Review of female identity in Fairy Tales and its re-interpretation in contemporary art

Abstract

Throughout history, the classic fairy tales have given rise to a series of mythified characters representing gender archetypes which perpetuate obsolete behaviour patterns and should therefore be questioned in the contemporary sociocultural context. Nowadays, these models referred to female characters, have been studied from the perspectives of a wide variety of disciplines. This paper inquires into the concept of fairy tale and in its origins, and shows some of the revisions that, mostly from feminist positions, have been carried out in recent decades in two creative areas: literature and visual arts. In these two areas we can see the interest and transformation experienced by genre since the last decades of the twentieth century. In some cases, they take the classic fairy tales as their starting point, although they always end up transforming the original sense of those tales by their adaptation for an adult audience.