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Feminist Fairy Tales: Difference between revisions
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{{work}}
{{Infobox book
| title = Feminist Fairy Tales
| image = Feminist Fairy Tales.jpg
| caption =
| author = Barbara G. Walker
| central theme = Feminine empowerment against old patriarchal values
| elevator pitch = An anthology of [[Gender Flip]]ped and original [[Fairy Tales|fairy tales]]
| genre = [[Feminist Fantasy]]
| publication date = 1996
| source page exists =
| wiki URL =
| wiki name =
}}
'''''Feminist Fairy Tales''''' is a 1996 anthology of revised and original fairy tales by feminist Barbara G. Walker.
Quite a few [[Fairy Tales|fairy tales]] are less than friendly towards women (case in point, there is an entire fairy tale genre about heroic wife-beating). Walker sought to right the wrongs by rewriting famous and lesser-known fairy tales (as well as some well known folkloric and mythology-derived tales) to empower female readers, especially those reading in the children's section.
It is arguable whether she succeeded, as described on [[Feminist Fairy Tales/YMMV|the YMMV page]]. Very often Walker missed the point of the original tale or was only familiar with the [[Flanderized]], [[Disneyfication|Disneyfied]] version of the story, which resulted in stories that read like a [[Shallow Parody]] of the original with a feminist slant. Also, there are heavy [[Values Dissonance]] between Walker's feminist principles <ref>which seem rooted on First and Second wave feminism, where great value was put on the things that made women "special" like reproductive capacity and "feminine" values being taken as seriously as "male" ones"</ref> and the ones in vogue in the state of the movement from the 2000s onwards<ref>which place greater emphasis in equality, women's independence, female solidarity, and choice over reproductive rights</ref>, resulting in stories that could read superficially as "empowering" but on close examination are anything but.
{{examples|Fairy Tales and Folkloric stories rewritten for the anthology:}}
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* ''[[Saint George and The Dragon]]''
* ''[[The Frog Prince]]''
* ''[[Thomas the Rhymer]]''
* [[Greek Mythology]]
* [[Norse Mythology]]
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* [[Arbitrary Skepticism]] / [[Flat Earth Atheist]]: "The Oracle" is effectively an atheist tract, with the witch monologuing on how magic and miracles aren't real, amidst numerous stories where magic ''is'' real and Mother Goddesses are ten a penny.
* [[Beauty Equals Goodness]]: While most of the heroic characters are non-descript or fairly average, most of the tales describe the male villains as particularly hideous. There are two tales on the anthology who try to subvert this trope, the original story "Barbidol" and "Ugly and the Beast" (a rewrite of "Beauty and the Beast"), but they are marred by flawed writing that make the characters [[Unintentionally Unsympathetic]], resulting in a [[Lost Aesop]].
* [[Bee-Bee Gun]]: Florian is attacked by [[Wrathful Wasps|mud wasps]] and almost dies of an allergic reaction.
* [[Bestiality is Depraved]]: Subverted. "Ugly and the Beast" has the twist that the Beast was never a cursed human, but an animal that just happened to be able to talk and act like a human. Absolutely no one considers it odd that Ugly goes on to marry him, least of all Ugly herself.▼
* [[Broken Aesop]]: the rewrites tend to break not only the Aesop of the originals, but also the ones expected for the plot. [[Egregious]]ly seen in the rewrite of "[[The Emperor's New Clothes]]", where the con-women become ever bigger [[Karma Houdini]]s than the originals - to wit, in this version they were flat out ''rewarded'' for basically conning the biggest leader of their nation, by said leader even!
** As noted above, it's rather difficult to take the moral of "The Oracle" (that there's no such thing as magic) seriously in a book of fairy tales that otherwise is full of magic.
** "How the Gods Met Their End" concludes with a Freya [[Expy]] decreeing that it's for the best that mortals forget all gods and go on to shape their own destinies. Immediately after, the readers is told how goddesses such as herself continued to be ingrained in the female psyche and worshiped forever, which is clearly treated as a great thing.
▲* [[
* [[Composite Character]]: Walker appears to be under the impression that Yahweh, Zeus, and Odin are all the same god with a name change and the exact same attitudes throughout all of history.
* [[Disposable Woman]]: In "How the Gods Met Their End", Low-Key has a young mother killed so that he can eat her heart and become pregnant. This is treated as a throwaway detail.
* [[Double Standard Abuse (Female on Male)]]: Every male character that mishandles a female one is despited as irredeemably evil. Women doing equivalent amounts of abuse on men, however, is seen as deserved by the male at best.
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* [[No Periods, Period]]: Inverted. Dear God, inverted. In "Cinder-Helle", it's revealed that Cinder-Helle can magically create her dress, coach, and horses... through the magic of her menstrual blood.
* [[Plagiarism]]: Several stories seem to be ripped off from pre-existing works:
** "Cinder-Helle" shares quite a bit in common with [[Tanith Lee]]'s "When the Clock Strikes". Both have the Cinderella character's mother belong to a secret underground religion (paganism for the former, Satanism for the latter) and hide by marrying a nobleman, all while raising her daughter to share her beliefs. The Cinderella character proceeds to woo the prince not out of love, but as a means to an end (using her status as queen to banish Christianity and reinstate worship of the Mother Goddess in the former, drive the prince insane as revenge against his father in the latter).
** "Fairy Gold" reads very similarly to Prosper Merimee's ''La Venus d'Ille''. Both feature a mystical statue in the "modest Aphrodite" pose, with an inscription in a strange language. Both stories have the statue fixate on a young man who unwittingly stumbles across it and both stories end with the young man dying in the statue's embrace. The only difference is that "Fairy Gold" treats this as a good thing.
** "The Weaver" copies a number of points from the fairy tale "The Nettle Spinner", including the heroine being a talented young weaver who is engaged to her childhood sweetheart, the villain being a cruel baron who causes his kinder wife much misery, and the conflict arising from the baron wanting to seduce the weaver.
* [[Sex Is Evil and I Am Horny]]: According to "How the Sexes Were Separated", this is one of the reasons why men hate women. The Zeus/God [[Expy]] forbids any sort of pleasure of the flesh and, because men can't stop desiring sex, they constantly feel guilty and channel it as anger towards women.
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[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Fairy Tale]]
[[Category:Literature]]▼
[[Category:Pages Original to All The Tropes]]
▲[[Category:Literature of the 1990s]]
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