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Author
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Comment
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tishaanne
Unregistered User
(3/2/04 4:06 pm)
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Prince
Why is it that a prince has to come and rescue the girl out of the fairy tales? For example, in "Cinderella", Cinderella cannot escape her evil her stepmother and stepsisters without the help of the prince. She needs the prince to escape and live happily ever after.
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Veronica
Schanoes
Registered User
(3/2/04 10:24 pm)
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Re: Prince
Well...it more or less depends on the fairy tale. In "The Snow Queen," for instance, Gerda rescues Kay and is aided by a Robber Girl. The prince doesn't rescue Rapunzel--she eventually saves him from blindness. And Katie Crackernuts rescues her prince. But yeah, a lot of the the current really popular versions of the best known tales, like Disney's, require a prince to wake up/save the princess. Why? I'd put my money on sexism.
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janeyolen
Registered User
(3/3/04 6:44 am)
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Re: Prince
You have hold of the wrong Cinderella variants. In many of them, she solves her own problems. See my article "America's Cinderella" in Alan Dundes collection THE CINDERELLA CASEBOOK.
Please get one of the following books:
NOT ONE DAMSEL IN DISTRESS Yolen
Also:
Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World by Kathleen Ragan (Editor)
Serpent Slayer and Other Stories of Strong Women, by Katrin Tchana and Trina Hyman
There are lots of other books with strong female heroes out of folk tales.
Jane
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Helen
Registered User
(3/3/04 8:29 am)
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Re: Prince
I agree with both of the above: I'd add, also, that the sexism definitely isn't inherent to the discipline of fairy tales as a whole, but to the process of selection that began, roughly with the editing of the Victorian period. Suddenly, tales that exemplified women's strengths - "Donkeyskin," East of the Sun, West of the Moon," etc. - just weren't as "popular" (that is to say, appropriate), as those featuring square-jawed heroes. We see that still, today, in the choice of tales for film adaptation - for, while Snow White, Cinderella, and Beauty and the Beast can all be interpreted to highlight the strengths of the heroines, the variants chosen for adaptation have focused instead upon their passivity, and their need to be rescued. It's *almost* a self-perpetuating cycle, happily being countered by collections like the ones that Jane pointed out, and films like, say, "Ever After" (which I have my share of issues with, but not on this count).
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Veronica
Schanoes
Registered User
(3/3/04 7:59 pm)
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Re: Prince
Oh yes, absolutely Helen. Sorry I wasn't clearer about that. I don't think the sexism is endemic to the genre--it's expressed in what fairy tales are considered "appropriate," "important," and also in how those tales get retold. So Beauty and the Beast goes from being a story about how a woman learns to love a creature who is superficially ugly but kind, loving, and unfailingly polite, (moral: don't judge a person by how they look) to Disney's B&B, in which a woman, by being generally loveable transforms a mean, frightening, and generally unpleasant fellow into a nice guy, which strikes me as a recipe for ending up in an abusive relationship.
Didn't mean to indict fairy tales as a genre. I love them.
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Helen
Registered User
(3/3/04 9:13 pm)
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Re: Prince
Yipes, sorry - I didn't mean to imply that you had. It's just that the process of bowdlerization infuriates me on the whole, and I've seen a lot of reactions to the genre that read the sexist attitudes of, say, 1850 to 1950 (with some definite exceptions) as being somehow inherent to the discipline as a whole. I tend to rant whenever possible, but agreed with your post completely. Sorry for creating the wrong impression!
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Terri
Windling
Registered User
(3/4/04 9:00 am)
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Re: Prince
Veronica, I completely agree with the point you're making (of course!), but I'm going to quibble with the example you've used. Madame Leprince de Beaumont's version of Beauty and the Beast (on which most modern versions are based) is indeed "a story about how a woman learns to love a creature who is superficially ugly but kind, loving, and unfailingly polite, (moral: don't judge a person by how they look)" -- but that's not how the story started out. The original Villeneuve story of Beauty and the Beast was somewhat different in theme.
In Villeneuve's version, the Beast is really a scary Beast, not
a kind, polite man disguised by fur. He is a man who has completely
lost his humanity, and the focus on the story is on the desperate
need for him to transform back, to regain his human state. It was
a story written at a time (18th century France) when arranged marriages
for women of the upper classes were still the norm, and the situation
Villeneuve described resonated for many women: the fate of being
handed over by one's father to a stranger who turns out to be a
beast. (These women had no legal say in the choice of husband, no
right to avoid the marriage bed, no right of divorce; and it was
common practice to marry off girls as young as 14 or 15 to wealthy
or well-connected men many years their senior, sometime decades
older. The 17th century fairy tale author Madame D'Aulnoy, for instance,
was married off out of a convent at age 15 to a drunken libertine
30 years older than her.) Beauty's courage in dealing with this
horrible situation she's been thrust into, and her ability (with
the help of a wise fairy) to do the right things at the right time,
is what enables her to help break the Beast's curse -- but if her
"goodness" is stressed in the Villeneuve story, it's not
so much a 20th century message of "stand by your man, even
if he's abusive," but a message that reflects an 17th/18th
century ideal that was passionately championed by women in the French
salons that civilite should exist between the sexes and
that marriages should be companionable and loving -- a radical notion
for women of that class and time.
Sixteen years after the publication of Villeneuve's Beauty and the
Beast, Madame Leprince de Beaumont rewrote it and published her
own version. Villeneuve's had been published as part of a novel
for adult readers; Leprince de Beaumont (who worked as a governess,
charged with educating well-bred young ladies) published her version
in a magazine for "young misses". She took a long, rambling
story (over 100 pages long) that was very much a comment on the
arranged-marriage system and transformed it into a short tale with
a clear "lesson" for young women. In her retelling, rather
than focusing on the need of the Beast to change, she focuses on
Beauty's need to change: to learn to see beyond appearances,
to recognize the good man in the beast, and to fall in love with
him as he is. It makes for an interesting tale in it's own right
-- but it's not quite the same as the original tale.
Marina Warner comments (in From the Beast to the Blonde, p. 294):
"By crossing the Channel with the fairy tale [Leprince de Beaumont
was living and working in England], Beaumont also echoes the change
from elite women's pre-revolutionary protests in France to comparative
acquiescence, after the revolution in England, among emigrees
and natives alike, and the comparable shift in the use of such stories
from the social arena of the salons to the domestic interior of
the home, the nursery, and the schoolroom. We see foreshadowed,
already, the Victorian angel of the house, whose task it is to tame
and gentle male lust and animal instinct. We also see an intelligent
female governess preparing her charges for this wifely duty....]
And then, as you point out, Disney changed it again -- and not for the better, in my opinion. (Though Marina Warner seems to like the Disney version.)
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Veronica
Schanoes
Registered User
(3/4/04 9:08 am)
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Re: Prince
Oh, well....there goes the justification for my hatred of the Disney version. Thanks for the info, Terri!
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Terri
Windling
Registered User
(3/5/04 9:21 am)
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Re: Prince
No, no, I think you're completely justified! I dislike the Disney version too. To me, the Disney version does seem to imply that it's a woman's job to stand by an abusive man and tame him (by making the Beast a semi-sympathetic character), whereas the Villenueve version paints the Beast in darker colors and Beauty is simply a girl *stuck* with a monster and coping with a horrible fate as best she can.
Though what I truly dislike about the Disney version is that it reduces the complicit role of the father, and creates a new-fangled villain for the piece in the role of the obnoxious suitor. Certainly fairy tales have been altered many, many times as they've come through the years; I just don't happen to personally like these alterations, which make the story too simplistic for my taste. Though it's nice to have a heroine who reads. (That seemed like a nod to Robin McKinley's Beauty to me.)
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(3/5/04 12:07 pm)
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Re: Prince
I wonder what people think of Beast
by Donna Jo Napoli (I've returned my copy to the library, so I apologize
if I've mangled the name). In this version it is the prince/beast
who must rescue himself from his curse of bestiality. The main character
is the prince/beast, whereas Belle is more of a secondary character.
I thought the point of view of the story very interesting, and it kept me reading--although overall this book ranked a "so-so" among my latest reading. The research showed too much for my tastes--distracting me from the story--and I didn't find the prince/beast's motivation to travel all the way to France believable. Still, I think it gives a nice twist to the "Beauty and the Beast."
All the best,
Alice
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Terri
Windling
Registered User
(3/6/04 10:00 am)
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Re: Prince
I liked Beast quite a lot. It's not necessarily my favorite of Napoli's wonderful fairy tale books, but I did enjoy her twists on the tale, and the unusual setting.
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RymRytr1
Registered User
(3/8/04 10:02 am)
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Re: Prince
Realistically, when the tales were being told by the poverty stricken poor, would you want your poor daughter to hear a story where (she) the girl in the story, is rescued by Billy, the lame Butcher's son?
Entertainment for them was all imagination. To have a Princess in a story is akin to Barbie Dolls now. Little girls play with Barbie and all her rich Accouterments. Everything from being a rock star to laying on the beach in the Bahamas. If you created a tale today, you could reverse the rolls and say that the Mayor's son (usually middle class) was saved by the beautiful daughter of a street person, or by someone rich and famous, like Madonna?
The King and his family were folks to be envied. Every parent hoped that someday, their children might break out of the circle of poverty and become a member of, at the least, the lower classes, (not the lowest). Perhaps to marry a Lord's Bastard, who generally, was better off then the villagers.
Remember economics and gender rolls of the period, when asking why this or that. As my old Da (Dad) would say when I whined about something that had already happened, "That was then, this is now. You can't put Humpty Dumpty together again, once you've made an Omelet."
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Rosemary
Lake
Registered User
(3/15/04 10:47 pm)
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Calvino's ITALIAN FOLK TALES
Helen wrote:
It's just that the process of bowdlerization infuriates me on the whole, and I've seen a lot of reactions to the genre that read the sexist attitudes of, say, 1850 to 1950 (with some definite exceptions) as being somehow inherent to the discipline as a whole.
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Maybe there are new people in this topic who haven't heard me say I think Calvino's ITALIAN FOLK TALES gives a great perspective on what the percentages may have been before the Grimms did their selection.
Calvino was the Italian 'Grimm' but did his work around the 1950s iirc. His book is full of bouncy heroines. There may be more female heroes than male, tho I haven't counted.
R.
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bielie
Unregistered User
(3/16/04 10:54 am)
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Disney's beast
www.surlalunefairytales.c...st_p1.html
As far as sexism is concerned: Why is it sexist for a prince to save a girl and not the other way round?
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Veronica
Schanoes
Registered User
(3/16/04 12:03 pm)
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sexism
The sexism comes when the versions of tales repeated to children and throughout our culture are massively disproportionate in their representation of women as passive victims who need a prince to rescue them. Since masculine gender ideology by and large is not based on powerlessness (quite the reverse), tales in which men are rescued by their lady-loves do not reinforce such imbalances of power and instead help to correct them.
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Helen
J Pilinovsky
Registered User
(3/16/04 12:23 pm)
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Re: sexism
Dear Bielie:
Thanks for linking to the previous discussion - sometimes going back to the older posts really helps to catalyze the ideas stimulated by new topics. The fact of a male protagonist rescuing a female character isn't by definition sexist any more than the inverse is: I think that the perception of sexism comes from two main factors, sheer quantity and aesthetic presentation. Veronica addressed the first point eloquently. When ninety some-odd percent of "popular" fairy tales remove all agency from the female characters, not on the basis of available source material, but because of an editorial preference for the reinforcement of appropriate gender roles, sexism starts to seem like it's either the cause or the effect, with either the former or the latter contributing to a skewed view of the field. And as for aesthetic presentation ... there are, perhaps, a few tales out there which present viewers with images of the heroines as ninnies (i.e., the Disney Cinderella who requires the assistance of vermin). Just my two cents ...
Best,
Helen
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Veronica
Schanoes
Registered User
(3/16/04 3:12 pm)
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Re: sexism
Oooh yes, Helen--the Disney Cinderella has got to be my most hated
heroine ever. Not only is she so passive, useless, and
gormless that she needs vermin to help her (vermin who
aren't smart enough to avoid traps but are still smarter than her,
apparently), those vermin actually shill for stereotypical gender
roles, as one of the female mice says to one of the male mice who
is actually trying to help make Cinderella's gown "Leave
the sewing to the women / while you go get the trimmings!"
Cause even male mice are more adventurous and outgoing
than females.
But my absolute most hated part of that movie? When Cinderella finds
the pet dog dreaming about catching her stepmother's hateful cat,
she says "That's bad!" And goes on to talk about how they
have to try to have nice feelings towards the mean stepmother and
cat. Because in the Disney 1950s ideal girl model, apparently it's
unacceptable even to fantasize about getting back at those
who are mean to you. You have to suffer and like it. Except for
when Cinderella, in another move calculated to make me loathe her,
makes fun of the stepsisters for being musically inept--basically
mocking them for not being musically accompmlished the way a good
girl should me.
Hateful, hateful movie.
In my opinion, of course.
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