Learning About Gender Roles in 1800's Fairytales

 Mehnoor Khan, Verrazzano Class of 2022, completed major in English Literature 

When I first began my capstone project I was excited to see where it would lead me. I had taken so many Science and English classes, but I didn't learn much about historic Pre-1800 Literature. This capstone helped me learn about a new world of literature that encompasses fairytales. 

My journey began reading the textbook From Instruction to Delight: An Anthology of Children's Literature to 1850, by Patricia Demers. After reading several stories in the book, I wanted to learn more about Charles Perrault's fairytales. I started to research the various fairytales he had written and noticed a gender bias in many of them, leading to the overall topic I wanted to pursue. 

“Discovering a Woman's Role in Pre-1800 Children's Literature” was the topic I chose to learn more about. It was pretty overwhelming at first! I didn't know how I would manage to write a 14–20-page paper on this topic using fairytales. I started to create mini drafts, the first one being three pages, and would send them to my professor, who would guide me in our monthly meetings on what to improve.

In each draft, I saw my writing improving. It was fascinating to see how far I had come, and I finally got up to my benchmark of around 15-16 pages. I learned about culture through Charles Perrault's writing and the gender roles women had at that time. The stories he had written were timeless and simply engaging. 

I had many struggles along the way with the most prominent one being a struggle to find my voice in my writing. I followed all the “textbook rules” of annotating the various fairytales and summarized them in my writing, but my thoughts and voice were slowly disappearing from my writing. I overcame this obstacle by doing several rewrites, picking apart the paragraphs I had written and by the end even I was surprised by the analysis I had written. 

This capstone was a fantastic project where not only did I learn about myself and my writing style, but discovered what it takes to become a great writer. 

Charles Perrault

Little Red Riding Hood