Fairy tales, on the surface, are delightful, fantastic stories for children about brave heroes, beautiful princesses and scary wolves and witches.
Most readers have not considered or did not realize the morality-building function of these stories when they encountered them as children.
As this book aims to demonstrate, these tales were intended, from the early days of wide-spread publishing in Europe, to teach children their roles in society, which were of course very dependent on gender ideas of the time.
Good boys become gentlemen by being clever and brave, and good girls become fine women by being virtuous and obedient. Since those days, however, ideas have changed. Post-modern interpretations of these stories turn these ideas around.
The works of Angela Carter are examined here to reveal how times have changed, and how the idealistic fairy tale worlds managed to not only engage children's imaginations but also instruct them to follow very restrictive, gendered roles in life.
Carter's interpretations, as author Şeyda Sivrioğlu demonstrates, break the rules and offer a very different perspective, in her re-imagined fairy tales for adult readers.
-Amy Woods-
