Grimms’ Tales and Women

This is a very interesting article by Maddie Crum, ‘Unhappily Ever After: How Women Became Seen not Heard in Our Favourite Fairy Tales‘, on how the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers silence women’s voices and experience. I think it oversimplifies the matter, but it’s a provocative starting point for discussions on the transformations of fairy tales and gender. The feminist reworkings of fairy tale by Angela Carter and others from the 1970s onwards prepared, in some ways, the intertextual fusions of fairy tale and paranormal romance which are common today; this essay explores some of the background of these texts. It’s also a very attractively designed, interactive web page!