We Said Feminist Fairy Tales,

Not Fractured Fairy Tales!

The Construction of the Feminist Fairy Tale: Female Agency over Role Reversal
Leslee Farish Kuykendal and Brian W. Sturm

A
child’s first exposure to literature is often a fairy tale, Many states mandate the study of folktales, fairy tales, and
frequently a derivative of one of the classics by the fables in their curricula (for example, the statewide curricula
Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault. While lack of of North Carolina, California, and Rhode Island emphasize
mythology instruction in the early elementary curriculum and this for third grade), preschools often include fairytales in their
lack of mythology recall knowledge in adolescents is cause for curricula, and public libraries use fairytales and folktales in
concern, high school students do know basic Aesop fables and preschool programs aimed at developing early literacy habits.
such well-known fairy tales as Cinderella.1 These tales, many hundreds of years old and found in countless
incarnations all over the world, are a basic part of the intricate
layering of stories and influences that perpetuate and inform
Brian W. Sturm is an Associate Professor the cultural norms surrounding the world the child lives in.2
at the School of Information and Library
Science, University of North Carolina at The cultural norms represented in fairy tales play a large part
Chapel Hill. His research and teaching in the socialization processes of the child who reads them.
interests are in literature, technology, Contained within these cultural norms are the shared beliefs
and library services for youth and in about gender roles held by the child’s society. The development of
the immersive power of information a gender identity is integral to a child’s self-perception. According
environments, including storytelling, to Judith L. Meece, gender conceptions are important for under-
reading, virtual worlds, and libraries. standing not only the self but also the behavior of others.3

Leslee Farish Kuykendal is a recent Additionally, they affect the way children are treated by peers
graduate of the School of Information and adults and influence future behavior expectations.4 As
and Library Science, University of children grow, they use information from their parents, peers,
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has school, literature, and the media to form theories on how men
relocated to Chicago and is actively and women are supposed to behave. Literature in general,
looking for a position as a youth services and fairy tales in particular, gender children. The characters
librarian. Her interests include the role depicted in stories help children to determine what it means
of public library services in the lives of to be male or female as it applies to behavior, traits, or occupa-
children and young adults, especially tion within a child’s culture.5 In this capacity, fairy tales can be
the relationship between Michael L. powerful cultural agents, telling the child who reads them how
Printz Award–winning titles and young they should behave with regard to gender.
adult readers, and storytime programs
for prereading children. Fairy tales contain shared beliefs about gender roles held by a
child’s society; however, shared beliefs can and frequently do

38 Winter 2007 • Children and Libraries

 We Said Feminist Fairy Tales, Not Fractured Fairy Tales
6 for a woman is to be passive, victimized, destroyed, or asleep.
take another form: the oversimplified gender role stereotype.
Beginning in the 1960s, United States researchers began to . . . It tells us that the happy ending is when we are ended,
notice the frequency with which gender stereotypes occurred in when we live without our lives, or not at all.16
children’s books. They questioned how this repeated exposure
to gender stereotypes might affect a child’s development. These feminists “saw women as artificially separated from and
wrongly considered unequal to men.”17
In response, a number of studies were conducted, many reveal-
ing similar patterns of male dominance and female subservi- During the late 1970s and 1980s, feminism evolved into the feel-
ence.7 Researchers concluded that repeated exposure to the ing that “women were naturally separate from men and rightly
stereotyped images of gender was likely to have a detrimental superior,” and rewritten folktales and fairy tales claiming to be
effect on the development of a child’s self-esteem as well as his “feminist” often simply reversed the normal gender stereotypes
perceptions of his own and others’ abilities and potential.8 (for example, Robert Munsch’s The Paper Bag Princess, 1980).18
Feminist writers also published collections of folktales with
Fairy tales can be immensely influential in children’s develop- strong heroines, such as Alison Lurie’s Clever Gretchen and
ing gender identity, so it is important to examine the messages Other Forgotten Folktales (1980) and Ethel Johnston Phelps’ The
that are being transmitted. It has long been recognized that Maid of the North: Feminist Folk Tales from Around the World
the traditional European canon of fairy tales, those that have (1981).19 While these collections often paired the strong, clever
survived to the present day, are tales that reflect and reproduce woman with a stupid or inept man (touting women’s superior-
the patriarchal values of the society that crafted them, and, as ity over men), they also began to transition feminist criticism
Marcia Lieberman explained, “Millions of women must surely toward the exploration of the cultural diversity and breadth of
have formed their psycho-sexual self-concepts and their ideas women in folktales and the recovery of the “collective female
of what they could or could not accomplish, what sort of behav- voice” in these tales.20
ior would be rewarded, and of the nature of reward itself, in part
from their favorite fairy tales.”9 Kay Stone characterizes this third wave of feminism as the view
of “both women and men as naturally separate but potentially
These stories portray women as “weak, submissive, depen- equal—if men shape up.”21 Feminist children’s fairy tales seem to
dent, and self-sacrificing while men are powerful, active, and lag several years behind the changing conceptions of feminism.
dominant.”10 Fairy tales define women as beautiful objects,
powerless to alter the events in their lives, while fairy tale men Jane Yolen lamented in her 1977 article, America’s Cinderella,
are powerful agents of their own destiny. There are characters “The magic of the old tales has been falsified, the true meaning
within these tales who defy these descriptions; however, their lost, perhaps forever.”22 And given what is known about canoni-
defiance comes with a price. Powerful women in fairy tales cal fairy tale literature, it is very tempting to agree with her and
are generally ugly if not also evil.11 The exception to this rule is mourn the loss of the true fairy tale.
the wise woman or fairy godmother; however, these powerful
women are still separated from traditional fairy tale women in However, “contamination,” a term folklorists use to explain for-
that they are not truly human.12 eign influence on pure narrative tradition, can have an enrich-
ing process on the fairy tale. Author Jack Zipes, of Sticks and
Traditional feminist criticism of the “classic” fairy tale texts Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from
rests on the fact that stories that reflect traditional patriarchal Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter, discusses the possibility that the
values survive, while those tales whose characters shed their contamination of fairy tales “can lead to the birth of something
archetypes and step outside the bounds of accepted behavior unique and genuine in its own right.”23
disappear into oblivion.13 Thus, the fairy tales told and retold
today are not necessarily representative of the genre. Rather, Though the European canon (Grimm or Perrault) are thought
they are a direct result of the “skewed selection and silent revi- of as “original” fairy tales, “There is no genuine or authentic
sion of subversive texts.”14 version of a fairy tale.”24 In fact, tales are constantly being
reworked and adapted to reveal new facets of a culture or the
Within this socio-political and -historical perspective, early creativity of an author or storyteller.25 Re-vision, a term whose
feminists (1950s and 1960s) examined the roles of women groundwork is laid in feminist postculturalist thought, indicates
embedded in the folktales and fairy tales that have survived and an author’s decision about which original elements to retain
found them to be “an unfortunate source of negative female ste- and which to refute when creating his new vision of the text.26
reotypes . . . [and] . . . one of the many socializing forces that dis- “Feminist rewriters of fairy tales have reworked the conven-
couraged females from realizing their full human potential.”15 tions of the genre so as to encode discourses that contradict or
Andrea Dworkin (1974) summarized this position: challenge patriarchal ideologies that are increasingly viewed
as anachronistic in today’s society.”27 Re-visions are one form
There are two definitions of woman [in fairy tales]. There is of contamination.28
the good woman. She is a victim. There is the bad woman.
She must be destroyed. The good woman must be possessed. Many feminists consider it fitting that women are now reclaim-
The bad woman must be killed, or punished. Both must be ing fairy tales, given fairy tales’ oral tradition and the historical
nullified. . . . [the ending of these tales] tells us that happiness connection between women and child rearing. However, it

Winter 2007 • Children and Libraries 39
We Said Feminist Fairy Tales, Not Fractured Fairy Tales
would be unfortunate for women to revise these fairy tales with gender.36 In keeping with this definition, Napoli alters the rep-
the sole intention of disrupting the binary gender construc- resentation of male and female characters with regard to issues
tion.29 The simple reversal of gender roles does not result in a of gender and gendered relationships.
feminist fairy tale, but rather a fractured fairy tale.
In her fairy tales, Napoli pays as much attention to subverting
Fractured fairy tales challenge gender stereotypes and patriarchal stereotypes of heroes and princes as she does to redefining
ideologies only at the story level of the text. These changes rely on female protagonists.37 Napoli re-visions the classic tale Beauty
a straightforward reversal of gender roles and the substitution of and the Beast in her novel, Beast. In Beast, Napoli alters the tale
strong female characters for more passive female characters.30 by presenting the story through the first-person narrative of
Prince Orasmyn, the Beast. Napoli introduces her readers to a
Children are not fooled by these false heroines. A 1989 study Beast who possesses the “traditionally feminine attributes of
focusing on children’s responses to Elizabeth, the protagonist delicate respect for Beauty’s [Belle’s] feelings, nurturance, com-
in Robert Munsch’s The Paper Bag Princess, found that many fort, gentleness, and patience.”38
of the children in the study were unable to view Elizabeth as
a genuine hero.31 The Paper Bag Princess is an example of a Additionally, Napoli skews the traditional power dynamic
feminist tale that complies with the traditional form of a fairy between Belle and Beast. In his lion form, Beast reads with dif-
tale but possesses obvious reversals of traditional gender ficulty and can only communicate by scratching words with his
roles. In this case, Princess Elizabeth rescues Prince Ronald paws or using nonverbal signs. Conversely, Belle has full access
from a dragon and then decides not to marry him. Children to language in its spoken and written forms. She keeps a jour-
in the study felt that Elizabeth ought to have “cleaned herself nal of sorts and writes her own story, chronicling her thoughts
up and married the prince.”32 Similar studies found similar and feelings about the Beast and her situation. “Napoli, thus,
results, with the sentiment being that while children admired positions Belle in a positive relation to language and culture by
strong female protagonists, these were not the characters they subverting androcentric theories that devalue women’s status
wished to emulate. in a patriarchal sex-gender system on the grounds that women
do not have full access to the symbolic (language as power and
It would seem, then, that in order to truly re-vision a fairy tale, culture).”39 In this way, Napoli alters the traditional representa-
thereby creating a work that is artistically new and rings true to a tion of male and female characters in order to create a feminist,
child, feminist authors must cease attempting to simply reverse rather than fractured, fairy tale.
gender roles. Rather, they must re-vision the entire work and cre-
ate something from the ground up. Donna Jo Napoli is one femi- The third way in which Napoli alters generic conventions in her
nist author who has found success re-visioning fairy tales, creating books is the renegotiation of patriarchal ideologies and values.
feminist rather than fractured fairy tales.33 She has altered generic In the Brothers’ Grimm telling of the story of Rumpelstiltskin,
conventions in three main areas in her books that allow her to the tale “rests on the premise that a daughter who produces
rework the discursive foundations of the traditional material: nar- wealth, whether through her own labor or through magical
rative strategy, representation of male and female characters, and means, is a girl who can make a good marriage.”40 Napoli’s
renegotiation of patriarchal ideologies and values.34 retelling of the tale, Spinners, attempts to challenge the patriar-
chal capitalist value placed on marriage by the Grimms’ version
Napoli chooses narrative strategies that subvert the traditional of the story by emphasizing the artistry, rather than the eco-
omniscient anonymous narrator in order to present other sides nomics, of spinning. In Spinners, spinning and weaving, though
of the story. She frequently chooses a first-person narrative, it earns Saskia a living, also earns her respect as an artist with
allowing the protagonist to be the agent of his own narration. the ability to create beauty where none existed before.41 Napoli
Feminists frequently write of the importance of giving voice, empowers Saskia with the same talent that the Grimm Brothers
agency, and subjectivity to those who have previously been used to sell her into marriage.
silenced and objectified. A female protagonist is enabled if she
narrates her own story. Children use fairy tales to identify cultural norms about the
world in which they live. Contained within these cultural norms
In children’s literature, the character’s voice serves as a meta- are the shared beliefs about gender roles held by the child’s
phor of female agency, providing her with the potential for society. As fairy tales are often a child’s early exposure to gen-
self-determination. In The Magic Circle, a feminist re-vision der identity and how it defines a character, these gender roles
of Hansel and Gretel, Napoli makes a deliberate decision to should be as realistic as possible.
give her sorceress protagonist (the traditional witch) voice and
agency. Napoli’s decisions regarding the sorceress invite the Real men and women are not the stuff of fairy tales, completely
readers to empathize with a character who has not only been good or completely evil archetypes. They are complicated. Real
objectified and vilified in the traditional tales, but whose rep- men and women play roles beyond the traditional gender-
resentation has, more generally, “been symbolic of misogynist defined positions depicted in canonical fairy tales.
attitudes toward women.”35
For feminist fairy tales to meet the needs of a society of chil-
A truly feminist children’s story has recently been defined as dren in want of fully realized, complicated characters (regard-
one in which the main character is empowered, regardless of less of gender), feminist writers need to move beyond straight

40 Winter 2007 • Children and Libraries

 We Said Feminist Fairy Tales, Not Fractured Fairy Tales
role reversal. Children see through these fractured fairy tales 13. Parsons, “Ella Evolving,” 137.
and do not identify with their one-dimensional protagonists. 14. Alison Lurie, Don’t Tell the Grown Ups: Subversive
Children’s Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), 20.
Feminist fairy tales must be stories in which the main character 15. Kay Stone, “Feminist Approaches to the Interpretation of
is empowered regardless of gender. In order to do this, more Fairy Tales,” in Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion,
authors should follow Donna Jo Napoli’s lead and re-vision and Paradigm, ed. by Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Philadelphia:
traditional stories by changing narrative conventions, empow- Univ. of Pennsylvania Pr., 1986), 229.
ering female and male protagonists, and developing narratives 16. Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: Dutton, 1974),
that encode truly feminist themes and values. & 48–49.
17. Stone, “Feminist Approaches to the Interpretation of Fairy
Tales,” 234.
References 18. Ibid.; Robert N. Munsch, The Paper Bag Princess (Toronto:
Annick Pr., 1980).
1. Diane Ravitch, “Tot Sociology: What Happened to History 19. Alison Lurie, Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales
in Grade Schools?” The American Scholar 56, no. 3 (1987): (New York: Crowell, 1980); Ethel Johnston Phelps, The
343–54; D. Ravitch, What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? (New Maid of the North: Feminist Folk Tales from around the
York: Harper and Row, 1987). World (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981).
2. Linda T. Parsons, “Ella Evolving: Cinderella Stories and the 20. Donald Haase, “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship,” in Fairy
Construction of Gender-Appropriate Behavior,” Children’s Tales and Feminism: New Approaches, ed. by Donald Haase
Literature in Education 35, no. 2 (2004): 135. (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Pr., 2004), 14.
3. Judith Meece, Child and Adolescent Development for 21. Stone, “Feminist Approaches to the Interpretation of Fairy
Educators, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2002), 409. Tales” 234.
4. Jack Demarest and Carole M. Kortenhaus, “Gender Role 22. Jane Yolen, “America’s Cinderella,” Children’s Literature in
Stereotyping in Children’s Literature: An Update,” Sex Education 8, no. 1 (1977): 29.
Roles: A Journal of Research 28, no. 3/4 (1993): 219. 23. Jack Zipes, Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of
5. Peggy S. Rice, “Gendered Readings of a Traditional Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter
‘Feminist’ Folktale by Sixth-Grade Boys and Girls,” Journal (New York: Routledge, 2001), 102.
of Literacy Research 32, no. 2 (2000): 212. 24. Parsons, “Ella Evolving,” 138.
6. Demarest and Kortenhaus, “Gender Role Stereotyping in 25. Hilary S. Crew, “Spinning New Tales from Traditional
Children’s Literature.” 220–21. Texts: Donna Jo Napoli and the Rewriting of Fairy Tale,”
7. M. R. Key, “The Role of Male and Female in Children’s Children’s Literature in Education 33, no. 2 (2002): 77.
Books: Dispelling All Doubt,” in Woman: Dependent or 26. Parsons, “Ella Evolving,” 140.
Independent Variable? ed. by R. Unger and F. Denmark 27. Crew, “Spinning New Tales from Traditional Texts,” 77.
(New York: Psychological Dimensions, 1971); L. J. 28. Parsons, “Ella Evolving,” 138.
Weitzman et al., “Sex-role Socialization in Picture Books 29. Ibid. 139.
for Preschool Children,” American Journal of Sociology 30. Crew, “Spinning New Tales from Traditional Texts,” 82.
77, no. 6 (1972): 1125–50; F. J. Freid, “Stereotyping in 31. Bronwyn Davies, Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tails:
Children’s Materials,” M.A.Ed. thesis, Kean College of New Preschool Children and Gender (New York: Hampton Pr.,
Jersey, 1982; Mary Alyce Lach and Sharyl Bender Peterson, 2002.)
“Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Books: Their Prevalence 32. Rice, “Gendered Readings of a Traditional ‘Feminist’
and Influence on Cognitive and Affective Development,” Folktale by Sixth-Grade Boys and Girls,” 212.
Gender & Education 2, no. 2 (1990): 185–87; Demarest 33. Donna Jo Napoli, Beast (New York: Atheneum Books for
and Kortenhaus, “Gender Role Stereotyping in Children’s Young Readers, 2000); Donna Jo Napoli, The Magic Circle
Literature,” 219. (New York: Dutton Children’s Books, 1993); Donna Jo
8. Lach and Peterson, “Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Napoli and Richard Tchen, Spinners (New York: Dutton
Books,” 185–87. Children’s Books, 1999).
9. Marcia Lieberman, “Some Day My Prince Will Come: 34. Crew, “Spinning New Tales from Traditional Texts,” 78.
Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale,” College 35. Ibid. 79.
English 34, no. 3 (1972): 385. 36. Ibid. 82–83.
10. Parsons, “Ella Evolving,” 137. 37. Ibid. 83–85.
11. K. S. Evans, “A Closer Look at Literature Discussion 38. Ibid. 85.
Groups: The Influence of Gender on Student Response and 39. Ibid. 86.
Discourse,” The New Advocate 9, no. 3 (1996): 187. 40. Ibid. 88.
12. Michael Mendelson, “Forever Acting Alone: The Absence 41. Ibid. 88.
of Female Collaboration in Grimms’ Fairy Tales,” Children’s
Literature in Education 28, no. 3 (1997): 111–25.

Winter 2007 • Children and Libraries 41