would have to be eliminated-even if it were her of her own flesh and blood. If you'll notice, evil stepmothers only made it to the villains' hitlist in the last century. Children's books publishers decided that biological mothers and fathers killing and consuming their own offspring has become too disturbing a notion for the modern person, hence the modification. That aside, Prince Charming never kisses Snow White either. Instead, our necrophiliac prince falls in love with our "dead" princess and finding himself unable to part from her sight, carts her away in her glass coffin for his own viewing pleasure. With luck, he stumbles upon a pothole that dislodges the poisonous apple from her throat. This is where they kiss, defeat the wicked queen and live happily ever after.