Fairy Tale Criticism Essay

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Haase, Donald. “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship: A Critical Survey and Bibliography.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 14, no. 1, 2000, pp. 15–63. This article discusses about feminist fairy-tale scholarship. The author’s main claim is that the study of feminism in fairy-tale is intricate due to its broad and diverse influences especially from 1970s to 2000s. It is certain that generally female has main or significant role in fairy-tales, however, its presentation influence gender identity not only on children, but also on females. The author provides support through citing other credible authors’ works and comparing those authors’ arguments. One of examples the author presents is how fairy-tales suggest women to behave certain ways such as submissive, naïve, and powerless, and at the end, there is always a handsome princess who rescue the main female character from dangers or desperate situations. Moreover, this induces women to believe that there would be a prince at certain time in their lives. The …show more content…

The author’s main claim is that relatively recent fairy-tale adaptations tend to reduce magical features either by replacing them with more realistic narratives or by disguising them. This is because demands of their readers have inclined towards realistic setting. In addition, magical components always have played an important role as they have been used for smoother narratives without a need of considering practicality since the readers would automatically rationalize that anything is possible in fairy-tales. However, those readers have changed as times are changing. The author holds up several adaptations of Snow White as examples: illustration of Snow White’s biological mother looks similar to Snow White as it seems more “probable” than her wish came true, magic mirror has replaced by human beings with the same role. The warrant that the author uses is that magic is not necessary in fairy-tales

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