Gender Stereotypes In Fairy Tales

Princesses are not the only women that are nullified through their portrayals in fairy tales; wicked witches- often time stepmothers- are shown to be vindictive and evil and therefore must be killed. In her analysis of Stardust and The Brothers Grimm, two film adaptations on Snow White, Susan Cahill points out that what is at stake is “beauty, longevity, and power for the older women,” (Cahill, 59). She further comments on the fact that “intergenerational female conflict is endemic in fairy tales,” (Cahill, 59). This jealousy is a key characteristic of older female characters in fairy tales. Whether it is Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, or Snow White, the female antagonist has a desire for something the younger princess has. In the case of

As previously mentioned, princesses spend most of their time doing housework. Evil stepmothers, a conventional female antagonist, are domesticated in a different way in modern stories. In an attempt to explain the reasons behind why these characters are evil, many new adaptations of old stories have been made, such as Roth Film’s Maleficent. As Jackie Pinkowitz points out in her article “No More Evil Stepmothers: Motherhood as Redemption for Female Fairy Tale Villains”, “these modern fairy tales advocate ‘active’ women and displace female dependence on matrimonial romance and male rescue, they nonetheless continue to domesticate women,” (Pinkowitz, 1). The villains in these stories are redeemed through assuming a maternal role. This serves to “promote the romanticized myth of motherhood as (the only kind of) personal and worldly success and salvation” (Pinkowitz, 3). In the context of Snow White, this explains why, since the Grimm’s story- earlier stories that are associated with Snow White have the mother as the villain (Windling)- utilize the evil stepmother as the antagonist. As Marina Warner explains in her book From the Beast to the Blonde, “the bad mother had to disappear in order for the ideal to survive and allow Mother to flourish as symbol of the eternal feminine, the motherland, and the family itself as the highest social desideratum.” This is potentially detrimental, as Pinkowitz says, for “the new generation of young girls who will grow up watching these new fairy tales and identifying with their more active female protagonists, and whose own agency might ultimately be circumscribed by their romantic valorization of motherhood” (Pinkowitz, 3). By confining women in their roles as mothers, fairy tales are able to