Red Riding Hood And Rapunzel Analysis

1057 Words5 Pages
In a world of fairy tales, happy endings and justice are always a common sight. Although it ends in good terms, these stories have an ambiguous meaning and are open to different interpretations due to the stories covering contentious aspects such as the portrayal of women. Popular fairy tales all the way from Red Riding Hood to Rapunzel highlight this highly debated topic of how women are portrayed as the weak and vulnerable in order to achieve this “happy ending”. Furthermore, almost all stories require men to abruptly enter the story to save the day and act as the heroic figure. Most fairy tales which were created by brothers Grimm have this common trend of this traditional gender norms. Even though fairy tales send across a positive…show more content…
In the story of Red riding hood, the main conflict occurs when the young girl was manipulated by the wolf to go off track from reaching her destination. Moreover, due to the naive and innocent portrayal of the girl, the wolf was able to reach her grandma’s house and devour her, and her grandma. This then leads to the contentious event of the abrupt appearance of the huntsman (male figure) out of nowhere to cut open the wolf’s stomach and rescue them both hence the happy ending. This is the part of how fairy tales are open to subversion and alternate readings as this could be interpreted as the portrayal of women to be the helpless figure. Similarly, in the fairy tale of Rapunzel, the trending theme of the damsel in distress is continued as the main female protagonist is taken away by a witch and was locked down in a secret castle deep into the woods. As the male figure (prince) tries to rescue her, the witch was able to push him off the castle in order to prevent Rapunzel from getting away. The prince falls down face first resulting the spikes on the ground to puncture his eyes. However, as the story’s happy ending seemed to be hopeless, Rapunzel meets the prince and her tears dropped into his eyes which resulted him gaining back his vision.…show more content…
We could see in the Rapunzel, how she was forced to leave the house due to the father stealing some rampion from the witch. Apprehensively, the father agrees to give away Rapunzel to the witch. From this event we could see how the mother was in no power to talk or have any say about it. This associates back to the gender stereotypes of women not having any household family power. Furthermore, mother was also the reason why the father went to steal some rampion as she said “Ill die if I do not get any Rampion”. This again highlights the stereotypical nature of women nagging and being troublesome as if she did not beg and cry about the rampion, the conflict would not have happened. Similarly in Red Riding Hood Although most fairy tales by the Grimms brothers fall under a lot of gender stereotypes, there are some fairy tales that show otherwise. These stories which challenge the gender stereotypes of women being portrayed as the weak and vulnerable are not as well known as others however there are quite a
Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of Feminism In Fairytales

    1379 Words  | 6 Pages

    In this section the facts and information will be displayed as a result of the research that has been conducted, and conferred in the methodology, so as to be able to understand the discussion and analysis in the next segment. 6.1 Feminism and Fairytales How different branches of feminism can be applied to fairytales vary greatly. To keep this essay focused on sexuality and gender. Marxist feminism explains that the oppression of women as a result of economical control through capitalism, with a

    Read More

More about Red Riding Hood And Rapunzel Analysis

Open Document