The gilt is off the gingerbread

This paper argues that Stevie Smith's revisionary fairy tales should be read as a feminist response to the conservative rhetoric of domesticity in the 1930s and 1950s, which encouraged women to continue as traditional wives and mothers. Following in the tradition of her Victorian predecessors who used the fairy tale for social critique, Smith retold fairy tales in order to offer the women of her time period alternative life scripts. Through her adoption of the fairy tale's basic narrative patterns, represented particularly in her favourite Grimm tale ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ she figured women's flight from traditional domesticity and envisioned positive transformations of home life

Aesthetics · Art · Favourite · Literature · Narrative · Rhetoric · Theology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Philosophy · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices · Themes in Literature Analysis