Feminists have an abiding interest in the socio‐historical and cultural contexts in which literature arises and is received, how women have helped shape and contributed to traditions, and how women are represented in texts and scholarship. Feminist involvement with fairy tales falls roughly into two major categories: primary texts, and feminist theory as a critique of the genre and its production.
1. Primary texts
Feminist fairy tales, by definition, engage in a debate about literary conventions and societal norms. But they are also—and this is often ignored in the scholarship—a response to other tales by women, a continuity of narratives and concerns.
The first production of women's fairy tales for publication began in the French salons of the 1680s. Isolated from schooling and the body politic, the French salonnières created a vehicle to engage in the aristocratic discourse of the day, the ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’ (‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’, 1687–96), a debate engendered by Perrault's attack on classicism and defence of indigenous literary motifs and forms. Writing primarily for adults, Mme d'Aulnoy, Mlle Lhéritier, Mlle Bernard, Mlle de La Force, Mme de Murat, and others, poked fun at classical literature by returning to the archaic and ‘pre‐logical’ world of the Middle Ages, of nursemaids, and of children. These women were drawn to a genre which allowed them to explore alternative realities, create an ideal world that could exist only within the imagination, and engage in the intellectual discourse of the day from which they were officially excluded. These writers conceived of worlds inhabited by extraordinarily majestic and powerful female fairies, a mirror of their own omnipotence within the salon as contrasted with the conditions of their real lives. While set in make‐believe realms, their stories were veiled critiques of contemporary society and dealt with issues such as choice of spouse, inheritance rights, and women's right to education. The French fairy‐tale tradition waned with changing political and historical conditions in France, but the ideas begun in the female‐penned fairy tales made their way to Germany and found fertile ground in the late Enlightenment and romantic periods.
While the salon‐based fairy‐tale tradition in France faded to re‐emerge in the literature of edification, as professional governesses and tutors took over the genre as a teaching tool for girls, Benedikte Naubert continued the tradition of storytelling for adults in the 1780s in Germany. Like her French predecessors, she sought inspiration not in classical sources, but in medieval Anglo‐Saxon and Germanic traditions, and she was fascinated by powerful sorceress figures, ‘a memory of that … which we once were, what heights our powers can reach without losing true femininity’. Themes in her works include women's rejection of marriage in favour of independence and communion with nature and magical powers; the creation of a female community outside traditional society; the mediating role of magical wisewomen; the positive rites of passage for females; and the rejection of patriarchal redemption. Naubert's work anticipates the themes and narrative structures of women's fairy tales in the 19th and 20th century.
The history of fairy tales in 19th‐century Germany is a case in point of how patriarchal practices have succeeded in diminishing the public perception of women's contribution to the genre; it also demonstrates the importance of revisionist scholarship in documenting the continuity of feminist concerns in literary history in order to reconsider the history of women and their contribution to the tradition. Writing contemporaneously with the Grimms and perhaps in even greater numbers than their male contemporaries, women fairy‐tale writers of 19th‐century Germany dealt with issues anticipatory of those women writers and feminists would treat in the last three decades of the 20th century. These issues include: voice and voicelessness; the commodification of women; gender relations; the importance of female education; a questioning of the redemption motif of marriage as women's only salvation; and a series of other social malaises and gender inequities in patriarchy.
Their tales challenged both literary and social conventions, as in Bettina von Arnim's 1808 untitled manuscript, in which a woman is robbed of a voice for human intercourse and learns instead the language of beasts. Other tales take issue with marriage conventions and patriarchal narratives, like Fanny Lewald's ‘Ein modernes Märchen’ (‘A Modern Fairy Tale’, 1841). Here Lewald stands the traditional story of the mermaid in search of a soul on its head when a slimy sea creature disguised as a cold fish of a man seeks redemption through a human mate, and the female protagonist thwarts his attempts to gain ‘humanity’. Louise Dittmar's ‘Affenmärchen’ (‘Tale of the Apes’, 1845) tells of apes put on the market, an allegory for young women dressed up and trained for a competitive marriage market, levelling a scathing critique of female education, gender relations, and capitalist exploitation. A fascinating text by Marie Ebner‐Eschenbach (one of the few 19th‐century writers to make it into the standard canon) is in many ways the most modern: in Die Prinzessin von Banalien (Princess Banalia, 1872) a virtuous queen tries to break out of social expectations of her as queen, woman, and wife, and longs to join her beloved, a wild man, in his realm. Contemporary feminists would explore this as her return to her animal side (embracing her own sexuality), a notion Ebner‐Eschenbach's time and own sensibilities could not yet actualize. Isolde Kurz's satiric ‘König Filz’ (‘King Tightwad’, 1890) shows how women's skills could be used to triumph when the heroine kills her adversaries in a flourish of culinary cunning. By the end of the century, Ricarda Huch's ‘Lügenmärchen’ (‘Pack of Lies’, 1896) dissects the canon and an entire century of men's and women's fairy‐tale writings. She criticizes the patriarchal attempt to usurp the female voice embodied in the siren's song and the fairy tale, an attempt which ultimately fails. The parry and jab of feminist revisions with received tradition had begun. In all these tales, as well as a myriad of others in Europe and North America, writers rewrote the patriarchal narrative to question reader expectations as well as literary and social conventions.
In the 20th century, women like Lou Andreas‐Salomé, Hermynia zur Mühlen, Lisa Tetzner, and Ina Seidel continued to experiment with the form, but perhaps the most significant experimentation has been in response to the Women's Movement, beginning in the 1960s in the United States. Feminist tales are often wicked retellings, rewritings, and fundamental rejections of traditional gender roles and societal expectations; they lay bare the implausibility of gender roles in canonical texts by men and the stifling effects they have on women and their identity. Anne Sexton's Transformations (1971) was an important first work because she recognized the impact of the socialization process on women and focused on the socio‐cultural context of received tradition.
Certain canonical stories, especially those of female subjugation and voicelessness, have resonated internationally with late 20th‐century feminist writers. ‘Bluebeard’ provides the structuring narrative in poems by the Greek‐American Olga Broumas (Beginning with O, 1977); in stories from the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann (‘Der Fall Franza’ (‘The Case of Franza’), 1978); the British Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber, 1979); the Canadian Margaret Atwood (Bluebeard's Egg, 1983); the German Karin Struck (Blaubarts Schatten (Bluebeard's Shadow), 1991); the Austrian Elisabeth Reichart (‘Die Kammer’ (‘The Chamber’), 1992); and the Irish Emma Donoghue (Kissing the Witch, 1997). ‘Beauty and the Beast’ has been another favourite: the American novelist Lynne Tillman, in ‘The Trouble with Beauty’ (1990) has her heroine retreat into autism after her father's sexual abuse and her consignment to his friend, the Beast, while works by Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar, 1971), Alison Lurie (The War between the Tates, 1974), and Alix Kate Shulman (Memoirs of an Ex‐Prom Queen, 1985) depict women who fall in love with beast‐like men without the redemptive denouement.
The fairy tale has always been an important genre in the socialization of children, and it was in fact the work of a woman, Mme
The ‘patriarchal plot’ has kept women's fairy tales for children from wide distribution, and modern feminists, perhaps unknowingly, are reinventing the weal of earlier women's works. In an attempt to change the cultural and social paradigms for future generations and to regain a sense of women's history, feminists since the late 1970s have organized their fairy‐tale collections according to three categories: (1) anthologies of active heroines to counter the negative impact of passive female stereotypes promulgated by canonical texts on maturing adolescent girls; (2) ‘alternative’ or ‘upside‐down’ stories with reversed plot lines and/or rearranged motifs; and (3) collections of feminist works or original tales based on well‐known motifs. The first category includes titles like Rosemary Minard's Womenfolk and Fairy Tales (1975); Ethel Johnston Phelps's The Maid of the North: Feminist Folk Tales from around the World (1981); Alison Lurie's Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folk Tales (1980); James Riordan's The Woman in the Moon and Other Tales of Forgotten Heroines (1985); Suzanne Barchers's Wise Women: Folk and Fairy Tales from around the World (1990); and Kathleen Ragan's Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from around the World (1998). The second category includes original tales for younger audiences that stand conventional expectations on their heads: Jay Williams's The Practical Princess and Other Liberating Fairy Tales (1969); Adela Turin, Francesca Cantarelli, and Nella Bosnia's The Five Wives of Silverbeard (1977); Jane Yolen's Sleeping Ugly (1981); Jeanne Desy's ‘The Princess who Stood on her Own Two Feet’ (1982); Babette Cole's Princess Smartypants (1986); and Judy Corbalis's The Wrestling Princess and Other Stories (1986), among many, many others. Collections belonging to the third category include: Jack Zipes's Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England (1986); the Irish series ‘Fairytales for Feminists’, with titles like Sweeping Beauties (1990) and Rapunzel's Revenge (1995); Angela Carter's Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book (1990); Nina Auerbach's Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers (1992); Barbara Walker's Feminist Fairy Tales (1996); Virginia Hamilton's Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales (1995); and Terry Windling's The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood's Survivors (1995).
2. Feminist theory
Feminist literary criticism has failed to keep pace with contemporary feminist fairy tales and, except for some revisionist scholarship, seems generally unaware of the tradition before the 1970s. Instead, feminist theory about fairy tales is fundamentally a critique of patriarchal literary and cultural practices in Western societies and concerns itself primarily with canonical tales, issues of gender, voice, and power in these tales, their impact on socialization and acculturation, as well as broader social issues like women's access to public discourse, the representation of women in literature and scholarship, and women's contribution to the fairy‐tale tradition.
Historically, the feminist theoretical response to fairy tales is a product of the Women's Movement in the United States and Europe and grew out of attacks on patriarchy in the late 1960s by feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, and Betty Friedan. This debate spawned a broad discussion about literary practices and their effects on the socializing process. In the popular press, texts like Madonna Kolbenschlag's Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye: Breaking the Spell of Feminine Myths and Models (1979), Colette Dowling's 1981 best‐seller The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence explored these issues, while within the academy, folklorists and literary critics developed critiques informed by the debate.
Some attacks addressed fairy‐tale research at the structural level and found that research agendas, as well as major tools and apparatus for discussing folklore and fairy tales, have a clear gender bias against women. Feminist folklorists like Claire Farrer demonstrated how in the Western tradition patriarchal practices have kept men in the role of editors and compilers to the exclusion of women. She found that folklore collectors consulted men about stories and their experiences as raconteurs, but consulted females only for information on such subjects as ‘charms, cures, and quaint beliefs’. Other feminists levelled attacks against the critical and research apparatus for working with fairy tales. Torborg Lundell, for example, argued that primary texts in folklore and fairy‐tale research, like Antti
Other work has been done on primary texts, most notably the Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales), to examine how editorial practices create traditions and how story selection perpetuates negative stereotypes of women. Some of the earliest research on 19th‐ and 20th‐century anthologizing practices surrounding the Grimms' collection has been done by Kay Stone. She found that a dozen docile heroines are the ‘overwhelming favourites’, and that ‘the passivity of the heroines is magnified by the fact that their stories jump from twenty percent in the original Grimm collection to as much as seventy‐five percent in many children's books’. Growing out of research like that of Stone, writers and critics like Jane Yolen not only anthologized collections with positive heroines, but also researched and wrote about positive models in less well‐received stories (‘America's Cinderella’, 1972).
In the 1980s, critics like Ruth Bottigheimer and Maria Tatar launched another attack at the Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen, namely that not only is there an inherent sexism built into the collection, but this misogyny was the product of Wilhelm Grimm's editorial intent. Working from the assumption that language and its use are social constructs, Bottigheimer backed up her study with a careful analysis of the verbs used in speech acts and found that female characters became increasingly mute in progressive editions, while evil female characters used their tongues with ever‐increasing acerbity. The irrefutable conclusion: the Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen were designed to acculturate children and women into roles and models of behaviour patriarchy wanted to maintain. In addition to the critique of the Grimms' tales, there were also studies such as Jennifer Waelti‐Walters's Fairy Tales and the Female Imagination (1982), which focused on seven French and French Canadian women writers whose novels illustrate the pervasive influence of fairy tales on women's lives.
Already as early as 1970, feminist discussion began to focus on the social and cultural effects fairy tales had on the children who listened to them, with respect to the child‐rearing process in general, and the process of individuation in particular. Feminist critics like Maria Lieberman rejected the notion that fairy tales are ‘universal stories’, and argued instead that they acculturate girls to believe that passivity, placidity, and morbidity, along with physical beauty, will make them the ‘best’ kind of girl to be. Others like Karen Rowe maintained that fairy tales prescribe restrictive social roles for women and perpetuate ‘alluring fantasies’ of punishment and reward: passivity, beauty, and helplessness lead to marriage, conferring wealth and status, whereas self‐aware, ‘aggressive’, and powerful women reap opprobrium and are either ostracized or killed. Whereas Bruno Bettelheim had suggested in his widely disputed and refuted work The Uses of Enchantment (1976), that fairy tales describe eternal truths about the disposition of the human psyche, and that the battles between evil older women and younger, helpless girls are therapeutic and gender‐neutral for children, feminist and other literary critics maintained and still maintain that the ‘eternal truths’ in tales of the Western tradition are the story of women's subjugation and disenfranchisement under patriarchy.
Recent work from the reader‐response school makes it possible to take stock of the progress made by the feminist cause and feminist rewritings of the tradition. Bronwyn Davies's Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales: Preschool Children and Gender (1989) demonstrated how children's play, their conversation, and their responses to feminist stories can provide new insight into the social construction of gender. In addition, Ella Westland's 1993 study ‘Cinderella in the Classroom: Children's Responses to Gender Roles in Fairy‐Tales’ included over 100 boys and girls aged 9–11 in five Cornish primary schools, whose perceptions of fairy tales were recorded through group discussions, pictures they drew, and stories they wrote. While the boys appeared to have little incentive to alter the standard fairy‐tale structure (beyond enriching the mixture with added violence) because they had more to lose than to gain from the changes, the girls argued they would not want to be a princess because it was simply too boring and restrictive; their stories were closely moulded on published upside‐down stories with independent, plain, and active heroines. The work of the past 30 years has indeed created a generation of ‘resisting readers’.
That the long tradition of feminist fairy tales is as yet generally unknown to the larger public has to do with the methods of canon formation, publishing history, and the distribution of power and literature within patriarchy, as Marina Warner has demonstrated in her significant study From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairytales and their Tellers (1994). The question remains as to what the next step will be. Recent work by feminists such as Karen Rowe and Cristina Bacchilega suggests there have been significant advances brought about by the interactions between feminist theorizing and feminist practice. The anthologies of so‐called alternative stories are, in fact, equally valid primary stories of realms of experience and longings for a better world the fairy tale can make real. It has been argued that fairy tales reflect lived realities of the writers and readers; perhaps future stories in keeping with the feminist project may one day reflect a new reality, a more prejudice‐free world.
Bibliography
- Bacchilega, Cristina, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (1997).
- Bernheimer, Kate (ed.), Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore their Favorite Fairy Tales (1998).
- Davies, Bronwyn, Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales: Preschool Children and Gender (1989).
- Helms, Cynthia, ‘Storytelling, Gender and Language in Folk/Fairy Tales: A Selected Annotated Bibliography’,
Women and Language , 10 (spring 1987). - Waelti‐Walters, Jennifer, Fairy Tales and the Female Imagination (1982).
- Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairytales and their Tellers (1994).
- Zipes, Jack (ed.), Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England (1986).
— Shawn Jarvis
