Tropes of representing gender in folktales congruently spring from culturally constructed perceptions of men and—principally—women in the social sphere where the narrative is popularized. These tropes in their turn, not only help, but do establish such perceptions and perpetuate them—in this case through storytelling. The folktales, here, drastically display the gendered manner through which women are being discursively represented, with constructed notions of femininity and masculinity.
Yet the tales herein discussed, negotiate inconsistent modes—usually fixed ones— of picturing female characters, moving in protean cadences from patriarchal femininity, to stereotypically biased depictions of female passivity as an accessorial complement for patriarchal masculinity, though, in the way, with emancipating references to female valour and cleverness.
To examine the different influential tropes that overlay this terrain, it is necessary to discuss some pivotal grounds of action between female and male figures in the folktales, and, correspondingly, to investigate the dominant roles stereotypically attributed to particular personages such as: the heroine, the stepmother, and the old woman.
The Heroine of the Folktale: Constructing the Good-Female Model
The heroine occupies the main bulk of the female characters in the folktales. She is usually the most beautiful of her peers, the most unfortunate, the youngest, and the most virtuous. And she is also the loving mother who attends her husband within the domestic confines. Heroines in the folktales actually embody heterogeneous roles rather than fixed ones. They are represented in various examples, though, as passive and patriarchal feminine agents.
Folktales play a critical role in the construction of gender identities especially for girls. Anne Cranny-Francis says about the role of fairy tales in western culture
…fairytales contain specific training in gender roles for girls as well as boys. They do this by introducing girls to a number of feminine characters, defining their specific characteristics and then evaluating those characteristics by reference to what subsequently happens to these characters in their narratives. In this way girls are instructed in what it is to be a good woman in this society. They are also told what it is to be bad and shown how punishment for that behaviour is inevitable. These bad characters inevitably come to a bad end in the narrative. 1
During the series of representations in folktales, specific characteristics are inferred and identified as good(patience, silence, …) or evil (jealousy, ambition, ...). The listener learns from the folktale’s message that the good one enjoys a happy ending (marrying a prince usually or receiving an economical prize) and the evil is always punished severely. Both the good model of femininity(usually the passive one) and the bad one in fairy tales thus, are sequentially determined by reward and punishment, and the listener learns from the folktale what characteristics good personages own and what inconveniences the bad one represents, and here is a discussion of some folktales heroines.
Passive heroines are depicted in various tales, yet more interestingly in The Girl Envied by her Stepmother. The heroine in this tale is a passive young maid; she is the paragon of fairy tales protagonists whom feminists have identified as: “passive objects, as romanticized innocents, as victims of mental and physical abuse”2. In this story, passivity is regarded as a virtue instead. The maiden does not act in defence of herself and while her father—the male character—is absent she chooses compliance rather than rebelliousness; as a result she is rather rewarded with gold for her patience and humility. The protagonist of this story perpetuates then the perfect image of the patriarchal female.
In fact, the thoroughly passive heroines do nothing to modify their pathetic situations; they rather chose to remain silent and to face their oppressors with submissiveness. They need the man’s agreement before they can act as in the Seven Brothers. At the beginning, the heroine of this tale proves herself as an active subject who embarks on a long trip in search for her brothers; it is an initiative that makes of her an “active seeker”3. Nonetheless, she, whose status the servant usurped, does not make attempts to defend herself as soon as she becomes under her brothers’ control; it is only when her brothers actively inspect the reason behind their camels’ skinniness that they find out the truth through her not-meant-to-be-heard verses. Likewise, she must wait for her brothers to determine whether she can dictate the chastisement to her faithless servant or not. Her encounter with her brothers thus limits her freedom of action, and makes of her a patriarchal-bound subject.
Patterns of patriarchal females, however, are still, if not abundant, present in other folktales. In Nounja and her Brother, the protagonist’s wellbeing is excessively dependent on the male character. The only one that ensures her steadiness in the story is her brother; but once he deserts her, she flees to the bushes to live among animals. The transition of state the heroine experiences here, asserts the structuralist paradigm that associates woman with nature, and man with culture.1 The woman loses status and significance right after her brother ceased to show interest in her, consequently, she is unable to engage herself in a civilized milieu because she lacks the male figure, and therefore the forest—nature— becomes the only site that can contain her; the woman in animal skin lives with animals because she identifies herself with them, and because she feels they share a kind of “rawness”: they are uncivilised and lack culture. But she swiftly retrieves status when the prince, who symbolizes culture, takes her for a wife. This representation infers that women without male supervision remain acculturated beings, what helps establish and perpetuate a patriarchal model of femininity.
Another association of woman to nature is ambivalently shown in The Spotted Beast. The composition of male/female relations initially manifests itself as a subversive element. The woman in this tale at the start seems to reverses the Saussurian paradigm, and instead of: man=culture/woman=nature, we have: man=nature/woman=culture. The man is the beast: he has bestial mannerisms and lives in the mountains; the woman only resolves to live with him when she learns that he was her fiancé; and in spite of that she yearns for her original surrounding. But what may the story project in fact is the bestiality of the woman, because the reading of this story raises the following question: Is not a woman who chooses to live with a beast, a beast herself?2
The female captive in the story of Nounja and the Ogress is one example of apparently a passive heroine. The story of Nounja begins with her captivity, and as a child she was kept by the Ogress in her hut. The isolatedness of the site wherein the heroine was rapt represented a danger for the heroine in case of any attempt of escape, and thus we could see how the ogress would go hunting leaving her alone to serve her children. She must wait for her cousin in order to realize her escaping plan. The heroine’s cousin, apart from being a male and from hiding away from within the Ogress’s compass, does not perform any essential role in the plan of escape Nounja wittingly arranges and realizes; she hides the young man, cheats the ogress, and fetches her cousin from the granary to escape. with the exception of the first scenes where he is shown determined to seek his cousin, the young man is exceptionally silent and out of sight in the story, unlike the young woman, who undertakes the most perilous task: to deceive the ogress; the young woman is largely heard throughout the storyline, and more than this, she assumes the responsibility of hindering the ogress’s steps. We can venture, then, and say that the cousin stands as a “body guard” for the heroine in case physical attendance is required, and therefore, the story shows us an active heroine rather than a passive one.
Nevertheless, and from another point of view, we can not help not noticing how the image of the heroine is being eroticized in the story. In addition to describing carefully her beautiful features and her long hair by the story teller, we are told how she uses her attractive long mane to allow to her cousin to descend into, and to mount from the granary. Psychoanalysits would have surely found sexual innuendo in the assemblage of the erotic images in that scene (male descending in and coming out of the hole with the help of a woman’s long hair). The way her femininity is being sexualized by the narrator, portrays her—though intelligent and active—as a mere object of desire. In all the folktales discussed so far, no attempt to retrieve a daughter or a sister has been realized, yet the young man is shown to cross unwaveringly the fearful forest looking, aimlessly for a cousin whose fate he ignores. We are not told whether the heroine marries her paternal cousin at the end of the story or not, but we can presume that—at least—the young man’s resolve to emancipate his cousin was instigated by a sexual desire; it seems that this reading calls for a renegotiation of the female subjectivity in this story. The heroine’s femininity is, then, constructed as physically weak, as active, clever, and brave—unless a male physical presence is necessary, yet still as an object of desire.
Women are also represented as sexual objects in The King’s Seven Daughters. The six raped princesses are no longer mentioned after their aggressor has ravaged them; the seven apple trees symbolised their sexual soundness, and no sooner than the princesses were raped that the trees shrivelled. The drying up of the apple tress, consequently, symbolizes the princesses’ own dryness; thus, being no longer virgin declares them symbolically dead. In other words they are no longer considered as perfect females, because they have lost the only thing that labels them as so: their virginity. This story teaches young girls the tremendous importance of preserving their virginity, and it lays the responsibility of losing it on them and on no one else.
On the other hand, we may find the example of the beast’s daughter in the Spotted Beast subversive in terms of the woman as an object of sexual desire. The young woman is chosen by the prince not only for her beauty, but especially for her strong personality, though she later on continues to evince passive attitudes when she prefers “dumbness” as a solution to her problem. Again in this scene, the woman is shown uncertain about herself, she is afraid to fall victim of her talkativeness as did her mother. She is, therefore, the only heroine that performs the most brutal form of passivity, and the worst form of silence.
However, the only “heroic heroine”1 features in The Seven King’s Daughters, it is the youngest princess who assumes to punish the malefactor rather than her father; she manifests the feminine syndrome of low physical capacities by having recourse to the magical help of the eerie creature1, but she equally proves her being active by taking the initiative to punish the man herself, and her subversive resistance by using her brainpower to overcome the misogynist villain.
Stepmothers and the Eternal Curse of villainy
Another category that suffers from gender stereotyping in folktales are stepmothers. Maria Tatar notes that:
Stepmothers stand as an abiding source of evil in countless fairy tales, and it is no accident that they rank among the most memorable villains in those tales. Folklorists would be hard pressed to name a single good stepmother, for in fairy tales the very title "stepmother" pins the badge of iniquity on a figure.2
Step mothers in the folktales are by and large guileful villains, who do not submit to the male patriarchal dominion, but, who, rather make attempts to violate its laws and to destabilize the roles of power; she may just act by impulses of jealousy, or trespass the boundaries of human powers of evil to become a witch like in Maghigha. These very images of trickery, guile, and extreme forms of evil attributed to stepmothers in general portray them as negative agents in society who make negative use of their freedom to perpetrate family disequilibrium and insecurity. Stories of evil stepmothers are mainly constructed to show endangered forms of female threat over the man, and the type of this threat mainly menaces his own children.
It is important to note that examples of stepmothers activity context lies out of the male dominance in the story. The stepmothers who seize the opportunity to do harm to their step-daughters in The Girl Envied by her Stepmother, and Maghigha begin their hurtful journeys in the absence of their husbands, i.e. when no male surveillance is around. The story of The Two Brothers makes clear the guileful acts of the young boy’s stepmother, while there is no mention of a husband. Whereas these stepmothers take hold of their being free of patriarchal dominance, in Nounja and her Brother we are exclusively facing an apparently good stepmother who shows sentiments of concern towards her husband’s wife and her child. But the main idea behind this singular representation is to disclose a perfect pattern of a patriarchal man, in whose presence the would-be evil step mother is tamed and disciplined; therefore she can not perform her destructive plans.
Folktales in fact negotiate different patterns of thought concerning gender relations. Unlike the previous example of the disciplined stepmother, the story of Abdurrahman Heb’reman discloses the counter-example of a tameable stepmother, or rather: an defective patriarchal man. I is probable that this woman uses the universally typical female guileful device which seduction. The woman manages to tempt the man and to persuade him to abandon his daughters with seductive mannerisms, she made him imagine a better life without having to be in charge of the seven girls. The absence of the girls denoted more freedom for the man and the stepmother, and thus the man succumbed to his wife’s enticement. This representation, similarly, helps construct and represent an example of the counter-patriarchal male model through the binary opposition of these two characters: the woman as an active seducer and the man as submissive and an easily deceived male figure.
Generally, the stepmothers in folktales are stereotypically depicted as evil doers. They are mainly pictured as destructive forces, who are dominated with desires to usurp man’s position of control.
Old Women
The figure of the old woman recurs only in two folktales, but it is equally important to analyse the cultural view of old women in the context of story telling. The analysis of these two figure, as opposed to the young figure represented by the heroine, may, however, demonstrate how femininity is constructed in the cultural context of these folktales.
Both old women represented in The King’s Seven Daughters and the Seven Brothers stories, share common features of being evil, jealous, and rabble-rousers. Generally, an old woman in the Riffian context is usually a widowed woman who is freed from the patriarchal authority of a man. In these tales, she is portrayed as having freedom to act at her leisure and to implement a repressed destructive feminine energy. In the first tale, an old woman who covets the seven princesses’ fortune of being young and rich has recourse to guile and disguise in order to rob them the only meaningful thing to female dignity. Thus we can observe that the old woman covets the young princesses for things she no longer has, and for which she can no longer aspire. Her lack of these attributes makes her feel unsatisfied about herself, desiring to rid the young girls of them, because in her view and in the view of her social context she is an incomplete female body lacking beauty, youth, and virginity; and therefore she is represented as the ugly, nonattractive, and the counter-feminine image who searches to destroy all that is beautiful and harmonious the way the old woman does in The Seven Brothers tale.
Summary
This close analysis of gender representation in the folktales reveals a constructed stereotypical model of femininity in the Riffian cultural context. We have noticed how the different categories of female figures represented in the bulk of the folktales work connectedly to reproduce images of good and evil female characters while being reliant on qualities and flaws that are connected with a specific category and which are culturally perceived as doctrinaire attributes and traits, and thus we could see how perfect images of femininity are attributed to the heroines who are: young, beautiful, intelligent, but especially submissive and patriarchal; whereas the counter-images of this model—represented by stepmothers and old women—is represented as: old, unattractive, guileful, transgressive, and disobedient with the patriarchal system. But maybe the most important-and equally dangerous—fact about folktales is the astounding frequency of associating villainy with women.
This association, I would argue, may again confirm strongly two things: that folktales are habitually made by and for patriarchal women. But what these women do ignore is the anti-patriarchal femininity in which they unconsciously used to and still act. Storytelling per se reverses the paradigm of patriarchy by women’s moving from silent to voiced because it creates an open space for voicing inner thoughts, for being subjective, and for criticizing men themselves (we saw how story telling portrays fathers especially as uncaring and criticizes them in the previous section); from passive to active because it is the female storyteller who establishes the very patriarchal rules she unconsciously breaks, and labels actively her own and her children’s identity through her way of weaving stories.
Notes:
1 Cranny-Francis, Anne; Engendered Fiction: Analysing Gender in the Production and Reception of Texts University of New South Wales Press (1992: 120) ---.106
2 Stone, Kay; And She Lived Happily Ever After. Women and Language, Vol. 19, 1996
3 Maria Tatar (1987: 62)
4 Miller, Alan L.; The Woman Who Married a Horse: Five Ways of Looking at a Chinese Folktale. Asian Folklore Studies, Vol. 54, 1995 . see also: Doniger Wendy; The Mythology of Masquerading Animals, Or Bestiality. Social Research, Vol. 62, (1995: 763). ---p.107
5 The author makes a remark that in folktales, women who prefer animal grooms in fact evince their intrinsic animality. See Doniger Wendy; The Mythology of Masquerading Animals, Or Bestiality. Social Research, Vol. 62, (1995: 763). ---p.108
6 A way used by Kay Stone to describe fairy tales heroines who chose their own life and fate; see: Stone, Kay; And She Lived Happily Ever After; Women and Language, Vol. 19, 1996
7 Apparently the supernatural creature qamqam samram is derived from Samsam Kamkam, or Samsam Ben Kamkam, a supernatural creature found in Moroccan Jewish oral tradition. See Haya Bar Itzak (1993: 108-109) ---p.109
8 Tatar, Maria (1987: 141) ---p.110
