A Funny Fairytale

Monsters and the Monstrous 11 Conference at Oxford University, UK

This paper seeks to examine the depiction of the evil step-mother Queen in Snow White. The focus will be on examining the characterization of the Queen as both step-mother and evil witch as depicted in the traditional fairy tale and subsequent revisions in the short stories: "Blancanieves" (Snow White) by Carmen Boullosa and Neil Gaiman's "Snow Glass Apples". These texts will be compared alongside films that also look at recasting the Queen as victim of her socio-cultural environment and patriarchal standards of beauty in films such as: Mirror, Mirror and Snow White, The Fairest of them All and the television series Once Upon a Time. This presentation proposes to explore how the Queen's monstrosity is replaced with a more humanistic understanding of her behaviour thereby resulting in a more sympathetic and less monstrous depiction of the "old evil Queen".

Academia Letters, 2021

Anthropology is very good at shifting perspectives and achieving a more holistic or alternate point of view from normative understandings. If we shift our point of view in the classic fairy tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, we can leave behind for a moment the poor, abused, overworked dark beauty, Snow White, and spend some time on the Queen and her obsession with her mirror, as well as her transformation into a hideous evil crone. Adapting a technique generated by Jeremy Taylor for dream work, as well as Alan Dundes' analytic tools in folklore studies, as well as Bruno Bettelheim's methodology, we can better understand some of the overlooked principles found in the tale and transform for ourselves this fairy tale dysfunctional family into something palatable and healthy.

The Monster Stares Back: How Human We Remain through Horror’s Looking Glass, 2015

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but when examining the portrayal of the Queen in Snow White one will note that evil too, is in the eye of the beholder. In her role as step-mother she is also depicted as an evil witch in the traditional fairy tale and subsequent revisions in the short stories: 'Blancanieves' (Snow White) by Carmen Boullosa and Neil Gaiman’s 'Snow Glass Apples'. By considering these texts alongside films such as: Mirror, Mirror and Snow White, The Fairest of them All and the television series Once Upon a Time, one will note a recasting of the Queen as victim of her socio-cultural environment and patriarchal standards of beauty. This chapter proposes to explore how the Queen’s monstrosity is replaced with a more humanistic understanding of her behaviour thereby resulting in a more sympathetic and less monstrous depiction of the “old evil Queen”.

2014

In this article, we argue that Donald Barthelme’s first novel, Snow White, underlines contemporary social problems by placing the well-known characters of fairy-tales in the postmodern consumer society of the sixties. The discrepancy between the two worlds is further emphasized by the general conflict between archaic principles, specifically gender roles, and the contemporary views of the liberated woman of the sixties. Barthelme’s narrator is meditative but discontent, and explicitly tempting his readers to become more conscious and cautious about their narrative expectations. He features the dialectic of the ordinary and the extraordinary within the universe of fairytales, bringing to life a Snow White with touches of Rapunzel and Little Red Ridding Hood, but also an emancipated woman, dramatizing thus the clash of the two worlds through the opposition of monotony and excitement, knowledge and confusion, simple and complex, right and wrong.

2014

The purpose of this study is to inspect how the Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White” has tied the concept of beauty for girls with fairness of skin and how –as a result—modern adaptations of this fairy tale (cartoon, like Warner Bros.’s 1943 animated short Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs and literary, like Helen Oyeyemi’s 2014 novel Boy, Snow, Bird) have reacted to this issue (however different the purpose and methods are) by featuring primarily dark-skinned characters as the protagonists (“So White” in Coal Black and “Bird” in Boy, Snow, Bird) in stark contrast to the original tale. It also covers the effects of the fairytale “Snow White” on equating beauty with light skin amongst young girls, as well as the response it caused as revealed in its two adaptations Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, a short animated feature and Boy, Snow, Bird, a novel.

This paper attempts to present a feminist analysis of Evan Daugherty an Rupert Sanders's Snow White and the Huntsman movie based on the Anglo-American approach to feminist literary theory. It will first explain the feminist literary theory as a term as well as a practice and its function in literary criticism, followed by an explanation of the Anglo-American approach and some of its prominent writers. The paper aims to attempt a feminist analysis of the movie based on the Anglo-American approach and Showalter's feminist critique, using dialogues from and references to the whole relevant scenes of the movie as a defense to show how Evan Daugherty John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini challenged the conventional representation of women in fairy tales with their female characters.

2016

This article 1 draws on the curious coincidence of several film releases of the "Snow White" tale in 2012. The Internet Movie Database lists five films with direct references to the fairy tale, among them Snow White and the Huntsman (directed by Rupert Sanders, starring Charlize Theron and Kristen Stewart) and Mirror Mirror (directed by Tarsem Singh, starring Julia Roberts and Lily Collins). 2 According to Jack Zipes, who collected thirty-five cinematographic representations of "Snow White" in The Enchanted Screen (2011), there is a "profound widespread public interest in a tale [i.e., "Snow White"] that provokes retelling and reflection because it touches upon deeply rooted problems in every culture of the world ranging from what constitutes our notions of beauty to what causes conflicts between women, especially mothers and daughters and stepmothers and daughters" (119). Which "deeply rooted problem" has inspired this recent revival of "Snow White"? Why do we keep retelling this particular fairy tale? 3 Maria Tatar suggests that it is the topic of aging that preoccupies contemporary directors, screenwriters, and audiences: "It may be that there is something about the boomer anxiety about aging that is renewing our interest in Snow White" (Ulaby). In The New Yorker, she adds that Snow White and the Huntsman "captures a deepening anxiety about aging and generational sexual rivalry" (Tatar). The rivalry between mothers and daughters has been a central issue in Second Wave feminist criticism (see, e.g., Barzilai; Gilbert and Gubar). Similarly, Baba Copper has critiqued how closely the mother-daughter rivalry is related to ageism among women, arguing that the problem of women's "generational division" should be called "Daughterism," because being older involves

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs