Red Riding Hood Rapunzel Analysis

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

In the story of Red riding hood and Rapunzel, the trending theme falls under the category of the damsel in distress as the

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