Ecofeminist Fairy Tales

Rising to popularity in tandem with the rise of the modern state, the fairy tale has come to form a secular social imaginary, an incubator for notions of alterity, social hierarchy, power, gender roles, freedom, responsibility, and justice. Over the past four centuries this genre has been continually recycled as a site for ideological debate between a Voice of modernity and the voices (masks) of its Others. Some critics argue that in patriarchal capitalist society, fairy tales are strategies for the domination and control of women and children. Others (therapists, childhood development theorists) argue that fairy tales model both the malady and the cure: self-integration, actualization, healing and wholeness. On the face of it, the “others ” targeted for domestication in fairy tales appear to be women and children. But there are a host of human and non-human others to interrogate: poor woodcutters living at forest edges far from castles, laboring dwarves, and a coterie of powerful non-human others, including not only animals, vegetables and minerals, but also those (mos