Some Disney movies are filled sexism stereotyping such as “Beauty and the Beast”, “Aladdin”, and “Snow White” just to mention a few. Have we really moved past the sexist stereotypes that marked Disney's earliest films? Although Disney movies are beautiful to watch, they are are portraying harmful stereotypes. We all girls, dreamed to be a princess from a fairy tale. Who did not?
Bettelheim Is Wrong In his essay entitled “Cinderella: A Story of Sibling Rivalry and Oedipal Conflicts,” Bruno Bettelheim argues that the popularity of the Cinderella folktale, especially among children, stems from children’s subconscious insecurities and emotions about real-life sibling rivalries. According to Bettelheim, the aspect of a “degraded heroine winning out over her siblings her abused her” appeals to children’s “agonies and hopes” in the face their own sibling and familial rivalries (Bettelheim). While his reasoning is partially correct, the core conflict in Cinderella is not sibling-based. It is much broader, and much more heroic than a simple sibling rivalry in which Cinderella prevails. Cinderella, in any variation of the folktale, is the story of an underdog, mistreated by everyone close to her but tolerant and patient in the face of hatred.
The theme of the story is to show how Barbie dolls are negatively influencing young girls and the drastic change they had on young girl’s observations of relationships, self-image, and childhood innocence. At a young age, these girls are creating stories of infidelity and aggression that mimic how relationships are viewed through the media. “Every time the same story. Your Barbie is roommates with my Barbie, and my Barbie’s boyfriend comes over and you steal him okay?” (Cisneros, pg 576) This is giving girls a distorted insight of what occurs in normal relationships. These stories, the young girls create using theses dolls, make it seem okay if these types of unhealthy relationships occur.
These caused the post modern versions of her stories to adopt dualisms of combining sexual desires with naivety and give alternative interpretations that perhaps the male characters suffered victimisation instead. Within “The Bloody Chamber”, based on the fairy tale of Blue Beard, the dualism Carter builds is evident in the young girls’ character. Firstly, the fairytale depictions portray the girl as innocent, weak and naive with the use of lexis such as “girlhood”, “bony hips, my nervous pianist’s fingers” and “I thought I must truly love him” – therefore conforming to the gender constructs of gothic literature. Nonetheless, Carter’s use of sexually explicit language such as “young girl’s pointed breasts” and “now teasingly caressed me, egregious, insinuating, nudging between my thighs” provides the character with a sexually adventurous nature, and as a result the story moves away from the usual depictions of women and thus gothic conventions. Carter’s use of the narrative in first person gives a foresight into the girl’s mind, therefore suggesting due to the hyperbolic and romanticising language of “that magic place” when describing her wedding night that she is not entirely victimised by the male character but by
A superficial reading of her might cause one to think of her then as a complex character. However, a deeper look shows passivity, shallowness and importance relying mostly on outward characteristics. A student in class likened Phoebe to a ‘Disney Princess” and it gave a handy label to how I saw her. A princess in Disney movies commonly displays few traits besides good looks, a singing voice and a desire to change themselves for a man, not to mention commonly needing rescuing by said man. They often show an inordinate naivety about the world tending to land them in trouble.
Analysis of Queen Mab Speech Mercutio's Queen Mab speech is a mocking declaration that dreams are illusory wish-fulfilment, and that they can have delusional and destructive effects. In juxtaposing lawyers and lovers, soldiers and the fairy entourage, his eloquent speech touches on a number of the play's opposing themes such as love and hate, fantasy and reality and idealism. Given the context of the speech, it seems like Mercutio is suggesting that, like Queen Mab, dreams are insubstantial and insignificant. One of the major themes of the speech is the veracity of dreams. Unlike Romeo, Mercutio does not believe that dreams can foretell future events.
Furthermore, this detachment possibly suggests an implicit commentary on the marginalized life of women in the Victorian era. 2. What does Lucy think of Polly and Graham? Is she fair? Lucy describes Graham in a very positive way: “a handsome, faithless-looking youth of sixteen” “his waved light auburn hair, his supple symmetry, his smile frequent.” However, the reader has the feeling that Lucy feels jealous of Polly: “I wished she would utter some hysterical cry, so that I might get relief and be at ease” and finds her ridiculous “when I say the child I use an inappropriate and undescriptive term – a term suggesting any picture rather that that of the demure little person in a mourning frock (...), that might have just have fitted a good-sized doll.” However, Lucy does not to take in account the fact that Polly is extremely young, that she has lost her mother and rarely sees her father.
These will include the evil step mother and Cinderella from Cinderella, Cruella De Vil from 101 Dalmatians, Mulan, Snow White and the evil step mother from Snow White. Presenter: Traditional Disney films will portray female characters one of two roles. She will either portray the pure and innocent damsel/princess, who is domesticated and in distress and in need of rescuing by her ‘prince’. This is a clear motif within all ‘princess’ Disney films, including Cinderella and Snow White. The other role that females take is the evil, jealous, vindictive woman who wants revenge, evident with Cruella De Vil and the ‘evil step mothers’ which are shown in many of the Disney films.
Cinderella is a Classic fairytale that most people have grown up watching or reading. There are also many versions of Cinderella around the world that told a tale of a young girl who went through many hardships and in the end married her prince charming with the help of some animal friends and a fairy Godmother. In "Cinderella: Not So Morally Superior" Elisabeth Panttaja examined Grimm’s Cinderella and wanted her audience to see the deeper meaning in the story in which the reader is left questioning the morality behind this fairytale. Good writers can change their reader’s mind or even move their audiences into actions though the art of persuasion and that’s exactly what Elisabeth Panttaja did in “Cinderella: Not So Morally Superior". She used pathos and logos to persuade her audience to look at Cinderella in a whole new perspective.
In Perrault’s version of the fairy tale, Cinderella is the protagonist. She is a beautiful, hard-working girl who is mistreated by her stepsisters and stepmother “who employ[ed] her in the meanest work of the house” (Perrault). Cinderella’s hard work is not her choice, but only because her family forces her to do all of the housework. However, Cinderella has a godmother that is a fairy. Cinderella’s godmother gives Cinderella everything she needs to attend the ball by striking certain things with her wand.