Kelsey Coley
Kristin McAndrew’s PhD
April 26, 2016
The Act of Censoring and Sanitizing Today’s Youth
As a little girl, I dreamed of being one of the princesses in the fairy tales that were presented to me throughout my childhood. This was including all of the Disney films that I absorbed throughout my childhood. Each adaptation I studied within the English course, emphasized on the negative impact on modern or contemporary gender roles. This gave me the ability to really dig deep or dissect the ambiguity of how these roles are in fact embedded in each and every tale I grew up with. I began to wonder, what is the essence of these tales? Children are being exposed to these fairy tales early on in life, so is society still brainwashing the children or youth of the upcoming generation on how they are supposed to act in regards to the traditional gender and social roles of society and culture itself? Within this essay, I will into detail of two adaptations studied in my class and how I believe we are conditioning the fundamental message within these folklores and adaptations by incorporating contemporary gender roles throughout each story.
Sociological criticism is defined in the reader provided in English 385 as “An approach to literature that examines social groups, relationships, and values as they are manifested in literature. Sociological approaches emphasize the nature and effect of the social forces that shape power relationships between groups or classes of people. Gender roles and social norms vary through each adaptation, incorporating the time period in which they were written.
I want to emphasize the abundance of literary meaning throughout the fairy tales given, and how someone should act in regards to gender roles while dissecting two different fairy tales that I studied throughout the semester. Social norms or class standing is defined as the customary rules that govern behavior in groups and societies, unwritten rules on how to...