The Happy Endings of Fairy Tales That Are Defined By Men

The happy and victorious endings of the many fairy tales, on the surface, suggest to the young female readers that if one is true to oneself, and endure to the end, that virtue will be rewarded, evil punished.  Beneath the celebratory mood of the triumphant endings, however, there are unsettling facts for women readers, namely, that men’s sexual desires and their definitions of female beauty have direct implications on whether the protagonists will suffer or be redeemed as virtuous women. 

Indeed, in many of the stories, it is the sexual desire of the protagonist’s father, who either by desiring to be re-married or by remarrying, brings severe afflictions to his daughter.  For instance, in both Brothers Grimm’s and Lin Lan’s Cinderella stories, the intervention of stepmothers and stepsisters via fathers’ remarriages mark the beginning of the protagonists’ wretched states that test their patience and virtues. 

On the other hand, in both Perrault’s “Donkeyskin” and “The Princess in the Suit of Leather,” the protagonists’ fathers’ uncontrollable, carnal desires to be remarried not only lead to incestuous schemes against their own daughters, but also instigate the ensuing miseries in their daughters lives.  If fathers’ “burning” (110) and “mad” (110) libidinous desires are responsible for their daughters’ dire predicaments, the sexual “desires” (113) and tastes of the princes and other male suitors dictate whether they will ignore or mercifully lend a hand to these innocent female victims. 

Donkeyskin, for example, if she did not conveniently fit into the prince’s (male) definition of beauty, would have indefinitely remained in a wretched state, “laugh[ed] and shouted” (115) at by everyone as “that dirty little fright” (115).  We learn why the prince decides to save Donkeyskin from her plight: “while he was gazing at her [Donkeyskin’s]…lovely profile, her warm, ivory skin, her fine features, and her fresh youthfulness” (113), was “at the mercy of his desires [that] he almost lost his breath” (113). 

In fact, Donkeyskin, well aware of the exterior qualities that men seek in women, “insisted that she [have] some time to change her clothes before appearing before her lord and master” (115), who holds the ultimate power to redeem and reinstate her as once more a princess.  Thus, the happy endings of many fairy tales subliminally suggest that it is largely the women’s physical/sexual qualities in the eyes of the libidinous males that ultimately dictate the virtues/fates of women.

The ending of Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood”

The ending of Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood, that “the wicked wolf…gobbled her [Little Red Riding Hood] up” (13), is shocking because the girl’s only guilt here is her innocence.  The story’s brevity and simplicity magnify the psychological shock that the reader suffers from its ending – the grim finality of “the prettiest” village girl, “who did not know that it was dangerous to stop and listen to wolves” (12).  By using wolf as a metaphor for “the public world” (versus the private home), Perrault’s message with the story is unequivocal: the world outside home is dangerous for little girls.    The fact that this strategic, murderous wolf represents a male in the public domain not only limits female’s public space out of sheer fear factor, it also intimates female inferiority and her foreseeable doom in the public world.  succinctly, the story empowers men, not women.  Therefore, as a woman, I appreciated the other versions that empower women, not men.  Especially, Thurber’s The Little Girl and the Wolf, though considerably alters the literary value of the original text, was comical and entertaining.