Feminist Folk and Fairy Tales

A collection that turns the fables--and fits the movement The story of Cinderella, which appeared in 9th century China, has been buffeted for ages by friend and foe alike.

It was stripped of its violence in the 17th century, criticized in the 18th as unfair to stepmothers and sentimentalized by Disney in the 20th. Now Cinderella, and most of the major fairy tales, have attracted a set of critics who deride them as sexist.

Feminists argue that the clever and strong women in folk and fairy tales are almost always hags, witches or deranged stepmothers. The heroines, says Author Ethel Johnston Phelps, "are good, obedient, meek, submissive to authority and naturally inferior to the heroes."

Phelps, a writer in Rockville Centre, N.Y., spent three years sifting through thousands of fairy and folk tales looking for brave and clever heroines. She found enough for two books: Tatterhood and Other Tales (The Feminist Press; 1978) and her just published The Maid of the North (Holt, Rinehart & Winston). Here the fables are turned: women rescue men, outwit demons and fight like Cossacks. Tatterhood, named for her ragged, mud-stained clothes, batters a gang of wicked trolls and recaptures the severed head of her sister. An old Japanese woman, paddling along a stream, thinks quickly when pursuing monsters suck up all the water: she tosses them some fish and the monsters have to release the stream water to eat them. Another heroine, a woodcutter's daughter, claims her prince by washing out three unremovable stains--a theme that could strike some feminists as too close to detergent commercials.

Phelps is careful to avoid the word beautiful because she considers it sexist.

In Tatterhood, Phelps writes that "we shall never know" whether the heroine was lovely or plain, because it does not matter. Phelps also adds a brush stroke here and there to make the females more active. In "The Twelve Huntsmen," she has the prince collapse at the key moment, not the girl. The Maid of the North, in the original version, fends off a suitor by talking up the disadvantages of leaving home to join a stranger's household.

Phelps' updated dialogue offers a feminist case against marriage: "A wife is like a house dog tied with a rope. Why should I be a servant and wait upon a husband?"

Though Phelps celebrates females who have brains and energy, her feminist lens at times distorts the drama beneath the surface of folk tales. As Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim made clear in The Uses of Enchantment, most protagonists in fairy tales are passive because the children who listen to them feel at the mercy of events and want to be reassured. Beauty or handsomeness is a routine signal to the child of moral worth.

Marrying and living happily ever after tells children that they are worthy of love and can find it when the time comes.

Typically, Phelps flattens out the story of Scheherazade by leaving in the logic and removing the magic: Why should the heroine fall in love with the murderous king or beg for her life? Writes the author: "Many readers may well be disappointed with these meek and improbable endings." Bettelheim pays more attention to the hidden message of the tale: Scheherazade and the king represent warring forces within the psyche: depressed and destructive vs. good and reasonable. The peace between Scheherazade and the king says that the child can be whole one day.

The real business of fairy tales is not propaganda. It is to help the young deal with anger, sibling rivalry, fear of separation and death and the eerie omnipotence of the adult world. "The fairy tale," adds Bettelheim, "offers solutions in ways that the child can grasp on his level of understanding." For girls and boys, those solutions do not invariably come through identification with the strong, but often with the bewildered, prefeminist likes of Cinderella and Snow White.

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