The Blue Fairy and Wendy

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DC Field	Value
dc.identifier	ECF_article_5672
dc.title	The Blue Fairy and Wendy. Incest, Sacrifice or Feminine Empowerment?
dc.contributor.author	Lévy-Bertherat Déborah
dc.publisher	Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Venice University Press, Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari
dc.type	Research Article
dc.language.iso	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://edizionicafoscari.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/english-literature/2021/1/the-blue-fairy-and-wendy/
dc.description.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.
dc.relation.ispartof	English Literature
dc.relation.ispartof	Vol. 8 \| December 2021
dc.issued	2022-03-16
dc.dateAccepted	2021-09-20
dc.dateSubmitted	2021-05-08
dc.identifier.issn
dc.identifier.eissn	2420-823X
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.identifier.doi	10.30687/EL/2420-823X/2021/08/009
dc.peer-review	yes
dc.subject	Empowerment
dc.subject	Female education
dc.subject	Gender
dc.subject	Motherhood
dc.subject	Peter Pan
dc.subject	Pinocchio

Research Article
open access peer reviewed

Incest, Sacrifice or Feminine Empowerment?

Déborah Lévy-Bertherat École normale supérieure, Paris, France

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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.

Published

March 16, 2022

Accepted

Sept. 20, 2021

Submitted

May 8, 2021

Language

Keywords: Gender • Peter Pan • Empowerment • Motherhood • Female education • Pinocchio

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/EL/2420-823X/2021/08/009

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.

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