¡Descarga Revisión feminista de los cuentos de hadas y más Ejercicios en PDF de Literatura solo en Docsity! The canon of literature has started to change from the 1970s. In these context on the second wave feminism, within this context on the sexual revolution, we have women writers that will offer their own interpretations to rewrite the male canon. Often female perspective to balance, to attack the authority that has been the male canon. She will rewrite 16 fairy tales. These are part of the male canon. These traditional fairy tales were initially written by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. What are they teaching? To be submissive, to brain-washed girls. To frightened young girls. They become women obeying the patriarchal system. Fairy tales are a state of formation for young women. They are used by patriarchal institutions in order to frighten girls to become adult women that are afraid of men. They have been essential to instruct a patriarchal education to young girls and have to embrace gender roles of submission. She considers that American women are like women in fairy tales. Submissive. Patriarchal culture has tricd to silence the existence of lesbians, but more
significantly, it has twisted and altered the real meaning that being a lesbian has, making up
an image of lesbianism in totally negative terms and constructing the identity of
homosexual women as a conduct against nature and allied consequently to the supernatural
and diabolic sphere.
However, Sexton does not carry her alternative view to the end and the encounter
with the prince involves for Rapunzel the discovery of masculine sexuality, ostensibly
different from the one she had known with the old woman and necessary in order to
Fairy Tales Revisited and Transformed 19
discipline Rapunzel into a normal sexual life. She asks herself “What is this beast [...] with
muscles on his arms / like a bag of snakes? / What is this moss on his legs? / What prickly
plant grows on his cheeks? / What is this voice as decp as a dog”” Margot Fitzgerald has
achievements of Sexton's work as specifically observable in “Rapunzel”: first, she has
changed the narrative and shifted the point of view in such a way as to make possible an
utterly different reading of the tale from the one proposed when it was first written. And
second, she is at the same time revealing the most deeply hidden notion which was
certainly present in the original configuration but which the classical version has attempted
to erase: obviously enough, the historical and physical existence of erotic love among
women. Borrowing Adrienne Rich's words:
SNOW-WHITE
“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” depicts a Snow White who has “cheeks as
fragile as cigarette paper, / arms and legs made of Limoges, / lips like Vin Du Rhone,”. She
“rolls her china-blue doll eyes,/ open and shut. / Open to say, / Good Day Mama”. Sexton
mocks this doll-like figure, exhibited as a lifeless being, a sort of machine-like creature
who opens and shuts her eyes mechanically, to greet her mother as good girls do. The
It is worth noting that the conflict between the stepmother and Snow White is
fought out in the space where masculine culture has instructed women to be rivals. The
male gaze residing in women's subconscious precludes all possibilities of a female bonding
within patriarchy and in this respect the mirror represents the “alienation of women from
each other in patriarchal culture” (Rose, 215). In other words, the social significance of this
The dangers of the outside world, the threat of defiminization implicit in public
life, are embodied by the sexually menacing animals that Snow White encounters in her
way such as the “hungry wolf” with “his tongue lolling out like a worm” or the “birds
calling out lewdly,/ talking like pink parrots/ and the snakes hung down in loops,/ each a
noose for her sweet white neck.” Even the nice and friendly little dwarfs become “those
little hot dogs” who take Snow White as a domestic assistant. The naive Snow White falls
