How the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales Silence Women
Very good read. The reality is I could quote dang near the whole piece. To make a long story short, it's an article tracing the known history of fairy tales and their transition over time. Their origins to their current form - in which the violence remains, but they have been sanitized of sex and the women silenced.
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"The classic fairy tale was appropriated to serve the purpose of socializing children," writes Tatar, and "the Grimms seem to have favored violence over whimsy." Violence, in the right context, was considered funny to young readers, while explicit references to sex were perceived as superfluous to the story, providing neither moral guidance nor entertainment. And, loyal as they claimed to be to their purpose of accurately recording the tales, the Grimms had books to sell.
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The Grimms didn't just shy away from the feminine details of sex, their telling of the stories repeatedly highlight violent acts against women. Women die in child birth again and again in Grimms' tales — in "Snow White," "Cinderella," and "Rapunzel" — having served their societal duties by producing a beautiful daughter to replace her. Those fair princesses aren't exempt from violence, as many are banished to towers, trees and forests, where they perform domestic duties until saved by a cunning prince. Although men are also the subjects of execution in the tales, their deaths are disproportionately the result of some sort of legal trialproving their guilt, whereas their female counterparts are violently discarded by nature's whims. So, violence against women is illustrated as a harsh fact of life, whereas brutalities against men require logical justification.
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When they aren't the victims of violent crimes or acts of nature, the women in Grimms' stories while away their time silently. Bottigheimer broke down the speech patterns of fairy tale characters, and the gender divide is clearer here than anywhere else. In "Hansel and Gretel," Hansel speaks more often and for longer than his sister, and the first phrase he utters to her happens to be, "Quiet, Gretel." This explicit shushing is a common thread throughout the Grimms' take on folklore; spells of silence are cast on women more than they are on men, and the characters most valued by male suitors are those who speak infrequently, or don't speak at all.
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It's worth noting that while this theme of female silence is prevalent throughout the written fairy tales published in Germany and enduring in America today, this trend wasn't always the norm: Charles Perrault's French renditions of these stories place greater value on beautiful women who are also articulate. This is evidenced by Perrault's pluckiest heroines, the women at the center of "Ricky of the Tuft," a story that prizes intelligence over physical attraction among potential female partners. The story, unsurprisingly, was not included in the Grimms' anthology; it'd have been a strange, lovely anomaly among the rest.
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A recent study conducted by The Washington Post reveals that while earlier Disney films divvied up dialogue between princesses and princes equally, the speaking parts in the movies became notably less equal in the 1980s and '90s. The worst offender of this Silent Princess Syndrome is "Aladdin," in which Jasmine speaks only 10 percent of the movie's lines.
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"For me, one of the most interesting things about looking through old fairy tales has been looking at the ways women were depicted back then, and how a lot of things actually haven't changed," Sparks said. "We still have these almost medieval notions about women at times, with our control over them and their bodies."
Jan 21, 2017 @ 04:00:12
