Fairy Tales and Their Relevance: A Synopsis on Violence Against Women (original) (raw)
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A little over two centuries ago, in 1812, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published the first volume of their collection of folktales, which they titled Kinder und Hausmarchen (Nursery and Household tales), and the second volume followed in 1815. Little did they know that this philological project, started by them as an attempt to preserve the German culture, as well as a step towards the formation of a unified German identity would emerge as the single most famous collection of fairy tales in the world, 'reaching millions of schoolchildren through cartoons and storybooks, joining them into a big international family' . The stories in the Nursery and Household tales have entertained several generations and have captured the imaginations of millions of children who perceive themselves as the poor and downtrodden heroes and heroines, oppressed by their teachers and parents, who emerge victorious over them and live "happily ever after". The childish obsession with fairy tales and their characters was perhaps best summed up by Charles Dickens, when he wrote "She was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss." Indeed many of these stories, including Snow White, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel are integral parts of our pop-culture as subjects of innumerable picture-books, cartoons, paintings etc.
Journal of International Social Research, 2019
Despite the term 'violence' associates the force which strong and powerful people use against the weak in order to have their ways, there lies a deeper truth beneath the surface. According to Erich Fromm, it is possible to say that violence actually stems from impotency or different kinds of weakness and feeling of deficiency. Hence, the origin of violence is psychological. From this point of view, it can be clearly noticed that violence has begun to lose its male character and gains a new and female attribution when examined under the light of some recent researches regarding myths, fairy tales and some religious narratives as the indicators of behavioural patterns in time immemorial. In these narratives, women can also apply violence, even to women. Especially in some famous fairy tales like Jorinda and Joringel, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Snow White, the female violence against female figures becomes strikingly obvious. So, in this study we have turned our perspective to the feminine world in these fairy tales and have tried to analyse the female violence victimizing the heroines by using some theories of analytical psychology and psychoanalysis.
Silent Girls in Fairy Tales: Against the Grain of Violence A Context
Violence Against Women, 2020
The poems selected here explore the hidden side of some of the most popular fairy tales. Girls become women guided by myths that define their passive role, their submission to violent behavior by men in their lives, be they fathers, husbands, or lovers. These poems look at a girl's fantasies from a different perspective: that a woman's life becomes the work of demystifying the myths that dominated her childhood to create a newly informed and subversive version of the myth. The poems selected for this special issue are included in the volume of poetry Después de la fábula/After the Fable by the Colombian poet Clara Eugenia Ronderos. In this book, she meditates on the extraordinary power that words have in defining human experience. As is evident in these four poems, she dares retelling fables from a new angle and gives us a way out of the prison created by legends. With an ironic, original, and heartbreaking poetic style, this book follows the narratives that define our world-view from infancy to adulthood. After the Fable contains 41 poems and is divided into two parts: the first one titled "First Fables" contains reflections on texts and narratives relating to our childhood and younger years, while the second part, "Other Fables," deals with myths, history, literature, and translation among other narratives that define
A week ago I participated in a Huffington Post Internet panel discussion about fairy tales with three people, who began waxing poetic about the wonders of the fairy tale and how it benefited children à la Bettelheim. I, too, was a little guilty of this, not of waxing poetic about Bettelheim, but about the utopian qualities of the fairy tale. And then, at one point, I blurted out something like: "We've been talking too much about the virtues of fairy tales, while they're really terrible! They're sexist and racist! They stem from patriarchal societies, and depict white men as saviors and women as comatose and barbie-doll princesses." Everyone laughed, and then we became serious shifting the topic to discuss some of the negative qualities of fairy tales, but we did not go far enough in our ideological critique. We did not discuss the childist aspects of fairy tales and how the tales reveal prejudices against children and young people, and how they might partially socialize children to accept the abuse they suffer, even today, without realizing it.
Cinderella Wants to Decide: A Feminist Study of Several Versions of This Fairy Tale Over the Years
2014
The literary fairy tale, present along history since the Middle Ages, is a device that portrays the ideology, politics, values, and morals of a society. However, they have also worked as an acculturation device for many centuries now. The language used in these tales is a key element, for it is selected by the tale collector or the tale writer with a purpose. A clear example is the fairy tale "Cinderella". People with power, men in the majority of cases, have articulated some specific discourse in order to reproduce or, rather, create, a reality in which men are strong while women are weak, men are active while women are passive, men are the leaders while women are the followers, just to mention a few dichotomies. Male collectors of fairy tales such as Basile, the brothers Grimm, and Charles Perrault have used their power as storytellers to reproduce a hierarchical structure of society, namely, patriarchy. These biased ideas on women, which the literary fairy tale has help...
Epitome International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research , 2018
Fairy tales, being a form of folk literature, continues to change and evolve according to the interpreters who gave them a written form. After years of being recognized as a source of entertainment, storytelling is now being viewed as a powerful tool for change and the overall development of an individual‟s personality, as well as an effective method to address social issues. As the characters depicted in children‟s fiction act as powerful cultural agents,fairy tales like Cinderella and The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood play a major role in the socialization process of the children who read them. However, a positive movement has been noted in the genre of fairy tales in the form of “feminist” versions of fairy tales. Perrault's classical fairy tales have thus been rewritten by feminists in recent times. Unfortunately, a close reading of many fairytales reveals that they set anoversimplified and un-questioned gender role stereotypes. As far as female stereotypes are concerned, the aim here is to explore how female characters in these fairy tales are represented as typical beautiful, submissive, enduring womenwhose happiness rests upon the men in their life. The fairy tales thus become a mere tool that men use or exploit to uphold and perpetuate the patriarchal conventions of society.
FAIRY TALES AS THE TALES OF PATRIARCHY: A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE
The exploration of differences between men and women becomes meaningful only through an analysis of power relations between them. Simone De Beauvoir argued that "woman is always situated as the other to man. The man is always the subject -self the 'I' whilst the woman is always the object, the other"