Myth, Folklore and Fairy Tales Part I | 17.1

1994

Digital only; out of stock in print.

My first exposure to analysis of fairy tales was through a pop psychology book I read in the mid-1970s. The author argued that Little Red Riding Hood was a behaviour model for girls, and women who bought red coats-particularly hooded ones-were prone to related behaviour patterns. Because they act on subconscious cues, the author claimed, these women were more likely to be victim­ized. Being young and naive, it did not occur to me to examine his analysis further. Instead, after purging my wardrobe of the colour red, I became obsessed with watching women in red coats, trying to detect this fatal “character flaw.”

Twenty years later, I am still fascinated by the messages filtered to our collective subconscious through traditional tales. These stories have a tremendous impact on the way we, as women, are trained to perceive the world. The way we leam to speak—by listening, mimicking, and setting down communication patterns in our minds, so do we absorb the constructions prescribing gender- assigned roles and proscribing social scripts at a highly impression­able stage of our development. The structures of traditional tales are reinforced all around us, from the paradigms of religion to the hierarchies of business to popular culture.

There has been a fair amount of research done in the area of feminist analysis of traditional tales—particularly fairy tales, though much of it focuses on a psychoanalytic approach. While this reflects a value for social individualism, examining tales through the filters of other disciplines yields alternate interpretations.