Women in Folklore and Fairy Tales
Hero is a masculine noun. It means an illustrious warrior, a man admired for his achievements and qualities, the central male figure in a great epic or drama, the epic hero.
A heroine, on the other hand, is the female equivalent. Or is she really the hero's equal in the epic? We might as well have called her a "hero-ess" or a "hero-ette," some kind of diminutive subset of real heroes. The heroine is the one who carries the spears but does not hurl them. The one who dresses well but does not dirty her nails in the fight. The one who lies down in a glass casket until an awakening kiss revives her.
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The "hero-ette" is the character who languishes in a pretty coffin or sleeps like death in a thorn-covered castle. She is the character with little to no agency, unconscious and helpless until Prince Charming saves her...
… Or so the Victorian folk tale anthologists would have had us believe. They regularly subverted and subsumed the stories that starred strong and illustrious female heroes, promoting instead those stories that showed women as weak or witless or, at the very best, waiting prettily and with infinite patience to be rescued.
… Or so the Victorian folk tale anthologists would have had us believe. They regularly subverted and subsumed the stories that starred strong and illustrious female heroes, promoting instead those stories that showed women as weak or witless or, at the very best, waiting prettily and with infinite patience to be rescued.
As story lovers it seems we may have forgotten the ancient tales of Diana of the hunt; or Atalanta, the strongest runner in the kingdom; or the inordinate wrath of the mother goddess Ceres; or the powerful female warriors known as Amazons; or the thousand and one other stories with a heroic female at the core.
However, folklorists have begun to resurrect the female hero, revealing riches that remain in the storehouse of folklore, unremarked but quite remarkable. They uncovered stories of the most admirable women heroes, young and old -- strong actors in their own epic narratives (excerpted from Jane Yolen's "The Female Hero and the Women Who Wait," Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World, ed. Kathleen Raglan, 1998).