TUTORIAL: CC 6

A study on of two fairy tales which distinctly influenced our patterns of

thinking as a child - Snow white and the seven dwarfs and The sleeping

beauty- origins, adaptations and fallacies

NAME: RITANWITA DASGUPTA

SEMESTER: III

COLLEGE ROLL NO: BA 270

CU ROLL NO: 212034-11-0091

CU REGISTRATION NO: 034-1211-0099-21

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

SHRI SHIKSHAYATAN COLLEGE

 Abstract

Fairy tales can be dated back as far as the first century. As time went on, a fairy tale would change multiple

times reflecting the society and the culture it is being told in. While exploring the variety of fairy tales, each

rendition showcases a similar theme of how, through society, women were categorized and appeared. Before

there was a “once upon a time” and “happily ever after,” there were countless variations of fairy tales that

conveyed morals, social, and/or political lessons through the narrations and characters, whilst displaying the

history of a culture. Fairy tales are a common part of a person’s childhood. Children’s literature helps a

young child make sense of what it is to be human and helps them understand the world around them. The

fairy tale genre provides ways for children to receive important messages. Although there are some themes

in fairy tales that are unrealistic, the overall effect is positive and offers fundamental elements for children’s

development. Based on the Jungian interpretation, fairy tales teach children how to deal with basic human

conflicts, desires, and relationships in a healthy way; acquiring these skills can ultimately impact a child’s

health, quality of life, or even influence its values and beliefs in the future. However, these tales have

intensely dark origins and many actions which are regarded as socially unacceptable. These often portray

nonconsensual intimacy and misogyny and ingrain many negative stereotypes and patterns, while to make

them kid friendly the stories are altered and retold in their visual media adaptations as well. The dark

folklores are disintegrated and everything is toned down to a child’s preference and their maturity. Through

this study, we aim to breakdown the origin of two such fairy tales and how children are actually getting

indoctrinated with certain stereotypes with their literature and how it’s not the same lighthearted vibe with

them as one grows up as we understand society and literature more. We will also observe how a make-

believe Fantasy world which are shape a child’s initiative can have actual untold stories which used to make

them typically a tale for households in general and not children in particular.
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Introduction

The Grimm Brothers’ fairytales have served as the foundation for the stories and movies that were recreated

from their original form and welcomed into our homes. However, these republished stories have a distinct

trend that focuses on the validation of women through beauty, while the men are portrayed as active and

violent. Disney films have been the prime suspect that illustrates the changes that fairytales have undergone,

now featuring stereotypes and more subtle forms of social manipulation. These fairy tales have been tracked

to how society sees the roles of men and females, exercising power over women, and maintaining gender

inequality. Based on a number of classic fairy tales, such as “Sleeping beauty” and “Snow White”, how have

these stories portrayed a representation of how society socially categorized women. Fairytale stories often

involve the presence of magic and mystical characteristics, while folktale stories are stories that have been

verbally passed down through generations by word of mouth, typically becoming timeless fictional stories.

Based on where the folk tale originated from, it can show signs of culture and social functions during that

timeframe. People would tell these stories to communicate knowledge and experience in a social context. A

similar trait that was seen in a majority of these tales is a gender role presented that women are weak and

vulnerable and only succeed when a man intervenes. In “Cinderella”, it is Prince Charming that brings her

from rags to riches; in “Sleeping Beauty”, it is the Prince who saves Aurora, waking her up from her

wretched curse, ultimately saving the day. These stories, now more popular among children, teach the wrong

message.

Attractiveness has been deemed to be the most important attribute that a woman can possess in fairy tales.

Based on the looks, it can indicate the chances for a happy future. The tales created in the earlier centuries

displayed a strong correlation between a female lead and her “beautiful” appearance. The females, normally

the main character, were accepting of their lot in life and waited for the prince to come and take control of

their future destiny and happiness. In popular stories, there would be an interpretation of some sort of

“beauty contest”, emphasizing that the women with the youthful beautiful appearance are the ones who will

live “happily ever after” and the women that are not beautiful will get the opposite outcome. Through the

ages, the causes and effects have been consistently at work. A fairy tale has always been influenced by
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society, becoming a mirror of our society at that moment. From traditional oral tellings to the written

literacy tale, to now films, fairy tales are carried by the new medium to be passed on to the next generation.

Only to be changed yet again to reflect the future society and include an influential message. However, In

the stories, the exception is to follow the beautiful girl through her journey where she will learn a lesson and

be rewarded with the ultimate accumulation: marriage. This leaves the reader to believe that if they fall

under the correct gender roles, they will be rewarded. “If you are beautiful, you should passively wait,

regardless of the situation you are in, for your prince to come and rescue you” (Neikirk, page 39). Through

the majority of the fairy tale, the heroine’s beauty is what would drive the plot, not her actions. Except for

the female’s daydreams, the male character is normally not mentioned in the story until later. He would be

the hero and/or prince who is handsome and brave. While the woman is locked away, the male proves his

masculinity by saving her and defeating evil.

“Snow white” and “The sleeping beauty”- Origins

The original story of Snow White is taken from a 19th-century German fairy tale or folk tale, written by

the Brothers Grimm. The German brothers known for their various folk tales and stories, published

‘Grimm’s Fairy Tales’ in 1812, which features the tale of Snow White as story number 53. Since its

publication, the book has seen several of the original stories resonate to be enjoyed in popular culture up

to his very day. An excellent example of this process is the tale entitled “Schneewittchen” (SCHNAY-vitt-

chen), or “Little Snow White.” The final, 1857 edition of the tale has a great deal in common with the most

famous retelling, Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. I’ll merely point out the major

differences, assuming you remember the film.

In the 1857 version of Snow White, the step-mother does not ask the Huntsman to bring back the little girl’s

heart, as she does in the film. She asks, rather, for Snow White’s lungs and liver. When the hunter fools her

by bringing the lungs and liver of a young boar instead, she “boils them in salt” and she eats them. Which is

awesome.
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Little Snow White runs off to the dwarves, who, as I mentioned before, have no names. They also have no

individuated personalities. The queen comes to the dwarves’ house not once, but three times, and each time

she leaves with Snow White apparently dead. The third time, the queen returns with what the Brothers

Grimm describe as “a poisonous, poisonous apple”—it’s so poisonous you have to say it twice. One face of

the apple is deadly, the other is not, and she convinces her step-daughter to taste the apple by biting the

wholesome side herself. Schneewittchen takes a bite and falls down dead.

The dwarves are unable to revive her, so they put her in a glass coffin, embossed with her name and birth.

Many years later, a prince comes to the house and sees the dead girl. And he falls in love with her. Which,

you have to admit, is kind of weird.

He asks to buy the girl from the dwarves, but they refuse. He tells them that he will die if he can’t see her

every day for the rest of his life. As his servants are carrying her home, they drop her, and the jolt effectively

performs the Heimlich maneuver on Snow White. A chunk of poison apple comes flying out of her mouth

and she returns to life.

At least, the real, 1857 version. But already, Jacob and Wilhelm had made many revisions to the tale.

Perhaps the most interesting is this: in the first published edition of the story, in 1812, there is no step-

mother. In the 1812 version, the evil queen is HER MOM. How much scarier and more vivid is her jealous

rage at the little girl’s beauty when that little girl is her daughter? Instead of merely telling the huntsman to

kill Snow White and bring back her organs, this wonderful mother says, “Take her out into the woods to a

remote spot, and stab her to death.” And then she eats her organs. (Or thinks she does.)

The ending is different, too. Not the iron-hot shoes—that happens in every edition (if it ain’t broke…!). In

the 1812 edition of the story, the prince manages to get the coffin home without dropping it. He makes his

servants carry it with him from room to room, so that he might gaze on his beloved. One of the servants
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eventually gets fed up having to lug this enormous glass box around, so he opens it and smacks the comatose

girl. At which point, the chunk of apple flies from her throat.

The origins of The sleeping beauty, are much darker and problematic than we can ever imagine. The original

version of Sleeping Beauty was first written down by an Italian author named Giambattista Basile, who

published a book called The Tale of Tales in 1634. It contained fifty different stories, including early

versions of Rapunzel, Cinderella, Snow white, and Sleeping Beauty, the last of which he called "Sun, Moon

and Talia” asile's book was used by Charles Perrault in the late 17th century when he wrote Mother Goose

Tales, and by the Brothers Grimm in the 19th century.

But Basile's version of Sleeping Beauty is much, much darker than the Disney version.

As if the king raping a sleeping stranger wasn’t disturbing enough, after he has sex with Sleeping

Beauty, the king goes home and “for a time thought no more about this incident.” Apparently, the

king didn’t think it was odd to find a sleeping woman abandoned in a castle. And clearly he had no

reservations about ditching her after raping her. Nine months later, Sleeping Beauty gives birth to

two children, a boy and a girl, while she is still asleep. The author brushes past how, exactly, it’s

possible to sleep through a twin labor. Once the babies are born, two fairies appear to help care for

them. Basile’s story is already way too dark for Disney, and at this point it takes another strange turn

as the fairies try to help the newborns breastfeed.

Sleeping Beauty wakes up when the fairies, in an attempt to place the twins on the sleeping woman’s breasts

so they can nurse, accidentally stick them on her fingers instead. The newborns “sucked so much that the

splinter of flax came out”.

When Sleeping Beauty wakes up to find two newborns mewling at her sides, she doesn’t have a

typical response, which would probably involve screaming. Instead, she just picks up the babies and starts

breastfeeding them. Giambattista Basile doesn’t mention how long the princess has been asleep, although it
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had to be at least a year. But readers must wonder if the flax poisoning that put Sleeping Beauty in a coma

might have affected her faculties—she sure doesn't react like a typical person.

Again, that long sleep must have affected Sleeping Beauty, because rather than stabbing the king or

demanding child support, Basile writes, “when she heard this, their friendship was knitted with tighter

bonds.” The two begin a romantic relationship. The king leaves out one small detail, though: he's already

married.

Even in the Charles Perrault version of Sleeping Beauty, popularized in his Mother Goose Tales published

in 1697, the evil woman is a hybrid between an “old fairy” and an “ogress,” filled with evil intentions. But

the “villain” in Giambattista Basile’s Sun, Moon, and Talia is the king’s wife, a woman married to a

cheating rapist.

Maleficent might be innocent in the original version of Sleeping Beauty, but once she figures out that her

husband is cheating, she turns vicious. She threatens a secretary to reveal the secret of the king’s

mistress, warning him, “if you hide the truth from me, you will never be found again, dead or alive.” He

spills the secret, and the queen tricks Sleeping Beauty into sending her children to the queen.

The queen orders her cook to slaughter the children and cook them up in “several tasteful dishes for her

wretched husband.” The gentle-hearted cook could not possibly kill the adorable twins, so he hides them and

cooks two lambs in their place. Then, the queen sits down with the king to watch him eat his children.

Whenever he compliments the food, she says, “Eat, eat, you are eating of your own.”

The queen isn’t satisfied with simply feeding the children to her cheating husband, so she kidnaps Sleeping

Beauty. The queen calls out Sleeping Beauty—obviously unaware of the rape—by saying, "You are a fine

piece of goods, you ill weed, who are enjoying my husband." She goes on to call Sleeping Beauty “the lump

of filth, the cruel b*tch, that has caused my head to spin.”

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Sleeping Beauty figures out what’s going on once she sees the bonfire, so she comes up with a plan to stall

for time. She asks the queen if she can take off her clothes before she’s thrown into the fire. Sleeping Beauty

slowly begins to remove her clothes one by one—her robe, her skirt, her bodice, and her shift. Each time she

takes off a garment, she screams loudly.

The king bursts into the room to figure out what’s causing all the screaming and finds his wife about to

throw his mistress into a bonfire. The queen tells the king that his children are dead and he ate them, to

which the king replies, “You renegade b*tch, what evil deed is this?” He orders his men to throw the queen

into the fire instead of Sleeping Beauty. After executing his wife, the king learns that his children are still

alive.

Portrayal in Disney: What went wrong?

And thus, they lived happily ever after "A - the obvious ending to any fairy-tale. I still remember mother

getting me a whole set of fairy tale books to read over the summer. It all started there. When you are a kid,

you can't escape the fairy tales. We have been reading fairy tales for as long as we can remember. They are

everywhere.

Children are not born thinking that girls like pink and boys like blue or that women need to be saved by

strong men. Instead, these differences is creating by humans itself and adopt these ways of thinking during

the upbringing, and Disney films have a special part to play in that. This gender discrimination is injecting in

children’s minds. Another common character trope portrayed in many Disney films is that a woman’s

personality is binary. The heroine, is portrayed as young/adolescent, who is frail, gentle, kind-hearted,

beautiful, loved by all, extremely feminine, domestic and sensitive. On the other end, the negative character

is depicted as a middle-aged woman portrayed to be vile, cunning, wicked, ill-hearted, unpleasant to look at

and downright unlikeable. For example, Mother Gothel (Rapunzel), Ursula (The Little Mermaid) and the

wicked Queen (Snow White) While considering the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Snow White is
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projected as being fairskinned and that makes the most beautiful.The film was created in 1937. A perfect

example of a stereotypical weak princess is portrayed through the character Snow White. The plot is based

around a young girl who has been trapped by an evil jealous queen and had planned to kill her/ put her

asleep. Snow White was taught from her childhood itself in order to be a “good girl”. She must obey

everyone. At last she ends up running away and living with seven dwarfs. “A woman is considered to be a

homemaker, naïve, and lacking in common sense” (Harrison, 2012). Snow White makes an agreement with

the dwarfs; they will keep her safe if she does the cooking and cleaning for them. Through this character, a

typical social stereotype about women is created that women are supposed to cook and do house works

while men are supposed to go to work outside. Snow White is presented as a naturally beautiful i.e., she is

very skinny, has unrealistic naturally red rose-colored lips, skin white as snow, hair black as ebony and

never looks bad. This is where the evil queen gets jealous of her in the story fits in. The evil queen thus

becomes obsessive of her appearance in the mirror and very jealous by seeing beautiful Snow White. In a

UMW blog, Ms. Andersen states, “The story gives women mixed messages saying not to obsess about looks

but be beautiful, and portraying a woman as the heroine, but still saying disobedience of the women’s roles

will lead to punishment” (Andersen, 2009). Snow White was punished for breaking the rule the dwarfs told

her, not to let anyone in. She was punished by getting poisoned from red apple that the evil queen makes a

trick on her into eating. When Snow White is under the sleeping spell inside the glass coffin, she is waiting

for her true loves kiss which shows the stereotype women have in a relationship. She is doing nothing and

just waiting for a man to come save her or help her. Through this incident it is showing that women must

need a man to help them from any bad situations and that women cannot help themselves.

Also Disney has been known to normalise a lot off things which can be really heinous. It conceals from us

the very essence of the problem in snow white. The consent is violated, the prince must have crossed all

limits of perversion when he decided to kiss a dead body. In other original texts it is even more gruesome.

However when we show kids such things it is absolutely normalised. Extreme perversion, unsolicited touch,
 Dasgupta 8

giving way to lust all of it is indoctrinated in children in a manner of making them understand “true love”

which is a sham.

Through Snow White, Disney has also been perpetuating rape culture, again in a manner extremely similar

to snow white. As mentioned earlier, in Bastille’s version, Talia is literally assaulted and she gives birth and

then she is almost abandoned. It is just another instance of perversion and lusty interests which is portrayed

as love. As no individual in a sane mind can fall in love with a stranger they just met. In any fairy tale the

lovers never get to know each other. There is only lust and infatuation which is indeed very beautifully

fabricated with impeccable visual arts and songs in the Disney movies. But there are stereotypes and shallow

gifts , for example the first gift the fairies bless sleeping beauty with is her beauty. While she sleeps she is

kissed , and she is revived when that man should never invaded the boundaries of a helplessly immobilized

woman, and do whatever he wants to and then label all of it as true love. In the Disney adaptations true love

is just hypocrisy and people being an absolute lech. Not even in his wildest dream it is acceptable for a man

to force himself on a sleeping woman. This is what Disney movies are ingraining but by sugarcoating the

actual adversity of the situation and this really needs to be paid attention to.

Conclusion

Attractiveness has been deemed to be the most important attribute that a woman can possess in fairy tales.

Based on the looks, it can indicate the chances for a happy future. The tales created in the earlier centuries

displayed a strong correlation between a female lead and her “beautiful” appearance. The females, normally

the main character, were accepting of their lot in life and waited for the prince to come and take control of

their future destiny and happiness. In popular stories, there would be an interpretation of some sort of

“beauty contest”, emphasizing that the women with the youthful beautiful appearance are the ones who will

live “happily ever after” and the women that are not beautiful will get the opposite outcome.
 Dasgupta 9

But this is how stories work; it’s generally understood that what we regard as acceptable or even desirable

within the context of a fictional world is not a morality that translates to real life. Even quite young children

are capable of grasping this; it’s why they love stories about naughty anti-heroes such as Horrid Henry while

also knowing they’d never get away with behaving like him.

Fairy tales today have become full-length animated and even live-action movies. Rather than written stories,

this is the new standard. Fairy tales that were written by authors like the Grimm Brothers had a deeper

meaning, lessons, and morals that appeared in the text. “If fairy tales have been a social gauge through the

ages, then today’s tales suggest that Western society has shifted even further from supporting biblical values

and principles to embracing the concept of relative morality and self-sufficiency” (Abler, The Moral of the

Story). According to Zipes, fairy tales have served a meaningful social function for both compensation and

revelation. They reveal the gap between truth and falsehood in our immediate society.
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Works cited

History of Snow White – Blackpool Grand Theatre

https://www.blackpoolgrand.co.uk/history-of-snow-
white#:~:text=The%20original%20story%20of%20Snow%20White%20is%20taken%20from%20a,White%
20as%20story%20number%2053

History of Sleeping Beauty

https://www.ranker.com/list/details-from-the-original-sleeping-beauty/genevieve-carlton

The twisted History of Snow White

https://www.literacyworldwide.org/blog/literacy-now/2013/10/24/the-twisted-history-of-snow-white

R Priya Krishna, “Gender stereotypes and Sexism in Disney movies: Analysing Disney Movies during
Pandemic in the backdrop of Gender studies” , IJIRT@May2022

https://www.ijirt.org/master/publishedpaper/IJIRT155117_PAPER.pdf
 Index

Topics Page numbers

1) Introduction 1-2
2) “Snow white” and “The sleeping 2-6
beauty”
3) Portrayal in Disney: what went 6-8
wrong?

4) Conclusion 8-9
5) Works Cited 10