Feminist appropriations of Hans Christian Andersen's "The little mermaid" and the ways in which stereotypes of women are subverted or sustained in selected works

According to Lewis Seifert, “Fairy tales are obsessed with femininity … These narratives are concerned above all else with defining what makes women different from men and, more precisely, what is and is not acceptable feminine behaviour” (1996: 175). This study, then, will demonstrate how certain patriarchal ideas associated with fairy tales are disseminated when fairy tale elements are reworked in film, visual art and the novel. The aim of this project, more specifically, is to show how certain stereotypical representations of women endure in works that could be read as feminist appropriations of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’. Stereotypical representations of women are numerous and may include: depicting females as fitting neatly into what is often called the virgin/whore or Madonna/whore binary opposition; depicting women as being caring and kind, but also passive, submissive and weak; and depicting older women as being sexually unattractive and evil (Goodwin and Fiske 2001:358; Sullivan 2010: 4). It must be said that the list of stereotypes relating to women given here is far from exhaustive