Rowe Feminism And Fairy Tales Summary

As a specialist in Renaissance literature and an English professor at UCLA, Karen E. Rowe examines the role of women and fairy tales in terms of modern female’s “romantic expectations” in her article “Feminism and fairy tales”. Rowe claims that fanatic tales “shape our romantic expectations”, and “illuminate psychic ambiguities” by affirming and encouraging concepts like happy marriage, epic love, and exiting romance. She summarizes the cause-and-effect relationship between the romantic fairy tales and adolescents’ unrealistic fantasies: “Portrayals of adolescent waiting and dreaming, patterns of double enchantment, and romanticizations of marriage contribute to the potency of fairy tale”(237). Undoubtedly, female are easily relating themselves
Women tend to “re-live” such fantasies in real life. Subconsciously, women are “waiting and dreaming” that “some day [our] prince[s] will come”(237). Then, in more detail, Rowe describes “women’s attitudes toward men and marriage” and the relationship among daughter, stepmother, natural mother and father with reference to several popular classic fairy tales. Rowe states that “the stepmother[s]…embody the major obstacles against [innocent stepdaughters] to womanhood…they personify predatory female sexuality and the adolescent's negative feelings toward her mother”(240). This is what I want to explore in my research paper: how characteristic of stepmothers in fairy tales affect the views of young children toward their real stepparents and genetic parents. Also, I want to find out how these children see marriages, would young girls be afraid of stepmothers, are they willing to become stepmothers as they grow up, based on the story of
Rowe quotes Bettelheim’s argument that “romantic tales often recreate oedipal tensions… The authoritarian mother becomes the obstacle which seems to stifle natural desires for men, marriage, and hence the achievement of female maturity”(242). The role of evil stepmother indeed shapes young girl’s view toward men and marriage. More importantly, as Bettelheim claims in “[The Struggle for Meaning]”, these “oedipal tensions” give the “chance [for young children] to understand themselves in this complex world with which [they] must learn to cope”(270). I totally understand in general, fairy tales use evil stepmothers to represent the conflicts that children would face in their real life. However, the plot of the story is misleading the behaviors of real life stepparents and stepchildren. In our world, some stepparents follow the step of evil stepmothers in tales, and some even get worse. The mistreatment is called the “Cinderella