The Tale Retold: Feminist Fairy Tales

J. R. R. Tolkien points out in his essay on fairy tales that the reader of them is gratified because he is consoled by a glimpse of the evangelium, of the way that life should ideally be. For Tolkien, the end of the tale is a vision of heaven; fairy tale heroes and heroines conduct themselves the way we all would if only this were not a fallen world. But feminists have noted that such endings may be full of stereotypes in which women are either merely beautiful, passive recipients of good luck, usually in the form of a handsome and wealthy prince-husband, or ugly, churlish witches who have nothing but contempt for the world they live in. The fairy tale would have the reader believe that either women are malevolent outcasts or they are good but passive married women and that marriage happily ever after is enough of a reward for a girl. In Tolkien's scheme of things, marriage is heaven on earth, a leap of faith that only the most devout believer can make.

Mostly, feminists do not object to the former kind of heroine, as long as there are other models besides the castrating bitch-witch in the tales; to permit women to be bad is to grant them a role useful in the repertoire of behavior necessary for everyday living. But the latter kind of heroine, of whom Sleeping Beauty is the most exemplary in her beauty and passivity, is only one kind of good girl in the possible roles described for women in fairy tales. Recent investigations of folklore collections have shown that there are large numbers of more active heroines who at the end of their tales are rewarded not for their passivity and beauty but rather for their assertiveness, cleverness, and courage. These are heroines who outsmart, overcome, and outlast the evils and obstacles that destiny sends them. The stories of such heroines have been largely suppressed, either by folktale collectors, who may, knowingly or inadvertently, have indicated to their sources that they are not interested in that sort of heroine and have therefore discouraged the teller from continuing in that vein, or by editors who have not perpetuated the stories by including them in modern collections, condemning those tales that have been recorded to the dry obscurity of out-of-print or scholarly editions.

But like other tales, these lesser known ones also end in the marraige of attractive heroines to equally attractive heroes. The emphasis on beauty, wealth, and marriage presents the modern feminist with a dilemma. Although the heroine may act in a way which provides an antidote to female passivity and male intellectual and physical superiority, her eventual fate, marriage to a man of wealth and physical charms, usually a prince, may be too conventional to sit well with those who affirm that women can do more with their lives than marry. There are three solutions to the dearth of folktales acceptable to modern feminists: one may present the tales, unaltered, with their traditional endings, and the devil take the consequences of the possible damage to a young girl's career expectations; one may rewrite the tales, deemphasizing physical beauty and marriage, but thereby violating the objectivity of the folklore collector by imposing one's own language and bias on the narrative; or one may write new tales, using folklore motifs with less conventional endings. My bias in this paper is for the first option. But my design in this presentation is to look at examples of all three solutions and find where and why they succeed and fail.

Jay Williams's The Practical Princess and other Liberating Fairy Tales (New York: Parents Magazine Press, 1978) is an attempt to write new tales of clever women who outsmart dragons, wizards, and the general stupidity of the world. The trouble is that there are not heroes worthy of the heroines in the fictional worlds that Williams creates. Take for example the names of the heroes of the tales: Stupid Marco, Forgetful Fred, and Philbert the Fearful. Each of these men finds a heroine to cherish him, not because he is...