This shows Sexton's belief that fairy tales make women look dumb. Angela Carter put a different twist to her story "The Bloody Chamber". In it the mother, a woman, comes and rescues the daughter from the man at the end of the story.
In the story of "Hansel and Gretel", Gretel can be seen as one example of an active, resourceful young heroine. Gretel's cleverness comes out when she gets the witch to get into the oven so that she can close the door on her while Hansel is locked in the stable. "Although Gretel does perform the decisive action at the end to save them from being eaten, for the first half of the story she is the frightened little sister, looking to her brother for comfort and help (Lieberman 252)." This shows that women can be resourceful but only when there isn't a man there to be resourceful for them.
The imagery of women as dolls is seen throughout Anne Sexton's poems as well as Angela Carter's stories. Sexton mentions Snow White's "doll eyes," Sleeping Beauty as a "little doll child," and Cinderella and her prince like "two dolls in a museum case." Also in Carter's "The Tiger's Bride", the girl sends back the mechanical doll to her father because she knows he will think that it is actually her. This shows their belief that fairy tales portray women as dolls. This imagery of women as dolls is used to show that women should be passive and beautiful.
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 getting rich: it will seem that the reward basis in fairy and folk tales is overwhelmingly mercenary. Good, poor, and pretty girls always win rich, handsome princes, never merely handsome, good, but poor men (Lieberman 251)." In "The Bloody Chamber" the girl doesn't like looking at herself in the mirror because she sees her shame.