SOURCE: "Daughters of Eve: Fairy-Tale Heroines and Their Seven Sins," in Off With Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood, Princeton University Press, 1992, 94-119.

Tatar presents a feminist reading of fairy tales in the following chapter from her book; she elucidates not only that the tales were largely didactic, but that they were particularly designed to encourage their female readers to grow into submissive women.

The numbers of children who go up in flames in nineteenth-century storybooks is nothing short of extraordinary. Little Truths, for the Instruction of Children (1802) begins its second volume with the illustrated story of Polly Rust—"Yes: she was one day left alone, and, I think, playing with the fire; her clothes were burnt off her back, and she so scorched as to die the next morning in great pain." Little Pauline, we recall, perishes in Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter because she...