Perfect Princes and Passive Princesses

In Stephanie's presentation, she talked about the different roles of men and women as presented in fairy tales. She pointed out that men in fairy tales are usually cast in the role of rescuer and the women need to be rescued. That got me thinking about how this plays out in some of our most common fairy tales. In Cinderella, the girl is rescued from a bad situation of servitude to her mean step mother and step sisters. In Snow White, she is rescued from the spell of the evil queen. Even in Little Red Riding Hood, the little girl is rescued by the brave hunter, if she is rescued at all. When Stephanie was discussing that the women in fairy tales often have passive roles, I found it interesting when she said that Sleeping Beauty's main role was to sleep, and I would add, to look beautiful. The males have a much more active role, although they do seem less interesting and complex as characters than do the females. When I was preparing my presentation, I wanted to see how the prince was physically described in the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, as compared to Cinderella who is described as beautiful. I found that he was never physically described at all, but he was described only in terms of what he did--his actions. Thus we have a good example of the male characters being all about the action and the female characters being passive. Cinderella never really did anything but clean, pick peas out of the ashes, and look beautiful to go to the ball. I see now why I loved the movie version of Cinderella called "Everafter" with Drew Barrymore. In this story, she reads books, swims in a lake, stands up for herself, throws apples at an intruder, and dresses up as a courtier to save her friend from being sold as a slave. She even stands up to the prince and basically tells him that he is spoiled and that he has all that power and doesn't use it for the good of others. Drew Barrymore's Cinderella rocks! I'm glad that some of our modern day fairy tales have women that are not passive. Now if Disney would just catch on...