Conclusion
Are the descriptors for women generally more positive or negative compared to men? Are women or men given a more active role?
While we could blanketedly state that there were more positive descriptors than men, it would be more accurate to state that the tales were more likely to describe women are definitively 'good' or 'bad' rather than neutral overall. If we ignore the neutral descriptors, women are described more positively compared to men across both editions, though their numbers decrease while the male equivalent increases (men become more positively described in the later editions whereas women are more negatively described). For the actions, there does not appear to be a clear connection between agenecy and passivity in the early editions. Tales with primarily male actions had just as many, if more, cases of passivity as those with primarily female-driven actions. In the later editions, active agency in male actions increased and there is a notable increase in passivity in stories with female actions. However, even if the actions were marked 'passive' for either gender, most of the actions were eagerly done. As for this collection of fairy tales, we can see some shift in agency refelcted in gendered actions but not as significantly as we had hypothesized. The most notable increase is in the number of male actions that were created in the later editions compared to their earlier counterparts.
How does the association between the fairy tales and marketing towards children lead to a shift in content within the stories, especially in regards to gender portrayal?
The steady increase in positivity of gendered descriptors aligns with a younger audience, and the shift away from neutral descriptors of characters could be a means of making character distinctions easier for children to comprehend. That is to say, the witch is clearly bad and the princess is clearly good. The increase in agency noted earlier may also represent the change in the purpose of these stories. Whereas the earlier editions are regarded as cautionary tales, or fables, and therefore are less interested in complex character building, the later editions of fairy tales we are more familiar with are read as more inspirational or whimsical stories a la Disney. With an increased agency in male actions, and a subsequent increase in passivity in female actions, we can see a clearer line being drawn in the roles of male versus female characters; rather than a little boy just being a little boy (like in earlier editions) with marked passivity, he becomes an active main character or traditional hero in the later editions. If children were meant to see themselves relfected in these tales, it would make sense for there to be a push for male characters to play more active roles in the narrative of the story while the female characters are often left to wait for their knight in shining armor (or marriage). We were unable to do background research on the historical marketing changes of the fairy tales, but it would be beneficial to see if the tales were first geared towards boys or girls.
Final Thoughts
Coming into this project, most of us assumed there would be a clear-cut distiction in the way the binary genders were described in these tales. With our previous historical knowledge, we agreed that it would be likely that women were described more negative and passive overall. After conducting our research, it is clear that such a conclusion may rely too heavily on preconceived ideas about the gender experience in literature. Many of these tales, as mentioned prior, were cautionary tales that did not rely too heavily on traditional gender norms. Rather than say the fairy tales became more gendered in later editions, it would be more suffice to say that the language of the tales become more strong and distinctive over time.
Going Forward
Four months is a short period of time to mark and analyze the entirety of the Grimm's corpus. With more time and resources, we would have liked to tackle the entire collection of works provided on the Ashliman website to mitigate the selection bias our current data has. It would also be beneficial, as mentioned prior, to conduct some research on the historical marketing of the tales to further contextualzie our second question. For the purposes of comparison, this project could be expanded to conduct the same markup analysis on another collection of fairy tales, or another translation of the Grimm's, that show similar editioral changes.