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Author
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Comment
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Aer
Unregistered User
(3/23/05 8:35 am)
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Heroines in Fairy Tales vs Heroes
I have found it interesting looking at the differences in the fairy tales between the Heroes, and the Heroines. Though both are usually good, and brave, it always seems that the heroes have an easier time of it than the heroines. In the classic formula a hero (usually the youngest of 3 sons) gets sent out to right some wrong in his father's kingdom, and finds along the way some sort of mentor which his brothers were unkind to. This mentor then tells the hero exactly what to do, but he ignores the directions, is caught and is given another quest which his mentor again tells him how to succeed at, and again he fails and is sent on a last quest, this time he listens to his mentor and succeeds in not only getting what he was sent for that time, but also in getting everything on the other quests as well.
A fairy tale heroine on the other hand usually meets her love early in the story, and through some twist of fate loses him, and in order to gain him back she must undertake a long and difficult journey which often involves great sacrifice, when she finally finds him again she is so changed by the journey that he doesn't recognize her, in fact he is usually about to marry another woman, and the heroine must win him back in some manner before she can have her happy ending.
I have always found this interesting. The hero is often allowed three mistakes, and because of his mistakes he ends up three times as wealthy at the end, but the heroine must suffer, and sacrifice just to discover where her wandering lover has gone, and then he is about to marry another woman. And though a herione sometimes has a mentor telling her what to do it is not as common as in a fairy tale with a male protagonist.
What do you people think about this? You probably know more than I do. My personal thought is that perhaps it is because the stories were originally told by women, it must have seemed to them that men had things so much easier, while if a woman wanted to keep her marriage, or love she must work hard, and suffer for it, and that men by nature were fickle (one of my personal favorites is the story of Helena who's prince is actually named "Prince Fickle").
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janeyolen
Registered User
(3/23/05 1:42 pm)
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Re: Heroines in Fairy Tales vs Heroes
You are only looking at one folk tale type--the suffering heroine. You mght check out my collection NOT ONE DAMSEL IN DISTRESS for a lot of other kinds of folk and fairy tale female heroes, who have pluck, vinegar, and strength. None of this suffering nonsense!
Jane
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Aer
Unregistered User
(3/23/05 3:13 pm)
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Re: Heroines in Fairy Tales vs Heroes
I've never found these long suffering heroines without pluck, vinegar, and strength. They always seemed cleverer, stronger, and more interesting than their male counter-parts, and never seemed distressed to me. There are many kinds of heroines, and looking back on my post I was generalizing, but I've found the suffering heroine interesting because it goes against the image that many people have of "fairy tale romance" an image that annoys me to no end, because though in some fairy tales romance seems to come easily, these ones show that romance is not simple, and must be worked for, and even when it is found there always is the possibility of losing it.
I'll definitely take a look at Not One Damsel in Distress though.
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midori
snyder
Registered User
(3/24/05 3:31 pm)
ezSupporter
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Re: Heroines in Fairy Tales vs Heroes
Another reason for these differences you have noticed may have to do with the difference of social expectations on the heroes versus heroines as they return from their journeys (transformed by their rite of passage from adolescents into adults). Male heroes are expected to follow that circular path--separation, initiation and return (as enlightened adults) and usually return to take over their father's role as king. Boys are expected to return--but girls are not. In exogamous societies girls are married away to a new house (in another village, town or country) and there must carve out a new adult identity in a foreign place--one that may well be fraught with conflicts (such as the mother in law in competition for the son's attention).
In narrative terms it seems that girls' journeys are made more traumatic because the narrative wants to make it clear to the audience that there can be no chance of the girl coming home. Threats of incest, violence, abuse, or the destruction of everything that provided comfort at home is a turning out of the girl and forcing/allowing her to find the way to her new home and adult identity.
What is interesting is as Jane points out, the girls need intelligence, vinegar and stammina to manage the journey. Even in some of the Armless Maiden narratives the girl has an almost preternatural awareness of the transformative event of her journey. In a Basque version a brother takes his sister to a grove of thorns and hacks off her arms. But as she stands there, bleeding, she tells him that he will step on a thorn and none but her hand will remove it. Of course he does...and in a very wrenching moment at the end of the narrative, the girl (now married to a king, her arms restored) returns home for a brief visit--sees where her brother is being tortured by a cage of thorns grown out of his foot and around his body. She pulls out the thorn and the rest fall away freeing the brother.
A South African version of the Goose Girl (Untombi Yapansi...which you can find on Surlalune's Goose Girl pages) shows the young girl fleeing her village just as the village goes up in flames (having been corrupted by her cannibalizing brother). Yet as she is revealed to the new King, she finishes her rite of passage, goes through purification and then brings her renewed village up from out of the earth, restoring them.
Hmmm...come to think of it, a lot of female hero stories seem to have this intensely creative/fruitful sort of ending. She doesn't go home, but she seems to effect a restoration of life.
Edited by: midori snyder at: 3/25/05 10:34 am
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Jess
Unregistered User
(3/25/05 9:46 am)
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At the risk of sounding Jungian
I wonder, Midori, if your observation has anything to do with various cultures' view that women are "life bringers" while men are more "territorial protectors"?
Jess
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midori
snyder
Registered User
(3/25/05 10:42 am)
ezSupporter
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Re: At the risk of sounding Jungian
Yeah..I'd be nervous I was making too broad a statement (though I think at some level I would agree with your observation) since not all female characters appear in the narratives as "life givers"...some are down right hostile death dealers. But certainly there are strong evocative images that surround the figures of young women undergoing rites of passage and brides (whether mortal or fantastic) that emphasize their life bringing and creative powers.
Also there are plenty itinerent male figures in narrative (trickster being one of them quite frequently) whose very power rests in the fact that they are not territorial, but universal. On the other hand, if confined to the hero as a young man in the rite of passage...I'd be more confident in associating his character with property or power derived from hereditary holdings.
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catja1
Registered User
(3/25/05 12:26 pm)
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Re: Heroines in Fairy Tales vs Heroes
I think you're right, and that's what makes a story like "Fitcher's Bird" so unusual -- that really is a story of a woman doing the separation-return cycle. And that story's moral system appears to be just the opposite of most female-centered fairy tales: exogamy is *dangerous* -- that skull in bridal finery! -- but if you're clever, you can rescue other women from the horrors of marriage and return them to the bosom of their birth family. It's a genuine "nesting" (pun intended) story; unlike Perrault's "Bluebeard," a good half of the story is taken up with the heroine's escape and return home, and the returning of her sisters.
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midori
snyder
Registered User
(3/25/05 5:31 pm)
ezSupporter
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Re: Heroines in Fairy Tales vs Heroes
I have a bit of a different take on those stories. I think they are more in the nature of cautionary tales for young women. Because they marry out and away, marriage ceremonies are usually long and complex, often involving a lot of interaction with the families as a safety precaution on the part of the family to insure the daughter is going to a reasonably secure future. When those rituals and arrangements are by passed--sometimes by the stubborness of the girl herself--she often winds up in trouble. There is a lovely Yoruba tale, "The very fine beautiful gentleman" about the girl who is refusing all the local suitors and falls in love instead with a handsome stranger she sees in the market. She insists on marrying him and then of course when she follows him home he starts returning the borrowed body parts until he is just a skull...and well you know the rest. (I just read a Scicilian variant of this narrative too!). Her coming home is less the journey of the hero...afterall, in traditional terms the journey ought to end in marriage. She winds up instead, back where she started...so this is really a failed journey (in the strict terms of recognizing the journey as part of a rite of passage. It's certainly a success in the sense that they are all alive!)
Another tangent to this idea would be in the Armless Maiden narratives. The girl marries--but without her arms (and without her own rite of passage completed which would result in wholeness, purification and return) the marriage isn't fully what it ought to be. There is always the reintroduction of conflict--the woman with her baby tied on her back is cast out into the woods. When the King finds her again in the woods...he must go through the motions of correctly seeking her hand in marriage. Only then does her journey end.
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Rosemary
Lake
Registered User
(3/26/05 7:19 pm)
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fairytale genre thread
I seem to have been thinking of this thread in my posts just now to the 'fairytale genre' thread about suffering heroines.
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Aer
Unregistered User
(3/29/05 7:17 am)
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RE:fairytale genre thread
I have just remembered quite an interesting Fairy Tale. I believe it was called the Girl who Pretended to be a Boy, and the story was about a king whose kingdom was threatened, but since he only had three daughters, and no sons they each went out in turn dressed as boys to try and rectify the situation. The youngest was the successful one, and she in the end rescued a princess from a wizard and was transformed into a boy perminently, and married the princess. It is interesting that in that story the Heroinefollows more closely the fomula that Heroes follow, and so in the end her sex is changed. In other Fairy Tales it is when a woman puts on the dress of a man that she can accomplish the most courageous acts (one of my favorites, the Twelve Huntsmen, seems to follow both this formula, and the one of the suffering Heroine in that the Heroine must dress as a man to win her love back who is about to marry another). The Girl who Pretended to be a Boy I believe is unique in that at the end though her actual sex changes.
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Shadowlands
Unregistered User
(4/8/05 9:00 am)
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RE:fairytale genre thread
I've always found the idea of weak female characters in Fairy Tales absurd. Really most of the heroines are strong, and active. I think in the Victorian Era though, the passive heroine became more popular, and that's why some of the more famous fairy tales follow the formula of the prince rescuing the princess, not the other way around.
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DerekJ
Unregistered User
(4/8/05 12:40 pm)
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RE:fairytale genre thread
>>In other Fairy Tales it is when a woman puts on the dress of a man that she can accomplish the most courageous acts (one of my favorites, the Twelve Huntsmen, seems to follow both this formula,<<
One of the things that makes 12H seem so "oddball" to modern readers is that it sets up the princess's plot, and then switcheroos the viewpoints drastically so that we're now following the Prince and the Lion, and their humorous attempts to set up traps, with just the barest offstage mention of the princess's cleverness at avoiding them.
As a result, we're never quite sure whether the story is actually
being serious for its time when it tells us that "women
love spinning wheels", and the story makes itself an easy "sexism"
scapegoat.
For contrast, I once tried a retelling that followed the Princess all the way through and kept her "checking on the prince's marriage" motives always at the front--
With the result that the Lion's "wisdom" of peas and spinning
wheels now sounded more clearly like the pronouncements of a pompous
Know-It-All who the reader wants to see outwitted (and
although some here might guess what the inspiration for that one
was, I kept hearing an Alan Rickman voice), and the "sexism"
almost evaporated in the humorous adventure...
...Nothing about "empowerment" or female roles, just the universal law-of-nature that an clever-motivated character in whatever form will always rub their clever motivations off onto the story.
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Black
Sheep
Registered User
(4/9/05 6:48 am)
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Moderators and Derek
I see from the above post that DerekJ appears to intend to continue posting on Sur La Lune without taking responsibility for his unacceptable behaviour in posting an insulting ad hominem remark and without giving the moderators and board members any reaasurance that he won't do it again.
Derek also, of course, still owes me a sincere personal apology.
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