Monstrous Women, Gruesome Girls, and the Beastly Wilds: Wild ways of seeing fairy tales through a feminist ecocritical lens

Fairy tales have long been known as heteronormative and patriarchal narratives that perpetuate gender stereotypes and limit possibilities for interruptions to assumptions around gender roles (Naraharisetty, 2018: n.p). Further, these patriarchal narratives extend to the natural world where nature is presented as an ‘Other’, ‘… a growing awareness of human separation from the wild and natural world’ (Bernheimer, 2009: xix). In silencing these entities, limiting possibilities of agency, both women and nature are controlled by the dominant societal force. In traditional tales, as Sheedy explains, the feminine is presented as ‘Analogous to nature, deviant women [and defiant girls] accordingly represent nature’s deviance, and thus are subject to male control’ (2021: 222). This control restores hierarchical differences between female and male, aberrant and normative. Surveying traditional tales through a feminist ecocritical lens, the tales of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’ are chosen for the thematic presence of nature and the feminine. Influenced by patriarchal ideologies of the time these states were presented as lesser than ‘man’ and ‘culture’, the oppression and marginalisation of these entities by the dominant culture deemed as normative behaviour. In applying the central claim of feminist ecocriticism – that there is a connection between environmental control and the subordination of women – this presentation will explore traditional depictions of silenced entities in fairy tales and consider the destabilisation of understandings of patriarchal sovereignty over women and nature in modern re-imaginings.