“Mirror, Mirror on the wall / Who is the freest of them all?”: portrayals of princesses in Grimms’ fairy tales and contemporary children’s literature

• Autor(a) principal: Tomé, Maria da Conceição
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Outros Autores: Bastos, Glória
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.2/4376
• topic: Contos de fadas; Literatura infantil; Papéis sociais; Género; Princesas; Fairy tales; Children’s literature; Social roles; Gendre identity; Princesses

The Brothers Grimms’ Kinder-und Hausmärchen seems to have promoted patriarchal bourgeois values as part of the socialization process in the nineteenth century, modelling children’s gender identity and behaviour over time. Taking into account, under the hegemonic representations of gender, that female identity becomes associated with a set of values and behaviours, this article presents an analysis of some portrayals of princesses in contemporary children’s literature published in Portugal, by relating those portrayals with two well-known Grimms’ fairy tales: “Little Snow-White” and “Little Briar-Rose”. Our aim is to find out in what ways those images of princesses of the twenty-first century are substantially different from those conveyed by Grimms’ fairy tales, analysing their emancipatory potential. Finally, we wish to apprehend which ideologies underpin those portrayals and to verify if they effectively lead to a new world vision by depicting women as real free human beings.