(This proposal should be considered for the proposed panel entitled “Appropriation of Fairy Tale in Contemporary Popular Culture” chaired by Alexandra Lykissas who will contact you regarding the panel proposal and interested presenters). In The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre, Jack Zipes argues that “[i]n the case of fairy tales… memes help create and build traditions by creating pools of stories, millions of stories, predicated on the human communication of shared experience. In human minds, we have made distinctions about which tales are more relevant than others and retain in memory the most relevant to retell and re-create” (19-20). Zipes, of course, is writing about fairy tales. The memetic quality of fairy tales has resulted in various re-tellings and re-creations of the story. Snow White is one of these fairy tales that has recently been memed. In my presentation, I explore how the Snow White fairy tale itself, especially the Brothers Grimm version, contains many spaces for expanding the story line, especially with Snow White and the evil queen. The most recent re-tellings of the Snow White tale in the big screen adaptations of Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and the small screen adaptation of Once Upon a Time (2011-present) reflect a cultural need to banish the docile domestic version of Snow White in the Brothers Grimm tale and in the Disney film to create from its ashes a more warrior-like, or kick-ass, heroine. Although each of these adaptations of the tale are not completely successful at striking down the “angel in the house,” they do attempt to portray a strong, active female heroine in a fairy tale tradition that typically portrays women as passive and docile.
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.