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Fairy Tales In Children's Empowerment

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Both Maria Tatar and Vanessa Joosen 's essays argue about the pivotal role of fairy tales in children 's empowerment. On one hand, Tatar claims that "the magical power embedded in language" (Tatar 57) is the key to "grant a form of agency unknown to the child who has not yet fully developed the capacity to learn language" (57). On the other hand, Joosen contends that reading numerous retelling of fairy tales can "make children and adolescents […] aware of issues and possible interpretations in these texts which they had not noticed before. [Thus leading] to a greater alertness and understanding when they read similar stories in the future" (Joosen 131). Therefore, even though both of the essays ' theses aim to explicate a way for children to obtain power, they do so on fundamentally different premises. Indeed, Tatar - literary conservative - asserts that "[in traditional tales] every word become a source of …show more content…

In her essay, Joosen references the critiques that the Grimm brothers have received, in particular by the feminist movement which "reacted to the gender bias of the traditional fairy tales" (Joosen 130). Feminists, such as Marcia Lieberman, are especially concerned with some of the patriarchal features - supposedly - common in all of the Grimms ' tales. For example, Joosen references Marcia Lieberman 's essay "Some Day My Prince Will Come" emphasizing three of the most relevant points of criticism in fairy tales: "the so-called beauty contest" (132), "the typical constellation of characteristics in fairy-tales women" (132), and "marriage as the ultimate reward for being beautiful" (133). Nonetheless, Lieberman critique, so extensively used by Joosen, only concerns itself with a narrow spectrum of the Grimms ' tales. In fact, part of the stories collected by the two German brothers result more controversial than their mere misogynistic vision given by Lieberman and

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