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A defence of fairy tales and their positive effect on children
Positive stereotype negative stereotyping
A defence of fairy tales and their positive effect on children
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Society creates Fairytales to teach people to have certain morals, and values. One Fairytale in particular is Hans Christian Anderson’s Thumbelina. Thumbelina is a story about a little girl who is underestimated because of her size. However, Thumbelina exceeds the expectations of the people she meets along the fairytale. However, this fairytales is filled with bias and negative stereotypes that society has developed to certain individuals. The idea that People frequently use demographic characteristics to categorize others and predict their likely behaviors, is the reason for people being out casted (Jennifer A. Chatman; Jeffrey T. Polzer; Sigal G. Barsade; Margaret A. Neale Administrative Science Quarterly ).
In Hans Christian Andersen's story of Thumbelina, a tiny sized girl goes on the adventure of a lifetime. The story was originally written in 1835 in Denmark, and first translated to English in 1846. Thumbelina is a magical story, with both positive and negative messages for viewers. On the surface it is about true love and accepting who you are, but seems to contradict those messages if looked into a little deeper. The opinions of other people temporarily persuade her, leading her to accept a marriage based on comfort rather than true love, because she thinks her prince is dead. However, Thumbelina finally stands up for herself and says no.
This Fairytale addresses the issue of how society portrays women as the weak gender. In the story Thumbelina is carried from one place to another by her friends, and seems to always be belittled. She relies heavily on friends, which can be seen as both positive and negative. The creatures she meets up along the way always address her as weak, and that she can’t do anythi...
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...h herself. She is the epitome of self – confidence, because she was small which was a disadvantage for her in the obstacles on her journey. The thing that made her confident was that she believed in herself, and she knew that she was small but her size didn’t matter in the end to her, her happiness did. Size doesn’t matter in the end because you can always prove people wrong, you can’t let other people tell you that you can’t do something just because you’re small. Thumbelina exemplifies that even though you are different than other people, your looks don’t define you, and your character defines you.
Works Cited
"The Three Waves of Feminism." - Fall 2008. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.
"Lit2Go." Thumbelina. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Apr. 2014.
Chatman, Jennifer A., Jeffrey T. Polzer, Sigal G. Barsade, and Margaret A. Neale. JSTOR. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Apr. 2014.
William E. Cain, Alice McDermott, Lance Newman, and Hilary E. Wyss. New York: New York, 2013. 48-53. Print.
...g. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 12th ed. New York: Pearson, 2013. 549-51. Print.
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56, No. 3 (1989), pp. 543-569. The Johns Hopkins University Press. JSTOR. Web. 24 April 2014.
This modern fairy tale contains diverse characters but none of them is as important as the grandmother. Through her narration, the reader gets all the information needed to understand the story. Indeed, by telling her own story she provides the reader the familial context in which the story is set with her granddaughter and her daughter but even more important, she provides details on her own life which should teach and therefore protect her grand-daughter from men, and then save her to endure or experience her past griefs. This unnamed grand-mother is telling her life under a fairy tale form which exemplify two major properties of fairy tale, as mentioned by Marina Warner in “The Old Wives' Tale”: “Fairy tales exchange knowledge [through the moral] between an older [most of the time feminine] voice of experience and a younger audience”. As suggested in the text, fairy tales are a way to teach insights of life through simple stories directed to, most of the time, younger generations. Most of the time because fairy tales work on different levels of moral which are directed to categories of people, for instance in “Little Red Riding Hood” the moral ...
Eds. Gary Goshgarian and Kathleen Kruger. New York: Parson-Longman, 2011. 500-04. The. Print.
Throughout many fairytales, Cinderella more evidently, there is the stigma of male roles and female roles. The man is the prince, the knight in shining armor, the strong protector and able provider, and the woman is the princess. Dainty and innocent, weak and capable only of looking pretty, fostering children and maintaining appearances of house and home. These roles of placement have been around long before fairy tales, and they’ll be around long after fairy tales, but the inclusion of these roles through characters in fairy tales does nothing but enforce the idea that this is the way things are meant to be, and women who do not assume these roles are wrong and unworthy. In her article, Orenstein refers to Cinderella as “the patriarchal oppression of all women”, and she is exactly right (Orenstein “What’s wrong with Cinderella?”). The impression left of these gender stereotypes travels off the pages of the fairy tale and into the real world when studies show that there is a “23% decline in girls’ participation in sports and other rigorous activity … has been linked to their sense that athletics is unfeminine” (Orenstein “What’s wrong with Cinderella?”). The blatant disregard for equality in these stories can be summed up with a term Orenstein coined, “relentless resegregation of childhood”, which ultimately defines what it means to be a boy or a girl in the terms of set behaviors and life duties (Orenstein “What’s wrong with Cinderella?”). Whether it be Cinderella or any other princess, the fairy tale business makes it a point to create a place for women with their stories, and unfortunately that “place” is demeaning and still practiced
Spiceland, David, Jim Sepe, and Mark NelsonGlobal Edition. New York: McGraw Hill, 2012. 258-264. Print.
In conclusion, the development of the folktales leads to the obtaining of ideas about gender. In many ways our society supports the idea that women seem underestimated as well as physically and mentally weak in comparison with the men who is portrayed as intelligent and superior. This can be shown in many ways in the different versions of this folktale through the concepts of symbolic characters, plot and narrative perspective.
Thinking back to our childhood, we all remember hearing many kinds of fairy tales. Some of them inspired us others confused us, and most of them taught us valuable lessons. Through out centuries tales and stories have been used as a valuable tool to pass on our culture to new generations. There is a strong belief that these fairy tales mirror and influence society. All cultures interpret tales in their own unique way. They add and subtract various aspects of the tale to fit the needs of their particular society. The same tale in the United States is different from the tale told in Asia. A good example of tale evolution can be seen in one of the most famous tales ever told which is “Cinderella”. As a professor of women’s history Karol Kelley points out in her essay Pretty Woman: A Modern Cinderella “There are some 700 versions of Cinderella”.This fairy tale as many others has been changing for many years, and in recent years Cinderella has come under some criticism for its depiction of women’s roles in society.
In a society unbridled with double standards and set views about women, one may wonder the origins of such beliefs. It might come as a surprise that these ideals and standards are embedded and have been for centuries in the beloved fairy tales we enjoyed reading as kids. In her analytical essay, “To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tales”, Karen Rowe argues that fairy tales present “cultural norms which exalt passivity, dependency, and self-sacrifice as a female’s cardinal virtues.” Rowe presents an excellent point, which can be supported by versions of the cult classics, “Cinderella” and “Snow White”. Charles Perrault’s “ The Little Glass Slipper” and the Brothers Grimm’s “ Snow White” exemplify the beliefs that females are supposed to be docile, dependent on the male persona and willing to sacrifice themselves. In many cases, when strong female characters are presented they are always contradicting in these characteristics, thus labeled as villainous. Such is the case of the Cinderella’s stepsisters in Perrault’s “Cinderella” and the stepmother in the Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White.” These female characters face judgment and disapproval when they commit the same acts as male characters. With such messages rooted in our beloved fairy tales it is no wonder that society is rampant with these ideals about women and disapprove of women when they try to break free of this mold.
...present powerful characters, while females represent unimportant characters. Unaware of the influence of society’s perception of the importance of sexes, literature and culture go unchanged. Although fairytales such as Sleeping Beauty produce charming entertainment for children, their remains a didactic message that lays hidden beneath the surface; teaching future generations to be submissive to the inequalities of their gender. Feminist critic the works of former literature, highlighting sexual discriminations, and broadcasting their own versions of former works, that paints a composite image of women’s oppression (Feminist Theory and Criticism). Women of the twenty-first century serge forward investigating, and highlighting the inequalities of their race in effort to organize a better social life for women of the future (Feminist Theory and Criticism).
By exposing the role of fairy tales in the cultural struggle over gender, feminism transformed fairy-tale studies and sparked a debate that would change the way society thinks about fairy tales and the words. “Fairy Tales and Feminism.” Project MUSE -, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/31411.