Fairy Tales as a Tool for accu

Anne Sexton’s poems in Transformations and Angela Carter’s stories in The Bloody Chamber can be similar in some aspects to fairy tales that all the boys and girls of the world have grown up with and will continue to grow up with into the future. The Brothers Grimm were the originators of these fairy tales when they started to record the stories that they heard from the people around them and now Disney has made some of these fairy tales famous by making movies out of them. The purpose of these fairy tales is to provide acculturation for young children growing up. They set gender roles for girls and boys to follow, as they become grown men and women. The poems of Transformations and the stories of The Bloody Chamber can be compared to the original fairy tales from which they are derived; through imagery, symbols, and in the message the writers are trying to get across.

Fairy tales can be used to show how an ideal woman should act. The typical fairy tale is usually about a young beautiful woman in distress who is eventually saved by her “night in shining armor.” Fairy tales show that women should be passive, beautiful, and pure, meaning being a virgin. “The immediate and

“The Frog Prince” is also a story where the girl first rejects the “beast” in the form of a frog. The girl loses her golden ball, the golden world of childhood, of innocence, spontaneity and playfulness. She wants to recapture the golden world while rejecting the ugly frog. “The innocent young girls fear of and repugnance toward the male genitals and the transformation of this disgust into happiness and sanctioned matrimony can hardly be symbolized better than by this transformation of the frog into the prince (Heuscher 234).” She marries the prince and the well is boarded over so that her golden ball can’t be lost again symbolizing that her virginity cannot be lost again.

Fairy tales can be looked at as giving the wrong message to children that grow up having them read to them. Just as the aspects previously discussed, women who are active are evil as in the case of the stepmothers and being beautiful to a women is most important. Some critics believe that “if a child identifies with the beauty, she may learn to be suspicious of ugly girls, who are portrayed as cruel, sly, and unscrupulous in these stories; if she identifies with the plain girls, she may learn to be suspicious and jealous of pretty girls, beauty being a gift of fate, not something that can be attained (Lieberman 250).” Sexton and Carter support these beliefs and show them in their versions of these fairy tales. Of course fairy tales may show some of these ideas within them, but they do not appear the same way to a young child as they do to us. Fairy tales should be thought of as a way for children to use their imagination and there is no reason why any child shouldn’t grow up with these stories.

Another important part of fairy tales is for the girl to get married. Being passive, beautiful, pure is what is going to get the girl to be chosen to be a wife. “Marriage is associated with ge

Some topics in this essay:
Bloody Chamber, Frog Prince”, Tiger’s Bride”, Bloody Chamber”, Gretel” Gretel, Brothers Grimm, Sexton Carter, fairy tales, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Angela Carter’s, passive beautiful, “the tiger’s, tiger’s bride”, “the tiger’s bride”, women dolls, angela carter’s stories, gender roles, bloody chamber”, “the bloody, golden ball, golden world, fairy tales women, “the bloody chamber”, tiger’s bride” girl,