Sarah Miller

Professor Pastore, Voisard

English Composition 101

17 November 2022

 Requirements to be a Princess

Throughout European history, the ideal woman was kind, passive, and beautiful. This standard of femininity is exhibited across Western literature. In many popular fairy tales such as Sleeping Beautyand Cinderella, the heroines are depicted as gentle in nature, docile, and sexually appealing. They are portrayed as damsels in distress who cannot help themselves and require male saviors.

In the fairy tales Cinderellaand Sleeping Beauty, the protagonists are mostly or completely passive. And they are typically rewarded when they exhibit these characteristics. In Sleeping Beauty, the heroine is not even awake during most of the story. She simply exists. This is a common theme among these female leads. She must passively exist while displaying kindness, beauty, patience, and humility, and only then, does she get her happily ever after. She is irrationally forgiving and docile. In Charles Perrault’s Cendrillion, he describes how forgiving, “good”, and beautiful Cinderella is. Despite being horribly mistreated by her family, the story goes that Cinderella “forgave them with all her heart and said that she begged them to love her kindly always” (Perrault). She does not react with anger. She waits for her prince to rescue her to free her of her predicament, where her cruel family treats her like a servant. Kay Stone, an author and retired professor at University of Winnipeg, writes that Cinderella, like many fairy tale heroines, “succeed because of their excessive kindness and patience.”

Similarly, in many versions of Sleeping Beauty, the protagonist is a very limited character. Stone writes in her article, “Sleeping Beauty and Snow White are so passive they have to be reawakened by a man”. Giambattista Basile, an Italian author and poet writes a version of Sleeping Beauty called Sun, Moon, and Talia, wherethe protagonist can be described as two things: beautiful and asleep. She is passive and like Cinderella and does not act with anger when she awakes and realizes she had been raped and impregnated by the king. Researcher and professor Roberta Seelinger Trites writes in her article, “Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels”, that women are portrayed as helpless and dependent creatures and are kept away from the scene of action.

In most versions of the fairy tale Cinderella, the protagonist, Cinderella, is passive in nature. In Charles Perrault’s version, she is characterized as amazingly sweet natured, kind, and beautiful. She goes out of her way to make her sisters’ hair look beautiful despite their mistreatment of her. She does not take revenge on them after she marries the prince and is no longer subordinate to them. She forgives them lovingly. Disney’s 1950 film, Cinderella, is based on Charles Perrault’s tale. Andrea Powell Wolfe, who specializes in twentieth-century American literature, writes in her article, “Revisioning the Cinderella myth: Sylvia Plath’s bee poems”, thatin the filmhumbleness, gentleness, and passivity are desirable feminine traits. At no point does Cinderella actively try to get out of her abusive living situation. She waits patiently to be saved. This, however, differs in Basile’s version of the tale, Zezolla,also known as The Cinderella Cat,where she is in fact active. She kills her stepmother and is not kind and selfless. But this is not the well-known or adored version seen in most media. The version most people enjoy and want to hear is Perrault’s, where Cinderella is passive, gentle, forgiving, and kind.

Cinderella is also highly valued because of her physical beauty. That was the only way she managed to be free of her abusive home. In fact, she is only a heroine once she is properly cleaned and dressed (Stone). In Perrault’s Cendrillon, the only mention of the prince’s perception of Cinderella is how beautiful she is. Everyone at the ball envied her beauty and tried to dress like her at the following event. Author Jing Ting Wang from National Chengchi University writes in her article, “Cinderella in the Patriarchal World” how the role-setting of Cinderella could easily attract men because Cinderella is, quote, “delicate, submissive, and most important, beautiful.” Cinderella was a fantasy of that time and a common fantasy for many men in modern times.

The concept of beauty and passivity is not exclusive to Cinderella and is also seen in the original and retellings of the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty. The protagonist does not even have a name in many versions. In Basile’s version of Sleeping Beauty, Sun, Moon, and Talia, the protagonist is passive in various ways. In the beginning of the tale, she is asleep. She does not and cannot react while being raped by the king and birthing her two children. She only awakes from her slumber by her child sucking the splinter out of her finger. After she awakens, she is still passive. When she finds out what happened to her, she does not respond. In other versions of the tale Sleeping Beauty, the protagonist is not any less passive. In Walt Disney’s 1959 film, Sleeping Beauty, based on Charles Perrault’s tale, the princess does nothing but wait to be rescued, while the prince is at the scene of action. In the article, “Show and Tell: Sleeping Beauty as Verbal Icon and Seductive Story”, the author, Maria Tatar, writes that in these tales the man is the one who slays the dragons and giants while the heroine is locked away and waits.  

            Sleeping Beauty’s character is limited to her external beauty. The Brothers Grimm version of the tale, Briar Rose,quotes how “the prince was so astounded by her beauty that he leaned over and kissed her.” This is the kiss that woke her. Being beautiful was her salvation. Author Alexander M. Bruce writes in his article, titled,  “The Role of the ‘Princess’ in Walt Disney’s Animated Films”, that “each female protagonist does little action and relies upon her own beauty on pursuing her primary objective of finding and marrying her ‘Prince Charming.’”

In their original tales, retellings, and rewritings on both paper and screen, the heroines in Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella do not do anything but exist prettily to get their happily ever after. They are chosen for their beauty, passivity, and gentle nature, and do not put in any effort to help themselves. They simply exist. In doing so, they are saved.

Works Cited

Basile, Giambattista, and Canepa, Nancy L. “The Cinderella Cat”. Marvels & Tales, Wayne State University Press, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1999), pp. 201-210. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41388543 

Basile, Giambattista, et al. Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales, or, Entertainment for Little Ones. Wayne State University Press, 2016.

Bruce, Alexander M. “The Role of the ‘Princess’ in Walt Disney’s Animated Films: Reactions of College Students.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 30, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1–25. JSTOR,http://www.jstor.org/stable/23416195. 

Cinderella. 1950. [DVD] Walt Disney Productions: by Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and Wilfred Jackson.

Grimm, Wilhelm, and Jacob Grimm. “Briar Rose.” The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of Grimm Brothers: The Complete First Edition, translated by Jack Zipes, vol. 1, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2014, pp. 162–164. 

Perrault, Charles, and C. J Betts. “Cinderella or The Little slipper Made of Glass”. The Complete Fairy Tales. Oxford University Press 2009. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10358394. 

Perrault, Charles. “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.” A Tale, Gale ECCO, Print Editions, 2010.

Reitherman, Wolfgang, et al., directors. Sleeping Beauty. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 1959. 

Stone, Kay. “Things Walt Disney Never Told Us.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 88, no. 347, 1975, p. 42., https://doi.org/10.2307/539184. 

Tatar, Maria. “Show and Tell: Sleeping Beauty as Verbal Icon and Seductive Story.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 28, no. 1, 2014, p. 142., https://doi.org/10.13110/marvelstales.28.1.0142. 

Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels. 

University of Iowa Press, 1997. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt20q1x3b. 

Wang, Jing Ting. “Cinderella’ in the Patriarchal World.” Academia.edu, 9 Mar. 2015, https://www.academia.edu/11339175/Cinderella_in_the_Patriarchal_World. 

Wolfe, Andrea Powell. “(Re)visioning the Cinderella myth: Sylvia Plath’s bee poems/ Kulkedisi mitinin (yeniden)ele alinmasi: Sylvia Plath’in ari siirleri.” Interactions, vol. 17, no. 2, fall 2008, pp. 111+. Gale Academic OneFile.