One of my main ideas for the upcoming critical essay was to pursue the topic of how girls are portrayed in the literature and films that we have examined in class. However, after some interesting reading, as well as pursing my classmate’s blogs, I have found that this topic seems to be very popular. It’s no wonder - for the most part, girls have been the central characters of the stories we have read and watched: Dorothy, Beauty, Alice, Wendy. Young girls who grow up through their respective stories is a well-crafted and oft-repeated tradition in literature and I find it immensely interesting. However, in order to stand out from the crowd, I have decided to try to pursue my essay in a different direction. While I attempt to remain close to the texts that I have read in class, the topic I choose will need some outside research as well, in addition to some outside reading.
One of the main points in some of our discussion of the texts has been if these girl characters are empowered somehow through their journeys. If they are, then of course we would have to consider them good role models for young girl readers, as well as adult women who look back at their childhood classic. However, I am going to argue in my essay that they aren’t empowered. In fact, their stories, trials and adventures have done nothing for them except push them back into submission, the ropes of their freedoms tightened and this has directly affected modern adaptations for the fiction and movies today still do not have strong women in leading roles.
Popular culture and thus - as an extension, or perhaps reflection of - society have not caught on to the idea of giving females real power. For the most part, audiences are left with under-developed, scantily-clad and weak-willed girls in media, who rely solely on others to help them with their problems. And this is solely because the blueprints are flawed themselves. Dorothy, Alice, Wendy, Little Red Riding Hood – they all have wonderful adventures, expressive imagination and beautiful stories to tell when they come back from their adventures. But the stories end there. Nothing is said about their lives when they grow up – except Wendy, who’s short epilogue is over-shadowed by the reappearance of Peter and his newly-formed relationship with Wendy’s daughter. Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White and the other princesses of fairy tales are left married, happily it seems, but chained into the conventions of marriage, the family unit and societal standards. None of the princesses, at least in the original stories, become queens or show any political sway. They don’t go on further adventures or learn new things through their explorations. I would suppose that if we could see their lives further, we would see them with a bundle of children, up to their heads in mindless chores and endless processions of royal engagements – and this is only the princesses! Imagine the lowly girls who don’t marry into royalty and their lives afterward their stories end, and immediately we see Alice an obedient Victorian wife, Wendy frustrated with her children’s wild fantasies, and Dorothy living Kansas, married to some poor farmer, up to her ears in manure.
While nice to think about, there is no significant achievement or accomplishment in young women expanding their imaginations. Sure, daydreams of Neverland or Oz, or perhaps falling in love with a handsome prince, are a nice escape. But the texts of yesterday – these so-called “classics” - have done nothing to change our present literary traditions. For the most part, girls and women in literature and film are still reduced to mere archetypes, left helpless while they wait for the man to save them. Sure, Tim Burton can have his grown-up Alice wield a sword against the horrible jabberwocky, then somehow feel empowered enough to blow off the restricting rules of Victorian society. And of course Little Red Riding Hood can be hyper-sexualized in modern re-tellings to make her seem more powerful and strong. But at the end of the movie version of LRRH released in 2011, it is Valerie’s lover Henry who kills her father the Wolf (a solution to an Oedipal complex, perhaps?) and Burton’s Alice still relies on a man (her would-be father-in-law) in order to expand her career horizons. Recent literary re-tellings of classic stories follow the same vein. In Angela Carter’s short story “The Bloody Chamber” – an adaptation of Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard – the young wife is saved from her murderous new husband by her mother. And 2011’s recent disastrous Sucker Punch (Jack Snyder) was marketed as a kick-ass blend of marital arts, big guns and strong women as they try to escape from a mental institution using their imaginations, a la Alice in Wonderland, only to leave audiences laughing in bewilderment and shock at the cliché dialogue, skimpy outfits and a overly-sexualized plotline involving the girls as dancing prostitutes in a brothel.
There are some hopeful glimpses into a future of where girls and women in literature will really feel empowered. Carter’s “In The Company of Wolves” leaves the young girl sleeping in the arms of the wolf after a passionate night, marking her maturity and shift from girl to woman. James Thurber’s two-paragraph “The Little Girl and the Wolf” is even more promising, which has our heroine shoot the wolf dead with an automatic after noting that obviously any conscious and mildly intelligent person would note that a wolf is not a grandmother, and ends with the moral “It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.” However, popular culture, namely films and TVs, as well as most of the widely-circulated literature, have obviously not caught on to how to update the fairy tale archetypes to empower their female characters.
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Title from:
Sexton, Anne. "Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)." Don't Bet on the Prince. Ed. Jack Zipes. New York: Routledge, 1987. Print.
Note: I greatly encourage and welcome some feedback on this topic! Going back over what I have just written shows me that there perhaps is several different topics within the above text.
