Do fairy tales have a lot to answer for?

[poshsinglemum]

Do they perpetuate the myth that all of us women need to be rescued? Or are they harmless fun?

tethers, I can see what you mean but, for me, I hate the fact that the mainstream stories seem to peddle the myth that a man will come to the rescue and everything will be ok. I think it creates unrealistic expectations in the hearts and minds of young girls.

I am a bit ranty about this, though, as I have two friends (sisters) who are complete romantic idiots and both were brought up on a diet of Disney and romance. Their mother reads Mills and Boon, FGS. They are both married; both have affairs; neither will do anything independently and both expect a man to swoop in and sweep them off their feet and do everything (oh and pay for everything) for them. I love them both dearly but I have learnt to keep my opinions to myself where their lovelives are concerned!

Oooh, and I can recommend Diane Purkiss writing about the history of fairies in Troublesome Things. Definitely explores the dark origins of the culture of fairy stories from the ancient world, through witch trials to more modern stories.

tethers, I believe the repeated messages of being rescued by a prince actually influences girls' lives. For example, they may go for a soft subject at uni, to "express themselves" whereas a boy would gravitate towards one that brings in the cold hard cash, because he knows there's no prince out there to rescue him, and he's going to have to rely on himself.
Not that I think girls should aim to be like boys, but I think it does create a sense of learned helplesness in girls. I'm only talking about the Snow White/Little Mermaid/Sleeping Beauty/Rapunzel genre. Strangely, paradoxically, you also get a sense in these stories that the girl's life is actually over when she marries (and I think that's quite close to the truth in some ways, or it definitely used to be the case-not so much anymore)

There are plenty of stories where the women do the rescuing - in The Little Goose Girl, or The Seven Ravens - but they are tucked away and need seeking out, instead of being forced upon us in 101 different incarnations.

yes, but you have to accept that the status quo is sexist, before you take it upon yourself to seek out other stories.

Sakura, I think that's too simplistic an analysis.

The 'being rescued by a prince' fairytales are not the only kind of fairytale- just the ones that Disney picks up on.

They are a product of their time, and should be contextualised as such. This does not negate their value to children, such as giving a name to their irrational fears (monsters, dragons, trolls etc.)

I would also question the assertion that it is impossible to be in love and in control of your own life- besides which, children do not want to be in control of their own life.

Am tired and rambling, but will be back tomorrow- really good thread

Or read an awful lot of fairy stories (which is how I found them as a child - I haunted the library ).

As a mother with an adult awareness of the messages, I make more of a specific effort.

Apologies-I know this is an old joke:

The fairy tale we should have been reading

Well I was obsessed with fairy tales when I was younger..

Cinderella - Beautiful yet oppressed girl treated like a slave is rescued by a wonderful prince who whisks her away to his castle and they LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER Looks across a DH as he scratches his stomach and sips his guiness and belches while pointing out the piled up washing

Sleeping beauty - A beautiful princess who doesn't know she is a princess lives with her god mothers in a mystic forest then she is cursed by an evil witch to sleep forever until her prince comes to r awaken her with true loves first kiss and they live HAPPILY EVER AFTER Morning breath..No

and so on... I like shreks' version better...

I think they influenced me, without a doubt. I was a child who read a lot , and there was always this recurring theme.
In fact it was only when I read Greer at the age of eighteen, that I realised that the pattern of a woman's life didn't have to follow "fall in love, meet prince" . Up until then, I though that this was inevitable, part of nature if you like. ANd what blew me away was how the stories portray the significance of meeting a prince in the lives of females.
I think things have changed somewhat now, there are more variations of stories for girls.
But to answer the OP, I do think fairly tales have a lot to answer for.

Loved that JessinAvalon

Ditto

My favourite retellings are by Robin McKinley (Beauty and Spindles End). We read our children lots of collections of stories, fairly tales and myths, and had quite a few on tape too. dh was quite a classicist and I just love stories so we looked for interesting stories from around the world which had lots of different things going on in them. Some with happy endings and some really quite gruesome ones too (some of the Celtic and Scandinavian ones were really fairly bleak).

But I did notice that the fairy tales that dd was given (nice and pink and flowery [blurg] were really very saccharine and quite passive too. Plus they were on the whole very badly written, which for books that are designed for children of an age to be read to is fairly unforgivable I think.

I swap the gender of all characters when I read them. You soon see which sexes are stereotyped them.

I've given up reading them and now read her my boring scientific papers. Might have to stop that when she gets old enough to understand what I'm saying

I've read Bettelheim on fairytales, but I freely admit that I was far, far too young to be doing so, and found it all rather unimpressive. The perils of having an entire university library at your disposal, but not enough experience to use it well (in that case).

I had Snow White and Rose Red (in the aforementioned 60s ladybird edition). I loved the fact that Rose Red was a brunette like me. I never quite 'got' the tale, though. I suspect there was something quite scary for me about there being no parents in it - although parents in fairy tales are seldom reliable.

nice list of fairy tales by story type here

Politically Correct Fairy Tales here

Love this thread.

It's not really that fairy tales are bad for girls. Just that the ones that get sold to girls (via Disney or pink books) are the bad ones. Huh.

Unprune - in the version of Snow White and Rose Red that I know they live with their mother in the forest. Not that it makes much difference!

Sakura/Tethers - I still feel like a failure because I have never "found my prince". To be fair, I didn't exactly wait around for him and just got on with things but, if I'm being very honest, I really do feel like a failure. After all, I am only completely independent with ab intelligent and beautiful daughter; highly paid job/career; fast car; lovely house; etc. Yep, a complete failure because I've never been married and am never likely to be.

Jingle Like you I didn't wait around and got on with things - I was brought up to be independent by my mum, single handedly for a long time after she was widowed so it was a strong message. But so was the message (being an only child who loved to read, and thus stuck in books for most of my childhood) that everything would be OK when i found a perfect partner to share my life with, The End...
I have been serially dissatisfied with my longer term partners, often more because of my unrealistic expectations of them or of what being in a relationship should feel like.
I can't blame it all on the fairytales but they sure didn't help!!They're part of a wider social construct that exists in our society, that love is the goal, and it should just drop into our laps like magic.

you know you are not a failure, you are doing incredibly well to achieve all of that on your own -parenthood is hard enough when there's two of you. But that feeling of something missing, and 'everything would be alright if' is in your guts not in your head and it can't be reasoned with can it? You can still find someone you want to be with, and who you can have fun with, but if you're anything like me you need to get your head round not expecting them to 'make you happy' (I hate it when people ask that - "does he make you happy?")

Have you read The Road less travelled? 'Love is not something that happens to you, it's something you do'. Now that's a powerful message I'd like my DD to learn - but it still troubles me that i don't quite want to believe it, and that maybe its for people who just haven't found 'the one' yet to convince themselves they're not missing out...

I've just dusted off me "Sexual Politics"

"The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity. And convictions of romantic love are convenient to both parties since this is often the only condition in which the female can overcome the far more powerful conditioning she has received toward sexual inhibition.

Romantic love also obscures the realities of female status and the burden of economic dependancy. As to "chivalry", such gallant gesture as still resides in the middle classes has degenerated to a tired ritualism, which scarcely serves to mask the status situation of the present."

She goes on to say that "romantic love" is the crumbs the patriarchy throws to women in order to conceal the truth of how powerless they really are. A type of patronization, if you like. Eastern cultures tend not to bother with it and are more pragmatic, but the dynamics of patriarchy (where the major political and financial institutions remain firmly in the hands of men) are the same throughout the entire world. "Romantic Love" is a sugar pill for western women.

it was written in 1970, so a lot has changed since then obviously

Sakura - not so you'd notice...

Dreamy - I really didn't like Road Less Travelled but I read it ages ago - maybe I should give it another go. My upbringing was a disaster zone - alcoholic father who used to regularly hit my mother; more or less brought up just by mum; terrified of father but also despised him; etc, etc. I also used to hide in my room and read a lot (as did my brother) from an early age (it was safe there). I suspect my parents' failed and damaged relationship has as much to do with my inability to sustain a relationship as my unrealistic expectations but I too feel the fables/tales can't have helped. Add an unhealthy dollop of Danielle Steel and the Brontes at about 14 years old and it's no wonder I'm such a screw up!

Fortunately, though, I am bloody gorgeous so I can still reel them in and could always compromise if I get really desperate

I've read The Uses Of Enchantment - interesting but not always entirely convincing imho. I think a lot of it was just imposing analysis to suit the time he was writing, rather than necessarily to suit the original stories.
It is a VERY LONG TIME since I read it though, so apologies if I've mis-remembered it.

And I disagree entirely that fairy/folk tales are predominantly about 'little women waiting to be rescued' - this is just the myth that Disney likes to put forward, whilst pretending to offer feisty female role models.

Just marking my place so I can hit amazon later!

I'm getting increasingly annoyed that most of the books we get seem to have a male main character, and the ones where it is not said are male by default (british language it's a hard habit to get out of) and hardly any are actual girls!

I bought Uses of Enchantment years ago when I was into psychology, but I never read it. I tend to prefer Jungian style analysis of fairy tales and archetypes, but have only dipped into that and not studied it enough.

I think that most fairy tales over time have been written by men, and therefore they mainly focus on men and boys and the hero's journey, which Joseph Campbell describes in his 6 volumes of the world's myths.

claig, I suspect that in reality the majority of fairy tales are told by women as part of an oral tradition. Unfortunately, the people who have documented and committed them to paper in the last couple of centuries have tended to be men. Perhaps the more disturbing and challenging material (from a male perspective) has been tidied away.