Happily Ever After… Or Is It?
Fairy Tales Through A Feminist Mirror
By Rolynda Gunnell
ON THE ORIGIN OF EUROPEAN
FAIRY TALES
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Because verbal lore is difficult to trace, we can usually
only attribute tales to specific authors after the advent
of the printing press (Bottigheimer, 1).
During the 1400’s, a popular fairy tale motif was riches
to rags to riches (ibid).
Gian Francesco Straparola published a collection of
Italian fairy tales in 1551 (ibid).
Giambattista Basile’s Pentameron is published in 16341636 (ibid).
Charles Perrault adapts several tales in the late 1600’s,
“he expunged crudities and added gallant prose” (2).
FAIRY TALES AND CHANGING PERSPECTIVES ABOUT WOMEN:
Sleeping Beauty
 The Ninth Captain’s Tale
• From the 1001 Nights
• Language creates a different texture
Sun, Moon, and Talia
• From Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of the Tales
• Originally written in Italian
 The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood
• By Charles Perrault
• The story takes on a familiar texture
Little Brier-Rose
• By the Grimm Brothers
• A lighter, more child-appropriate texture
The “Disneyfication” of Fairy Tales
 The Merriam-Webster Dictionary has added the
term “Disneyfication” to their definitions.
 Disney released his first full-length animated feature
film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1937.
 Disney made destiny, romantic love, and happily
ever after a fundamental theme of Fairy Tales.
 The Disney versions still adhere to prevalent
Fairy Tale motifs, such as: people who are ugly
are inherently evil and people who are beautiful
are inherently good.
Women and Fairy Tales
 In “You Can’t Change History, Can You?” Debra Seely
states, “Much of History has been the record of the
workings of the great and powerful – armies, kings, and
explorers. Many stories have been left out – the poor, the
slaves, and women’s stories, for example, and if these
stories were told, it was often by others” (Seely, 22).
 Little Red Riding Hood was originally called “The
Grandmother’s Tale”. It was told orally by women and
the Wolf was the only male character (Stephenson).
 The Queen’s Mirror: Fairy Tales by German Women by Shawn C.
Jarvis and Jeannine Blackwell is a collection of Fairy Tales
from 1780-1900 that were written by women (Wyatt).
Of Feminists and Fairy Tales
Feminist Fairy Tales have been defined as
those that “challenge conventional views
of gender, socialization, and sex roles…
the narratives are symbolical
representations of the authors’ critique of
the patriarchal status quo and of their
desire to change the current socialization
process” (Zipes, xi-xii).
 Feminist themes pervade every type of media.
ANALYSES
 “Even after centuries of Snow White and Cinderella tales,
glass… remains a prominent image and always a beautiful one.
Hard and impermeable as it may seem, it can be shattered in an
instant. Its message is ‘Look, but don’t touch.’ … These
properties have made glass the perfect material to represent a
chaste, unattainable type of human beauty” (Hart).
 From the viewpoints of Leslee Farish Kuykendal and Brian W.
Sturm, “rewritten folk tales and fairy tales claiming to be
‘feminist’ often simply reversed the normal gender stereotypes…
The simple reversal of gender roles does not result in a feminist
fairy tale, but rather a fractured fairy tale. Fractured fairy tales
challenge gender stereotypes and patriarchal ideologies only at
the story level of the text. Children are not fooled by these false
heroines. [Studies found] that while children admired strong
female protagonists , these were not the characters they wished
to emulate” (39-40).
Works Cited
Bottigheimer, Ruth. "Fairy Tales Old Wives And Printing Presses." History Today 54.1
(2004): 38-44. Academic Search Premier. Web. 26 Nov. 2012.
Dirks, Tim. "Filmsite Movie Review: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
Filmsite, The Greatest Films: The "Greatest" and the "Best" in Cinematic History.
AMC Networks, n.d. Web.
"Disneyfication." Merriam-Webster. Ed. Peter Sokolowski. Encyclopaedia Britannica,
n.d. Web.
Hart, Carina. "Glass Beauty." Marvels & Tales 26.2 (2012): 204-220. Academic Search
Premier. Web. 26 Nov. 2012.
Kuykendall, Leslee Farish, and Brian W. Sturn. "We Said Feminist Fairy Tales, Not
Fractured Fairy Tales!." Children & Libraries: The Journal Of The Association
For Library Service To Children 5.3 (2007): 38-41. Academic Search Premier. Web.
26 Nov. 2012.
Seely, Debra. "You Can't Change History, Can You?" The ALAN Review (2004): 22.
Canvas. Web.
"Sleeping Beauty." Sleeping Beauty. Trans. D.L. Ashliman. The University of Pittsburg,
05 May 2009. Web. <http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0410.html>.
Stephenson, Brittany. "Comparative Text." Introduction to Folklore.
Salt Lake Community College, Taylorsville. Fall 2012. Lecture.
Wyatt, Susan. "Reflections of Psyche." JSTOR. University of California Press, Nov.
2005. Web. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jung.1.2005.24.4.40>.
Zipes, Jack. "Preface." Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North
America and England. New York: Methuen, 1986. Xi-Xii. Print.
Images Cited
CAZ08BLOW. Digital image. Google Images. Google, n.d.
Web.
Ella Enchanted Book Cover. Digital image. Google Images.
Google, n.d. Web.
ImagesCA39B28A. Digital image. Google Images. Google, n.d.
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ImagesCAL97BUK. Digital image. Google Images. Google, n.d.
Web.
Just Ella Book Cover. Digital image. Google Images. Google,
n.d. Web.
Prince Cinders Book Cover. Digital image. Google Images.
Google, n.d. Web.
Rumplestiltskin's Daughter Book Cover. Digital image.
Google Images. Google, n.d. Web.
Snow-white-and-the-huntsman-1. Digital image. Google Images.
Google, n.d. Web.