Warner Purity

The literary fairy tale mixed hagiography with romance to pioneer a new heroine, a proto-romantic champion of the truth of the imagination and the holiness of the heart’s affections. But this kind of tale, which D’Aulnoy and L’Heritier perfected in the late seventeenth century, no longer issued any kind of challenge to the established code of femininity in the nineteenth-century nursery. By forgetting that fairy tales interact with social circumstances, we miss seeing how the copybook blonde princess becomes instead a stick with which to beat young women, as in ‘Blonda’. The conventions of fairy tale, including the shining beauty and goodness of the heroine, become cliches, used by moralists to enforce discipline (and appearance) on growing girls. Good behaviour earns a reward: beauty, sex appeal, the very desirability the stories used to dramatize as so painful and problematic.

— Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers