The Blue Fairy and Wendy
Incest, Sacrifice or Feminine Empowerment?
Abstract
In Collodi’s Le avventure di Pinocchio (1883) and Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911), the little girls’ characters – the fairy and Wendy – do grow up, adopting the roles of ‘surrogate mothers’ for the heroes. Playing the mother to excess, they challenge gender hierarchy. It is therefore less a transgression of rules than it is a subversion of values. Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) and Peter Pan (1953) advocate order and obedience, thus doing away with the freedom of childhood. Garrone’s Pinocchio (2019) and Zeitlin’s Wendy (2020) mitigate gender stereotypes, but the disturbing ambivalence of the girls disappears, in favour of more univocal characters.
Submitted: May 8, 2021 | Accepted: Sept. 20, 2021 | Published March 16, 2022 | Language: en
Keywords Gender • Pinocchio • Empowerment • Peter Pan • Female education • Motherhood
Copyright © 2021 Déborah Lévy-Bertherat. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/EL/2420-823X/2021/08/009