Post by Erica Chan on Sept 5, 2010 19:04:47 GMT -5
Gender and Socialization
(In Fairytales and Feminism, New Approaches, Edited by Donald Haase)
Rooted in sociocultural critique and in the controversy ‘about what is biologically determined and what is learned’ (Lieberman 394), early feminist criticism of fairytales, as seen in the Lurie-Lieberman debate, was principally concerned with the genre’s representation of females and the effects of these representations on the gender identity and behavior of children in particular. As Lieberman concluded, “We must consider the possibility that the classical attributes of ‘femininity’ found in these stories are in fact imprinted in children and reinforced by the stories themselves. Analyses of the influence of the most popular children’s literature may give us an insight into some of the origins of psycho-sexual identity” (395). There was – and still is – widespread agreement with Lieberman’s argument that fairytales ‘have been made the repositories of the dreams, hopes, and fantasies of generations of girls’ and that ‘millions of women must surely have formed their psycho-sexual self-concepts, and their ideas of what they could or could not accomplish, what sort of behavior would be rewarded, and of the nature of reward itself, in part from their favorite fairytales” (385).
Throughout the 1970s these ideas were repeated in writings by American feminists, which did not always analyze fairy tales in depth but more frequently utilized them simply as evidence to demonstrate the sociocultural myths and mechanisms that oppress women. In 1974, for example, Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating echoed Lieberman’s thesis by asserting that fairytales shape our cultural values and understanding of gender roles by invariably depicting women as wicked, beautiful, and passive while portraying men, in absolute contrast, as good, active, and heroic. Similarly, Susan Brownmiller, in the course of her book Against our Will: Men, Women , and Rape (1975), offered the tale of Little Red Riding Hood as a parable of rape and argued that fairytales – particularly classics tales like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White train women to be rape victims (309-310). And in 1978, Mary Daly began the first chapter of Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism by pointing to the fairytale as a carrier of the toxic patriarchal myths that are used to deceive women: “The child who is fed tales such as Snow White is not told that the tale itself is a poisonous apple, and the Wicked Queen (her mother/teacher), having herself been drugged by the same deadly diet throughout her lifetime…, is unaware of her venomous part in the patriarchal plot’ (44).
By the end of the decade, both in scholarship and in books intended for mass-market distribution, these oversimplifications of the fairytale’s problematic relation to social values and the construction of gender identity gave way to somewhat more complex, or at least more ambivalent, approaches. In 1979, Karen E. Rowe reaffirmed the ‘significance of romantic tales in forming female attitudes toward the self, men, marriage and society’. Moreover, Rowe emphasized in particular that the idealized romantic patterns in fairytales were also evident in mass-market reading materials intended for adult women, including erotic, ladies’, and gothic fictions. The fairytale’s romantic paradigms could therefore be viewed as influential not simply in childhood but also in the lives of adult women, who ‘internalise romantic patterns from ancient tales’ and ‘continue to tailor their aspirations and capabilities to conform with romantic paradigms’ (Feminism and Fairy Tales 222).
However, Rowe also observed that ever since modern feminists had begun to expose and challenge society’s ‘previous mores and those fairy tales which inculcate romantic ideals’ (211), modern women had become increasingly conscious of the gap between romantic ideals and the reality that ‘all men are not princes’ (222). Consequently, Rowe’s work asserted that fairytales ‘no longer provide mythic validations of desirable female behavior… [and had] lost their potency because of the widening gap between social practice and romantic idealization.’ (211). According to Rowe, the result for women was an ambiguity that left them in an unresolved tension between enacting cultural change and adhering to the deceptive ideals of the fairytale, which still exerted an ‘awesome imaginative power over the female psyche’ (218):
Today women are caught in a dialectic between the cultural status quo and the evolving feminist movement, between a need to preserve values and yet to accommodate changing mores, between romantic fantasies and contemporary realities. The capacity of women to achieve equality and of culture to rejuvenate itself depends, I would suggest, upon the metamorphosis of these tensions into balances, of antagonisms into viable cooperations. But one question remains unresolved: do we have the courageous vision and energy to cultivate a newly fertile ground of psychic and cultural experience from which will grow fairytales for human beings in the future? (223)
In Rowe’s view, the fairytale – perhaps precisely because of its ‘awesome imaginative power’ – had a role to play in cultivating equality among men and women, but it would have to be a rejuvenated fairytale fully divested of its idealized romantic fantasies.
Other feminists of the same era had specific ideas about how the fairytale could be employed ‘to cultivate a newly fertile ground of psychic and cultural experience.’ In 1979, feminist literary scholar Carolyn G. Heilbrun proposed that ‘myth, tale, and tragedy must be transformed by bold acts of reinterpretation in order to enter the experience of the emerging female self’ (150). Citing Rowe’s essay, which she knew then as the 1978 working paper from the Radcliffe Institute, Heilbrun offered the Grimms’ fairytales as an example of cultural texts whose models of male selfhood could be adopted and reinterpreted by women in light of their own search for identity:
One feels particularly the importance of not limiting the female imagination to female models. Bettelheim has shown how small boys can use the female model of helplessness in fairytales to reduce their anxieties and unmentionable fears: similarly, young girls should be able to use male models to enhance their feelings of daring and adventure. To choose only the most obvious example, consider the many Grimm fairytales employing the theme of the ‘three brothers’. What if the girl could conceive of herself as the youngest of the three? Powerless, scorned, the one from whom the least is expected, even by himself, this third brother, because of virtues clearly ‘feminine’ – animal-loving, kind, generous, affectionate, warm to the possibilities of affiliation – this third brother, again and again rejected, nonetheless persists to success with the help of his unlikely friends, and despite the enmity of what, in the person of the two older brothers, might be called the ‘male’ establishment. (147).
Drawing on The Golden Bird, The Queen Bee, The Three Feathers, The Golden Goose, and The Water of Life, Heilbrun suggested how the youngest brother’s situation is actually ‘a paradigm of female experience in the male power structure that no woman with aspirations above that of sleeping princess will fail to recognise’ (148). Identification with the male hero is possible, Heilbrun argued, once women recognize that ‘the structures [of the fairytale] are human, not sexually dictated”: “What woman must learn to assume is that she is not confined to the role of the princess; that the hero, who wakens Sleeping Beauty with a kiss, is that part of herself that awakens conventional girlhood to the possibility of life and action’ (150).
As if on cue and in the same year, Madonna Kolbenshlag published Kiss Sleeping Beauty GoodBye: Breaking the Spell of Feminine Myths and Models. In an eclectic approach that combined social concerns with psychology and religion, Kolbenschlag discussed fairytales to expose the feminine myths of Western culture while reasserting the potential such stories have to awaken and liberate women. In other words, she took an approach that reconciled the cultural specificity of fairytales as ‘parables of feminine socialisation’ with the view that the same stories can call ‘women forth to an ‘awakening’ and to a spiritual maturity’ (4). As she notes in her introduction, ‘Much of what we live by and attribute to nature or destiny is, in reality, a pervasive cultural mythology. Because myths are no less powerful than nature and because they mirror as well as model our existence, I have introduced six familiar fairytales as heuristic devices for interpreting the existence of women. These tales are parables of what women have become; and at the same time, prophecies of the spiritual metamorphosis to which they are called’ (x).
Similarly, Colette Dowling’s popular volume of 1981, The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence, did not simply indict the fairytale but instead suggested how women’s psychological and social attitudes are mirrored in the stories. From this perspective, a critical understanding of the classical fairytale as a mirror of the forces limiting women makes it possible to project alternative ways of constructing lives. This has been the goal, too, of Linda Chervin and Mary Neill’s The Woman’s Tale: A Journey of Inner Exploration (1980). By sharing the authors’ personal reflections on fairytales – such as Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderrella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White and Rose Red – Chervin and Neill hoped to encourage women to reflect on their own responses to the stories and on their inner, or spiritual journeys. In Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity (1992), feminist psychoanalyst Marion Woodman offered a Jungian interpretation of the Grimms’ All Fur and the commentaries of her female patients to demonstrate how women could regain autonomy in a society dominated by men. Despite the diverse orientations of these works – which ranged from the literary to the psychological and sociological, to the philosophical and spiritual – they all encouraged a self conscious, critical engagement with the classical tales as a means to liberate women to imagine and construct new identities.
(In Fairytales and Feminism, New Approaches, Edited by Donald Haase)
Rooted in sociocultural critique and in the controversy ‘about what is biologically determined and what is learned’ (Lieberman 394), early feminist criticism of fairytales, as seen in the Lurie-Lieberman debate, was principally concerned with the genre’s representation of females and the effects of these representations on the gender identity and behavior of children in particular. As Lieberman concluded, “We must consider the possibility that the classical attributes of ‘femininity’ found in these stories are in fact imprinted in children and reinforced by the stories themselves. Analyses of the influence of the most popular children’s literature may give us an insight into some of the origins of psycho-sexual identity” (395). There was – and still is – widespread agreement with Lieberman’s argument that fairytales ‘have been made the repositories of the dreams, hopes, and fantasies of generations of girls’ and that ‘millions of women must surely have formed their psycho-sexual self-concepts, and their ideas of what they could or could not accomplish, what sort of behavior would be rewarded, and of the nature of reward itself, in part from their favorite fairytales” (385).
Throughout the 1970s these ideas were repeated in writings by American feminists, which did not always analyze fairy tales in depth but more frequently utilized them simply as evidence to demonstrate the sociocultural myths and mechanisms that oppress women. In 1974, for example, Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating echoed Lieberman’s thesis by asserting that fairytales shape our cultural values and understanding of gender roles by invariably depicting women as wicked, beautiful, and passive while portraying men, in absolute contrast, as good, active, and heroic. Similarly, Susan Brownmiller, in the course of her book Against our Will: Men, Women , and Rape (1975), offered the tale of Little Red Riding Hood as a parable of rape and argued that fairytales – particularly classics tales like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White train women to be rape victims (309-310). And in 1978, Mary Daly began the first chapter of Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism by pointing to the fairytale as a carrier of the toxic patriarchal myths that are used to deceive women: “The child who is fed tales such as Snow White is not told that the tale itself is a poisonous apple, and the Wicked Queen (her mother/teacher), having herself been drugged by the same deadly diet throughout her lifetime…, is unaware of her venomous part in the patriarchal plot’ (44).
By the end of the decade, both in scholarship and in books intended for mass-market distribution, these oversimplifications of the fairytale’s problematic relation to social values and the construction of gender identity gave way to somewhat more complex, or at least more ambivalent, approaches. In 1979, Karen E. Rowe reaffirmed the ‘significance of romantic tales in forming female attitudes toward the self, men, marriage and society’. Moreover, Rowe emphasized in particular that the idealized romantic patterns in fairytales were also evident in mass-market reading materials intended for adult women, including erotic, ladies’, and gothic fictions. The fairytale’s romantic paradigms could therefore be viewed as influential not simply in childhood but also in the lives of adult women, who ‘internalise romantic patterns from ancient tales’ and ‘continue to tailor their aspirations and capabilities to conform with romantic paradigms’ (Feminism and Fairy Tales 222).
However, Rowe also observed that ever since modern feminists had begun to expose and challenge society’s ‘previous mores and those fairy tales which inculcate romantic ideals’ (211), modern women had become increasingly conscious of the gap between romantic ideals and the reality that ‘all men are not princes’ (222). Consequently, Rowe’s work asserted that fairytales ‘no longer provide mythic validations of desirable female behavior… [and had] lost their potency because of the widening gap between social practice and romantic idealization.’ (211). According to Rowe, the result for women was an ambiguity that left them in an unresolved tension between enacting cultural change and adhering to the deceptive ideals of the fairytale, which still exerted an ‘awesome imaginative power over the female psyche’ (218):
Today women are caught in a dialectic between the cultural status quo and the evolving feminist movement, between a need to preserve values and yet to accommodate changing mores, between romantic fantasies and contemporary realities. The capacity of women to achieve equality and of culture to rejuvenate itself depends, I would suggest, upon the metamorphosis of these tensions into balances, of antagonisms into viable cooperations. But one question remains unresolved: do we have the courageous vision and energy to cultivate a newly fertile ground of psychic and cultural experience from which will grow fairytales for human beings in the future? (223)
In Rowe’s view, the fairytale – perhaps precisely because of its ‘awesome imaginative power’ – had a role to play in cultivating equality among men and women, but it would have to be a rejuvenated fairytale fully divested of its idealized romantic fantasies.
Other feminists of the same era had specific ideas about how the fairytale could be employed ‘to cultivate a newly fertile ground of psychic and cultural experience.’ In 1979, feminist literary scholar Carolyn G. Heilbrun proposed that ‘myth, tale, and tragedy must be transformed by bold acts of reinterpretation in order to enter the experience of the emerging female self’ (150). Citing Rowe’s essay, which she knew then as the 1978 working paper from the Radcliffe Institute, Heilbrun offered the Grimms’ fairytales as an example of cultural texts whose models of male selfhood could be adopted and reinterpreted by women in light of their own search for identity:
One feels particularly the importance of not limiting the female imagination to female models. Bettelheim has shown how small boys can use the female model of helplessness in fairytales to reduce their anxieties and unmentionable fears: similarly, young girls should be able to use male models to enhance their feelings of daring and adventure. To choose only the most obvious example, consider the many Grimm fairytales employing the theme of the ‘three brothers’. What if the girl could conceive of herself as the youngest of the three? Powerless, scorned, the one from whom the least is expected, even by himself, this third brother, because of virtues clearly ‘feminine’ – animal-loving, kind, generous, affectionate, warm to the possibilities of affiliation – this third brother, again and again rejected, nonetheless persists to success with the help of his unlikely friends, and despite the enmity of what, in the person of the two older brothers, might be called the ‘male’ establishment. (147).
Drawing on The Golden Bird, The Queen Bee, The Three Feathers, The Golden Goose, and The Water of Life, Heilbrun suggested how the youngest brother’s situation is actually ‘a paradigm of female experience in the male power structure that no woman with aspirations above that of sleeping princess will fail to recognise’ (148). Identification with the male hero is possible, Heilbrun argued, once women recognize that ‘the structures [of the fairytale] are human, not sexually dictated”: “What woman must learn to assume is that she is not confined to the role of the princess; that the hero, who wakens Sleeping Beauty with a kiss, is that part of herself that awakens conventional girlhood to the possibility of life and action’ (150).
As if on cue and in the same year, Madonna Kolbenshlag published Kiss Sleeping Beauty GoodBye: Breaking the Spell of Feminine Myths and Models. In an eclectic approach that combined social concerns with psychology and religion, Kolbenschlag discussed fairytales to expose the feminine myths of Western culture while reasserting the potential such stories have to awaken and liberate women. In other words, she took an approach that reconciled the cultural specificity of fairytales as ‘parables of feminine socialisation’ with the view that the same stories can call ‘women forth to an ‘awakening’ and to a spiritual maturity’ (4). As she notes in her introduction, ‘Much of what we live by and attribute to nature or destiny is, in reality, a pervasive cultural mythology. Because myths are no less powerful than nature and because they mirror as well as model our existence, I have introduced six familiar fairytales as heuristic devices for interpreting the existence of women. These tales are parables of what women have become; and at the same time, prophecies of the spiritual metamorphosis to which they are called’ (x).
Similarly, Colette Dowling’s popular volume of 1981, The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence, did not simply indict the fairytale but instead suggested how women’s psychological and social attitudes are mirrored in the stories. From this perspective, a critical understanding of the classical fairytale as a mirror of the forces limiting women makes it possible to project alternative ways of constructing lives. This has been the goal, too, of Linda Chervin and Mary Neill’s The Woman’s Tale: A Journey of Inner Exploration (1980). By sharing the authors’ personal reflections on fairytales – such as Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderrella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White and Rose Red – Chervin and Neill hoped to encourage women to reflect on their own responses to the stories and on their inner, or spiritual journeys. In Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity (1992), feminist psychoanalyst Marion Woodman offered a Jungian interpretation of the Grimms’ All Fur and the commentaries of her female patients to demonstrate how women could regain autonomy in a society dominated by men. Despite the diverse orientations of these works – which ranged from the literary to the psychological and sociological, to the philosophical and spiritual – they all encouraged a self conscious, critical engagement with the classical tales as a means to liberate women to imagine and construct new identities.