Feminist Interpretation Of Fairy Tales

Abstract – The paper is an attempt to revisit a typical children 's narrative, the fairy tale that has transfigured the romantic imagination of generations of young readers.It will be an attempt to see how a bed time story has been cast into a text of female bonding and women empowerment, how the revisionist agenda is to rework these short stories into the current dialectics of feminist ideology.The paper will also look at how recent reinterpretations of this iconic text has been implanted with the attributes of post-modernist socio cultural polemics.

Jack Zipes (1979) in revisiting fairy tales had declared that, "our lives are framed by folk and fairy tales ', (xi). They have been stuff that has made the repositories of the dreams, hopes

These implications paved the way for interpretation and reinterpretations and were used for various agendas including politics. Even before literary critics such as Lewis Seifert in Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690-1715: Nostalgic Utopias and Patricia Hannon in Fabulous Identities: Women 's Fairy Tales in Seventeenth-Century France have combined political, historical, and feminist approaches to study the important vogue of French fairy tales, while John Stephens and Robyn McCallum have analyzed the importance of ideology in the retellings of folk and fairy tales in the realm of children 's literature. Clearly, the scholarship in this field has simultaneously played a part in casting a magic spell over the vital quality of the tales, diluting their socio-historical import and often obscuring problems with extraneous material, while at the same time exposing social contradictions and the ideological nature of cultural

Looking back one can see Cinderella being invoked by Margaret Fuller in Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845), a book that was perhaps the first public discussion of women 's rights. This was followed by Louisa May Alcott who in her novel Little Women drew upon both Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella to project how women in her times had to abide by the conventions dictated by men. Subsequently Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Jane Austen during the Victorian era down to Angela Carter, AS Byatt, Margaret Atwood and Anne Sexton, to name a few twentieth century women writers, have delved into this fathomless storehouse to reclaim the gendered agenda lying dormant in their