Category: fairy tales

fictionadventurer:

magpie-trove:

I read an introduction to a collection of folktales starring girls one time that was like “unlike Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, these girls are great role models for my daughters because they are strong and not passive pictures of the way Victorians wanted their demure women, waiting for their prince.” As an interpretation however, this is an incredibly poor understanding of these tales both because they are not Victorian tales but very old archetypal ones which carry a meaning beyond whatever overlay various ages choose to put on them and also because it fundamentally misunderstands the tales and undervalues the importance of passive strengths (by which I mean virtues like endurance, patience, vigilance, courage, all those which involve staying a certain way despite opposition).

Let’s look at Cinderella for instance. Many modern interpretations are just like the one above. Such stances, however, tend to overlook the fundamental element at the core of every Cinderella Story. Cinderella is at its core about identity. In every Cinderella story, the step-mother’s wickedness is in attempting to strip Cinderella of her identity. She is no longer a daughter of the house—the step-mother does not even allow her to count as a “maiden of the land” invited to attend the prince’s ball. She must be invisible; she must serve the house; she must sleep among the ashes so they cover and transform her and make her out to be something she was not before. Even her name, the core marker of her identity, must bear the ashes’ marks, and she becomes Cendrillon, Ashputel, Cinderella. Her step-mother employs every means to erase her as any one at all. When the royal delegation arrives and asks if there are any other maidens in the house the woman replies simply: no, there is no one else. But Cinderella’s power is her character. No matter how hard the step mother tries to erase it, she remains herself. 

Cinderella was never doing nothing. She was, instead, maintaining her identity with every move she made. She was made out to be a base creature, dehumanized, a nobody, but she never acted the part. Her continued kindness, sweetness, and gentleness shows who she really is despite the outward transfiguration. Her character acts as a marker of her true identity just as the horse head marks the goose girl or the princess’ delicacy marks the princess’ true identity in the princess and the pea. Cinderella can go to the ball and have the prince fall in love with her not because the fairy godmother sent her but because of who she is—a lady, a daughter of the house, a maiden of the land, a person with worth, a girl who loves. And at the end, the prince comes searching for her identity—who she is—and at just the moment the step-mother declares she does not exist she can come down and say it’s me, the lady of the glass slipper and the ashen scullery maid, this is who I am—and be recognized and loved for it. The whole time Cinderella has been rescuing herself by refusing to be what the stepmother tried to make her into in the only way that mattered; and the climax of the story is her reclaiming her identity. 

Snow White? Again, her character—her goodness and innocence—save her. They are not passive characters—they are simply characters the whole world must pass around, because they will not move. And that is the most under-rated form of strength that exists in the world. 

Around the same time that you posted this, I had stumbled upon an article that actually suggested parents should find alternative stories rather than having their children read “Cinderella” and “Snow White”. And you do such an excellent job of explaining just why that’s such a terrible take, but I’m just going to ramble on this theme because this is sparking a lot of latent thoughts.

I can and will go on rants about “feminist” fairy tales, because our culture acts like that’s a reform that fairy tales need, when I can’t think of another genre that provides so much exploration of feminine strengths. You don’t have to go very far in fairy tales to find women who rescue men, who can fight a battle or outsmart a trickster. But some of the most enduring fairy tales and the ones that get most maligned are the ones that celebrate traditionally feminine strengths–patience, gentleness, care for children, sewing and cooking and laundry and other domestic arts. Who do these people think were telling these fairy tales across the centuries? Who was passing them on to their children and using them to liven up sewing sessions or long winter nights? Who told them to the Grimm Brothers? Not men who wanted to keep women in their place, but women who lived in these places, who knew their own strengths and their own courage and the amazing things that they were capable of accomplishing. And that’s why these tales celebrate all kinds of women, and uniquely feminine women, not just the ones who can do the same things that the men can do.

Modern society seems to think that the only kind of strength that matters is active strength–someone who takes action to solve their own problems. But that take that ignores the fact that there are a lot of problems that can’t be solved, at least not alone. “Cinderella” and “Snow White” and even “Rapunzel” are abuse survivors. “Sleeping Beauty” is a child living under the weight of a chronic illness that dooms her to an early death. There are plenty of people in similar real-life situations that they can’t escape on their own. But it takes intense strength to hold onto your identity and your goodness in such bleak circumstances. It takes strength to accept help from others. These women are dazzling role models that any parent should be glad to let their child learn from. There’s more than one kind of woman in the world, and they need to see examples of more than one kind of strength.