Feminine/ Feminist Reflections on Fairy Tales

• Autor(a) principal: Rodrigues, Cláudia Susana Tavares
• Data de Publicação: 2005
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/15244
• topic: Literatura; Literatura oral; Contos de fadas; Representação da mulher - Literatura; Crítica literária; Análise de discurso

To analyse some fairy tales such as Beauty and the Beast and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from the perspective of modern feminism is like revising the paradigms which form our romantic expectations and illustrate psychological ambiguities that frequently confuse contemporary women. Portraits of adolescents waiting and dreaming, patterns of enchantment, and the romanticism of marriage contribute to the power of fairy tales. However, such fantasies praise the heroines’ incapacity to act independently, the reliance on exterior rescue and the binding to the father or to a prince. Although many readers recognise obvious elements of fantasy, they sometimes still identify themselves with the heroes and especially with the heroines. Unconsciously, women can transfer from the fairy tales to the real world cultural norms, which exalt passivity, dependency and self-sacrifice as feminine virtues. Intrinsically, fairy tales perpetuate the male status quo, making female subordination seem a desirable fate from which it is impossible to escape. It is this feminine perspective and feminist criticism that I intend to expose in my thesis, touching on the importance that fairy tales still have today, in the 21st century, not only on child rearing but also on the adults’ behaviour. In this thesis, I briefly explain how fairy tales emerged several centuries ago and how they evolved until our time in several versions, with several perspectives. My purpose is to analyse how fairy tales, on the one hand can influence us positively, showing us what is good and what is evil, and on the other hand, can influence us negatively because they present us with the “socially” accepted behaviours expected from women. In fairy tales, women are almost always represented as stepmothers and bad witches or as sweet, passive princesses dependent on the male image (father or prince) in order to be happy. It is this representation of female image that I intend to explore and analyse, showing my point of view of how fairy tales continue to represent behavioural models considered adequate to the female sex and to mirror a female image which is still accepted and seen as the most adequate – the image of a submissive, passive woman waiting for her prince charming to save her and bring her the desired happiness.