the sleeping beauty in the wood by charles perrault

Scholars were left to explore the kind of moral lessons this story is teaching a vulnerable and sensitive audience: for girls to be pretty and silent for boys to harass and dominate.

According to Baker-Sperry & Grauerholz (2003), “Children’s fairy tales, which emphasize such things as women’s passivity and beauty, are indeed gendered scripts and serve to legitimatize and support the dominant gender system” (p. She is, thus, the victim of a toxic masculine society that reduced her to an unconscious and thoughtless object, conveniently enough, with the help of an item specifically attributed to obedient housewives. Aurora had just turned 16, the17th century equivalent of adulthood, and is immediately neutralized before she has the opportunity to form her own identity and opinion. This is representative of an abusive society, which silences women as soon as they reach the appropriate age. The needle puts Aurora to sleep, a still state of silence. Generally, many critics see the needle as a phallic symbol, the manifestation of a dominant patriarchy. All of them include the fatal needle that leads to the slumber of the princess. Not only is she awakened by a stranger but she eventually marries him, although she does not know him at all.įurthermore, the tale has various plots that were written by multiple authors throughout the time. As the girl is clearly unconscious, this is a case of sexual harassment as she is unable to give the prince her consent. In the most famous retellings of Sleeping Beauty, the princess is awakened from her curse-induced coma with a kiss. The controversy lies within this feminine double standards where the villains are overly powerful and violent characters in comparison to the weak and helpless protagonists. Shamna (2017) states that: “Motherhood is thus degraded in most of these fairy tales and simultaneously young boys are indirectly encouraged to disregard and neglect their own mothers” (p. Ironically, it creates a fear based correlation between children and their mothers.

This contrast does not really convey a healthy familial environment or a stable parent-children relationship. What is mostly interesting is that the villains in these stories are almost exclusively women, including mothers and stepmothers. Fairytales have a tendency to revolve around helpless female characters and their macho hero coming to the rescue.

The sleeping beauty in the wood by charles perrault