The mass consumption of domestic fairy tales in Victorian periodicals had a lasting effect on the popular culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Walt Disney’s film adaptations of the heroine-centered fairy tales of the 1930s and 1950s with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty ultra-conservatized and idealized the marriage practices of the Victorian Era, and those versions of happily-ever-after reverberated through the popular culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In my presentation, I will speculate that popular culture’s traditional views of happily-ever-after stem directly from the fairy tale adaptations within Victorian periodicals and Disney’s conservative appropriation of the genre by tracing the perceptions of happily-ever-after conveyed in Cinderella adaptations. I will specifically examine the following variations: the Grimms’ “Cinderella”; Cinderella adaptations from popular Victorian periodicals; the 1950 animated Disney film; the film Ever After (1998); and the live-action Disney Cinderella (2015). The most recent Cinderella adaptations contain heroines with more agency and courage than those of the Victorian fairy tales because women’s agency is more accepted and expected in recent decades. However, while Ever After and the 2015 Cinderella promote female agency, the characters do live traditionally “happily-ever-after” with marriage, money, and emotional companionship. Finally, I will make the case that the tales found within Victorian periodicals played a larger role than novels in shaping the popular culture of the nineteenth century through today because they were more accessible and readable for the growing literate middle and working classes.
About the presenterSheila Farr
I am an Assistant Professor of English at Thiel College, a small, liberal arts college in Western Pennsylvania, where I teach a variety of courses in the English Department and Honors Institute. My teaching areas include women’s literature, literary adaptation, the novel, digital rhetoric, composition, and research. My research areas include 19th-Century British literature, especially novels by women; fairy tales; adaptation theory; and feminist theory.