Quem merece um final feliz?: os contos de fada da Walt Disney e os ideais de mulher no mundo contemporâneo

Abstract

Gender studies are part of a new approach to historical research that, since the advent of the Annales School, in France, has been concerned about the politics that appear in everyday life. Women, their image, and their role on society´s transformations, ignored by official history studies until then, gained voice. In this new approach, music lyrics, movies, diaries and other minor daily elements have become important as historical documents. Fairy tales and animation movies, which are studied in this monograph, are part of these documents. Fairy tales were usually studied by researchers from psychology or folklore, but are equally important historically for gender studies, as they are usually narratives about women, and because they suggest behavior patterns for them as recipes for happy endings. The tales that are most known were heard from women storytellers and usually reproduced by European male writers that became internationally famous, such as Charles Perrault and The Brothers Grimm, between the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 20th century, some of these tales, such as Snow White and Cinderella, gained new storylines by the lens of the Walt Disney studios, which adapted the tales to the new ideals of women present in the society that would watch the movies. This study analyses the models of women in Disney´s fairy tales, comparing them to the written fairy tales on which the movies were based. It also tries to understand what changed, evolved or remained the same throughout time in the images of women on featured fairy tales