Who’s the Fairest?: Adapting Snow White
HUM 2085: Film and Television Adaptation
Summer 2013
Dr. Perdigao
May 23, 2013
Film as Medium
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Cinema—from Greek kinein (to move): movie, film (Dick 2)
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Text—from Latin textum (that which has been woven) (2)
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Film as hybrid art—draws on theater, painting, music, dance, mime, photography
(2)
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Narrative film—tells a story
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Film as narrative told through sound image, builds to a climax and culminates in a
resolution (4)
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Movie time vs. running time: movie time manipulates real time (8)
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Roland Barthes’ theory of the reader’s role in the text—no longer a consumer but
producer (269), basis of reader-response criticism in the 1970s
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Applying models of interpretation from literature to the medium of film
Literary Techniques
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Flashback (Dick 270)
-may be introduced by a slow fade-out/fade-in, dissolve, wipe, or quick cut
-furnishes information that is otherwise unavailable, dramatizes a past event
as it is being narrated, or explains the connection between past and present
when none of the characters can do so (270)
Flash-forward (271)
-popular since the 1960s
-some aspect of an event is shown before it occurs
-related to the literary foreshadowing or prolepsis (rhetorical technique in
which a speaker anticipates—and answers—an objection before it has even
been raised) (271-272)
Point of view (272-273)
-first person film, with voice-over narration, subjective camera
-third person narration—omniscient camera, likened to omniscient narrator
Henry James’ “center of consciousness” or “reflector,” identification with one
character (274)
Transforming the Fairy Tale
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“Metamorphosis is central to the fairy tale, which shows us figures endlessly
shifting their shapes, crossing borders, and undergoing change” (Tatar 55).
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Idea of “shape-shifting,” transforming physical body as well as identity
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For Tatar, stories as “shape-shifters”
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“Finally, the transformative magic in fairy tales—their spells, curses, and charms—
lead to metamorphoses that enact the consequences of magical thinking. And yet
the transformation of beasts into princes or boys into hedgehogs, as children
quickly learn, is possible only in the world of stories. Even as fairy tales ultimately
debunk magical thinking, showing that it works only in the realm of story, they also
affirm the magical power embedded in language, the way that the ability to use
words can grant a form of agency unknown to the child who has not yet fully
developed the capacity to use language.” (Tatar 57)
Fragmentation and Cohesion
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“The Grimms seem here to stay, and yet, what we find of Grimm and of fairy tales
in the United States seems often to take the form of cultural debris, fragments of
once powerful narratives that find their way into our language to produce colorful
turns of phrase. In the media, we read about a Goldilocks economy, about the
Emperor's new clothes, and about Sleeping Beauty stocks. In popular send-ups of
the classic plots, the purpose is usually to mock the values found in the earlier
variants, whether it is the virtue of selfless industry or a lack of vanity.” (Tatar 58)
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“The Grimms’ tales seem to have a ubiquitous cultural presence, even if they
appear adapted, refashioned, reconfigured, and often profoundly reinvented. Even
as fairy tales transform themselves, they seek transformative effects, producing
what Graham Greene refers to as ‘excitement and revelation.’” (Tatar 59)
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“The curses, spells, and charms of fairy tales are far removed from what Austin
describes as the performative, for they have the unprecedented power to create real
physical change, not just the power to perform rituals that produce a change in legal
or official status or to persuade, support, or discourage. It may be true that we talk
about language as having somatic effects (words can ‘wound’ or have the power to
‘assault’ us), but, in fact, it is only in fairy tales that they are endowed with the
capacity to produce real physical change.” (Tatar 61)
Transformation
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“For children, all adults possess wizardry in their control over symbolic forms of
expression—they can create illusions, effect changes, and take on agency through
words. The child reading a book, by learning about the magic art of the Great
Humbug, can begin to move from the childhood condition of lacking the words
needed to name, describe, and define what affects us. Fairy tales help children
move from that disempowered state to a condition that may not be emancipation but
that marks the beginnings of some form of agency.” (Tatar 63)
Retelling the Story of Snow White
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2012: Tarsem Singh’s Mirror Mirror, Rupert Sanders’ Snow White and the
Huntsman, and ABC’s television series Once Upon a Time
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Retellings reflect the contemporary culture surrounding the production (or
reproduction of the story)
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The Brothers Grimm’s adaptation of own sources—from first publication to
revisions, alterations of language, development of narrative voice of the stories
(homogenization), expanding the stories to allow for inclusions of morals
(comparison to Peter and Wendy—the narrator’s control over the ending)
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Brothers Grimm text as “educational tool,” new marketing—taking stories from
literate adult audience to children
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From “literary fairy tale” to reflections of a more popular culture
Grimm Revisions
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“Snow White” as less sexualized story than “Little Red Riding Hood” so less
“sanitization” but alteration of character, narrative
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Alteration from role of the “Evil Queen”—jealousy of Snow White’s own mother
in early version
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Snow White’s redefined roles—cook, clean, wash, knit—consistent with conduct
books of the period: gender roles prescribed with women as modest, submissive,
selfless
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Disneyfication of Snow White
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Framed with a book as “establishing shot”
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Revision of details of plot
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Mirrors and other reflective surfaces
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Identity and performance
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Love story
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Awakening of Snow White contingent upon Prince’s kiss
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1930s gendered stereotypes
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Disney’s as dominant version, rewriting how culture remembers the story
The Uses of Enchantment and Disenchantment
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Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (1975)
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Psychoanalytic readings of fairy tales
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Therapeutic benefit to reading fairy tales
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Rivalry with the parent, Oedipal/Electral struggle for power and supremacy
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Queen’s jealousy as projection of child’s own ideas—turning jealousy into that of
the other, for Bettelheim
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Snow White’s desire to kill parents
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Less literally, freedom from parents, individuation
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Snow White’s maturation before second death threat, stops child’s development
into adulthood
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Story of psychological growth, development and maturation into adulthood
Mirrors and Identity
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Psychoanalytic readings, uses of the mirror, from Jacques Lacan to Christian Metz
on film
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Jacques Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” (Écrits,
1966)
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6-18 months old
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Introduction of the “Ideal I”
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“The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from
insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in
the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a
fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic—and,
lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark
with its rigid structure of the subject’s entire mental development” (4)
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Janet Strayer’s “Trapped in the Mirror” (1996): mirror as compelling character in
narrative, projection of society’s desires, the “male gaze” echoed in film
Contemporary Culture
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1970s and 1980s—feminist theories, ideas about the self, language in critical
theory, New Historicism
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New retellings and critical rereadings
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Readings shifting focus from psychoanalytic to classed society—maturation into
contemporary society, prescribed roles for men and women; revisions to parody
those roles
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Feminist readings to challenge the passivity of the princess character and to
humanize the “Evil Queen”
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Role of the “Evil Queen”—power, as masculine rather than feminine, the making of
the female “monster,” even a cannibal (Snow White and the Huntsman?)
The Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White”
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Story begins with queen sewing, in the middle of winter
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Needle—three drops of blood fell onto the snow: white as snow, red as blood, black
as the wood of the window frame (167)
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Snow White reaches age seven—mirror answers Snow White is more fair
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Lungs and liver rather than heart
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Beauty saves her from the huntsman
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Finds dwarfs’ cottage—Goldilocks revelation
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Delight at her beauty
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Asked to keep house, cook, make the beds, wash, sew, knit, keep everything neat
and tidy (171)
The Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White”
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Queen filled with envy
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Disguise—worst fear, old woman
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Offering “pretty things”
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Dwarfs save her from the staylace
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Caution to Snow White—fails to heed, three times
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Red and white of the apple—duality, good and evil of stories
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Dwarfs mourn Snow White for three days—want to bury her but she still looks to
be alive
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Glass coffin—so they see her from all sides
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Name in golden letters
The Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White”
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Marriage upon her awakening
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Stepmother invited
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Now replaced by young queen in mirror’s response
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Punishment—iron slippers; dance until death
The Brothers Grimm’s “The Three Little Men in the Woods”
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Widow and widower, two daughters
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Bathe in milk and drink wine
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Wicked stepmother
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Thrown out into winter landscape to fetch strawberries
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Meets dwarfs, given gifts for charity—more beautiful each day, gold pieces falling
from mouth, king makes her his wife (41)
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Woman’s daughter—becomes uglier each day, toad will jump out of her mouth,
will come to an unhappy end (42-43)
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Moral—benevolence, care, selflessness
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Transformation into a duck to take care of her child
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Three days visit—sword passes over her three times
The Brothers Grimm’s “The Three Little Men in the Woods”
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Stepmother devises own punishment: put in a barrel studded with nails and rolled
down the hill into water (45)
The Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White and Rose Red”
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Widow
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Two rosebushes in garden, white and red roses—children resemble rosebushes
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Children are kind and devout, helpful and cheerful
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Snow White—more quiet and gentle
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See child in woods with glittering white dress (244): angel
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Summertime—Rose Red; wintertime: Snow White, flowers and fire
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Mother reading stories
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Bear visits, leaves to guard treasures after winter
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Gnome
The Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White and Rose Red”
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Transformation of bear after breaking the curse
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Mother plants rosebushes, white and red—etymological story, myth-making
Snow White and the Huntsman and Popular Culture
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Kristen Stewart—passivity of Bella Swan, rivals for her love in the Huntsman and
William (not a vampire and werewolf but close)
Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games and Alice in Tim Burton’s Alice in
Wonderland
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Opening of the film—revision of wish for Snow White: “Once upon a time, in deep
winter, a queen was admiring the falling snow, when she saw a rose blooming in
defiance of the cold. Reaching for it she pricked her finger and three drops of blood
fell. And because the red seemed so alive against the white she thought, ‘If only I
had a child as white as snow, lips as red as blood, hair as black as a raven's wings,
and all with the strength of that rose.’ Soon after a daughter was born to the queen
and was named Snow White.”
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The idea of will, power, and strength for Snow White; admired for defiant spirit as
much as for her beauty
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Beauty in Grimm story
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Role of the huntsman in her escape and safety
Studying the Queen
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Ravenna’s story, reaction to men, power over them
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Ravenna’s beauty as pharmakon, poison and cure
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“When a woman stays young and beautiful forever, the world is hers.”
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“So poisonous was the reign of Ravenna that nature turned on itself and people
turned on each other. The land died and, with it, hope. And all that time she kept
Snow White imprisoned high up in the north tower.”
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Women Snow White meets—scar selves to save their lives
Snow White and the Huntsman and Popular Culture
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Returns to the mirror
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Revelation that Snow White has come of age, that she is the reason why the queen’s
powers wane
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Her innocence and purity can destroy her but she is also her salvation—if she takes
her heart, she will be immortal
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/06/snow-white-and-thehuntsman-and-fairy-tales.html
Prophecies
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“You have eyes, huntsman, but you do not see. You who have been the one with
her the longest. She is life itself. She will heal the land. She is the One. Can’t you
feel it? . . . Where she leads I follow”