Background Story

These past two months, my English class read A Game of Thrones, the first book of George R.R. Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire. The book recreates a medieval world, observing different territories and kingdoms under the rule of various royal families. Martin breaks the book up into different chapters, each observing the life of one of eight characters, each telling a different story, and each somehow connecting to all of the others. We'll come back to A Game of Thrones a little later.

 For one of the class's assignments, we were asked to write a research paper on anything somehow pertaining to the book. This seemed like somewhat of a challenge for me because it was a research paper with so much freedom and room for creativity - it was something I had never really done before because most of my research papers in high school had some guidelines that we had to follow with choosing our topics, if not simply giving us the topic to research. This was completely open-ended which though seemed exciting, was fairly nerve-racking as well.

I thought about what I was interested in. I considered past experiences of mine; anything that could pertain to anything related to the book. I was stuck and didn't know where to look. My teacher, Drew, told me to think about anything that I was passionate about, or maybe something I was involved in during high school.

I looked back to my resume that I hadn't touched since I was applying to college, and under 'Activities' I saw 'Panel on Gender and Race'. I remembered back to my freshman and sophomore year: a history teacher of mine saw a passion that I had for discussion and more specifically, race and religion. I was fascinated with how race, religion and gender influenced social scenes in high school and I wanted to find more people with that same interest. The following week, I was invited to take part in a panel where students from bordering school districts representing different ethnicities and religions met to talk about high school and the role that these characteristics played in defining our lives.

We began to talk about gender roles in literature, and one girl began talking about this idea of a damsel in distress and how women are often portrayed as weak and incapable without a man. The example she used that stuck with me the most became a focal point for my research paper - Cinderella. 

Cinderella

(Start @ 5:30)

We all know the story of Cinderella... Cinderella is a beautiful, innocent girl living with her abusive stepmother and stepsisters. When she hears news that the king is throwing a ball for his son to find him a wife, she is ecstatic, only to have her dreams crushed when her family tells her that she cannot go. She runs off into the woods, hysterical, when she runs into her fairy godmother! Her godmother says a couple of rhymes, sprinkles some of her magical dust and poof - poor, little Cinderella is magically turned in to the most beautiful girl in all of the land and is told that the spell would ware off at midnight. Cinderella left the ball just in time, and through a series of events and the loss of a glass slipper, the prince eventually finds Cinderella and the two live happily ever after. 

It's the classic story of an archetypal princess, and is one of the most well known stories in the world. What was that girl in my panel talking about? What's so bad about Cinderella?

I found a thesis essay written by Swami Shreeji and Nancy Hewitt (Professor of Women's Studies at Rutgers University) titled “Gender Roles Indoctrinated Through Fairy Tales in Western Civilization”. In the essay, Shreeji observed five different versions of Cinderella, all written in the late 19th century from various countries. 

 

"In every version," Shreeji says, "Cinderella slaves over the housework, never rebels and does not think to stand up for herself. Instead, she is the good-hearted victim. She makes no decisions of her own." Cinderella essentially gets away with never having to think for herself sheerly because of beauty. Cinderella is even kind to her abusers and allows them to step all over her.

Even when she meets her fairy godmother (as seen in video above), Cinderella stands there like a rag doll as her godmother dresses her and transforms her. "It is utterly inhuman," Shreeji says. "She has no bad emotions or ambition. She does not even seek to go to the ball to snag the Prince, but merely to attend the event. She has no negative or ambiguous qualities. She is beautiful, kind, and helpless.”

So What?

Cinderella is FAR too popular and influential of a story to contain a negative image towards women. In every version, Cinderella's step sisters are hideously ugly (though they may not appear entirely so in the Disney version). Should ugly be synonymous with evil? It essentially teaches little girls that beauty is all that matters, and that nobody should be content with the way they look except for the most beautiful girl in all of the land. Cinderella is NOT a positive role model for young girls, and yet so many little girls look up to Cinderella and other Disney princesses and strive to be just like them.

A Solution?

My sister is now in sixth grade. Two years ago, in an attempt to bond with her, we sat down together to watch a movie. I let her pick the movie and she chose 'Enchanted' and so I decided to humor her and watch it. It didn't mean much to me at the time, but thinking back to it now, the movie has a fantastic message.

It's the story of a stereotypical princess, but with a modern twist. Jazelle (the princess) is accidentally removed from her cartoon world and plopped into New York City, where she has to face the real world. Over the course of the film, she is transformed from the weak and scared girl in search of her prince that we are familiar with, into a girl who questions these values... Jazelle develops a sense of independence. 

Why should every version of Cinderella be the exact same story that we all grew up with? Modern adaptions of Cinderella can change this negative portrayal of women. Writers should follow the example of Enchanted - it's so easy to change a basic story and turn it into something meaningful. 

A Game of Thrones: 'Strong Female Characters.'

As I began to talk about earlier, Martin's novel A Game of Thrones is broken up into different chapters, each observing one of eight different characters. Four of those characters are female, which already shows an importance of women in Martin's writing. I think that in Martin's writing, he purposely plays on the idea of gender stereotypes, but unlike Cinderella, he shows how easy it is for a girl to perpetuate, or break the stereotypes.

In my opinion, one of the strongest female characters in the novel is Arya Stark. Arya is just a little girl and when she was first introduced, I didn't really take to her. Her older sister Sansa tried to get Arya to attend a party that the queen was throwing and Arya refused to go. At first, I thought Arya was just young and stubborn... but as I continued to read, I discovered that Arya isn't just stubborn for the sake of being stubborn. Sansa believes that it is essentially a girl's duty to act proper, and eventually marry a handsome prince. Arya questions this and doesn't see why she has to be who others want her to be.

The following clip is from the first season of the TV series Game of Thrones. Arya's father finds a sword that Arya was secretly keeping and he tries to talk some sense into his daughter. 

(Show 40 seconds, and 1:43)

Arya puts it perfectly. "I don't want to be a lady." She also asks her father, "how could you let him marry someone like that?" Arya is a strong character and a good role model, because she is a free thinker and can make decisions on her own - something Cinderella can't do. 

The Importance of Strong Female Characters

Characters like Arya are important, because they act as role models for young girls. It is extremely easy to emulate what we read in books, or see in movies and television. Pat Heine, a co-author of Strong Female Characters in Recent Literature wrote, "girls often have to battle messages that tell them they are second best, or victims, or human beings measured by the beauty of their bodies and the pliability of their minds." 
 

Heine and his colleagues compiled a criteria list, to determine if characters serve as strong and positive role models. 

After viewing this list, two characters from fantasy novels came to mind:

Hermione Granger (Harry Potter series)

Hermione, despite being the only female lead character in Harry Potter, is one of the smartest and hardest working wizards in all of Hogwartz. Because of her work ethic and intelligence, she becomes one of the strongest wizards that Hogwartz has to offer. She fits the criteria: she displays emotion, she grows tremendously throughout the series, she works hard to maintain healthy relationships... all of which helped me determine that Hermione is a positive role model. 

Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games) 

Katniss is chosen at random to represent her nation in an anual fight to the death tradition called, "The Hunger Games." Though nervous and seemingly fragile at the beginning, Katniss proves to be one of the smartest contestants, and an incredibly bowman among everything else. Though Katniss is a physically strong character as well, she is a positive role model because of where her head is - she is smart and an independent thinker (though sometimes too independent). 

Are There Any Cons?

All of my research continued to use the phrase 'strong female character', but it seemed like only Pat Heine had any real definition for the phrase and the other authors were just throwing around the words. 

Carina Chocano, a freelance writer who I stumbled across while researching the term, actually  believes that the use of 'strong female characters' in television and literature can potentially be a bad thing. This threw me off guard a little - all of my other research was telling me that the use of strong female characters provides such a strong message to young girls, and is nothing but beneficial to their development. 

“Maybe what people mean when they say ‘strong female characters’ is female characters who are ‘strong,’ i.e., interesting or complex or well written – ‘strong’ in the sense that they figure predominately in the story, rather than recede decoratively into the background. But I get the feeling that what most people mean or hear when they say or hear ‘strong female character’ is female characters who are tough, cold, terse, taciturn, and prone to scowling and not saying goodbye when hanging up the phone” - Carina Chocano

This quote made me think a bit. Specifically, it made me think of one television character - 

For those who have never seen the show before, this is Breaking Bad's Skyler White, the wife of the show's main character. When looking at the list Pat Heine offered, Skyler literally fits all of the criteria -

• Displays a variety of emotions
• She grows and changes
• She is courageous and intelligent
• She wrestles with problems and significant issues
• She is (undoubtedly) moving away from traits such as passive, weak, frightened, dependent, etc.  
• SHE IS STRONG.

So why do I completely resent her? I would show up at school the day after an episode aired, and the talk around the school would be how nobody can stand Skyler because she's always getting in the way, and complicating things.

Is she a good role model?

Chocano says no. She says that strength in females has an increasingly negative image because television and movies often show strength in women as bitterness or anger as a means for standing up for one's own beliefs. 

In a recent study of men and women's responses to strong women in television, it was discovered that both men and women have negative views towards women who appear to take on psychological characteristics and traits that we are used to see in men (we say that men are agentic and women are communal).

The study did, however, also discover that men and women see nothing wrong with women holding powerful positions as long as they aren't "assigned masculine characteristics." 

“You know what’s better than a propulsion engineer with a sideline in avionics whose m-aterial instincts and beliefs in herself allow her to take apart an airborne plane and discover a terrorist plot despite being gaslighted by the flight crew? A girl who reminds you of you.” - Chocano