Unauthorizer models of women in traditional stories
The chosen article is entitled "Disinorizing models of women in traditional stories", written by Cristina Segura Graíño. It is collected in Arenal magazine, volume 21, number 2, entitled "Fairy, Princesses, Witch … Women in Stories", occupying pages 221-241.
To begin, mention as a summary that this article places us in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries around several transmitters of traditional stories: Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers. In the text, four of these stories are analyzed: Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Snow White, showing its importance at the time to transmit the patriarchy model, as well as the "ideal behaviors" that girls have to follow the girls. In these stories the girls stand out for their beauty and their ultimate goal is to marry to find happiness. For this they must be obedient and work properly doing household chores.
After this brief introduction, a series of key concepts that appear in the brief will be shown below, with their corresponding definition:
- Wolf: A parallelism is made between the wolf, a red -driver character, and the dangers that can happen to the woman if she is curious and disobeys the established.
- Ideal Model: Traditional stories always show the "ideal model" of a woman: worker, beautiful and obedient, dedicating themselves to domestic and attending the husband.
- Misoginia: a clear rejection of the woman and the feminine characteristics of her is shown in these stories, implying that her curiosity and disobedience of her, attracts the danger, and the prince must rescue her and fix the problem.
- Moral: The teaching of these stories is to instill the girls who correspond to the "ideal model", despite passing hardships, in the end they will be rewarded with their happy ending; otherwise misfortunes will occur.
- Patriarchy: In popular stories, the prince exercises power over the princess, being the one who controls her destiny, and she must be submissive to him. These values are intended to instill children from childhood, making them see what is right and what they should aspire to.
- Prince: The text shows us that the prince in these stories is the hero of history: without him there would be no happy ending and the princess’s life would not make sense.
- Submission: The end of women in these stories is to be obedient and devote to the domestic work of it, to fulfill the previously defined moral.
After this glossary of important concepts, belonging to the article to be analyzed, the critical assessment will be carried out:
To begin, valuing its content, I ask myself a question regarding these stories: if they belong to a different time than the current one, in which there was a vision of the woman who is intended to change today, why do they continue to spread their stories? Is it just a matter of entertainment, or is it still intended to instill these thoughts from childhood? According to Ortiz Txabarri “[…] they are being made assimilated a whole social structure and behavior patterns that are probably not the most appropriate to achieve total equality between sexes."In my opinion, the film and literary industry is gradually changing these models of" perfect woman ", including empowered female characters, but there is still a lot of work to show this new image as the" ideal model ", so that the Girls understand that they can be owners of their destiny and their happy ending without the need of a man.
Added to this, you are also betting on changing the version of the traditional story for another more consistent with our time, with more feminist ideas, which usually leads to controversy. An example of this change is the visibility campaign "Me Too", which pretends that children will be aware of the sexual and physical violence suffered by the women of the stories, denouncing the normalization that concurs of this matter, and showing that "change the story".
Another aspect to analyze is the importance of beauty in women and that of strength in men, stereotypes that are shown as the perfect thing for love to happen and eat partridges. The courage, heroicity and gentlemen of man, and the beauty, submission and skill in the domestic work of women are valued. Likewise, it is necessary to analyze the issue of love, since the prince falls in love with the princess only by view, without valuing her ideas and personality. I consider that these stories show an unrealistic superficiality and an equivocal idea of the love of girls, which end up wanting to make up to be beautiful and like, without assessing the rest of non -physical qualities.
On the other hand, speaking of other characters in the stories, as Román García states, it is striking that the evils are mostly female figures: ugly and cruel witches that are envious of the beauty and generosity of the princesses; While, in contrast, the good ones are normally male figures: magicians, dwarfs … that are wise and kind.
Finally, with respect to the ideas shown by the author of the article, I agree with her opinion that the stories have great strength and to be able to influence the children, so at that time they were written, they were written It showed the patriarchal model, which was the prevailing, and today the stories are being changed to others that are closer to feminist thought, given its impact and the current importance of fighting for equality.
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