Last semester, I took a WGS First Year Seminar in which we spent one week discussing the grossly misogynistic aspect of several problematic fairy tales that Disney popularized:
the Little Mermaid (lose your voice and be pretty!)
Cinderella (cut off your toes; you won't need them when you have a man!)
Sleeping Beauty (worst princess)
but we spent the most time of all discussing Gilbert and Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic, and specifically their take on Snow White.
When watching the 1937 Snow White, I couldnt help but view it through mostly a feminist lens. Gilbert and Gubar describe the competition between the women: "the one fair, young, pale, the other just as fair, but older, fiercer; the one a daughter, the other a mother; the one sweet, ignorant, passive, the other both artful and active; the one sort of an angel, the other an undeniable witch." The main problem that this raises--why do women have to be either an angel or a demon? Women in fairy tales are either categorized as angelic or bitchy, and I don't think any REAL woman can be given exactly one category in which to live her life. Through the films, we see the stratification between angel and witch very clearly through makeup, figure, and sexualization.
One interesting character evolution we can see in film is of the wicked stepmother. In the 1916 version, she is given a name as Queen Brangomar and is more realistic. She conspires with a witch for more beauty, who kills Brangomar's sister and makes her queen. This somewhat lessens the severity of her evil by splitting the character of the Wicked Stempother into three different women. In Disney's, the Stepmother is much more interesting than Snow White. Dark makeup and a slinky figure show that she must be evil. She relies on some demonic magic and her dangerous beauty to get what she wants. Enchanted uses a real actress to embody this stereotypical evil woman.
Disney downplays Snow White's lack of agency in the tale by giving her working songs, and a previous "relationship" with the prince. But in the tale, Snow White is purchased as a beautiful thing by the prince. She is simply passed from a literal to a figurative glass coffin- a life of domesticity and happiness living with a Prince.
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You make such an interesting point about the either/or nature of fairy tales with female characterization. I would also go even further to say that the same goes for male characterization as well. Thinking about the stories we've read and watched involving male protagonists, it seems they are usually polarized as well: charming or beastly. Where I run into trouble with that line of reasoning, however, is in trying to reconcile the fact that fairy tale men often change between beastly and charming, with the understanding that fairy tale women's characters usually remain fairly static. (That is to say that the Beast was able to learn how to be charming again, but Belle would always be the odd, dainty girl with a big heart.)
ReplyDeleteSo really, my first instinct was to write off the polarization of characters simply as a fairy tale trope, but there is no denying that there are differences still between the male and female characterizations. Curious, very curious.
I found your argument about how women in Fairy Tales are portrayed on either end of the spectrum: Pure Evil and Pure Good. And if Darnton was correct, and fairy tales act as an historical lens into European peasant culture, than what does that say how Males viewed females back then. Did they view them in very simplistic light? If they strayed slightly from their perfect definition of a woman: innocence, purity, industriousness, and virginity--were they then immediately casted out in society, and villainized? Just some thoughts. Very intriguing blog post
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