The Effects of Fairy Tales in Anne Sexton's Cinderella Essay

Cinderella is a childhood fairytale that we all love and remember. It is a tragedy that turns into love and happily ever after in the end. In contrast to this popular story, Anne Sexton's version of Cinderella is a dark and twisted version of the classic fairy tale. It takes on a whole new perspective and is fairly different from the childhood fairytale that most of society knows. The poem takes less of a focus on the happy ever after in Cinderella and makes it into vivid bloody and violent images. She retreats more toward the pain and neglect. The poem is not based off the Disney version of Cinderella, but rather original dark version by Brothers Grimm. Sexton uses a very sarcastic and

Anne Sexton was a junior-college dropout who, inspired by emotional distress, became a poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize as well as three honorary doctorates. Her poems usually dealt with intensely personal, often feminist, subject matter due to her tortured relationships with gender roles and the place of women in society. The movies, women’s magazines and even some women’s schools supported the notion that decent women took naturally to homemaking and mothering (Schulman). Like others of her generation, Sexton was frustrated by this fixed feminine role society was encouraging. Her poem “Cinderella” is an example of her views, and it also introduces a new topic of how out of touch with reality fairy tales often are. In “Cinderella”, Anne Sexton uses tone and symbolism to portray her attitude towards traditional gender roles and the unrealistic life of fairy tales.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were the pioneers for making children’s literature more risky. These fairy tales were originally meant for adults, thus explaining the violence and other dark topics. After Grimm Fairy Tales became popular they re-wrote the stories, deleting a fraction of the dark topics. Some of the stories included in the copy of the fairy tales that I rented from the library include Cinderella, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, and Rumpelstiltskin. All of these are classics, but not as Disney or other animators portray them. Disney took out all the dark topics and replaced them with cute. In Cinderella there is recurring themes of graphic violence, child abuse, and wicked mothers. Most of these themes there are in all Grimm fairy tales. Like Snow White has a wicked stepmother, Hansel and Gretel has child abuse, and Rapunzel has graphic

In the familiar more traditional version, Cinderella is a poor maid girl that, with the help of fairy godmother, gets a chance to meet prince charming. They fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after, and then what? What is a happily ever after? Is this even a realistic thought? In the dark comedic poem Cinderella, Anne Sexton forces the reader to examine this question. Utilizing literary devices such as tone, imagery, and style, Sexton encourages the reader to think about how silly and unlikely a fairy tale ending actually is.

Have you ever had a dark and gloomy day? Imagine having that feeling every single day. The Grimm’s Cinderella was written in 1812. 1812 was one of the harshest years for America. An event that formed it was the war against Great Britain and the United States. Not only was there a war, but there was also a series of disastrous harvests. Taxes got higher, and more than twenty people who were involved with a Luddite Act were hung. In 1812, there was also the only assassination of a prime minister, who was shot dead in the House of Commons. The Grimm Brothers have put the dark times of 1812 into their stories. Some of their stories contain violence, child abuse, and wicked mothers. They came up with these types of stories after their father died, and when they struggled out of school. That gave them enough time to research and put together a collection of folk tales. Now you can see why the Grimm’s Cinderella was dark and gloomy. Although the plot stayed the same, over the years, the story did get lighter. Disney’s Cinderella came out in 1950. In 1950, learning information was not by fear, but by engaging happiness. Disney’s Cinderella transforms the Grimm’s Cinderella into a happier atmosphere. While some similarities between Disney’s Cinderella and Grimm’s Cinderella are noticeable, the differences are pronounced, especially when referring to the slippers, her father, and the ball.

The Grimm Brothers version of Cinderella is a written down oral story that people passed down from generation to generation, meant to teach a lesson about piety and good behavior. Before the Grimm Brothers ever wrote it down, the story had been told several times by memory. It is thus not surprising that the descriptions of certain events in the story, such as the way Cinderella went to the Ball, are lacking in details. It is obvious that these parts of the story are unimportant to the overall message of the story. Instead, it focuses on the piety of Cinderella and the wickedness of the step-sisters. Through the events of the story, it becomes obvious that the goodness of Cinderella is justly rewarded, and that

The Prince stereotypes the role of women being in need of a destined lover. He is the one that identifies Cinderella as the one in the dress, though excluding behavior, her appearance dazzles him for two nights at the ball. Most importantly, he’s not the hero of the fairytale, but readers can interpret the fairy godmother as the savior of Cinderella’s demise. The role of magic comes in part with the acceptance of achieving the imagery of an elegant woman, impressing the Prince who gains interest in her. The

When I started analyzing Cinderella I noticed some gender roles/stereotypes that are brought to light. One of them being how women are the ones who stay home and perform household chores. They are “housewives” who depend on a man. The father is briefly in the beginning and afterwards we do not hear of him, initiating that he is off working, or on a business trip while the mom and daughters are home. We also see through Cinderella (who is forced to do all the chores) how their are consequences if she (or women) don’t complete or do the chores that are expected of them (like not being able to go to a ball in Cinderella's case). Another theme that is consistent in Cinderella as it is in other princess stories is the value of being beautiful. We see this when the fairy godmother shows up and makes Cinderella beautiful. She transforms her house clothes into a gown and so forth showing us that beauty is in the way you look or your appearance. If we pursue this theme further we see that the prince falls in love with Cinderella based on how she looks (love at first

Anne Sexton was a junior-college dropout who, inspired by emotional distress, became a poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize as well as three honorary doctorates. Her poems usually dealt with intensely personal, often feminist, subject matter due to her tortured relationships with gender roles and the place of women in society. The movies, women’s magazines and even some women’s schools supported the notion that decent women took naturally to homemaking and mothering (Schulman). Like others of her generation, Sexton was frustrated by this fixed feminine role society was encouraging. Her poem “Cinderella” is an example of her views, and it also introduces a new topic of how out of touch with reality fairy tales often are. In “Cinderella”, Anne Sexton uses tone and symbolism to portray her attitude towards traditional gender roles and the unrealistic life of fairy tales.

Through literary devices such as simile, repetition and symbolism, Anne Sexton delivers the message that there is no way to live "happily ever after." Using four short stories as a lead in, Sexton makes powerful arguments about society by creating the symbol of the dove and alluding to the story of Cinderella. For Sexton there is no Cinderella, there is no prince charming, and there is no happy ending. However, through "Cinderella," she argues that the "happy ever after" ending remains an illusion society chases.

The men in “Cinderella” also value women for their beauty. The prince has a ball for all the maidens in the land to find his future wife, which “amounts to a beauty contest” (Lieberman 386) for a new trophy wife. While some argue that Cinderella’s rebellion of going against her stepmother’s instructions of staying home shows that the story has feminist qualities, the prince weakens her achievement when he chooses her only because of her beauty as “girls win the prize if they are the fairest of them all” (Lieberman 385). Her need for independence is transformed into the prince’s need for a pretty wife, making her again an object in her family. Once integrated into the prince’s family, Cinderella goes from the maid of her family to the smiling porcelain doll next to the prince as the “first job of a fairy tale princess is to be beautiful” (Röhrich 110). This gives the impression that the only way

In fairy tales, female characters are objects, and their value centers around their attractiveness to men. Since fairy tales rely on cultural values and societal norms to teach morals or lessons, it is evident that fairy tales define a woman’s value in a superficial way. Fairy tales teach that, typically, beauty equates to being valuable to men because of their fertility and purity; whereas, ugliness equates to being worthless and evil, including being ruined because of their lack of virginity. Descriptions readers see from fairy tales like “Rapunzel,” and “Little Snow-White” revolve around the women’s, or girl’s, physical appearance, and both stories play out to where the women remain in a state of objectification. In addition, they are damsels

For as long as history stretches back, the role of women in society has been portrayed as nurturers of men as well as birth givers. Society has taught girls that they should aspire to marriage and hope to be mothers while men are enabled to live their life as they choose. This never-ending cycle of ingrained inequality is hard to break due to its early entrance in the lives of young children. Children grow up watching fairy tales such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and the Little Mermaid. As harmless and mundane as these fairy tales may seem, they tend to carry some of the most problematic and misogynous messages of them all. The Classic Snow White and The Seven Dwarves as portrayed by Disney carries misogynous views that shackle even women of today. The story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is a prime

In a society unbridled with double standards and set views about women, one may wonder the origins of such beliefs. It might come as a surprise that these ideals and standards are embedded and have been for centuries in the beloved fairy tales we enjoyed reading as kids. In her analytical essay, “To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tales”, Karen Rowe argues that fairy tales present “cultural norms which exalt passivity, dependency, and self-sacrifice as a female’s cardinal virtues.” Rowe presents an excellent point, which can be supported by versions of the cult classics, “Cinderella” and “Snow White”. Charles Perrault’s “ The Little Glass Slipper” and the Brothers Grimm’s “ Snow White” exemplify the beliefs that

But in fact we use the stories that we tell children, and especially those that we tell over and over, to instill messages, to teach cultural norms, to establish the roots of what we hope will be proper behavior as the children grow up. Fairytales are a form of propaganda. The traditional fairytale almost always reflects (and therefore works to reproduce) the power relations of patriarchy; its rigid sexual patterns teach that fear and masochism are tenets of femininity and all of the symbolic inversions that occur are not chances to upset the standard patriarchal hierarchy but are instead ways of maintaining it (Bacchilega, 1997, pp. 50-1).