Unveiling the Implicit Political Agenda: A Comparative Analysis of the Construction of Gender Roles in Grimm’s Ashputtel and Giuseppe Pitré’s The Magical Little Date Tree

Abstract

In 1981, American therapist Colette Dowling proposed the term "the Cinderella Complex" to the field of psychology to investigate how millions of women have fallen into the trap of the hidden fear of independence. Deriving its name from the fairy tale Cinderella, the term also has begun to elucidate how the discourse of fairy tales has created a 'nonconscious ideology' and designates gender roles in society throughout the ages. In relation, this study scrutinizes the comparative analysis of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tale Ashputtel (1812), widely known as Cinderella, and Giuseppe Pitré's The Magical Little Date Tree (1875), the Italian version of Cinderella, through the lenses of plural investigation methods which encapsulate the feminist literary criticism and the cultural materialist approach. It analyzes how the dominant ideology, the patriarchal discourse represented by the Brothers Grimm through Cinderella, constructs a nonconscious ideology to subjugate women to become passive, weak, submissive entities, not only in fairy tales but also in daily life. This study suggests that the hegemony of the dominant ideology is reversed by Pitré's protagonist Ninetta, who subverts gender roles through creating a language, a voice of her own and encouraging her sense of independence and self-reliance. Therefore, she surpasses the limits of Cinderella, who is gendered by the hegemony, and sheds light upon how fairy tales construct gender-appropriate behaviors in society.