Gender Stereotypes In Fairy Tales

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Fairy tales help to establish gender roles at a young age to characterize and represent the ideals, values, and roles that each gender should succumb to. They specifically target younger aged audiences; therefore these stories provide children with images in which encompass their roles as either male or female. Females are taught to be kind, sweet, week, honest, self-sacrificing, and beautiful. On the other hand males are taught to be courageous, brave, saviors, and wise. Many of these characteristics are shown in fairy tales such as “Sleeping Beauty”, “Puss in Boots”, and “Beauty and the Beast”. In the fairy tale, “Sleeping Beauty”, the princess is awarded with gifts from the fairies (or wise women in the Grimm version) after her christening. These gifts include, beauty, intelligence, grace, and the ability to dance, sing, and play all kinds of instruments very well. These gifts help to portray the classical image of a stereotypical female in which they are just showcase items to be the perfect wife to their husband. The princess is also represented as a damsel in distress, …show more content…

The princess is portrayed as a clueless woman that can be “won” over by very superficial characters, such as wealth. The protagonist, Miller’s son, is at first portrayed, as a poor farmer’s boy with only a cat to his name, however over a very small period of time and the wisdom of his cat, Monsieur Puss, was able to become wealthy and win over the king and the princess’s heart. This stereotype in which males are able to go from being poor to rich is fairly common and helps to reinforce the idea that males are more successful in obtaining wealth on their own and are considered as the more independent gender. On the other hand, females remain poor unless they marry into wealth. This idealizes that women are solely dependent on their spouse for their income, since they have no means of achieving it on their

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