Since I love female characters and their representations, I decided to divide them by convention into three categories that are a pure simplification:
- The Baddies
- The Saints
- The Humans (or ambiguous)
These categories are stereotypes drawn above all from fairy tales, in real life, as we all know, these distinctions are not included because each person has different facets. The bad guys in movies or books fascinate us because they have a weakness or a trait of humanity, just as the good always have some weakness or pettiness. The net distinctions selected in classical fairy tales and in the commedia dell'arte and these strong and well-defined characters have been a source of inspiration for literature, theater and cinema which they then elaborated and multifaceted, so allow me this simplification. for fun.
I will put among the Baddies all those characters like the Vampiresses, the Witches (always meaning the characters of fairy tales and
without any reference to history) the Gorgons, the Bad Queens, the Monsters. Examples are the witch of Snow White, the Stepmother of Cinderella, the wicked witch of the West of the Wizard of Oz
(etc.), Medusa, Ursula.
Among the Saints we will have the Fairies (to tell the truth the Fairies are divided in fairies of light and fairies of darkness), the Princesses but also the Grandmothers, the poor girls and so on. Examples are the Fairy Godmother, Cinderella, the little match girl, the Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother, Snow White, etc.
The reference is always to the fairy tales because only there we find the stereotype (not only feminine but also masculine) where a character corresponds to a human feeling or a handful of feelings.
By the way, I do not want to go into a feminist discourse disputing the fact that beautiful women in fairy tales are often also good and ugly women are base (example: the sisters of Cinderella), the fact that mature women are mothers or are jealous and pursue lost beauty (example The Queen of Snow White), that the old ladies are either sweet grandmothers or are ugly and bad witches. I will not dwell on the educational value of fairy tales but I think it is very clear if it is contextualised by referring to the historical period. They tried to give a tool to distinguish good from evil without gray areas and perhaps, indeed almost certainly, they wanted to 'educate' to adapt to a certain type of mentality, especially women. Today we all know that gray areas exist and make us human, that the stereotype applied to reality is harmful and we women understand our value and do not expect any prince on the white horse. That being said, we are all adults and we are here to enjoy the literary value of fairy tales.
Finally, the Ambiguous or the Humans. Even if the word ambiguity has a negative meaning I want to use it in an etymological way. From Latin ambiguus "having double meaning, shifting, changeable, doubtful," adjective derived from ambigere "to dispute about, contend, debate," literally "to wander, go about, go around,"
Indecision, that always being fought between two forces, the condition that distinguishes humanity. Within this broad category there are all the possible nuances. The representatives of this category could also be called Human.
In my long or short 'career' as a dollmaker I have dealt with all kinds of characters and how many more will come! Thanks also to special and really interesting requests.
For the human or ambiguous I present to you Mary, the first victim of Jack the Ripper to read his story click on the picture.
Now can you suggest me a bad, a saint and an ambiguous woman to insert in my next characters?
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