Fairy Tale Illustrations and Real World Gender: Function, Conceptualization, and Publication

• Main Author: Ruth B. Bottigheimer
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Radboud University Press in cooperation with Open Journals 2010-12-01
• Series: Relief: Revue Électronique de Littérature Francaise
• Subjects: publisher's role; gender analysis; Grimms' "Goosegirl"; cultural constraints; children's drawings
• Online Access: http://www.revue-relief.org/articles/10.18352/relief.542/

Fairy tales that have been illustrated with a single image apiece are themselves generally a commercial enterprise, whose content and design must be conceived in a broadly acceptable mode in order to sell. Second, the selling process assumes a profit motive. Third, it can be shown that the single illustration mode results in projecting an individual illustratorʹs vision of a tale. Fourth, when large numbers of illustrations in single‐illustration mode exist in commercially produced books, the aggregate range of their content comprises the range of culturally‐acceptable images for a given story. (A methodology for analyzing fairy tales with multiple images will be introduced separately at the end of this article.)