Once Upon A Nightmare: An Analysis on How Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tales, Gender Roles, and Feminism Have Given Rise to Fractured Fairy Tales and Feminist Fairy Tales.
Once upon a nightmare there was a businessman who wanted to create an empire. However he needed costumers and a product at that, but who could he get, a consumer source untapped? After a few thoughts, an idea popped in his head, “Children!”, he thought and he began to form his plan. For the product, he took old stories and made them a-new, of course they carried a different message, one that he knew. Flashforward, and business is booming, young girls are brainwashed, and the parents are ignoring. He create an empire, his dream a success at last, but he created a nightmare for women …show more content…
This is due to the fact that Disney has manipulated these tales into promoting gender roles into children, yet it also leads to the objectification of women as well, which in turn promotes a rape culture. As fairy tales often portray women as objects or hidden treasure for the daring male knight to rescue from the castle in which they are trapped in. The classic fairy tales that Disney has created portrays women as proclin dolls, beautiful yet breakable, and because of that powerless as well. As Leslee Farish Kuykendall and Brian W. Sturm, wrote in We Said Feminist Fairy Tales, Not Fractured Fairy Tales! The Construction of the Feminist Fairy Tale: Female Agency over Role Reversal, “These stories portray women as ‘weak, submissive, dependent, and self-sacrificing while men are powerful, active, and dominant.’10” (39). It is this submissive and dependent tendencies that are placed onto female characters in which the ending is almost always guaranteed to be a wedding, or something in which the female protagonist will never have to lift a finger, and will be able to rely on others for the rest of her life. As Victoria Amador wrote in, Fantasy Worlds and Disney Girls: Frozen, Brave, and Reimagined Twenty-First Century Romance, “The requisite/happy ending almost always figures into the films’ mythology, with an affirmation of the status quo of …show more content…
An example of a fractured fairy tale and feminist fairy tale can be seen in Cathy Lynn Preston’s writings in her opening paragraph, as she shows the text of an e-mail in which a girl named Anna gives her retelling of the famous story, The Frog Prince. In this e-mail she depicted how her princess would eat the frog rather than become his slave of a housewife, tasked with giving birth to children and the cleaning and cooking of the house alongside his mother (Preston
Once upon a nightmare there was a businessman who wanted to create an empire. However he needed costumers and a product at that, but who could he get, a consumer source untapped? After a few thoughts, an idea popped in his head, “Children!”, he thought and he began to form his plan. For the product, he took old stories and made them a-new, of course they carried a different message, one that he knew. Flashforward, and business is booming, young girls are brainwashed, and the parents are ignoring. He create an empire, his dream a success at last, but he created a nightmare for women …show more content…
This is due to the fact that Disney has manipulated these tales into promoting gender roles into children, yet it also leads to the objectification of women as well, which in turn promotes a rape culture. As fairy tales often portray women as objects or hidden treasure for the daring male knight to rescue from the castle in which they are trapped in. The classic fairy tales that Disney has created portrays women as proclin dolls, beautiful yet breakable, and because of that powerless as well. As Leslee Farish Kuykendall and Brian W. Sturm, wrote in We Said Feminist Fairy Tales, Not Fractured Fairy Tales! The Construction of the Feminist Fairy Tale: Female Agency over Role Reversal, “These stories portray women as ‘weak, submissive, dependent, and self-sacrificing while men are powerful, active, and dominant.’10” (39). It is this submissive and dependent tendencies that are placed onto female characters in which the ending is almost always guaranteed to be a wedding, or something in which the female protagonist will never have to lift a finger, and will be able to rely on others for the rest of her life. As Victoria Amador wrote in, Fantasy Worlds and Disney Girls: Frozen, Brave, and Reimagined Twenty-First Century Romance, “The requisite/happy ending almost always figures into the films’ mythology, with an affirmation of the status quo of …show more content…
An example of a fractured fairy tale and feminist fairy tale can be seen in Cathy Lynn Preston’s writings in her opening paragraph, as she shows the text of an e-mail in which a girl named Anna gives her retelling of the famous story, The Frog Prince. In this e-mail she depicted how her princess would eat the frog rather than become his slave of a housewife, tasked with giving birth to children and the cleaning and cooking of the house alongside his mother (Preston