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.
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