When we think of fairy tales, what immediately comes to mind is reading them or being read to as a child and growing up thinking about the image of the characters in those stories or the naïve wonder happy endings. What we often overlook is the outdated gender roles or the antique standards of beauty that are bolstered onto these stories, which subliminally affect children’s perception on these topics and later go on to create unrealistic standards for women in society. The discussion surrounding the impact of these outdated stereotypes is very important and through the various articles can be explored to find solutions to these problems.

The perfect example of a story that directly influences this take is Sleeping Beauty, or more specifically, “Briar Rose” in the Grimm Brothers Grimms’ Fairy Tales, where the main heroine is so passive they can barely be called a character. In the Grimm retelling of sleeping beauty, After the king and Queen gets news that they are having a child, invites people of the kingdom except one witch, who curses their child to a hundred years of sleep by a spindle. When Briar Rose (sleeping beauty), on one uneventful day wanders the castle and encounters an old lady spinning a spindle, her curiosity gets her to fall asleep and the rest of the castle with her. Years later when thorns loom over the castle a young prince hearing rumours of a princess in that very castle decides to “rescue” her. As fate would have it, the same day that the prince decides to visit the castle was the same day where a hundred years ago sleeping beauty touched the spindle. The prince gets to meet the princess, the princess falls in love and it’s all happily ever after from there, or is it? Does the minimal active roles of the main heroine really lead to a story with good examples for children?  To quote Kay Stone directly, “But if the Grimm heroines are, for the most part, uninspiring, those of Walt Disney seem barely alive. In fact, two of them hardly manage to stay awake” (Kay Stone Paragraph 7), it really reveals that the good hearted nature of these characters are not enough to set an example for children in how they should act and behave.

When bringing up the impact of fairy tales on children, the question arises of whether or not it really matters. “Bettelheim[…] Because he assumes[…] that the tales were intended for the education and edification of children, his book is essentially a guide to reading them as symbolic displacements of the core issues of child development. Bettelheim believes that exposure to fairy tales can enable children to work through their anxieties and therefore promote emotional growth.” (Zipes), this points out the involvement of psychologists when it comes down to the impact that fairytales can have on emotional growth, but how could that happen with stories like Sleeping Beauty where the character herself does not go through that emotional growth, it limits any kind of positive impact that could have on a child. When it comes down to it, most instances of symbolism and morals are often spoon fed to the reader, and even though the audience is most likely a child Bettelheim states that children should learn to interpret these stories on their own to draw conclusions, and that often these hurt the quality of the stories themselves, “Before leaving Bettelheim, I want to flag his insistence that it would be wrong to “explain” to children the symbolism implicit in the tales. Bettelheim (1976) grasps not only that children must come to and generate their own personal understandings and interpretations but also that such understandings are in flux as they grow. Beyond this, he recognizes that to “explain” a story is to rob it of the mystery that makes it so appealing” (Zipes). From the input of psychologists like Bettelheim it can be seen how fairy tales play a key role in the development of a child and that outdated morals will lead to outdated mindsets, clashing with the modern world.

Bringing up some outdated gender roles, Jack Zipes show us exactly how fairy tales setup children at a young age to dated stereotypes of men and women, “When primogeniture held sway, for example, the tales gave rise to heroic roles for youngest sons, thereby compensating them in fancy for their poverty and for the devaluation they suffered by reason of disinheritance. Likewise, under the terms of arranged marriage, fearful girls were soothed by monsters or slimy beasts (often frogs) who transformed at stories’ ends into loving princes and who thereby elevated young brides class-wise as well as gentling any anxieties fueled in them by their gendered destiny”. These roles in stories show the existing problems of gender stereotypes today, by women being presented as fearful and weak where the man being shown as strong and worthy of riches by birth. “Heroes succeed because they act, not because they are” (Kay Stone),  and with that quote it solidifies the injustice shown towards characters like sleeping beauty and how a character so central to a plot can be written as a Mary Sue and harm the notions of a what a child thinks of a woman.

Reflecting on “Briar Rose” by the Grimm Brother’s, every quote outing the hidden harms of fairy tales can be traced back to this one story. Every character, their motivations, every story beat leads to moral lessons that were written hundreds of years ago, and their outdated roots still holds in the psychology of children today. Further discussions that explore the possibilities of the damage that fairy tales have caused could change the narrative, but as of now the likely conclusion on the effects of fairy tales on children is definite.

Muhammad Intisar Ahmad

Sources used:

Things Walt Disney Never Told Us by Kay Stone

Fairy Tales have a negative influence on young children

Revisiting fairy tales: the original folk and fairy tales of the brothers grimm by Jack Zipes

Grimms Fairy Tales by The Grimm Brothers