Disney

Disney Fairy Tale Women

Disney has made many traditional fairy tales popular. The effect of how women are portrayed in these tales is tremendous. Good examples are Snow White, the Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. 

The stereotypical Disney heroine is beyond beautiful but passive until they get rescued and chosen by a handsome prince. Heroines are always helpless, submissive, good behaving, and victimized by someone for their good looks. All the powerful women are evil, ugly and wicked; almost always only part human as in Sleeping beauty, the Ogress queen and in Snow White the Queen. The beautiful, fairest of them all, girl always ends up with their prince charming, and they will get married without even knowing each other, usually day after they meet. Heroine always wins in the end, and marriage and wealth is not so surprisingly always the prize. 

Marcia R Lieberman points out the image of women in fairy tales in her essay “’Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale.” As we have seen with all the Disney books and motion pictures one specific characteristic in a girl, woman matters as they “focus on beauty as a girl’s most valuable asset, perhaps her only valuable one.” (Lieberman, 385) Beauty is all there is, all one needs and life will be lived happily ever after.

The Brothers Grimm "Snow White"

The Stereotypical Housewife

Snow White is portrayed as a very stereotypical female in the story by the Brothers Grimm. Beautiful, naive, helpless are the words one can use to describe her based on the story. She is portrayed as someone who is so beautiful but still needs to be rescued by men in every aspect of her life. Her beauty does guarantee her to be noticed and loved by everyone; she doesn’t have to even lift a finger to receive her happily ever after. Her story evolves from being a stereotypical female housekeeper for the dwarfs to a princess marrying her prince charming. How wonderful would it have this happen in the real world? 

Young children are very impressionable, they learn everything by listening and looking answers through mostly the media today, and this stereotypical portrayal certainly harms the image that nowadays the stereotypical views don’t exist, and the goal is to instill a belief in young girls that they are as strong as men. If you want your daughter to learn that her primary goals in life are to be beautiful so that they can achieve it all with the least effort, to be subservient to men, and naïve to the point where having brains and intelligence doesn’t matter, then Snow White is the perfect bedtime story. Snow White is viewed as an object by every man in the story, both the dwarfs and the prince, initially spared by the huntsman from death as thing of beauty rather than a human being, and later given away to the prince in a coffin lying dead as if she were a possession. 

Not once in the entire story is anything mentioned about Snow White’s character, is she good or bad?  In this story, her character doesn’t matter, because she is only a pretty toy to be possessed by men. Stereotype of beauty over brain, and position of housewife over education and intellect rule the inner moral of this story.