feminist criticism fairy tales

In Jane Austen, fairy tales meet biting feminist critiques

Professor of English Language and Literature, Queen's University, Ontario

Disclosure statement

Robert Morrison receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Queen's University, Ontario provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation CA.

Queen's University, Ontario provides funding as a member of The Conversation CA-FR.

View all partners

Jane Austen is not an obvious ally of today’s feminist movement. All six of her novels are now more than two centuries old. All six centre on a tale of provincial domesticity and romantic courtship. And all six are full of twists and witty turns that move inexorably toward a gratifyingly happy ending.

Yet below their glittering surfaces and rose-coloured tales of well-matched couples falling deeply in love, Austen’s novels vigorously critique the patriarchal structures of her day. They bristle with anger and a deep sense of injustice. Many of her plots and sub-plots about men and power — and women’s resilience in the face of that power — sound like stories we are hearing today.

Austen wrote in the early 1800s, when life for most women involved submerging their individual identities in their responsibilities as daughters, wives and mothers. Women were considered politically, economically, socially and artistically subordinate to men. It was a life that condemned many women to half-lives of humiliation, loneliness and abuse.

The novelist and short story writer Carol Shields has concisely summarized the complicated nature of Austen’s artistry and appeal . Austen, declares Shields, exploits “an arch, incontrovertible amiability” to conceal “a ferocious and persistent moral anger.”

Fairy tales meet social critique

Mr. Darcy’s first marriage proposal to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1813) is the most famous moment in Austen’s most famous novel. It is also the most telling example of Austen’s remarkable ability to combine wish fulfilment with social realism, and fairy-tale romance with biting cultural critique.

On one level, the scene between the two would-be lovers is a world removed from harrowing accounts of sexual harassment and assault. Darcy is proposing marriage to Elizabeth, not sex, and in his eyes at least, it is a very romantic offer.

He knows that her social standing is far below his own, and that in asking for her hand he is going against the wishes of his family and his own better judgment. But, as he patiently and politely explains, his love for her has overpowered him, and he wants her to become his wife.

On a more fundamental level, though, the exchange between the two is full of irony and dark anxieties.

Darcy is a wealthy and well-connected man who enjoys great freedom, and who moves assertively through a world of elegance and opportunity. Elizabeth is a younger and much more vulnerable woman who can already see poverty and spinsterhood out of the corner of her eye, and who can only obtain a place in the higher echelons of society through marriage to a man like Darcy.

Asserting strength and independence

The stark power imbalance between them fills Darcy with certainty that Elizabeth will be delighted to learn that she has been singled out by a man of his influence and social standing, and that she will eagerly consent to the match. To be sure, as he outlines his plans for their future, he expresses his “hope” that she will accept him.

But this is an empty gesture. Elizabeth “could easily see that he had no doubt of a favourable answer. He spoke of apprehension and anxiety, but his countenance expressed real security.”

When Darcy concludes his offer and Elizabeth is finally given the chance to speak, she rejects him with an eloquence and a decisiveness that make her among the most admired women in English fiction. Her character gives passionate expression to the anger she (and Austen) felt at patriarchal presumption and authority.

Demanding respect

Darcy is utterly confounded by her refusal, but what Elizabeth objects to in his behaviour is what millions of women from her day to ours have objected to. Operating from a position of much greater social and financial power, Darcy wants Elizabeth to agree to an arrangement that suits him, but not her. He presumes that he knows what she wants. He devalues her. He objectifies her. He pressures her.

Elizabeth is having none of this. She may be well below Darcy on the social ladder, but she towers above him in terms of her understanding of sexual politics and gender relations. Darcy expects deference and gratitude from her. She demands respect from him. They spar constantly.

Finally, she lashes out at him for his “arrogance,” his “conceit” and his “selfish disdain of the feelings of others.” No one — let alone a socially inferior woman — will have ever spoken to him in those terms.

Having imposed himself on Elizabeth, Darcy does not like it when she pushes back at him. “His complexion became pale with anger, and the disturbance of his mind was visible in every feature.”

Safely ensconced within the conventions of romance, Elizabeth does not have to worry about Darcy’s anger boiling over into violence. Indeed, after bidding her a civil farewell, his love for her quickly reasserts itself, and then steadily transforms him into a partner who is worthy of her.

A long-term fight

Austen occupies a key position in the long continuum of modern feminist thought. As the great novelist and literary critic, Virginia Woolf, observed almost a century ago , “Austen is…mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface.”

Elizabeth Bennet is her most sparkling character, and she plays the lead role in one of the most compelling love stories of the last 200 years.

But she is also a woman whose bravery, anger, and intelligence enable her to expose the patriarchal assumptions of Darcy, and to refuse him because of them.

Austen’s novels contain insightful contemporary critiques of patriarchy. They also throw searching light on the ways in which those same injustices continue to inflict widespread and long-term damage now.

Ultimately, Austen is about love and mutual respect. Her life was diminished by the same patriarchal structures that damaged the lives of so many women in her era, and far beyond. But Austen can inspire us now because she fought back in her life — and especially in her art.

• Jane Austen
• Pride and Prejudice

Communications and Events Officer

Lecturer (Hindi-Urdu)

Director, Defence and Security

Opportunities with the new CIEHF

School of Social Sciences – Public Policy and International Relations opportunities

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Rethinking fairytales as feminist fables is rescuing them, not ruining them

A new series of rejigged tales gets much closer to the spirit of these stories than the ‘traditional’ versions we’re force-fed

T here’s a book called Politically Correct Bedtime Stories , written by James Finn Garner, which used to be on my parents’ shelves, and is now on mine. Published in 1994, it was a massive bestseller in its time, satirising changing social attitudes and acting as an amusing corrective for the holier-than-thou: Little Red Riding Hood, for example, finds the wolf’s suggestion that it isn’t safe for a little girl to walk through the woods alone “sexist” and “offensive in the extreme… ” but, she says, “I will ignore it because of your traditional status as an outcast from society, the stress of which has caused you to develop your own, entirely valid, worldview”. It also stands as a reminder that the so-called culture wars, all that rightwing fury at the “tyranny of woke”, are simply the political-correctness-gone-mad wars of yesteryear rebranded for a new, digital age.

Right-on children’s books have had a resurgence, as demonstrated by the success of series such as Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls . This autumn, children have been gifted four rejigged fairytales in the form of Vintage Children’s Classics’ new Fairy Tale Revolution series , which sees Bluebeard, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel and The Ugly Duckling revisited by Malorie Blackman, Rebecca Solnit, Jeanette Winterson and Kamila Shamsie respectively. They are all just lovely: sweet and funny and, if you’re an adult reading them, unexpectedly moving too. I sincerely hope that the culture warriors don’t get a hold of them.

In Hansel and Greta (note the name change), Winterson gives us children in despair at the destruction of their forest to make way for a railway line. The antagonist is a nasty aunt called GreedyGuts, who says that “the point of life is to eat as much as possible, make as much money as possible, go on holiday as much as possible … buy two new cars every year, a jacuzzi in the garden, and a Luxury Level Executive Home… ” Hansel and Greta, of course, triumph, plant trees, and all is right with the world.

In Solnit’s Cinderella Liberator, meanwhile, the eponymous heroine and the prince decide to be friends, and she opens her own cake shop, above which she houses hungry, frightened children “running away from the wars in other kingdoms”.

Frothing traditionalists may say that such stories are indoctrinating children. But really, fairytales have always indoctrinated children: I was raised by Disney to believe that I needed a 22-inch waist and a prince with a castle to truly get by in life. Thankfully, my feminist mother balanced these out with books such as Jane and the Dragon, The Tough Princess, and Babette Cole’s Prince Cinders (I wrote about the latter for this paper’s A book that changed me column). Though “princess culture” has been justly critiqued, Disney has come on leaps and bounds in the intervening years, and films such as Shrek have reinvented the medium.

In light of this, you could say that the woke fairytale has been done to death – Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber was published in 1979. It, too, was based on Bluebeard, a tale that terrified me as a child, with the villain’s gruesome room decked with the heads of all his ex-wives, and its startling message to girls that there are men out there who will try to kill you. Do we really need a Malorie Blackman version now, too? And yet Blackman subverts the tale yet again, adding unexpected elements and new ambiguities, as well as subtle and clever warning signs of abusive relationships. Sound heavy? It isn’t; it’s full of playfulness and charm.

What these books and others like them teach us is that there is no “definitive” version of any myth, legend or story. Think Sleeping Beauty is kissed awake by the prince? In other versions she is raped, and gives birth, while unconscious, and that’s before you get to the attempted cannibalism later. As Winterson writes in her afterword, “these are stories told mouth by mouth, long before they were written down, but even in the writing they shot away, appearing again in a different place and time, recognisable but new”. The cultural historian Marina Warner, who has written much on fairytales, and whose book From the Beast to the Blonde is a feminist classic, notes that they transcend borders. “No frontier,” she writes, “can keep a good story from roaming.” And as they roam, their cultural meanings twist and shift.

Of course, there is often one narrative that triumphs, and it is usually the version that most suits society’s ends. Archetypes emerge, and variations are forgotten, a fact beautifully illustrated by the classicist Natalie Haynes’ new book, Pandora’s Jar , which re-excavates the women of the Greek myths, from Helen and Medusa to Clytemnestra and even Medea. The book illuminates how the narratives of woman we think we know have often been reshaped and rewritten, and mostly by men. How many are aware that Helen of Troy – yes, she of “the face that launched a thousand ships” – was, according to Siculus, abducted and raped as a 10-year-old child? We mostly hear of her destruction-causing beauty, and little else.

I have always been fascinated by myths, perhaps because my own namesake is the Welsh princess Rhiannon, from the Mabinogion – a collection of medieval Welsh tales. She is the classic calumniated wife, falsely accused of infanticide and cannibalism. As punishment, she must sit by the castle gate and tell travellers of her crime, before offering to carry them on her back. Even as a child I wondered why it was that this woman accepts her fate when she has been framed using blood from a puppy; why doesn’t she protest her innocence? It seemed grossly unfair, and still does. Time for a rewrite, perhaps.

• Children and teenagers

Most viewed

Carter’s Feminist Revision of Fairytale: The Narrative Strategies of “The Company of Wolves”

• Original Paper
• Published: 19 January 2017
• Volume 10 , pages 53–67, ( 2017 )

Cite this article

• Jie Wu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0754-1101 1  

4425 Accesses

13 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

The paper examines how the British woman writer Angela Carter rewrites Charles Perrault’s household fairy tale—“Little Red Riding Hood” in her short story—“The Company of Wolves.” This paper attempts to analyze the two distinctive narrative strategies—re-characterization and second-person narration, skillfully deployed by Carter in order to rewrite Perrault’s classic tale into a feminist story. In Carter’s version, Little Red Riding Hood is represented as a witty new woman who embraces her own sexuality and regards herself as a subject rather than an object. Through the transposition between reader and character, Carter’s tale produces a new subject position for readers, particularly for young female readers.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price includes VAT (Russian Federation)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Rent this article via DeepDyve

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

bell hooks: Exploring Intersectionality, Black Feminist Thinking & Radical Love

Writing biography in the face of cultural trauma: Nazi descent and the management of spoiled identities

Joachim J. Savelsberg

Queering the female writer in screen biofictions: Daphne (2007) and Shirley (2020)

Barbara Braid

Refer to Jack Zipes (ed.), The Tials & Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood , 1993, p. vii–ix.

Atwood, Margaret. 1994. Running with the Tigers. In Flesh and Mirror , ed. Lorna Sage, 117–135. London: Virago Press.

Bacchilega, Cristina. 1997. Postmodern Fairy Tales . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Carter, Angela. (ed.). 1981 [1979]. The Company of Wolves. In The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories , 110–118. London: Penguin Books.

Carter, Angela. (ed.). 1990. Introduction. In The Old Wives’ Fairy Tales Book , ix–xxii. New York: Pantheon Books.

Carter, Angela. 1998. Notes from the Front Line. In Critical Essays on Angela Carter , ed. Lindsey Tucker, 24–32. New York: G.K. Hall & Co.

Google Scholar  

Carter, Angela. 1992 [1979]. The Sadeian Woman : An Exercise in Cultural History . London: Virago.

Carter, Angela. trans. 2008. Afterword. In Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Other Classic Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, ed. Charles Perrault. New York: Penguin Books.

Cranny-Francis, Anne. 1990. Feminist Fiction—Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction . Oxford: Polity Press.

Crew, Hilary S. 2002. Spinning New Tales from Traditional Texts: Donna Jo Napoli and The Rewriting of Fairy Tale. Children’s Literature in Education 33 (2): 77–95.

Article   Google Scholar  

Crofts, Charlotte. 2003. “Anagrams of Desire”: Angela Carter’s Writing for Radio, Film and Television . Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Duncker, Patricia. 1984. Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter’s Bloody Chambers . Literature and History 10: 3–14.

Fludernik, Monica. 1998. Angela Carter’s Pronominal Acrobatics: Language in ‘The Erl-King’ and ‘The Company of Wolves’. European Journal of English Studies 2 (2): 215–237.

Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan. 2000 [1979]. The Madwoman in the Attic . New Haven: Yale University Press.

Gupta, Linda Ayscue. 2008. An Examination of Feminist Rewrites of the Fairy Tale, Utilizing Robert Coover’s The Briar Rose : 1–16. http://ramsites.net/~lagupta/An%20Examination%20of%20Feminist%20Rewrites%20of%20the%20Fairy%20Tale .

Haffenden, John. (ed.). 1985. Angela Carter, In Novelists in Interview, 76–96. London: Methuen.

Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kainulainen, Teppo. 1996. Deconstruction of Genre in John Hawkes’s Whistlejacket . Critique 37 (4): 289–299.

Katesavos, Anna. 1994. An Interview with Angela Carter. Review of Contemporary Ficiton 14: 11–17.

Lau, Kimberly. 2008. Erotic Infidelities: Angela Carter’s Wolf Trilogy. Marvels & Tales 22 (1): 77–87.

Lieberman, Marcia. 1972. “Some Day My Prince Will Come”: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale. College English 34: 383–395.

Makinen, Merja. 1992. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and The Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality. Feminist Review 42: 2–15.

Perrault, Charles. (ed.). 2008. Bluebeard. In Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Other Classic Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, 5–10 (Trans: Carter, Angela). New York: Penguin Books.

Phelan, James. 1994. Self-Help for Narrative and Narrative Audience: How “I”— and “You”?—Read “How”. Style 28 (3): 350–365.

Richardson, Brian. 1994. I etcetera: On the poetics and ideology of multipersoned narratives. Style 28 (3): 312–328.

Richardson, Brian. 2006. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction . Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

Rowe, Karen E. 1986. Feminist and Fairy Tales. In Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England , ed. Jack Zipes, 209–226. Aldershot: Gower.

Rubinson, Gargory J. 2000. ‘On the Beach of Elsewhere’: Angela Carter’s Moral Pornography and the Critique of Gender Archetypes. Women’s Studies 29: 717–740.

Schofield, Dennis. 1997. Beyond the Brain of Katherine Mansfield: The Radical Potentials and Recuperations of Second-Person Narrative. Style 31 (1): 96–117.

Sheets, Robin Ann. 1991. Pornography, Fairy Tales, and Feminism: Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”. Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (4): 633–657.

Swyt, Wendy. 1996. “Wolfings”: Angela Carter’s Becoming-Narrative. Studies in Short Fiction 33: 315–323.

Tiffin, Jessica. 2009. Fairy-Tale Studies: Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and Metaficiton in Modern Fairy Tale . Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Warhol, Robyn R., and Gendered Interventions. 1989. Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel . New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Zipes, Jack (ed.). 1993. The Trials & Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood . New York: Routledge.

Zipes, Jack. 2008[1979] Introduction: The Remaking of Charles Perrault and His Fairy Tales. In Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Other Classic Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (trans: Carter, Angela), ed. Charles Perrault, vii–xxvii. New York: Penguin Books.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jie Wu .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Wu, J. Carter’s Feminist Revision of Fairytale: The Narrative Strategies of “The Company of Wolves”. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 10 , 53–67 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-016-0162-7

Download citation

Received : 14 September 2016

Accepted : 28 December 2016

Published : 19 January 2017

Issue Date : March 2017

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-016-0162-7

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Angela Carter
• “The Company of Wolves”
• Feminist rewriting of fairytale
• Narrative strategies
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

• Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches

In this Book

• Donald Haase
• Published by: Wayne State University Press
• Series: Series in Fairy-Tale Studies

Table of Contents

• Title Page, Copyright
• pp. vii-xiv
• 1 Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship
• 2 Fertility Control and the Birth of the Modern European Fairy-Tale Heroine
• Ruth B. Bottigheimer
• 3 On Fairy Tales, Subversion, and Ambiguity: Feminist Approaches to Seventeenth-Century Contes de fées
• Lewis C. Seifert
• 4 German Fairy Tales: A User’s Manual. Translations of Six Frames and Fragments by Romantic Women
• Jeannine Blackwell
• 5 The Mirror Broken: Women’s Autobiography and Fairy Tales
• Elizabeth Wanning Harries
• 6 Fire and Water: A Journey into the Heart of a Story
• pp. 113-128
• 7 The Fairy-Tale Intertext in Iberian and Latin American Women’s Writing
• Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta
• pp. 129-148
• 8 Babes in the Bosque: Fairy Tales in Twentieth-Century Argentine Women’s Writing
• Fiona Mackintosh
• pp. 149-168
• 9 Creolization as Agency in Woman-Centered Folktales
• pp. 169-178
• 10 Genre and Gender in the Cultural Reproduction of India as “Wonder”Tale
• Cristina Bacchilega
• pp. 179-196
• 11 Disrupting the Boundaries of Genre and Gender: Postmodernism and the Fairy Tale
• Cathy Lynn Preston
• pp. 197-212
• Bibliography
• pp. 213-242
• Contributors
• pp. 243-246
• pp. 247-268

Additional Information

Project muse mission.

Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.

2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218

+1 (410) 516-6989 [email protected]

©2024 Project MUSE. Produced by Johns Hopkins University Press in collaboration with The Sheridan Libraries.

Now and Always, The Trusted Content Your Research Requires

Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.