The Effects of Fairy Tales in Anne Sexton's Cinderella

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Fairy tales have always been focused towards children ever since Walt Disney took over the industry of remaking these stories. He took out all of the gore and some of the violence to make it more acceptable for children. With Anne Sexton's version of Cinderella, she brings back the gore and violence to its full capacity just like with the original Brothers Grimm story. Sexton's poetic version of Cinderella gives a humorous and eye-opened twist to this classic fairy tale. What brings all of these stories together is the way they all socialize women to make them naive. With this in mind, fairy tales do humiliate and objectify women to get them to accept violence within society.

One way that Sexton shows how fairy tales socialize women is how naïve they can be. The beginning of the poem summaries about four of the Grimm's stories and three out of the four are referring to women. The majority of women going from the bottom to the top give the impression that most women can do this, which is far from reality and rarely ever works out. It gives women a false hope where something magical has to happen in order to get ahead in the world. Especially with the dove in the poem and how "whenever she wished for anything the dove would drop it like an egg" out of the tree (Sexton). This is the reality that everyone wants, money growing on tress, real magic, a dreamland. A fairy tale is just that, a false reality created to make minions out of people, dream for that unreachable dream. This is how fairy tales can socialize women to make them naïve.

In addition, the fairy tales objectify women in the socialization process that these stories seem to have. Cinderella's father, her own flesh and blood, even objectifies her when he co...

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...ll put you with anything to think that they have it. Desperation can kill a person or in this poems case, lose feet components, which is violence in itself. Finally, when society is made to have only beautiful women in it, it makes it so easy for women to except violence, just tell them it will make them beautiful. Sexton recreated this story with a humorous poem in a very suddle way to make the way women except violence a little more apparent to the reader. Thanks to this, maybe people will not be so dumbfounded when it comes to reading fairy tales and stop trying to reach that unattainable dream.

Works Cited

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Folk and Fairy Tales. Eds. Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek. 3rd Edition. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2002.

Sexton, Anne. “Cinderella.” Web. 20 June 2015.

http://www.units.miamioh.edu/technologyandhumanities/sexton.htm

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