LLED563:

Being Female

Lesson Overview

The gender roles of women seem to be narrow in fairy tales. Consider the characters we've met so far: Red Riding Hood, Red Riding Hood's grandma, Snow White, and Snow White's step-mother. Females often are wicked witches, evil stepmother/stepsisters, or beautiful, but passive young girls. Even though the gender roles of women seem to be narrow in fairy tales, different versions of the same story often exhibit more diversity than seems apparent. In this lesson, we will read many versions of Cinderella and look at the myth of women and their roles in traditional literature and today's literature. We'll consider how folktales and myths present images of women and girls by examining the historical/cultural/social/semiotic context.

Lesson Objectives

In this lesson you will:

• Analyze fairy tales from feminist and semiotic perspectives.
• Explore female characters in fairy tales.
• Select and compare different versions of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and/or Snow White.

Construction of Femininity

The three most well-known fairy tales are probably Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. Each of these stories has appeared in dozens of story collections and as illustrated picture books. Each has been made into films, the best known being the Disney versions. They all have "damsel in distress waiting to be rescued" and "princess and prince live happily ever after." They are what form our ideas of what a fairy tale is. However, there are more than 1,000 versions and variants of the Cinderella tale.

The earliest variant, Yen-Shen, was recorded in China during the T'ang Dynasty (618-907 CE). The version best known in the West, Perrault's version on which the Disney film is based, as we shall see, is probably one of the most narrowing in terms of the role of women. Many versions from other cultures provide stimulating contrast to Perrault's version, such as John Steptoe's Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters, Virginia Hamilton's Catskinella in Her Stories, and Rafe Martin's The Rough-Face Girl. These stories show women and girls succeeding because of their inner qualities or their resourcefulness, rather than their patience in waiting for their prince to come.

It can be tricky to uncover how stories go about building ideas on what it means to be female. Because we, the readers, usually come from the same culture as the story does, we often share assumptions about gender with the story. Because reader and text are making the same assumptions, the roles females take on in stories can appear "natural." The task is about uncovering the assumptions about what it means to be female in folktales and myths. In her book Reading Otherways, feminist children's literature critic, Lissa Paul, suggests some questions that open up to examination how ideas of femininity are constructed in classic text. Have these questions in mind when you proceed with this lesson and read different versions of fairy tales.

• Whose story is this?
• Who is the reader?
• When and where was the reading produced?
• Who is named? And who is not?
• Who is on top?
• Who gets punished? And who gets praised?
• Who speaks? And who is silenced?
• Who acts? And who is acted upon?
• Who owns property? Who is dependent?
• Who looks? And who is observed?
• Who fights for honor? And who suffers?
• How are values systems determined?

Reading Highlights

The following may not cover all of the assigned readings for the lesson. Always be sure to check your syllabus schedule for reading specifics.

Stuart Hall | Marina Warner | Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar | Marcia Lieberman

Stuart Hall

This is a section from Stuart Hall's book Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, some of you might have read the whole chapter in the Picturebook course, but we will focus here on his discussion on Roland Barthes' idea of myth here. As Hall notes, Roland Barthes reads myth from a semiotic perspective: he sees myth as a "meta-language" (a second-order language). "Meta-" is a prefix you often see on terms used in cultural critique. "Meta" implies a self awareness of the idea represented by the root word. Metacognition refers to "thinking about thinking." Metafiction would be a story that explores the idea of what it means to be a story. Myth as a meta-language, means that myth is not merely a classification of stories, but is a system used to represent ideas. According to Barthes, when we talk about "myth," we are using language to talk about how language works. This view turns "myth" into a powerful cultural tool for teaching people about what human life ought to be about. Hall notes one of Barthes' big ideas concerning myth: that myth turns history into nature. Taking this idea to Cinderella, Barthes would argue that the story doesn't question the roles that Cinderella assumes, making it appear that she is "naturally" passive and patient and that is how all women should be. We can take this analysis a step farther and argue that female characters who do show some agency, in this case the stepmother and two stepsisters (they want a prince and they are going after him), are punished for going against their nature.

Marina Warner

Have Barthes' idea of myth in mind when you read Marina Warner's essay, "Monstrous Mothers: Women Over the Top." In this essay, Warner notes that our modern culture has noticed that women have been pressing for greater power and agency over their own lives. She argues that dominant culture has responded to this movement by putting forward myths about the danger of women who lust for power. This argument can be summarized with the following two statements:

1. "Women in general are out of control, and feminism in particular is to blame," and
2. "Men are no longer in control and, mothers are not what they used to be."

At first glance what Warner says about the mythology of ungovernable female sexual appetite seems suspicious, but note the examples she uses from popular movies and stories. Warner's reading of myth is influenced by Barthes' ideas about myth as a meta-language that turns history (or culture) into nature. She moves one step farther than Barthes though, by advancing a social project that recognizes that myths are not fixed (remember the article by Haase on who owns myths!) but can be transmuted into new stories that point to different ways we humans can live with each other.

Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar

Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar offer a different lens to look at Snow White. They read the story as a beauty myth. To them, the story suggests that beauty is the virtue of young women and loss of it turns old women into witches. From this perspective, Snow White and stepmother can be read as a mother/daughter split and as two sides of the same character. Anne Sexton's poem Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (p.96) ends with Snow White looking into the mirror. What would happen next if there were a sequel to Snow White? Following the expectation of fairy tale, she would probably have to be the villain.

The real villain of Snow White is time. Women age and as they age, younger women replace them as objects of beauty and desire. The stepmother's attempts to kill Snow White are actually attempts to forestall aging. Of course this is doomed to failure. You can see this process in Trina Schart Hyman's illustrations. The stepmother is shown earlier in the book as dressed in simple clothing with a minimum of make-up and jewelry. In the next to last illustration we see an older stepmother, not ugly by any means, but older and now wearing much fancier clothing, much more make-up and lots of jewelry. She no longer has the beauty of a young face and body and so "puts on beauty" as a way of staying attractive. What Sexton picks up on in her poem is that Snow White is destined to become the stepmother, competing hopelessly against younger women who will come along and replace her "as the most beautiful of all." Snow White then is a "myth" that repeats itself with each generation of girls and women.

Marcia Lieberman

In her article 'Some Day My Prince Will Come': Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale, Marcia Lieberman took issue with two essays printed in the New York Review of Books by Alison Lurie, who had recommended certain tales in Andrew Lang's 19th-century collections as feminist as the females in those stories appeared to be strong characters. Lieberman did a close study of the tales and found that most traditional fairy tales spread false notions about sex roles: most of the heroines were passive, helpless, and submissive, and in many cases they functioned largely as a prize for a prince. However, shall we reject fairy tales altogether? Are there possible positive effects of the tales? Do readers receive the tales in a fixed way? And if we take the complete Grimms' fairy tales, for instance, or tales from different cultures, or tales not so popularized, will we find some tales that portray female characters differently? These are some questions to consider after reading this article. You might wish to post your thoughts on this in the threaded discussions.

Activities & Assignments

Threaded Discussion

1. Participate in the Comparing Motifs discussion forum. To access this discussion forum, go to the Activities link on the left menu, go to your Team Threaded Discussion Space folder, and choose the Lesson 4 - Being Female folder.
   • Compare the motifs in selected versions of Cinderella with Sleeping Beauty and/or Snow White. 
   • Also, discuss how the female and male characters are portrayed in the tales.
   • If you prefer, make a chart (see Comparison Chart for reference) to represent your ideas.
      
2. Share your thoughts on the scholarly essays. (By scholarly, we are referring to the essays written about the stories and not the stories themselves.)
   • Post your thoughts in the Being Female - Thoughts on Scholarly Essays discussion forum. To access this discussion forum, go to the Activities link on the left menu, go to the Threaded Discussions folder, and choose the Lesson 4 - Being Female folder.
     
     Essays to be discussed--be sure to discuss the work of each author:
     
     Tatar, "Introduction: Cinderella" and "Spinning Tales: The Distaff Side"
     Warner, "Monstrous Mothers: Women Over the Top"
     Gilbert & Gubar, "Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother"
     Lieberman, "'Some Day My Prince Will Come': Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale"
     Hall, excerpts from "The Work of Representation"
      
   • Read and comment on your classmates' posts.