Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them 2020949890, 9781793612779, 9781793612786

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Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture

Koppy, Kate Christine Moore. Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture : How We Hate to Love Them, Lexington Books,

Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Koppy, Kate Christine Moore. Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture : How We Hate to Love Them, Lexington Books,

Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture How We Hate to Love Them

Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Kate Christine Moore Koppy

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Koppy, Kate Christine Moore. Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture : How We Hate to Love Them, Lexington Books,

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London, SE11 5AL, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020949890 ISBN 978-1-7936-1277-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-1278-6 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Koppy, Kate Christine Moore. Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture : How We Hate to Love Them, Lexington Books,

Contents

Acknowledgments vii A Note about Citation Practice

ix

PART I: SETTING THE SCENE

1

1 Introduction 3 2 Once Upon a Time, There Was a Story

19

3 What Are Fairy Tales, Anyway?

45

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PART II: CINDERELLA TRANSFORMED IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

63

4 Cinderella’s Subtypes

65

5 Cinderella Variants and Versions

77

6 Cinderella as Shorthand

89

PART III: OLD WINE IN NEW WINE SKINS: CONTEMPORARY FAIRY-TALE PASTICHE ON FILM 7 Fairy-Tale Pastiche, a Rising Trend in the Twenty-First Century

97 99

8 Manhattan Meets Andalasia, and Both Are Changed: Overt Fairy-Tale Pastiche in Disney’s Enchanted 111

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Koppy, Kate Christine Moore. Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture : How We Hate to Love Them, Lexington Books,

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Contents

9 Challenging the Patriarchy and Restoring Interpersonal Harmony: Covert Pastiche in Disney-Pixar’s Brave 127 Conclusion 139 Bibliography 143 Index 157

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About the Author

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Acknowledgments

The word “monograph” comes from Latin—mono for one, graph for write. In literary studies, “monograph” refers to a book like this one, about a single subject, with the name of a single author on the cover, and it is the sort of project required for advancement in the feld. This word conjures visions of the solo author thinking and writing in their ivory tower offce or their drafty garret. But this label belies the way that books are made, even single-author books like this one. This monograph began life as my dissertation in Purdue University’s Comparative Literature Program, where my collegial cohort—J. Case Tompkins, Chad Judkins, Hwanhee Park, and Erin Kissick—worked together to support one another’s research and help each other across the fnish line. During my defense, when I proposed breaking my dissertation into a series of short articles, my committee—Charles Ross, Shaun Hughes, Jeff Turco, and John Hope—insisted that it was a book. I am grateful for their vision, encouragement, and comments at all stages of this process. And I appreciate Judith Lakämper, my acquisitions editor at Lexington Books, for agreeing with them and recognizing the value of this project. This research has been especially aided by access to digital resources. The abundant library holdings and database subscriptions of Marymount University and the Washington Research Library Consortium meant I could do research from offces, classrooms, coffee shops, and my home. Websites like Heidi Anne Heiner’s Sur La Lune, D. L. Ashliman’s Folktexts, Robert Godwin-Jones’s German Stories, Russel Peck’s Cinderella Bibliography, and the Internet Movie Database make public texts and information that were critical to this study. The professional life of an early career scholar who is precariously employed is a challenging one. Working time and energy is divided by vii

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viii

Acknowledgments

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teaching duties, writing, and the continuous job search process. I am incredibly grateful to the colleagues and friends who read drafts and listened to the musings of a frazzled reviser, especially Carl Sachs, Cassandra Good, and Erin Kissick. Finally, I am thankful to Anna and Sofa, the daughters who learned to recognize and avoid the frenzy brought on by inspiration and also to cook for themselves.

Koppy, Kate Christine Moore. Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture : How We Hate to Love Them, Lexington Books,

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A Note about Citation Practice

Citation is not a neutral act. Readers learn about new conversations within the feld and about new possibilities for conversations across felds from citations. The metrics used by university administrations to evaluate scholars for tenure and promotion track citations. When citation choices emphasize engagement with existing scholarship by established researchers, the scholarly conversation can become an echo chamber. Citations, however, also have the power to raise the profles of early career researchers and assist in disseminating their work. As frequently as possible, therefore, I have chosen to cite scholars who are women, who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC), and who are outside the usual conversation within the fragmented world of fairy-tale studies. The space for other voices in this book is, of necessity, limited, so my citation priorities mean less space for eminent fairy-tale scholars. In choosing to cite as I have, my goal has been to move the conversation in directions that embrace ideas rooted in a greater diversity of perspectives. The scholarly conversation I am most interested in being part of is feminist, intersectional, and interdisciplinary. There are new conversations to be had about fairy tales.

ix

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Part I

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SETTING THE SCENE

Koppy, Kate Christine Moore. Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture : How We Hate to Love Them, Lexington Books,

Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Koppy, Kate Christine Moore. Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture : How We Hate to Love Them, Lexington Books,

Chapter 1

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Introduction

Hundreds of fairy tales enter the cultural space each year as flms, novels, and picture books. The fairy-tale genre pervades narrative media in the United States today. Paradoxically, though, we censure fairy tales even as we consume them as entertainment and use them to communicate about the world we live in. These narratives, though, have been under-examined in scholarly literature to date.1 This monograph seeks to understand the proliferation of fairy tales—in children’s picture books, in young adult fantasy novels, in popular literature, and on screens large and small—as well as the proliferation of harsh fairy-tale critiques—in parenting advice publications, in religious magazines, and in feminist scholarship. Arguments about the value of fairy tales in contemporary American society intersect with arguments about how to raise children to be good adults, about the place of faith in society, about the false dichotomy between faith and science, about evangelical Christians’ perception of persecution. This monograph does not offer prescriptive answers to these questions, but it does reframe the conversation to include the intersections among them. American culture is experiencing a profound shift. Fairy tales (and their popularity) are both a signal of this shift and a reason for the shift. Their proliferation is the result of changes in other areas of U. S. culture, and they infuence the ways that this culture continues to change. In an increasingly pluralistic and secular United States, fairy tales have become a key part of what I call American secular scripture.2 That is, fairy tales form a corpus of shared stories that work to maintain a sense of community among diverse audiences in the United States, much as biblical scripture and associated texts used to. To start to understand this dynamic, I want you to think for a minute about being with your extended family at a big family meal like Thanksgiving, 3

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Christmas, or the Fourth of July. If your extended family is anything like mine, at some point the telling and retelling of family stories will start: stories of childhood silliness, of crises averted, of teenage rebellion. At any given family gathering, a subset of the total corpus of family stories will be told, but over the course of many gatherings as the members of the family tell and retell these stories, the narratives remind those who star in the stories who they have been. The narratives also communicate the history of this family to its newest community members, who may be added by birth, marriage, or association. Often the youngest members of a family can tell stories about events that happened long before their births as though they had been there. The ability to recognize family stories as familiar stories and to participate in the maintenance of the community through storytelling strengthens each person’s sense of belonging to the group. Relating complete narratives, however, is not the only way to reinforce belonging. Allusion to family stories through key phrases or punch lines works just as well. These pieces of narrative, taken out of their original context and applied to new situations, help the members of a community to make sense of the world they live in through reference to the narratives they know, and to easily communicate their ideas about this world to others who know the same narratives. For example, in my mother’s family to say that someone “can’t say ‘supersonic’” is to say that person is unaware of their own abilities. It makes no sense to those outside this family, but insiders know that this phrase refers to the time when my then-four-year-old aunt, the ffth child who is seven years younger than her next elder sibling, wanted someone to read her the cereal box. One by one, she asked each of her elder siblings, and one by one they reminded her that she could read. She insisted that she couldn’t, and they insisted that she try. In exasperation, she pointed to the words on the cereal box and shouted, “But I can’t say ‘supersonic’!” Clearly, they were right. Pieces of narrative, like this one, excerpted from their original context serve as shibboleths that separate the members of a community from the nonmembers. The supersonic story only ever gets told in its entirety when a newcomer to my family hears the fragment and fails to laugh. The person who does not laugh at the joke when everyone else does, like the most recent spouse to marry in or the child who is just becoming aware of the stories, knows that they have not yet achieved full member status within the community. Similar to how family stories participate in the maintenance of family identities, narratives help to create and maintain larger communities. For the purposes of this monograph, I take the word “community” to mean any group of people who share an identity label.3 Examples of these identity labels include words like American, Black, Christian, queer, each of which has a community associated with it. All individuals, of course, have complex personal identities

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Introduction

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located at the intersections of the many communities to which they belong.4 The community identifer at the center of this monograph is the national identity of American, shared by all of the people who make the United States their home. In any particular community, a group of core narratives reinforce communal bonds by serving as shared stories. Once the corpus of shared narratives becomes a cohesive unit, they constitute the raw material for new narratives. Creators of other texts allude to, draw from, or rework the material presented by the core group with purposes ranging from satire to reverence. The experience of recognizing an allusion in a text reinforces a person’s sense of membership in the same community with the creator and with other people who also recognize the allusion. For the people living in the United States today, fairy tales, this book will show, serve in this capacity of shared stories. Over time, the core narratives in a community will change by adding new stories of the same kind, abandoning some stories, or shifting to a different kind of story. As this change happens, allusions to the old corpus become obsolete. Allusions continue to point to the same place, but people are no longer able to follow the reference. For example, in the classroom, I am sometimes confounded by my undergraduates’ inability to decode the system of allusions in the texts on my world literature syllabus. The problem, I fnally realized, is that although most students have some familiarity with the biblical scripture that many of these texts draw from and allude to, they lack fuency with its stories and images because biblical scripture is not in their corpus of core narrative. However, although my undergraduates struggled to recognize the parallels between the prologue to Goethe’s Faust and the book of Job, sacred scripture in both Jewish and Christian faiths, they could fnd parallels with Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast in a wide variety of texts. Writing in 2010, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life concluded that “Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion.”5 Their report on the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey describes their analysis: The Pew Forum’s religious knowledge survey included 32 questions about various aspects of religion: the Bible, Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism, world religions, religion in public life, and atheism and agnosticism. The average respondent answered 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions correctly. Just 2% of those surveyed answered 29 or more questions correctly (including just eight individuals, out of 3,412 surveyed, who scored a perfect 32); 3% correctly answered fewer than fve questions (including six respondents who answered no questions correctly).6

Not only do Americans in general not know much about religion in general, but American Christians do not know much about their own scripture. Pew

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notes, for example, that only 41 percent of Christians surveyed could “identify Job as the Biblical fgure known for remaining obedient to God despite extraordinary suffering.”7 Thus, my students are not alone in their lack of knowledge about religious texts. Although 37 percent of Americans surveyed by Pew reported reading sacred scripture outside of worship services at least once per week,8 they tend to select favorite passages, limiting their exposure to the full corpus of religious material, and increasing diversity of faiths means that even those 37 percent who are reading on their own are not all reading the same sacred scriptures. This increasing diversity of religious belief among Americans, including secular humanism and atheism,9 means that the Bible no longer serves as a means of cultural cohesion. Although one might argue that sacred scripture has recently been making a comeback in political discourse, there is still a sharp divide between biblical narratives and the production of twentyfrst-century texts, be they highbrow art and literature or popular culture. Contemporary texts like Madeleine L’Engle’s Certain Women, which is a modern retelling of the story of King David, must overtly broadcast their intertextual references with direct quotes and names borrowed from biblical scripture.10 In the United States in the twenty-frst century, the corpus of core narratives is dominated by fairy tales. It is Grimm, Andersen, Disney, and Lang that Americans draw inspiration from and allude to as we create the narratives that tell us who we have been and who we might become. As Cristina Bacchilega writes in Postmodern Fairy Tales, “The stories we tell produce and fnd us in the past, and enable us to live through the present’s uncertainties by projecting us into the future,” so it is imperative that we turn scholarly attention toward these stories.11 This book frst lays out the transition from the biblical scripture of Judaism and Christianity that informed community identity in Early Modern Europe and the American Early Republic to a shared corpus made up of fairy tales. Then follows an analysis of the way that new narrative texts in a variety of media draw on the raw materials of fairy tales to tell new stories. Fairy tales function in this way for the American community because they have not been sacred to any single group, and because they have already crossed national, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries, so similar stories exist in the corpuses familiar to different groups of people. For these reasons, the community of people who make their home in the United States and who call themselves American can use these stories to reinforce community identity. Those members of the American community who also identify with marginalized communities, however, rarely see themselves represented, and far too often see themselves represented poorly. The fairy-tale stories American culture has been telling are problematic because systemic racism,

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Introduction

7

heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and ableism in the industries of cultural production favor stories that reinforce white supremacist patriarchy. As Dhonielle Clayton, cofounder of We Need Diverse Books, noted in her virtual talk at the 2020 Gaithersburg Book Festival, “Without [diverse books] we’re not telling the truth.”12 The United States is a kaleidoscope of communities, with the potential to create striking patterns of dynamic interaction, but our narrative media tend to show us a static image. Because I am a cis-het, abled, white woman, my authority to comment on these aspects of contemporary fairy tales is limited. In an effort to balance critical analysis of these issues with the call to stay in my lane, I have, throughout this monograph, quoted and cited voices who can speak to these concerns authoritatively, and my hope is that this book will prompt conversation among literary scholars with perspectives and training that differ from mine. In The Dark Fantastic, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas writes eloquently of her experience of consuming fantastic stories as a Black woman in her call for critical race counterstorytelling:

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In the Anglo-American fantastic tradition, the Dark Other is the spectacle, the monstrous Thing that is the root cause of hesitation, ambivalence, and the uncanny. [. . .] Readers and hearers of fantastic tales who have been endarkened and Othered by the dominant culture can never be plausible conquering heroes nor prizes to be won in the fantastic. [. . .] For many readers, viewers, and fans of color [. . .] at the level of consciousness, to participate in the fantastic is to watch yourself be slain—and justifably so, as the story recounts.13

Thomas’s analysis shows that the fantastic, the discursive space for exploring social issues, which has the potential to imagine new ways of being, has thus far tended to reinforce the structures and ideas of white supremacy in the new social systems it proposes. While Thomas’s monograph analyzes teen and adult fantastic flms and television in order to articulate a broadly applicable theory, the body of scholarship by Vivian Yenika-Agbaw analyzes representations of Blackness in literature for children and similarly fnds that some texts set in Africa-inspired settings reinforce white supremacist power structures.14 This dynamic and its interaction with Americans’ ideas about race deserves more attention than it has been receiving in discussions of literature in classrooms and in scholarly publications. Disability studies offers similar calls to reevaluate the texts that we create and consume. In her analysis of Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Ann Schmiesing fnds a dynamic similar to Thomas’s theory of the Dark Fantastic—disability serves as a narrative tool for advancing the plot or revealing a character’s relative goodness (or lack thereof).15 Although Schmiesing’s analysis includes only the Grimms’ and closely

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Chapter 1

related texts for comparison, the pattern she articulates can also be found in fairy-tale texts throughout Western culture up to the present. More broadly, in Disfgured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space, Amanda Leduc explores her own reading and viewing experiences of Western fairy tales and refects on the impact negative representations of disability have on disabled readers. In a hopeful moment, Leduc posits the potential for fairy-tales stories to depict characters who remain “disabled throughout the [story] and [don’t] encounter a magical cure.”16 Stories that do this would be a powerful challenge to the ableism endemic to contemporary American culture. Work about fairy tales by scholars using queer theory has become increasingly mainstream in fairy-tale studies in recent years. In his introduction to a special issue of Marvels & Tales in 2015, Lewis Seifert notes that “queer reading practices work against the expected, the familiar, the predictable—of gender, sexuality, and structures of domination more generally—exposing their unexpected, unfamiliar, and unpredictable sides.”17 This approach to analysis and interpretation helps both scholars and popular audiences to see the queerness latent in texts and helps authors creating contemporary adaptations to depict queer identities and desires within the narrative structures of familiar fairy-tale stories.18 Despite all of these criticisms and despite all of fairy tales’ shortcomings, this problematic form remains a powerful narrative force. On American pages and screens, the fairy tale is widely replicated in a variety of genres and media. In recent years, Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and Brynhild have graced the silver screen; television programs inspired by fairy tales continue to be popular; and Disney is remaking its animated fairy-tale canon with live-action flms. In 2014, Disney’s Malefcent, the story of the villain from Sleeping Beauty, grossed $240 million in the United States in the frst six months after release.19 The Disney company’s choice to make this as a live-action flm rather than animation marked a departure from their wellestablished practice. Fast on the heels of this success, the live-action remake of Cinderella was announced. In ffteen weeks in U.S. theaters, this flm grossed $200 million.20 These box offce numbers for remakes of familiar stories are on par with the numbers for releases of new animated flms over this period. This practice of remaking previously animated flms as liveaction ones has continued with Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, and Aladdin. In the fnal decades of the twentieth century, Disney produced two parallel streams of feature flms: animated fairy tales and live-action family movies. Both required signifcant investment in creative story development to be sustainable. The box offce numbers for recent live-action fairy-tale remakes indicates that Disney has found a way to economize on the creative effort by retelling familiar stories outright rather than creating new and novel plots, characters, and settings. At the same time, fairy-tale stories and allusions also

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Introduction

9

thrive on the small screen. In Channeling Wonder, Pauline Greenhill and Jill Terry Rudy argue that the adaptability and familiarity of fairy tales make them uniquely suited to the serialized nature of television programming.21 As the reading and viewing public encounter them across media, the narratives of the traditional fairy-tale canon are the corpus of core narratives from which contemporary American society—from the mid-twentieth century to the time of writing in 2020—builds other stories, including that quintessentially American fairy tale, the story of the American dream. As more and more immigrants arrive in the United States with a variety of ethnic backgrounds, the core narratives they shared with their communities of origin are not the same as the core narratives in this new home. “At a time like this,” Jim Cullen argues, “the American Dream becomes a kind of lingua franca, an idiom that everyone [. . .] can understand.” The Walt Disney Company has been able to capitalize on this need for a new lingua franca, forging a connection between the American dream and fairy tales from their earliest forays into flm to their current work. Thus, just as sacred scripture provided the corpus of core narratives for previous generations, the fairy tale now acts as the lingua franca of allusion in art and literature, as the basis for typological reinvention, and as a shared story that reinforces notions of culture and community. Fairy tales have become our secular scripture, our primary narrative tools of cohesion, even though they do not represent the diversity of the people present in the United States.22 Americans’ exposure to fairy tales begins early in life and cuts across divisions of race, class, and faith. The interconnected nature of merchandising that links flms, picture books, toys, and clothing ensures that everyone interacts with fairy-tale stories whether they seek them out or not.23 Scholars from a variety of felds have investigated the role that fairy tales play in the lives of children and come to opposing conclusions. Because childhood is the point of contact with fairy-tale narratives and because they are tacitly sanctioned by the adult authority fgures in children’s lives, fairy tales have a signifcant impact on contemporary American children’s perceptions of the world. On one hand, some scholars fnd fairy tales’ impact on the way that children conceptualize the world they live in to be positive. In Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood, folklorist Maria Tatar argues that these “intoxicating, enthralling, and occasionally terrifying” stories “serve as companions and compass roses, offering shocks, terrors and wonders, as well as wisdom, comfort and sustenance.”24 Literary scholar Elizabeth Harries agrees and draws a direct line between the poet Anne Sexton’s experience of fairy tales as a child and the art she created as an adult.25 Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim goes even further, insisting on the necessity of fairy tales for successful development. His book The Uses of Enchantment “attempts to show how fairy stories represent in imaginative form what the process of healthy

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human development consists of, and how the tales make such development attractive for the child to engage in.”26 J. R. R. Tolkien points out, however, a downside to associating fairy tales with childhood: “Fairystories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the ‘nursery,’ as shabby or oldfashioned furniture is relegated to the playroom, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.”27 The labeling of fairy tales as childish in the same way that crayons and blocks are childish things to be given up once one reaches maturity leads to a devaluation of this corpus of stories among critics and scholars. On the other hand, some parents and educators view fairy tales with suspicion and discourage children from reading them. Sometimes the suspicion is motivated by an association of fction with lying, and at other times, motivated by misogynistic subtexts.28 William Nelson traces the debate about the value of fction back to the classical period of Western European literature, fnding that at that time, the value of fction for entertainment and for truthtelling was recognized. Nelson reports an increasing unease with fctional stories coming into Western intellectual discourse with Christianity, especially with regard to the veracity of gospels and testaments claiming to be scripture.29 This unease, particularly with verisimilar fction, persists into the Early Modern Period, as evidenced by the prevalence of the veracity topos in so many Early Modern novels that claim to have been found in eyewitness manuscript or epistolary form in the attic of the author’s dearly departed relative. On the deceptive power of fairy tales specifcally, folklorist Rudolph Schenda criticizes the mismatch between fairy-tale norms and social norms in the contemporary world warning that “fairy tales offer children [. . .] such a thick packet of long-outdated familial, social, and conjugal norms that their divergence from actual patterns of living can lead to powerful disorientation.”30 Schenda and authors in the popular press who agree with him are arguing that child readers cannot fnd value in storyworlds that are far removed from their own life experience. Schenda, writing in 1986, could not have predicted the innovations in fairy-tale stories since then (see part III), but these criticisms persist despite the ongoing change in the narratives. Further, these criticisms rest on an expectation of verisimilitude that itself is problematic. The expectation that our art and literature resemble our reality is misplaced and myopic. Indeed, C. S. Lewis asserts that frequent forays into the discursive space of story “strengthen our relish for real life. This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual.”31 Tolkien also concludes that tales of the marvelous in particular offer the audience “Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, [and] Consolation,” which help readers to cope not only with the challenges of modern mechanized society but also with the challenge of accepting human mortality.32 Madeleine L’Engle concurs. She writes that “a story where myth, fantasy, fairy tale, or science fction explore

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Introduction

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and ask questions moves beyond fragmatic dailiness to wonder. Rather than taking the child away from the real world, such stories are preparation for living in the real world with courage and expectancy.”33 More recently, in her analysis of women writers’ use of the fantastic since the 1960s, Lauren Lacey asserts that they “are engaged in a process of developing an ethics of becoming that both interrupts and revises power structures that support some of the most damaging ideologies of our times, ranging from patriarchal belief systems to environmentally destructive economic policies.”34 In their writing about writing, these authors offer their careful consideration of the role that the fantastic plays in the lives of readers, particularly the critical role it has in the development of children’s ability to think, imagine, and understand complex ideas. A healthy imagination, and the experience of imagining along with fantastic texts, prepares audiences for encountering the unexpected in the real world. Building on the work of John Niles and Northrop Frye on narrative in society, this monograph argues that fairy tales have become American culture’s secular scripture. John Niles argues that it is our use of story that separates man from other animals,35 and he identifes several functions of narrative including transmission of current knowledge, celebration of a community’s core values, and the creation of a ludic discursive space.36 Part II of this book will analyze the Cinderella tale type with a focus on the core values being depicted, and Part III will examine fairy-tale pastiche as a discursive space. Northrop Frye gives one model for how American culture got to where we are. His book The Secular Scripture posits that every society has stories of at least two kinds: the mythical and the fabulous. Although mythical and fabulous narratives may have similar structures, the critical difference between them is the authority and social function they carry.37 The mythical narratives are the “more important group,” as they occupy the central ground of a society’s verbal culture, are considered to be revealed text, offer cosmic wisdom, and include secular stories of national origin.38 The fabulous folktale narratives, in contrast, are the peripheral group of narratives, which provide entertainment and have a more nomadic existence, crossing the boundaries of language and culture, though “as literature develops, ‘secular’ stories also begin to take root in the culture and contribute to the shared heritage of allusion.”39 Over time, individual mythical narratives coalesce into a mythology and inhere within a culture in response to social forces.40 Once established, mythologies can absorb fabulous material, through a sort of mythological imperialism, as with the history books of the Old Testament having become sacred.41 Jack Zipes argues that this has happened with fairy tales as the classical fairy tale makes it appear that we are all part of a universal community with shared values and norms, that we are all striving for the same

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happiness. [. . .] We need only have faith and believe in the classical fairy tale, just as we are expected to have faith and believe in the American fag as we swear the pledge of allegiance.42

This monograph asserts that in the contemporary United States the core narrative function that Frye describes is fulflled by fairy tales, though not only in their classical forms to which Zipes refers, and I will argue that their presence in contemporary American culture is deeply pervasive. Fairy-tale stories show up in books and flms not only as overt adaptations that use the names and settings of familiar tales, but also as the narrative structure underlying verisimilar fction and nonfction narratives, and as a shorthand we use to talk to each other. Because of these many roles they play in contemporary American society, fairy-tale texts—literary and cinematic—must be studied alongside and in conversation with the stark and dark texts, which generally appear in anthologies and surveys of modern literature. We particularly need more scholarly attention to this dynamic—the United States is a nation made up of multiple communities based on race, religion, language, and socioeconomic status, but the consumption of fairy tales cuts across these divisions. Growing up in the United States means becoming familiar with the new canon of tales largely formed by the Disney corporation’s transmedia storytelling. Disney’s animated flms and related fairy-tale materials pervade American childhoods, but they don’t accurately represent American childhoods. Publishers, authors, screenwriters, animators, and characters are dominated by white faces. Fairytale stories reinforce white, heteronormative, Euro-American ideals, worldviews, and standards of beauty, and thereby reinforce the marginalization of BIPOC, LGBTQ folks, and people with disabilities. America’s cultural hegemony around the world exports this lack of representation and threatens to eclipse creative work grounded in other cultures, particularly in the postcolonial anglophone world.43 This book is an argument for the inclusion of fairy-tale narratives, in both literary and cinematic media, in the academic canon of contemporary literature. A community’s scriptural texts fulfll three functions: they provide origin stories, enumerate rules for living, and offer examples of lives lived well and ill. For most of human history, sacred scripture, stories of the community’s gods endorsed by their religious leaders, fulflled this role. In the last halfmillennium, this has ceased to be true. Part I, “Setting the Scene,” traces the decline of biblical scripture in the Western world and takes up the question of how fairy tales became secular scripture. Attention is given in chapter 2, “Once Upon a Time, There Was a Story,” to the historical role of sacred scripture as core narrative for maintaining community, particularly the way that sacred scripture suffused daily life through media like the book of hours

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Introduction

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and schoolbooks from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century. This chapter then offers several snapshots of the transition from biblical scripture as a corpus of core narratives to fairy tales as a secular scripture. Chapter 3, “What Are Fairy Tales, Anyway?,” takes up competing critical theories of fairy-tale origins, the dynamics of tradition, and the ways in which fairy tales are fantastic, simultaneously conservative and radical, and inherently intertextual. One of the functions of secular scripture is the maintenance and dissemination of cultural values. A close look at the trend of revision within the tradition of a single tale type can, therefore, help to illuminate the values of the cultures for which each variant was produced.44 Part II of this book focuses on “Cinderella Transformed in the Twenty-First Century.” In chapter 4, analysis of the changes in the Cinderella tradition over time exemplifes the arguments outlined in part I regarding the way that familiar narratives become the cohesive glue that a community uses to defne itself. As one of the most widely attested and widely studied tale types, with versions of the tale recorded as early as ancient China and Greece, the Cinderella tale offers a compelling case study in consistency across variation. The longevity of the Cinderella story is a testament to the conservative aspect of fairy tales. Readers tend to think this story is one story when in reality it has been many stories united by a critical mass of common motifs, dramatis personae, and motivations. The individual Cinderella tales which I will discuss in chapter 5 begin with Giambattista Basile’s early seventeenth-century variant and follow the tale type through time to Malinda Lo’s early twenty-frst-century novel. In this discussion, I am interested in the Cinderella character’s social status at the beginning of the text, in the qualities or actions for which the text seems to be rewarding her, and in the portion of the narrative on which emphasis is placed through extended description. It is the changes in these aspects of the narrative, which chapter 6 argues, will be most salient to understanding our collective love affair with this tale type. This chapter also serves to establish a methodology for reading fairy tales as secular scripture which can then be generalized to other tale type traditions. Part III, “Old Wine in New Wine Skins: Contemporary Fairy-Tale Pastiche on Film,” will consider more innovative narrative possibilities of fairy tales. The category of fairy-tale pastiche is home to texts that draw on multiple tale types and on contemporary American ideals to tell stories that offer criticism, which may be directed at fairy-tale norms, contemporary American norms, or both. The recent flms Brave and Enchanted are contemporary fairy tales which do not claim participation in the tradition of a specifc tale type, but they are nevertheless recognizable as fairy tales. Each of these simultaneously participates in the broad fairy-tale tradition while also commenting on some of its norms: pastoral image of nature, patriarchal

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Chapter 1

control of the family, and marriage without real choice. This section shows how the motifs, dramatis personae, and functions of the fairy tales of the traditional canon have become an inventory of building blocks, which can be mixed and matched to create wholly new stories, disconnected from the tradition of any one tale. Brave and Enchanted engage with fairy-tale norms in strikingly different ways. The animated feature Brave presents a coherent fairy-tale story while shifting the focus from the creation of a relationship with the gendered other to the maintenance of relationships within the nuclear family. This story focuses on the matriarchal power structure within the family and challenges the fairy-tale norm of marriage without choice. The flm Enchanted, meanwhile, interrupts the fairy tale it begins presenting by transporting the characters from an animated green world to the middle of Manhattan. In this case, the female hero makes a valiant effort to uphold fairy-tale norms in the face of twenty-frst-century New Yorker skepticism. The flm concludes with the fairy-tale maiden and the Manhattan lawyer negotiating a middle ground between fairy tales and that twenty-frst-century skepticism.

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NOTES 1. As recently as the spring of 2018, fairy-tale discourse dominated the popular press coverage of the wedding between Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, as in Caroline Kitchner, “The Enduring Appeal of the Fairy-Tale Wedding,” The Atlantic (May 18, 2018). Fairy-tale discourse has also framed the discussion of the Trump family’s role in U. S. politics from the campaign through the frst two years of his presidency as in Jon Allsop, “Inside the Fairy-Tale Mind of Trump,” The Columbia Journalism Review (September 27, 2017). 2. My thanks to Charles Ross for introducing me to the phrase “secular scripture,” which was frst coined by Northrop Frye in his 1976 book of that title based on the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he gave at Harvard. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). On fairy tales as scripture, see Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 179. The concept is explored more thoroughly in part I of this book. 3. My use of the word “community” this way is a departure from established usage in the felds of anthropology and folklore. I nonetheless stand by my choice to use it this way in this monograph. 4. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality is key here. For the frst articulation of this idea, see Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Policies,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989 (1989): 39–168.

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Introduction

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5. Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know— but Doesn’t (San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 2007), 1. 6. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, Full Report, Project Director, Luis Lugo (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, Published September, 2012), 16, Accessed January 2015 via http:​//​www​​.pewf​​orum.​​ org​/O​​ther-​​Belie​​fs​-an​​d​-Pra​​ctice​​s​/U​-S​​-Reli​​gious​​-Know​​le​dge​​-Surv​​ey​.as​​px. 7. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, Full Report, 20–21. 8. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, Full Report, 12. 9. For a discussion of American religious diversity, see “Survey Methodology” in Pew’s 2010 report on the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey and the 2007 report Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey: Religious Affliation: Diverse and Dynamic, Project Director, Luis Lugo (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, Published February, 2008), Accessed July, 2015 via http:​//​www​​ .pewf​​orum.​​org​/f​​i les/​​2013/​​05​/re​​port-​​relig​​ious-​​lands​​cape-​​st​udy​​-full​​.pdf. 10. Madeleine L’Engle, Certain Women: A Novel (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1993). Other texts to consider in this vein include William Faulkner, Absolom, Absolom! (New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday, 2011); Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2011); and Robert Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1985). 11. Cristina Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 24. 12. Dhonielle Clayton, Adam Gidwitz, and Hena Khan, “How Diverse Books Can Open Minds and Change the World,” Wade Hudson, Moderator (Virtual Panel Discussion), Gaithersburg Book Festival (June 24, 2020). 13. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, The Dark Fantastic (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2018), 23. Empahsis in original. 14. See, for example, Vivian Yenika-Agbaw, “Isadora’s Adaptation of Grimms’ Fairy Tales & African Childhood,” Making Connections: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cultural Diversity 12, no. 1 (2010): 41–48; Vivian Yenika-Agbaw, “Black Cinderella: Multicultural Literature and School Curriculum,” Pedagogy, Culture, and Society 22, no. 2 (2014): 233–50. 15. Ann Schmiesing, Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2014), 1–3. 16. Amanda Leduc, Disfgured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2020), 227. 17. Lewis C. Seifert, “Introduction: Queer(Ing) Fairy Tales,” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 29, no. 1 (2015): 15–20 at 17. 18. For an analysis of representations of queer identities in publications for adults from 1997 to 2010 and in the nascent queer young adult feld since 2015, see Alayna Cole, “Smashing the Heteropatriarchy: Representations of Queerness in Reimagined Fairy Tales,” TEXT Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 22, no. 2 (October 2018): np. 19. Internet Movie Database (IMDb), www​.imdb​.com.

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20. Internet Movie Database (IMDb). 21. Pauline Greenhill and Jill Terry Rudy, Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales, Television, and Intermediality (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2014), 2, 5–6. 22. Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 6. 23. On the pervasive nature of fairy tales in the lives of children see Lutz Röhrich, “Introduction,” in Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 1–9. See also Lutz Röhrich, Folktales and Reality, trans. Peter Tokofsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), esp. chaps. 6–7. In Röhrich’s book “folktale” is used to translate Märchen for which the term “fairy tale” is used in this book. 24. Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood (New York, NY: Norton, 2009), 30, 5. 25. Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). On Angela Carter and the interplay of fairy tales, fction, and criticism in contemporary letters, see Stephen Benson, ed., Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2008). 26. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1977, New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989), 13. 27. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy-Stories: Expanded Edition, with Commentary and Notes, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (London: HarperCollins, 2008), 44. For an analysis of the changing role of children’s literature in a globalized capitalist society, see Jack Zipes, Relentless Progress: The Reconfguration of Children’s Literature, Fairy Tales, and Storytelling (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009). See also David MacFadyen, Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges: Russian Animated Film since WWII (Toronto: McGill-Queens Press, 2005), xiv. 28. For a review of the literature relating to fairy tales and misogyny, see Donald Haase, “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship,” in Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004); and Kay Stone, “The Misuses of Enchantment: Controversies on the Signifcance of Fairy Tales,” in Some Day Your Witch Will Come (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2008). On women fnding their voices in tales, see Valerie Paradiž, Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairytales (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2005). (My thanks to Shaun Hughes for suggesting this book.) For an analysis of the interaction of gender and genre in folklore genre theory, see Amy Shuman, “Gender and Genre,” in Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, ed. Susan T. Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. J. Young (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 71–88. 29. William Nelson, “The Boundaries of Fiction in the Renaissance: A Treaty Between Truth and Falsehood,” ELH 36 (1969): 30–58 at 31–32. See also, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). In contemporary American culture,

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Introduction

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this unease lingers, especially among conservative religious groups. For an overview of twentieth-century arguments, see Leland Ryken, Triumphs of the Imagination: Literature in the Christian Perspective (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1979). 30. Rudolph Schenda, “Telling Tales—Spreading Tales: Change in the Communicative Forms of a Popular Genre,” in Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 75–94 at 89. See also, Emma Gray, “Parents Say Classic Fairy Tales are Too Scary to Read to Kids (STUDY),” Huffngton Post (February 21, 2012); Libby Copeland, “Are Fairy Tales out of Fashion?” Slate (February 29, 2012); and Richard Dawkins’s speech at the Cheltenham Science Festival, as reported in Sarah Knapton, “Reading Fairy Stories to Children Is Harmful, says Richard Dawkins,” The Telegraph (June 4, 2014), http:​/​/www​​.tele​​graph​​.co​.u​​k​/new​​s​/sci​​ence/​​ scien​​ce​-ne​​ws​/10​​87591​​2​/Rea​​ding-​​fairy​​-stor​​ies​-t​​o​-chi​​ldren​​-is​-h​​armfu​​l​-​say​​s​-Ric​​hard-​​ Dawki​​ns​.ht​​ml. Note also the commenters who agree with these points of view. 31. C. S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 15. 32. Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy-Stories, 59 and 74–75. 33. Madeline L’Engle, “Preparation for Real Life,” in Madeline L’Engle Herself: Refections on a Writing Life (New York, NY: Convergent Books, 2018), 165. 34. Lauren J. Lacey, The Past That Might Have Been, the Future That May Come: Women Writing Fantastic Fiction, 1960s to the Present (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2014), Rakuten Kobo ebook, Introduction, para. 1. 35. John D. Niles, Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature (Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 1. 36. Niles, Homo Narrans, 2–4. 37. Frye, The Secular Scripture, 8. 38. Frye, The Secular Scripture, 6–8. Frye’s position is not, of course, universally shared. In his introduction to The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), George S. Williamson offers a balanced overview of the widely varying theoretical attitudes toward mythology from the eighteenth century to the present. He cites the work of Ivan Strensky and Bruce Lincoln, both critical of the value of myth (5), in opposition to the work of those like Frye, Bettelheim, Jung, Levi-Strauss, and Zipes, who argue that mythological art and literature have some inherent value for the people who both produce and consume it. 39. Frye, The Secular Scripture, 7–9. 40. Frye, The Secular Scripture, 9–13. 41. Frye, The Secular Scripture, 13. 42. Jack Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale: The Thomas D. Clark Lectures 1993 (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 5. 43. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” TEDGlobal, 2009; Thomas, The Dark Fantastic. Thomas speaks to the Black experience in the United States and the United Kingdom, while Adichie addresses similar issues with a more global view.

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Chapter 1

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44. The word “variant” refers to an innovative branch within a tale type tradition. “Cendrillon” and “Aschenputtel” are different variants of the 510A tradition. The word “version” refers to an edition, translation, or retelling of a specifc variant, though it may or may not blend elements from multiple variants. Disney’s 1950 Cinderella flm, for example, claims to be a version of Perrault’s “Cendrillon” variant, but also includes elements of Grimms’ “Aschenputtel” variant.

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Chapter 2

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Once Upon a Time, There Was a Story

In his book The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall notes, “We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”1 It is our addiction to stories, he argues, that separates Homo sapiens from our animal cousins and creates a broad community of human beings. As I presented in the Introduction, smaller groups of this broad human community also use narratives to establish and maintain identity. Families, ethnic groups, nationalities, and religious denominations all use stories to tell each other who they are. As communities evolve, however, the stories that work to maintain identity also change. This chapter traces the decline of biblical scripture’s role as America’s community story and shows that fairy tales have come to serve some of those functions. As a community’s stories change over time, older texts become less comprehensible to newer audiences. In a recent world literature course I taught, for example, the undergrads were unable to make the connection between the prologue to Goethe’s Faust and the Hebrew scripture’s book of Job, in which God allowed Satan to destroy Job’s life in order to test his faithfulness to the God who had always protected and prospered him.2 Job, unconscious of this bargain, remained faithful to God despite the hardships visited upon him by Satan, and was ultimately rewarded.3 In Goethe’s play, in contrast, God allows Mephistopheles to attempt to lure Faust away from the right path. Mephistopheles’s efforts take the form of a bargain with Faust that Mephistopheles will give him a continuous stream of new experiences but claim his soul the moment Faust is content.4 Faust is aware of the bargain he has made with the devil and participates fully in the range of experiences, both good and bad, that Mephistopheles offers him. This contrast between Job’s and Faust’s levels of participation in the destruction of their own lives offers fertile ground for conversation in the classroom, but only if students 19

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Chapter 2

come to the latter text equipped with knowledge of the biblical story. In my experience they are able to discuss Faust’s interactions with Margarete, Wagner, and Mephistopheles in terms of morality, but their lack of familiarity with the Job narrative inhibits their ability to notice the complexity of Goethe’s presentation. Although most students have some familiarity with biblical scripture, and some even attend worship services every weekend, they lack fuency with biblical stories and images because these are not the core narratives at the heart of their community. The communicative effcacy of Goethe’s allusion to Job and other biblical allusions that pervade Western literature from the medieval period through the Enlightenment has depended upon the public’s habit of daily contact with biblical text in a variety of media including attendance at annual mystery plays in public spaces during church festivals and at corporate worship where they heard scripture read out loud, listened to homilies, and viewed stained glass windows and statues more than once per week. In addition to this, elite audiences engaged in personal devotional reading and displayed art inspired by biblical themes in their homes. In the medieval and Early Modern periods in Europe and its colonies, the stories of biblical scripture were sacred to devout believers but also foundational to public culture. In any culture, sacred scripture is text that provides an origin story, enumerates rules for living, and offers positive and negative examples of interaction with those rules. The Tanakh (the Hebrew Scriptures or the Old Testament, considered sacred by both Jews and Christians) does all of these things. Genesis chapters 1 and 2 offer creation stories. Rules for living can be found in the Ten Commandments, which appear in both the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, as well as in the guidelines for daily life and worship throughout the book of Leviticus.5 The books of history, poetry, and prophecy abound with examples of lives lived well and ill in the stories of Moses, Ruth, Esther, Solomon, and David, among others. The Christian Gospels and epistles modify these rules for the followers of Jesus and offer further examples of lives lived well and ill in the parables told by Jesus and in the accounts of the apostles’ lives after his death. For believers, shared regard for these particular texts as sacred provides a faith-based community identity that transcends language, nationality, and time period. Indeed, the Torah, the fve books which are attributed to Moses and which appear at the beginning of the Tanakh, occupies the center of Jewish intellectual life, and over millennia scholarly interaction with these texts has produced a rich tradition of argument and story, collectively Talmud, that further cement the Jewish community even as it has been fragmented by the diaspora. Christian interaction with these same sacred texts from the time of Christ to the Early Modern period produced a rich tradition of visual arts depicting biblical scenes and saints’ lives in Byzantine mosaics; medieval

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Once Upon a Time, There Was a Story

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cathedral windows, statues, and icons; and Early Modern paintings. Common regard for these narratives has even, at some points in history, united Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In Peace Be Upon You: Fourteen Centuries of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Confict and Cooperation, Zachary Karabell notes the central role that Judaism played in the formation of Islam as well as the privileged status that Jews in Muslim areas enjoyed through the end of the Second World War.6 The common recognition of one another as people of the book has at some times and in some places superseded political animosity among these groups. Presently, these sacred scripture texts continue to shape community identity within groups of devout believers, but they are no longer foundational to public culture in the United States and the global anglophone world more broadly. In his body of research, Mark Chaves traces the way that religiosity in the United States has remained more or less constant, but the scope of infuence that religious authority has in public culture has declined.7 In Secular Steeples, Conrad Ostwalt offers a model for the dynamics of how this happens along multiple paths simultaneously: (1) the church becomes more worldly, (2) the secular culture takes on religious functions, and (3) the secular culture moves away from the religious.8 In Ostwalt’s model, then, the church adopts the habits and concerns of the world at the same time that secular culture provides a sense of community and moral teaching. Paul Nathanson’s analysis in Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America supports this general idea with the Oz books and flm as a specifc example, fnding that secular artistic production is related to a community’s religious life. Sociological studies of twenty-frst-century church culture and of non-church communities like fandoms also show examples of the dynamic Ostwalt theorizes.9 One other important aspect of culture where these changes play out over time is literature. This chapter will examine the interdependent relationship between what we read and how we understand our collective identity by looking at four key moments in the development of American textual traditions: frst, a snapshot of England at the beginning of the Early Modern period of colonization; then the American colonies and Early Republic; third comes the turn of the twentieth century; and fnally, our contemporary moment. THE BOOK OF HOURS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND For centuries, books belonged to the church. The clergy and the cloistered had a great degree of control over the contents and the construction of books, in large part because the process was painstaking and expensive. Turning ink and skins into words on pages was a feat. As late as the twelfth century

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in England, literacy was a specialized technology mainly used by the church and the government in their offcial capacities of transmitting sacred texts and of keeping records. Over time, profciency in this technology spread throughout the gentry and guild structure because of its usefulness for record keeping. These users then adapted the technology to apply it to entertainment purposes, writing down prayers, songs, and narrative texts.10 By the ffteenth century in England, biblical scripture was made accessible to the growing reading public by the fourishing of commercially produced horae, or books of hours, that tool through which devout lay people were able to participate in the sort of daily worship carried out within cloistered communities. A set of hours specifes particular prayers and psalms to be recited at particular hours of the day, days of the week, and days in the liturgical calendar. Ownership of horae allowed the laity to follow these cycles of devotion similarly to the cloistered religious. In his introduction to Time Sanctifed: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life, Roger S. Wieck notes that

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from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth century, the Book of Hours was the medieval best-seller, number one for nearly 250 years [. . .] because it was on the pages of Books of Hours that the best artists created some of the most beautiful pictures of the period, and because the words that were also on these pages offered their medieval reader an intimate conversation with one of the most important people in his or her life: the Virgin Mary.11

As a consequence of their best-seller status, these books survive in much greater quantities than the manuscripts containing hagiography (stories of saints’ lives), romances, and love lyrics, which were also kept in medieval homes. In Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers 1240–1570, Eamon Duffy reports, “Almost 800 manuscript books of hours made for use in England are scattered in libraries all over the world, and surviving printed versions produced for the English market in the two generations before the reformation are even more abundant.”12 According to Wieck, this abundance refects both the cult of the Virgin Mary and the laity’s envy of the clergy’s prayers, their books, and their direct relationship with God.13 The earliest of these horae were often bespoke manuscripts and, like other books, were accessible only to the elite and the wealthy. But as paper replaced vellum and woodblock and movable type made printing possible, mass production became feasible. Horae cascaded down the socioeconomic ladder into the hands of those aspiring to elite status as they found it within their means to purchase these books as markers of wealth. Although horae were generally used privately, or within domestic worship settings, they nonetheless contributed to the formation of a reading community.

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Once Upon a Time, There Was a Story

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Over this period, books of hours varied greatly in their level of customization and illumination. Bespoke, handmade horae were often highly illuminated and decorated objets d’art while mass-produced versions were more limited in their visual program. They are, however, surprisingly consistent in their contents across time and geography. Recurring contents include the Hours of the Virgin, the Litany, a calendar of saints’ feast days, the Penitential Psalms, the Gradual Psalms, and the Offce of the Dead. Such books may also include the Hours of the Holy Spirit and the Hours of the Cross.14 This constancy created among the people who used horae a reading community for whom the texts of the prayers and the visual program of the miniatures became a common idiom. These particular texts and their accompanying illuminations focused the users’ experience on the person of Mary and on the necessity of penance and repentance. The Hours of the Virgin, for example, rehearse the important events of Mary’s life at assigned hours of the day: annunciation at matins (approximately 2:00 a.m.), visitation at lauds (dawn prayer), nativity at prime (approximately 6:00 a.m.), and so on. Wieck notes that “if the Book of Hours can be compared to a Gothic cathedral, the Hours of the Virgin would be its high altar, placed at the center of the choir and surmounted by an elaborately carved and painted altarpiece on top of which would be mounted, at a height close to the soaring vaults of the church, a radiant stature of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child.” This rehearsal of the events of Mary’s life was accompanied by a schedule for reading particular psalms on particular days of each month. Wieck’s survey of extant horae shows that even those which do not include a complete Psalter often contain the Penitential Psalms, traditionally attributed to King David as part of his penance for adultery and murder, and these invite the user to use David’s words to repent their own transgressions. The Litany, which generally follows the Penitential Psalms, is a “list of saints with each invocation followed by ‘Ora pro nobis’—‘Pray for us’” and it is a means by which the user of the book of hours enlists the intercession of the saints.15 The repetitive reading of these texts over time inscribed the language of these passages on the minds of the reading community and created an inventory of responses to the vagaries of daily life that was accessible to people even when the horae were not in their hands.

Several years ago, I ran an informal experiment on myself to see what the experience of having the psalms as regular reading was like. I bought a 1662 edition of the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, the heir to horae after the Protestant reformation, and I read the psalms set for morning and evening reading for several months. I found that the words of the psalms came back to me unbidden. At moments of joy, at moments of sadness, and at moments of challenge, they would just pop into my head. Repetitive, engaged reading of these texts over time made them part of the framework

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of my world. The difference between my experience and the experiences of medieval and Early Modern users of horae is that I was alone in my recitation. Had I repeated out loud the words from the psalms that were playing as my personal soundtrack, very few people would have recognized much. Few people outside of the cloistered life continue to mark the hours with daily Psalter reading, and the psalms have ceased to be the poetry that underpins our lives,16 but when reading this way was a widespread practice, language from the psalms woven into conversation or written text would likely have been recognized and understood. At a time when formal, university education was reserved for men, inscriptions, dedications, and colophons show that books of hours were used by people of all genders, sometimes gifted along the lines of feudal obligations and sometimes cementing interpersonal familial relationships.17 The widespread production and use of books of hours represents a democratization of the technology of literacy. This expansion of literacy and access to sacred texts laid the groundwork for the fourishing of the Anglican church in the wake of Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the early sixteenth century, particularly with regard to the value for individual, personal access to sacred scripture that is not mediated by the clergy. Though the book of hours with its emphasis on Mary is a decidedly Roman Catholic document, its overall structure as a guide for daily devotional practice by individual believers is replicated in the Protestant Book of Common Prayer, and this is the context that shaped the early English colonizers of the land that would eventually become the United States.

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READERS, LITERATURE, AND THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC’S FOUNDING DOCUMENTS Literacy mattered to the Pilgrims and the Puritans. Their Protestant, Calvinist worldview depended on a theology that put the Bible at the center of their religious life. Particularly important was individual, personal, access to sacred scripture. A mere seven years after the initial founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, they established Harvard University. Less than a decade from the absence of European-style settlement to the creation of an institution dedicated to the study of the arts and sciences refects a serious commitment to education. This kind of commitment also drove the creation of community schools for children in the New England colonies, the importation of schoolbooks from England, and ultimately the publication of schoolbooks suited to the colonial context. The New England Primer, published in Boston by Benjamin Harris as early as the late 1680s, quickly spread through the Northern colonies.18 Because of

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eighteenth- and nineteenth-century library practices, few copies of the primer survive, and the earliest extant copy is a 1727 Boston edition currently held by the New York Public Library.19 References to continuous editions, however, show up in printing house catalogs and advertising material, and this book’s longevity, with new editions being printed well into the nineteenth century, is further evidence of its signifcant infuence on American school culture. In his examination of The New England Primer and three other Early American readers published before 1775, Roscoe Robinson notes that 85 percent of the content was religious in nature, followed by 8 percent coming from morals and conduct, and 7 percent was in a miscellaneous category.20 This content included not only biblical stories but also allusions as in the alphabet rhymes “A In Adam’s fall, We sinned all.”21 The heavy reliance of The New England Primer on Christian sacred scripture for its content is simultaneously a refection of the reading experience of the creators of this book and a continuing infuence on the development of cultural identity among its community of students. In its moment in school rooms and homes in the anglophone colonies in the Americas, this book shared shelf space with Psalters, with Bibles, and with books of sermons. These are the Protestant heirs to the medieval book of hours, and like horae, they were constant companions for their readers. Learning to read with psalms, proverbs, and prayers meant that to be literate in reading and writing was to be literate in scriptural discourse. The generation that created The New England Primer, and adopted its use in schools, grew up reading both religious texts like the Christian gospels and the psalms and also secular texts that depended on those religious materials for their language of allusion. Early Puritan writers like Anne Bradstreet and Mary Rowlandson used references to biblical scripture as shorthand to express emotions and complex ideas to their readers. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson tells the story of Rowlandson’s captivity, which begins with a Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Narragansett raid on her home in Lancaster, Massachusetts, during Metacom’s War. She was captured along with three of her children, one of whom dies in her arms due to a gunshot wound and the others of whom are separated from her by their captors. Throughout, Rowlandson frames her story as one of suffering, abjection, and restoration like that of the biblical fgure Job, which provides comfort to her in the moment and hope for her future. In describing her relationship with her captors, Rowlandson quotes Job 16:2: “This was the comfort I had from them, miserable comforters are ye all, as he said.” In Job’s exclamation “miserable comforters are ye all,” he is rebuking the people who visit him in his abjection and offer no comfort because they fail to understand his experience. Like Job’s friends,

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some among Rowlandson’s captors try to ease her burden by offering food, commissioning her for handiwork, and relaying news of her children. They don’t, however, understand her particular despair, and, like Job, Rowlandson fnds their attempts at comfort to be ineffective. Further, in describing a conversation Rowlandson has with her son who was also taken prisoner, she writes, “We had Husband and Father, and Children, and Sisters, and Friends, and Relations, and House, and Home, and many Comforts of this Life: but now we may say, as Job, Naked came I out of my Mother’s Womb, and naked shall I return: The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away, Blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).22 By following Job’s example during her period of captivity, Rowlandson minimizes her losses by referencing God’s power to give and to take away. By adopting Job’s posture of gratitude in abjection, Rowlandson can also hope that God will deliver her as God delivered Job, restoring his wealth and blessing him with a new family.23 When Rowlandson writes the narrative of her captivity six years after the events, her choice to frame her losses—of home, loved ones, material comfort, and personal security—as being like the losses of Job is a powerful shorthand whereby her audience understands how the experience affected her. Instead of saying, “I felt bereft and alone. I despaired that God had abandoned me,” she quotes Job, asserting that her experience was like his, and her readers’ familiarity with Job’s story means that they understand the magnitude of what she does not describe in detail. Based on this framing, Rowlandson’s readers know that she views herself as a blameless victim, that she was beloved of God, and that her suffering was inexplicable to her as it was happening. Like Job, Rowlandson’s story ends with restoration. She and her two surviving children are reunited with their community, and the Puritans, having won the war, are able to rebuild their towns and carry on with their colonizing project. Rowlandson’s contemporary readers, and any subsequent readers who are deeply familiar with the book of Job, read her captivity narrative differently than those who lack this familiarity. Anne Bradstreet made similar rhetorical moves in the poetry of her daily life.24 Bradstreet’s life included great anxieties—as an early colonizer whose husband traveled on the business of the colony—and great losses—of pregnancies, of children, and of grandchildren. In “Verses on the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666,” she makes allusions to Job and to Ecclesiastes, writing, “I blessed his name that gave and took” and “all’s vanity.”25 This poem depicts Bradstreet’s emotional response to watching her house burn— frst fear and sorrow over the loss of security and property, and then a turn to remember that the things of this world are unimportant, concluding with the line, “My hope and treasure lies above.” Like Rowlandson, the scriptural allusions Bradstreet includes are a record of the words that gave her comfort

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in moments of distress and a shorthand communication to her audience who shared her familiarity with the text to which she was alluding. Puritan colonists were not the only ones for whom biblical scripture functioned in this way. In Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t, Steven Prothero notes that even outside of Anglican communities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America “basic literacy and religious literacy were one. Americans acquired, as they learned to read, at least the rudiments of a Protestant worldview, which (because of widespread literacy) was by no means confned to elites or, for that matter Protestants.”26 In Early America, piety was intertwined with public life, and the Protestant Bible, catechisms, and sermons provided shared narratives of cultural cohesion. Deists like Paine, Jefferson, and Franklin all pepper their prose with references to God. Individual devoutness was not required for sacred scripture to serve the role of community shorthand. This shared knowledge of biblical scripture worked to bind into community the many religious groups represented in the American colonies. In The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, David Holmes highlights the religious diversity of the late colonial and early federal periods, enumerating the myriad sects who found this so-called New World to be safe space for living out their various visions of the faithful community. While Christian religious groups dominate, Jewish communities were also present in the colonies. Holmes notes that the frst census in 1790 “counted 1,234 Jews in a total American population of almost three million” whose synagogues were present in many major port cities. Additionally, these colonizer religions brought from Europe existed in contention with the Native American faiths indigenous to this land, some of which survived colonial violence.27 Regardless of religious faith or devoutness, however, children who attended public schools in the late colonial period would have been exposed to the dominant Christian culture’s scriptures and their worldview in schoolbooks like The New England Primer. In addition to its presence in schoolbooks and in personal writing, the language of sacred scripture shows up in offcial government documents. Despite their diversity of denominational affliation, the signatories to the Declaration of Independence, for example, invoke the Creator in their justifcation for action. More than a century after Rowlandson and Bradstreet, the founders continued to use this kind of religious language in offcial documents and in nonreligious writing despite their distance from devout Christianity.28 Further, delegates to the Continental Congresses and leaders of the Early Republic used the network of Christian clergymen throughout the colonies to spread information and to build a sense of common purpose. In Pulpit and Nation, Spencer McBride highlights the way that religion can be central to civic life, regardless of levels of sincere belief. He traces the Continental Congress’s use of clergymen as intermediaries between leaders and people because they

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were familiar to and trusted by their congregations and the broader communities in which they were situated. One aspect of the formation of a civic identity through religious commonality was the Continental Congress’s recurring calls for fast days. In this way, the language, symbolism, and practices of religion were used to create a sense of community among those colonists who had come to the Americas for a variety of reasons.29 Religion was able to function in this way because of a general level of familiarity among the diverse peoples present in the colonies. Biblical scripture that was sacred to some was also simultaneously a secular scripture whose stories were familiar to all educated members of the society because of the prevalence of biblical allusions in art and literature and because of the way education happened. In his History of American Schoolbooks, Charles Carpenter notes the religious content of colonial and Early American schoolbooks such as The Protestant Tutor and The New England Primer, but, he asserts, “to speak of any of these early schoolbooks as religious is not exactly correct.”30 John Nietz offers a more nuanced assessment in his survey of Old Textbooks, noting that in the colonial period and the Early Republic, the content of schoolbooks varied with the control of the schools. In colonial New England, public schools, like most government functions, were under the control of Puritan leadership; thus Calvinist religious materials dominated The New England Primer in contrast to primers in other colonial spaces dominated by other Christian sects. With the constitutional separation of church and state in 1789, religious material became less prevalent in schoolbooks, and the “religious content that did remain was more or less non-sectarian in nature.”31 From the dominance of religious material in the earliest American readers (85 percent in those published before 1775), there is a sharp decline to 22 percent in the Early Republic period. This decline continues more gradually until, in the early twentieth century, religious material accounts for only one and a half percent of reader content.32 Scholars of secularism and demography offer analysis of why religious authority declined over the course of the long nineteenth century. This current study will focus instead on analysis of the texts that flled the space left when biblical scripture lost its previously held place in public discourse. THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY THE WIZARD OF OZ AND DISNEY’S SNOW WHITE Sacred scriptures, you will recall from our earlier discussion, share the functions of providing origin stories, articulating rules for living, and providing examples of how to live. In mythologies around the world, the origin stories share an emphasis on metaphor and symbolism.33 The Hebrew book of

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Bereshit, for example, presents two metaphors—one of a creator who speaks the creation into existence and one of a creator/potter who molds humanity from the earth and breathes life into them. In contrast, Old Norse mythology presents the creation as coming from the interaction of opposites—the land of ice meeting the land of fre—and confict between the gods and the giants. These metaphors of origins shape the worldview of those who believe them. Jews and Christians see the world as having been created by a deity who cares for it, and they see themselves as part of an ongoing relationship with this deity. The Old Norse mythos includes no such caring purpose behind the origin of the world as we know it. In contrast to metaphor-based origin stories, Western scientifc inquiry since the Early Modern period has focused on exploring answers to the question of origins based in observable and verifable fact. Current scientifc consensus notices the continuing expansion of the universe and extrapolates this expansion backward to a point in spacetime when the universe consisted of highly concentrated energy. Since the singularity, or the Big Bang, expansion has continued, and the universe has also become increasingly more complex, forming atoms, molecules, dust, planets, life. Similarly, nineteenth-century observation of the changes wrought in plants and animals by selective breeding or geographic isolation led to the theory of evolution, which can similarly be extrapolated backward to trace the origins of the species interacting with one another on this planet today. These paired theories of origin and evolution offer a scientifc, rather than religious or philosophical, explanation for the nature of the world and how humanity came into being.34 The scientifc values for observation and verifability that were used to judge these new theories of origins were also applied to the origin stories of biblical scripture. In his introduction to Christian Fantasy, Colin Manlove discusses the shift toward literalist interpretations of the Bible in the Victorian period. He notes that in the backlash against the supernatural generally, which began in the seventeenth century, there was initially tolerance for continued use of the Christian supernatural, and a co-opting of the pagan supernatural to fgure the Christian, but ultimately this tolerance also disappears.35 The movement away from an allegorical understanding of biblical narrative and toward an insistence on literal interpretation is an aberration in the long tradition of Christian thought, but one that nonetheless has a signifcant impact. At the same time the Victorians were tending toward literalism, Darwin and other scientists investigating origins provided “an external criticism of ‘truth to fact’ by which to assess” the Bible.36 This turn to scientifc inquiry to answer the question of origins is refected in changes in the creative texts of American popular culture and in the content of schoolbooks. By the 1920s, the contents of The New England Primer (still in print!) and similar schoolbooks like the McGuffy Reader had shifted

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away from religious stories in favor of material that Roscoe Robinson groups into the categories of Animals and Birds (20%), Boys and Girls (11.5%), and Fairy Stories (9.5%).37 This change in the content of readers over the course of the nineteenth century refects a change in the role of religion in public life in the United States. Though the infuence of the Christian majority certainly remained strong, the contents of schoolbooks had become less refective of sectarian faith groups than they had been in the early period of American colonization. As religious stories ceded space to other kinds of texts, the reading public had less exposure to them, and therefore less fuency and familiarity. It became possible to be a person with a high degree of general literacy, but lacking biblical literacy. Houses of worship in this period remained centers of community engagement for their members, and their sacred scripture, informed by their specifc theological approaches, remained a source of shared stories within each faith group. The literature and cinema produced in the early twentieth century, though, shows that biblical sacred scripture was in decline as the language of allusion. When L. Frank Baum created the allegorical tale The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, he reached not into biblical typology, but into the fantastic adventure tale. Walt Disney made a similar choice a generation later with his invention of the Mickey Mouse character and his adaptations of familiar fairy tales. As in Mary Rowlandson’s Early American narrative of her captivity, in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy fnds herself outside of her home space not of her own volition. In this case, a tornado carries her from Kansas to an unfamiliar land called Oz.38 In contrast to Rowlandson’s frequent invocations to God for help and comfort, Dorothy does not use Christian religious language at all. Initially she adopts the reverent attitude toward the all-powerful Wizard that she sees in the denizens of Oz, but her adventures reveal that he is merely a man. The objects for which Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Lion are questing have been inside them all along. It is their actions, not their supplication, that allows them to live into their potential. This is the American story of the self-made person in fantastic technicolor. Similarly, Disney’s 1937 animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarves features a female hero who is exiled from her home.39 Snow White, in contrast to Rowlandson and Dorothy, displays little desire to return. Once she fnds safety in the house of the dwarves, she turns her attention to creating a life with them, and the flm celebrates the stereotypically feminine character traits—patience, good humor, and a knack for housekeeping—that make this household-building possible. While scholars have analyzed religious symbolism in the flm, no overtly Christian language is used. Snow White does not hope for divine relief in her exile, though she is tempted by the wish

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fulfllment that the Evil Queen offers her in the guise of an old woman with an apple. In making these choices, Baum and Disney were drawing on children’s literature that had grown exponentially as a share of the publishing market over the last decade of the nineteenth century. Andrew and Leonora Lang’s Blue Fairy Book, frst published in London in 1889 and reprinted in New York in 1890, entered the marketplace at a time when literature for children was dominated by verisimilar depictions of everyday life. The success of this book and the many Rainbow Fairy Books that followed offers evidence for the popularity of fantastic stories for children. The Langs had incredible, unexpected success with these publications which spread widely through the reading public. Similarly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1890–1920), there were twenty-one different editions of the Grimms’ fairy tales produced in English in the United States.40 This shift away from biblical scripture and rise of fairy-tale material in American popular culture has taken place against the backdrop of modernity. In All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Marshall Berman writes that while modernity may “promise us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world,” it also “threaten[s] to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”41 Berman zeroes in on the nature of transformation—it promises something new at the cost of the familiar, and this trade is inherently unsettling. One of the hallmarks of modernity’s artistic and cultural movements, perhaps in response to the unsettling nature of transformation, has been a persistent demand for verisimilar representation of the realities of life. Films like the 1921 Manhatta and others in the city symphony genre present the mechanistic movement of people through the urban space over the course of a day. While this representation is beautiful, it is also dehumanizing. In this flm, there is no one person with whom the viewer is invited to identify. No one is named. The perspective is so broad that all the people are merely cogs in the machine of the greater whole. It is absolutely a verisimilar depiction of the city of New York over the course of a single day and simultaneously an uncanny erasure of the individual identities of the human beings who live and work there.42 In contrast to the impersonal panorama, some realist modernist authors like Virginia Woolf offer stark representations of the day-to-day realities of modern life by zooming in on the minds of characters, and focusing on the ennui of decisions: Will we go to the lighthouse? Who will buy the fowers?43 In both cases, the impersonal panorama and the hyper-focused personal story, this turn toward realist, verisimilar fction that strives to present life as it is largely elides experiences of the divine, whether direct or indirect. Manhatta offers no indication that there is a divine conductor for its city

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symphony. Writers of verisimilar fction like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Henry James, and Willa Cather might mention their characters’ involvement in religious communities or criticize the infuence of the church on society, but religious language does not pervade their texts or serve as a communicative shorthand in the same way that it did for Rowlandson, Bradstreet, and other Early Modern authors. Both the broadly impersonal and the intimately individual texts are successfully verisimilar and very masterfully written, but they do not invite the audience to imagine the possibility that things can be different. Discourse about how we would like things to be is supplanted by depictions of how things are. In these texts (as well as others that populate anthologies and syllabi of modern literature surveys) there is no escape, and no consolation. On the one hand, as a scholar of the past, I love these verisimilar glimpses into what lived reality looked like. On the other hand, as a reader, I fnd that I have to limit my consumption of realist texts from the turn of the twentieth century. The starkness of their representations of the dark side of modernity can be demoralizing. Starkly verisimilar fction eschews the fantastic and the miraculous, and ultimately, I would argue, these texts do not fll society’s need for narrative as discursive space. Two artistic responses to this shortcoming in verisimilar modernist realism developed. One type of response was that which focuses on the despair inherent in starkly realistic representations of life in the fn de siècle period. This response led to surrealist art (Picasso, Dalí, Magritte, et. al.) and absurd literature (Beckett, Camus, Kafka, et. al.), which have joined realism in the canon. The second response, which has been left out of the canon of the long twentieth century, was an escape from realism into the fantastic, which led to the corpus of fairy tales, science fction, and fantasy that fourished in the popular literature and cinema at the same time. The most prominent twentieth-century creator of fairy tales in popular culture is, of course, Walt Disney and the company he created. As John Wills notes in Disney Culture, the success of the Disney company in the early twentieth century was a combination of “shrewd marketing, technical excellence, musicality and comedy, and emotional impact. Disney connected with ideas surrounding childhood, the rise of television and cinema, the growth of consumer culture, and a national predilection for nostalgia and utopianism.”44 Disney does not depict the shocking conditions of war or the challenges of poverty in the Great Depression. Rather, he offers people what Tolkien would later theorize as the purpose of the fantastic—“fantasy, recovery, escape.”45 Disney does this not by returning to the sacred marvelous of miracles and spirituality, but by reaching into the fantastic marvelous of fairy tales. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, his frst full-length animated feature flm,

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comes in 1937 at the depth of the Great Depression with a message of hope for the downtrodden and the hardworking. Writing in 1975, Kay Stone engages with the choices made by translators of the Grimms into English and by Disney with regard to the representation of women as heroes and as villains in fairy-tale books and flms for the U. S. market in the middle of the twentieth century. Her analysis emphasizes the passivity of female heroes, noting “the tests of most heroines require nothing beyond what they were born with: a beautiful face, tiny feet, or a pleasing temperament.”46 The criticism of pleasing temperament as a characteristic Snow White, Cinderella, and others were born with is a curious one. This analysis misses the agency required to choose patience and to persevere in hard work despite its unpleasantness. In modifying the Snow White story, Disney combined the fairy-tale setting and characters with the virtuerewarded themes of other nineteenth-century popular culture phenomena like Horatio Alger’s books and O. Henry’s short stories. By bringing the themes of the American dream story into the fairy tale, Disney invited the audience to see themselves in the characters. These vaguely medieval, vaguely European settings and characters can be models for citizens of the American democracy because the challenges and complications of their plots, when abstracted, are the challenges and complications of modern life—how to resist unjust power, how to navigate family confict, how to behave when life goes wrong. Following the success of Snow White, Disney continued to work in the same model—adapting familiar fairy tales for U. S. audiences. These adaptations strengthened the fairy tale’s place in American culture by infusing the tales he chose with norms representative of his early twentieth-century audience between the world wars and during the Baby Boom. As Tison Pugh notes, Western European fairy tales look to a simpler and “medieval-ish” past to create a time of romance, adventure, and magic, and Disney’s genius was to couple this nostalgia with a liberal dose of futurism, blending the two diametrically opposed temporalities into a seamless whole.47

This blending of a nostalgic past and a hopeful future stands in opposition to the starkly verisimilar representations of modern life in the cinematic and literary production of Disney’s contemporaries. Rather than forcing the audience to confront life as it is, Disney’s work invites them to imagine something different. Audiences across demographics responded positively to this invitation, even when it was not in their own best interests. The particular something different that Disney offers up is consistent across the early animated flms—it is white, patriarchal, and capitalist. It reinforces the message of the American dream, that good people who work hard will be

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rewarded with a higher station in the hierarchy. This message simultaneously offers hope to the people at the bottom of the hierarchy—the poor, women, people of color—and also discourages them from challenging the hierarchy itself. In his 1993 monograph, Fairy Tale as Myth, Myth as Fairy Tale, Jack Zipes is critical of the Disney empire’s “cultural stranglehold on the fairy tale” noting that “Walt Disney cast a spell on the fairy tale, and it has been held captive ever since. [. . .] Disney employed the most up-to-date technological means and used his own “American” grit and ingenuity to appropriate the European fairy tales.”48 The success of Disney’s flms and his creation of a merchandise and amusement park experiences related to those flms assured that his interpretations of these stories would become the dominant ones in American culture. While criticism of Disney’s methods and message is certainly legitimate, the language Zipes uses (stranglehold, held captive, appropriate) casts Disney’s interaction with fairy tales as violence enacted upon them. Such criticism of the changes inherent in the process of adaptation implies that the narratives somehow rightfully belong only to the place in which they originate, that there is some right way to adapt fairy tales, and Disney has gone beyond the pale. Zipes himself has written extensively about the changes that the Grimms made in the narratives as they moved from notes to the frst volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, and thence to further editions over the course of the nineteenth century.49 The Grimms certainly adapted the tales to suit the cultural demands of their print audience. Indeed, this sort of adaptation is inherent in the dynamics of the fairy tale as tradition: each new instance of enacting the tradition by telling tales orally or reprinting them or adapting them for the screen changes the tales themselves. Kay Stone points out that “the changes Disney makes [including downplaying royalty and magic] are similar to those made by traditional American storytellers, who also had to adapt European tales to the new demands of this continent.”50 When authors and editors make changes as they adapt fairy tales, their own aesthetic principles are not the only driving force. Pugh asserts that despite all of the criticism the Disney Corporation receives for its commercial imperialism, “the recreational desires of Disney’s consumers are fulflled through these commercial transactions.”51 Stone concurs that the flms’ “continuing success reveals something about adult reactions to fantasy and about Disney’s understanding of these reactions.”52 Thus, although the fairy tales offered by Walt Disney and the Disney Animation Studio may not offer the most complex plots or the most nuanced commentary on social issues, they fulfll the roles that our impersonal scientifc origin stories and our dark modern and postmodern art and literature do not: “Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation.” In a society that was becoming increasingly diverse in terms of both culture and faith over the course of the twentieth

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century, fairy tales took on the role of secular scripture, the body of narratives common to all the people who make their home in the United States and available to all Americans as the building blocks for telling their own stories.

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THE TURN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Disney’s early success with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Cinderella (1950), and Sleeping Beauty (1959) fueled the continuing project of fairy-tale flms by the Disney corporation, but it also fueled children’s picture books based on Disney’s versions as well as fresh translations of Grimm and Perrault. By the late twentieth century, Americans were even teaching science through the fairy-tale quest structure in popular children’s book series like The Magic Treehouse and the cartoon series The Magic School Bus, recently rebooted for a new generation.53 Further, as these stories pervaded the pop culture space, they became the shorthand Americans use to talk to each other. Fairy-tale allusions show up in news reports, advertising, and verisimilar literature and flm. This diffusion of fairy tales throughout American popular culture allows them to act as a set of shared stories for people who are part of different communities based on national origin, race, religion, or class. People who consume American popular culture become profcient in this system of fairy-tale allusion shorthand. One prime example of this shorthand is the phrase “Cinderella story,” which is commonly applied to texts which themselves make no overt claim to the Cinderella tradition, but share the rags-to-riches elevation of the main character.54 One such is The Blind Side, Michael Lewis’s biography of Michael Oher, which garnered suffcient public interest to be made into a flm of the same title in 2009 and was marketed and reviewed with the phrase “Cinderella story.”55 The details of Oher’s story are nothing like the details of most Cinderella stories: he is not pressed into service by a demanding (step)family, no fairy godmother transforms him and sends him to a ball. But the shape of his story is similar to Cinderella’s story. He moves from a low socioeconomic station to a higher one through hard work and good character with the help of a woman whose magic is her wealth, status, and whiteness. Oher’s personal transformation allows him to succeed in the public space of the football stadium. He is far from alone in his receipt of the Cinderella story label. Successful climbers of the socioeconomic ladder in the U. S., including Walt Disney himself, have been referred to this way as a shorthand for saying, ‘This person is a good person who worked hard and met a bit of luck. The reward for their hard work and their goodness is an increase in wealth and status.’

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In the twenty-frst century, the creative teams of Disney’s animation and live-action production studios are breaking the model established by Walt himself. Brave (2012), Frozen (2013), and Moana (2016) all take as their central concern the maintenance of the nuclear family within the context of its community and feature female protagonists who challenge the gender norms expected by their respective societies.56 Writing recently, Jack Zipes notes the power of fairy-tale adaptations to destabilize expectations—the king’s sons become the farmer’s sons. Authors, illustrators, screenwriters, and animators can use this potential for social commentary that challenges entrenched ideas and unjust patterns. This potential for subversion, though, is counterbalanced by fairy tales’ power to support the status quo.57 Ultimately, every fairy-tale story ends with a restoration of order. The protagonist returns from adventure changed with new knowledge, new perspectives, and new relationships, but these new aspects of the self are integrated into the existing system, which is only modifed slightly to accommodate them. Moana, for example, starts her flm by defying her father and leaving her community, a signifcant act of rebellion against the status quo. Her adventures challenge her physical strength, her seafaring prowess, and her interpersonal communication skills. In the end, however, she brings her new knowledge back to her role as the daughter of her community’s leader. The fnal scene suggests that Moana’s father recognizes these changes in her and welcomes her back to the community in order to share them with everyone. The structure of the community and its norms has not, however, been radically changed by the return of the transformed Moana, only modifed slightly. In this way, fairy-tale stories take the audience on adventures that suggest radical changes, they invite the reader or the viewer to consider different ways of being and challenge them to solve unexpected problems with fantastic objects and magical helpers. These stories then return the audience to the protagonist’s home space in order to restore order, to remedy the rupture that inspired the adventure in the frst place. Sacred scriptures provide origin stories, enumerate rules for living, and offer examples of lives lived well and ill. Contemporary American culture has turned to science for explanations of our origins in the Big Bang and evolution, but one of the weaknesses of scientifc explanations of human origins is their very scientifc nature—they describe processes, rather than relating narratives. Current scientifc theory fails to offer rules for living or examples of how to live well. Humans, being what we are, nonetheless try to fnd models for ourselves in the scientifc explanation of the world. Social Darwinism, for example, applies the evolutionary principal of the survival of the fttest to human economic and political interactions to argue that those who have more resources and power have achieved such because they are somehow better or stronger.58 Scientifc theories of origin and evolution do not offer a

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hero with whom human beings can identify, just the clinical description of the interaction of atoms and molecules, predators and prey. Fairy tales do offer examples of lives lived well and lives lived badly, and, unlike the fxed corpus of sacred scripture, they allow us to adapt, reinterpret, and retell their stories as we explore who we are and what we wish to become.

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SO, WHERE DOES ALL THIS LEAVE US? The fact that bodies of sacred scripture around the world share the functions of offering origin stories, enumerating rules for living, and providing examples of lives lived well and ill is signifcant. This repetition of functions is evidence of their importance to human societies. This chapter has traced the way that sacred scripture functioned in medieval and Early Modern England and subsequently in the American colonies and the United States. By the middle of the twentieth century, the functions of sacred scripture were divided. Scientifc theory provides the origin story while fairy tales, widely available since the Victorian period in anthologies and picture books and now from the transmedia Disney empire, currently offer positive and negative examples of human interaction and the cohesion of a shared narrative as a community reference point. Even as fairy tales come under repeated criticism, we continue to consume them to a degree that they have become the common shorthand that we use to communicate with one another. It is my contention that scholars should be paying more attention to this dynamic, and the remaining chapters of this book offer models of how to engage with fairy-tale material. We particularly need more scholarly attention to this dynamic—the United States is a nation made up of multiple communities based on race, gender, sexuality, religion, language, and socioeconomic status, but the consumption of fairy tales cuts across these divisions. People who grow up in the United States become familiar with the new canon of tales largely formed by the Disney corporation’s transmedia storytelling. These stories dominate American childhoods without accurately representing them. The decision-making roles in publishing, cinema, and marketing continue to largely be flled people who live at the privileged pole on these axes of oppression, and fairy-tale stories on the whole tend to reinforce entrenched structures of power. Like the verisimilar and surrealist texts that populate the canon and the syllabi of modern art, literature, and cinema, fairy tales and fantastic texts are a response to modernity that is legitimate and worthy of study. Only the former, however, have been regarded by scholars and critics as elite texts. The latter, in contrast, have been labeled popular culture or genre fction and segregated to their own sections of libraries and bookstores under the labels

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“Romance,” “Fantasy and Science Fiction,” and “Horror.” In his discussion of the lack of critical insight among consumers of texts in his introduction to The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy Tale and Fantasy Past, Tison Pugh points out the dynamic by which these cultural artifacts avoid scrutiny Disney claims for itself the realm of children’s fantasy and cloaks itself within this mantle: as children’s innocence is seen as a prized virtue within many discourses of Western thought, so too does Disney itself become camoufaged under a veneer of innocence, despite the commercial nature of its endeavors.59

Like the image of old furniture relegated to the nursery offered by Tolkien, fairy tales thus become objects that remain beneath our notice even as they are the space in which our children grow up and the foundation on which our future is formed. Like that furniture in the nursery, fairy tales are the heritage of the past even as they become the playthings of the next generation. In his introduction to Film and Fairy Tales, Kristian Moen elaborates on Tolkien’s assertion that fairystories offer “Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation,” noting that early twentieth-century fairy-tale flms were “especially conducive to contending with the effects of modernity; while often set in far-off realms of fantasy, they nevertheless helped articulate the ways in which we might see, understand and feel the effects of a changing modern world.”60 The neglect of texts representing an escape into the fantastic in response to modernity in surveys and scholarship on modern literature constitutes a scholarly lacuna.

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NOTES 1. Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (New York, NY: Houghton Miffin Harcourt, 2012), xiv. 2. The book of Job 1:9. 3. The book of Job 42:10–15. 4. Johann van Goethe, Faust, Prologue, the bargain appears at ll, 1473–1479. 5. See Exod. 20:1–17 and Deut. 5:6–21 for the Ten Commandments. 6. Karabell, Peace Be Upon You, 8. For an overview of cooperation among these groups, see Zachary Karabell, Peace Be Upon You: Fourteen Centuries of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Confict and Cooperation (New York, NY: Vintage, 2009). On cooperation in medieval Spain, see Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston, MA: Back Bay Books, 2009). On Jews and Christians at the watershed moment of the First Crusade, see Michael A. Singer and John Van Engen, Jews and Christians in Twelfth-century Europe (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).

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7. Mark Chaves, American Religion Contemporary Trends (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 8. Conrad Ostwalt, Secular Steeples: Popular Culture and the Religious Imagination (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), 29ff. 9. Paul Nathanson, Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991), xviii. On religious functions performed by secular structures, see Gary Laderman, Sacred Matters: Celebrity Worship, Sexual Ecstasies, the Living Dead, and Other Signs of Religious Life in the United States (New York, NY: The New Press, 2009), especially the introduction and Chapter 1. 10. See Kate Koppy, “The Findern Codex and the Blog In the Middle: Understanding Middle English Vernacular Manuscripts through the Lens of Social Media in the Twenty-frst Century,” in The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript: Text Collections from a European Perspective (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 149–51; Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin, The Production of Books in England 1350–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Laura Hibbard Loomis, “The Auchinlek Manuscript and a Possible London Bookshop of 1330–1340,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 57, no. 3 (1942): 595–627. 11. Roger Wieck, Time Sanctifed: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (New York, NY: George Braziller, 1988), 27. On personal devotional reading, see Nathan D. Mitchell, The Oxford History of Christian Worship, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright and Karen B. Westerfeld Tucker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), particularly “The Ritual Negotiation of Social Life,” 315–17; and “6. Daily Prayer,” 328–29. 12. Eamonn Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 3. 13. Wieck, Time Sanctifed, 27. 14. Duffy, Marking the Hours, 5–6; Wieck, Time Sanctifed, 27–28. 15. Wieck, Time Sanctifed, 60, 99, 101. 16. On the Psalms as liturgical poems, see Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk (New York, NY: Penguin, 1996), particularly, “The Paradox of the Psalms,” in which she writes, In a monastic choir [the Psalms] inevitably pull a person out of private prayer, into community and then into the word, into what might be termed praying the news. Psalm 74’s lament on the violation of sacred space: ‘Every cave in the land is a place where violence has made its home’ (v. 20) has become for me a prayer for the victims and perpetrators of domestic violence. Watching television footage of the Los Angeles riots of early 1992 gave me a new context for the words of Psalm 55 that I encountered the next morning in the monastic choir: ‘I see nothing but violence and strife in the city’ (v. 9) (100).

Norris’s experience of the psalms becoming a framework for interaction with the world was also my own experience when I read them according to the morning and evening schedule of The Book of Common Prayer: 1662 Standard Edition. 17. Duffy, Marking the Hours, 11, 33; Poos in Wieck, Time Sanctifed, 35. 18. John Nietz, Old Textbooks (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1961), 47.

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19. Charles Carpenter, History of American Schoolbooks (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), 25. 20. Roscoe Robinson, Two Centuries of Change in the Content of School Readers (Nashville, TN: George Peabody College for Teachers, 1930), 11. 21. Nietz, Old Textbooks, 50. 22. Italics original; Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlansdon and Related Documents, ed. Neal Salisbury (Boston, MA: Bedford St. Martins, 1997), 74, 82. 23. The book of Job 42. 24. See Anne Bradstreet, The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 25. Job 1:21, Ecclesiastes 1:2. 26. Stephen R. Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t (Pymble, NSW: Harper Collins, 2007), 64. 27. David L. Holmes, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1. For analysis of the interactions of European and indigenous faiths, see Linford Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014). 28. David L. Holmes, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3–8, 1. For a textual analysis of how biblical idiom informs American letters through the nineteenth century, see Robert Alter, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 29. Spencer McBride, Pulpit and Nation (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 7–8, 2. 30. Carpenter, History of American Schoolbooks, 23. Both The Protestant Tutor and The New England Primer were frst printed in the seventeenth century, and the latter continued to be revised and reprinted into the nineteenth century. 31. Nietz, Old Textbooks, 53–54. 32. Robinson, Two Centuries of Change, 66. 33. On the religions as systems of metaphors, see Mark Schaefer, The Certainty of Uncertainty (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018). 34. For a comprehensive discussion of comparative mythology focused on creation stories, see David Leeming with Margaret Adams Leeming, A Dictionary of Creation Myths (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). For a basic overview of the Big Bang, see Valery Rubakov and Dmitry Gorbunov, Introduction to the Theory of the Early Universe: Hot Big Bang Theory (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientifc, 2017). For a basic overview of the theory of evolution, its original context, and its development, see Cynthia Mills, The Theory of Evolution: What It Is, Where It Came From, and Why It Works (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004). 35. Colin Manlove, Christian Fantasy: From 1200 to the Present (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 3. On the miraculous in protestant theology, see Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For analysis of a similar pattern in a different place, see George Williamson, The

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Longing for Myth in Germany (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2004). Williamson offers a more complex narrative.

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“While some reformers challenged traditional beliefs and practices, others introduced theological rhetoric and modes of thought into the emerging institutions of art, scholarship, and politics. . . . Such infuences could fow in both directions, however, and in some cases a reformulated concept of the sacred was reimported from secular disciplines like aesthetics, philosophy, or philology back into the feld of theology. The upshot of this was not a unidirectional secularization, but rather a process in which nonecclesiatical institutions and individuals competed with the churches and clergy to address the central theological and religious concerns of the German educated classes” (9–10). In this model, church and the arts are mutually infuential even at a time of increasing secularization in general.

36. Manlove, Christian Fantasy, 156. 37. Robinson’s timeline includes the 1920s in his Period of Experimentation and Investigation from 1915–1926. Robinson, “Two Centuries of Change,” 63. 38. L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, illus. W. W. Denslow (Chicago, IL: George M. Hill Company, 1900). 39. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, directed by William Cottrell, David Hand, et al. (1937; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Feature Animation). 40. On Lang’s fairy-tale collections and their historical context, see Glenn Burne, “Andrew Langs’s The Blue Fairy Book: Changing the Course of History,” in Touchstone: Refections of the Best in Children’s Literature, Vol. 2: Fairy Tales, Fables, Myths, Legends, and Poetry (West Lafayette, IN: ChLA Publishers, 1985), 140–50. For a timeline of publications, see D. L. Ashliman, “Grimms’ Fairy Tales in English,” https​:/​/ww​​w​.pit​​t​.edu​/​~das​​h​/gri​​mm​-en​​​gl​.ht​​ml, Last accessed January 15, 2020. For analysis of this publication history, see Simon Bronner, “The Americanization of the Brothers Grimm,” in Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture (Denver, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1998), 184–236. 41. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, NY: Penguin, 1988), 15, Quoted in Kristian Moen’s introduction to Film and Fairy Tales (London: Tauris, 2011), xiv–xv. 42. Manhatta, directed by Charles Sheerer and Paul Strand, (1921). For more on the city symphony genre, see A. L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video: From Canonical Avant-Garde to Contemporary British Practice (London: British Film Institute, 2011). 43. These questions occupy the pages of the Virginia Woolf’s novels, To the Lighthouse (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1927) and Mrs. Dalloway (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1925), respectively. Other authors whose work is likewise starkly verisimilar include James Joyce, Ulysses (New York, NY: Modern Library, 1992), Dubliners (New York, NY: Modern Library, 1926); and William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1990). 44. John Wills, Disney Culture (Newark, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017), 18.

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45. Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy-Stories, 59. 46. Kay Stone, “Things Walt Disney Never Told Us,” in Some Day Your Witch Will Come (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2008), 13–23 at 17. 47. Tison Pugh, “Introduction: Disney’s Retrograde Medievalisms: Where Yesterday Is Tomorrow Today,” in The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past, ed. Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 5. On Disney and the dynamics of sentimental modernism, see also Stephen Watts, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Columbus, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997). Additionally, Kristian Moen argues that sentimental modernism is not unique to Disney’s fairy-tale flms, Film and Fairy Tales, xvi. 48. Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth, 72. 49. See Jack Zipes, trans., The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). On changes made by the Grimms, see for example Jack Zipes, “Once There Were Two Brothers Named Grimm,” the Introduction to The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, xvii–xxxi. On the dynamics of change in fairy tales more broadly, see the meme-based approach Zipes takes in “Toward a Theory of the Fairy Tale as a Literary Genre,” in Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006). 50. Stone, Some Day Your Witch Will Come, 29. 51. Pugh, “Introduction: Disney’s Retrograde Medievalisms,” 2. 52. Stone, Some Day Your Witch Will Come, 25. 53. Pinocchio, directed by Norman Ferguson and T. Hee (1940; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Feature Animation). Cinderella, directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske (1950; Burbanck, CA: Walt Disney Productions). Sleeping Beauty, directed by Clyde Geronimi (1959; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Productions). Mary Pope Osborne, The Magic Tree House (Series) (New York, NY: Random House, 1992-present). The Magic School Bus, developed by Alison Blank, Kristin Laskas Martin, and Jane Startz (1994–1997; Columbia, SC: SCETV). The Magic School Bus Rides Again, produced by Stuart Stone (2017–2018; New York, NY: Scholastic Entertainment). 54. The rags-to-riches Cinderella story is particularly common in the flm genres of musicals and romantic comedies. See Russel A. Peck’s “Movies and Television,” page in his online Cinderella Bibliography for discussions of Like Water for Chocolate, Love Actually, Maid in Manhattan, My Fair Lady, An Offcer and a Gentleman, and The Wedding Planner. 55. Janet Maslin, “An End Run Out of Poverty, Into an NFL Trajectory,” Rev. of The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis, New York Times Website: Books, http:​/​/www​​ .nyti​​mes​.c​​om​/20​​06​/10​​/05​/b​​ooks/​​05mas​​l​.htm​​l?​_r=​​2​&r​ef​​=book​​revie​​ws, Published: October 5, 2006, Last accessed July 29, 2012. See Michael Lewis, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (New York, NY: Norton, 2006). For analysis of the biography and the flm as white savior narrative, see Erin Ash, “Racial Discourse in The Blind Side: The Economics and Ideology Behind the White Savior Format,” Studies in Popular Culture 38, no. 1 (2015): 85–103.

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56. Moana, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker (2016; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Animation Studios). Brave, directed by Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman (2012; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studio). Frozen, directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee (2013; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Animation Studios). 57. Jack Zipes, “Speaking the Truth with Folk and Fairy Tales: The Power of the Powerless,” Journal of American Folklore 132, no. 525 (2019): 243–59. 58. This theory advanced by nineteenth-century sociologist Herbert Spencer in The Principles of Biology (London: William and Norgate, 1864). 59. Pugh, “Introduction: Disney’s Retrograde Medievalisms,” 3. 60. Moen, Film and Fairy Tales, xvi.

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Chapter 3

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What Are Fairy Tales, Anyway?

In the Introduction and in chapter 2, I gave a succinct defnition of sacred scripture based on its three functions. Sacred scripture (1) provides origin stories, (2) enumerates rules for living, and (3) offers examples of lives lived well and ill. It is much more diffcult to write a similarly succinct defnition for the fairy tale, a term coined in the late seventeenth century by MarieCatherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy. As many scholars who study fairy tales have shown, “fairy tale” is a collocation that resists defnition.1 This pair of words has been applied to all sorts of texts from oral narratives of the heroic and miraculous to highly wrought belles-lettres novels. Despite the name, however, these tales rarely take place in fairyland, and the main characters are merchants, rich families, nobility, and royalty rather than fairies. While some tales include a fairy godparent in the role of magical helper or a disgruntled fairy villain, some fairy tales include no fairy characters at all. Since the late nineteenth century, scholars have been having a variety of conversations about fairy tales. Some scholars focus on origins, while others discuss psychology and symbolism. Still other scholars focus on adaptation as a process. Ultimately, my focus is on our collective use of adaptation to create stories that help maintain communities. This conversation that I want to have with you, though, is infuenced by the stances we take in these other conversations. In this chapter, I will walk through some highlights of ongoing scholarly conversations and their implications for my concerns and present my working defnition of the fairy tale as a genre. I describe fairy tales as fctional narratives that simultaneously transmit cultural values and offer the audience discursive space to imagine “a future that differs from what now exists”2 as they observe the main character’s struggle to ameliorate the lack that was the impetus to action. These stories are both new and not new—fairy 45

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tales have a complex origin story of their own. Throughout their long history, they make use of plot structures and story elements that are universally familiar. Fairy tales are fantastic, they are simultaneously conservative and radical, and they are inherently intertextual.

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FAIRY TALES HAVE A COMPLEX ORIGIN The question of origins, where fairy tales come from, is one that has dominated scholarly conversation from the turn of the twentieth century to the contemporary moment. The loudest voices in the conversation tend to stand in opposition to one another, advocating either for a folk origin in oral taletelling or for a textual origin by literary authors. When Giovanni Francesco Straparola (Venice, early sixteenth century), Giambattista Basile (Naples, early seventeenth century), and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (Germany, nineteenth century) created their collections of tales for publication, they presented them as having come from peasant tellers or informants. This is a kind of veracity topos that is not uncommon in medieval frame narratives (The Thousand Nights and One Night, The Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales) and in Early Modern novels like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive, or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill.3 It is a rhetorical move that separates the author-collector who is selling the text to the reader from the author-creator with whom the story originated. For centuries, the reading public has played the believing game.4 By and large, we have accepted the premise that the stories we read were not written by these men, but collected by them. This belief persists among the reading public despite extensive scholarly study that shows it to be an incomplete one at best. Although this backstory for our beloved stories is popular and compelling, it may not accurately refect where these stories come from and why they were poised to fll the vacuum left by the decline of sacred scripture as a corpus of common narratives in American culture. This persistence of the folk origin model depends in part on its power to strengthen the interpretation of fairy tales as distilling a national cultural mood into narrative.5 In Why Fairy Tales Stick, Jack Zipes argues that folk and fairy tales that stabilized in the seventeenth century “reinforced the ideological norms of patriarchal societies. They spoke to the conficts and predicaments that arose out of attempts by social orders to curb and ‘civilize’ our instinctual drives.”6 In other words, fairy tales create a discursive space where it is safe to engage with challenging social issues. Furthermore, the diffusion of the creative force behind the tales to the mass of folk coheres the folk together. These centuries-old, orally circulating tales among the folk are the putative source that bleeds recognizable

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folktale motifs into medieval lais and romances. However, the folk origin model fails to account for the disappearance of such oral production when, as Rudolph Schenda notes, other forms of oral communication, such as the legend, the jest, and the recital of daily events, have continued to exist symbiotically with print.7 In Clever Maids, Valerie Paradiž challenges this model of folk origins. She traces the paths stories took to the Grimms’ anthology through networks of educated women and men in and around the city of Kassel. Ruth Bottigheimer goes further to argue for an entirely text-based origin for fairy tales. This model is grounded on research into social and political history and codicology which, she argues, “converge so unerringly on 1550’s Venice and Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s newly created tales.”8 In this model, the early authors of fairy tales draw on the tales of magic which had existed among the larger body of folk tales but adapt them with regard to the audience’s concerns about class mobility, wealth, and new interactions with the marvelous, thanks to expanded exploration of the world at macro and micro levels. This author and text model of fairy-tale origin contextualizes and historicizes the narratives rather than universalizing them, but it depends on an either/or understanding of fairy-tale origins and ignores the dynamics by which technologies of composition and transmission exist side by side and can be mutually infuential. The codicological trails Bottigheimer traces from Straparola to Basile to the Grimms, while an interesting thought experiment, are ultimately unsatisfying as an origin story and ignore the similarities between European tales and those collected in the rest of the world. In Russia, for example, Perrault’s “Cendrillon” was frst published in 1697 with the title “Золушка” (Zoluška). This tale, which is still available in Russian picture books today, is considered by the reading public to be distinct from the more complex 510A tale “Василиса прекрасная” (Vasilisa the Beautiful), which appears in the collection of Aleksandr Nikolayevich Afanas’ev,9 a project similar in scope to and contemporary with the Grimms’ Kinderund Hausmärchen.10 Though Vasilisa’s story begins similarly to Basile’s “Cenerentola,” Perrault’s “Cendrillon,” and the Grimms’ “Aschenputtel,” with a merchant’s daughter subject to the tyranny of a stepmother, this text differs markedly from those three as the stepfamily are not the only ones who force Vasilisa to work for them. This typifes the many avenues of transmission left unexplained by Bottigheimer. Beyond the questions Bottigheimer’s model leaves unanswered, though, a book-and-author origin for fairy tales has far-reaching repercussions for their interpretation. The peasant storytellers of Basile’s frame tale and the folk informants claimed by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm exemplify the veracity topos that adds weight to a text by claiming an origin beyond that of the author. Ostensibly, the text framed by such a claim is not the mere fancy of

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the author, but the author’s transmission of a narrative created by someone with more authority to tell the story. In each case, these women who tell stories are strongly associated with the local folk culture, and the male compilers of tales act as a bridge between the local culture and the broader, more educated, more cosmopolitan audience of the book. Basile’s storytellers, for example, are “the best of the city” chosen from “all the women of the land” who responded to his summons, and the prince asks them to tell tales “of the sort that old women usually entertain little ones with.”11 “Best” here does not mean prominent or beautiful or wealthy. These women are earthy and deformed: “lame Zeza, twisted Cecca, goitered Meneca, big-nosed Tolla, hunchback Popa, drooling Antonella, snout-faced Ciulla, cross-eyed Paola, mangy Ciommetella, and shitty Iacova.”12 The thing they are best at is telling stories. By diffusing the authorship of the tales in their collections, Basile and the Grimms aid the formation of national identities because they can claim that these stories represent the ideas and ideals of the broader culture from which the putative tellers are drawn rather than representing only the imaginative prowess of the authors themselves. Without this connection to the authority of the broader public, the stories do not function as well as national rallying points. The connection of fairy tales to the world’s folk is also the basis for later interpretations of these texts. Early twentieth-century psychoanalyst Carl Jung developed an analytical schema that posits the stock characters of fairy tales as aspects of the self. Two generations later, literary theorist Joseph Campbell’s analysis of similarities among fairy tales, myths, and folk stories led him to articulate a theory of the monomyth that refects a universal human experience. These archetypal interpretations of fairy tales, and the creators and critics whom they infuenced, depend on a folk origins model in order to view tales as representations of the human psyche. Without the folk origins model, Jung and Campbell’s interpretations take on overtones of propagandistic manipulation of the masses by elites. The stories become, as Bottigheimer writes, the tools of “canny suppliers [who] recognize and respond to [. . .] people’s conscious or unconscious incorporation of tales that suit their needs.”13 If fairy tales are a project of the folk, then they are refective of the zeitgeist of that folk, an artifact of the collaboration of the people who read or hear and retell them. If, however, fairy tales are the tools of producers driven by proft, they are untrustworthy vessels for the zeitgeist, and may become prescriptive models, rather than descriptive refections of a grassroots, collaborative public culture. The historical and literary analysis of Paradiž, Bottigheimer, and others exposes the fction of the pure folk origins model suggested by the framing of European tale collections and reinforced by scholarly study in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, the folk model has continued to inform public

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interpretation and adaptation of these stories since the nineteenth century. Certainly, the mere fact of the persistence of the model of folk origins is reason to interrogate it. It seems to me that the folk origin model and the literary origin model are the extremes of a pendulum’s arc, and each is overstating its case. Taking a more moderate stance in their introduction to Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairytale in Italy and France, Nancy Canepa and Antonella Ansani articulate a view that gives credit to Straparola and Basile for their innovation while still allowing for the idea of folk participation in the formation of the tales as well as the idea that tales-as-such were in circulation for centuries before Straparola and Basile.14 Thus, they credit Basile not with the invention of anything but with “the decision to rewrite the fairy tale.” This kind of literary appropriation of folkloric material (whether whole tales or motifs) participates in a widespread seventeenth-century “appropriation of material that had previously been relegated to a heterogeneous spectrum of popular genres such as street theater, broadsides and chapbooks, festivals (such as Carnival) and, of course, folktales.”15 Such appropriation can be traced back even further thanks to Jan Ziolkowski’s analysis of analogues to contemporary tales like “Little Red Riding Hood” in medieval Latin poetry.16 Thus, the conclusion that seems most likely to me is that a symbiotic interplay of textual and oral traditions sharing motifs and plots extends from at least the medieval period to the present.

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FAIRY TALES ARE UNIVERSALLY FAMILIAR Library shelves around the world are full of fairy-tale anthologies that present the collected stories of different nations—French fairy tales, German tales from the Grimms, Native American folk and fairy tales, Japanese fairy tales. Part of the pleasure of reading a volume of tales that originates outside one’s own cultural space is the otherness of the stories’ settings, character names, and material culture. But another part of the pleasure of reading such volumes is the experience of recognizing familiar plots and characters. The most remarkable thing about these anthologies is their similarity to one another. These collections are left to us from the twin movements of romantic nationalism and colonialism in the nineteenth century. As European monarchies, principalities, and city-states coalesced into modern nation-states, collection of the stories of the folk of each nation fourished. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who collected tales in Germany, are arguably the most well-known, but similar projects were carried out by others—Achim von Arnim working also in Germany, Giuseppe Pitrè in Sicily, Alexander Afanas’ev in European

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Russia.17 These impulses to collect stories are informed by the folk origins model. The European colonial project carried this impulse for story collection to its colonies. Like the businessmen who extracted agricultural goods (tea, cotton, opium) and raw materials (iron, coal, guano) from colonized spaces to be refned, processed, and packaged for resale to citizens and colonized people, folklorists extracted the stories of the cultures being impacted by colonization. This type of collection is sometimes described as a benevolent act of preservation, archiving these tales before they disappeared in the face of modernization, but this is a Eurocentric framing that privileges European ways of knowing and transmitting wisdom from one generation to the next. It also ignores the violence of exporting European ideas about what it means to be modern into the colonized spaces. The outsider folklorist’s act of recording fxes the collected stories in a specifc form and then privileges that form over modes of transmission and adaptation that belong to the home culture of the story.18 At the turn of the twentieth century, these story collections from around the world became the raw material for scientifc inquiry by folklorists, focusing on the search for the origins of all tales in an Ur-tale. Similar paths of inquiry in other scientifc felds led to theories of origins that shape the way we interact with the world today. Linguists have created a family tree of known languages and reconstructed protolanguages that were never recorded but are the logical sources of present-day world languages. Proto-Indo-European, for example, is the forebear of Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Latin, German, and most other languages spoken in Eurasia.19 Anthropologists, aided at the turn of the twenty-frst century by scholars of the human genome, have traced the common ancestry of humanity to fnd that we all come from southern Africa.20 Folklorists’ search for the Ur-tale has been less successful at identifying a point of origin for these stories that span the globe, and pursuit of a single tale from which all other tales derive has ultimately been abandoned by the scholarly community. Nonetheless, because of the undeniable similarities in tales from different parts of the world, questions of origins and transmission patterns have dominated discussions within fairy-tale studies for much of the last 100 years. These discussions have produced tools for taxonomic classifcations of fairy tales into types, which folklorists and scholars of fairy tales continue to use—Propp’s morphology and Aarne, Thompson, and Uther’s tale type index. In The Morphology of the Folktale, Vladimir Jakovlevič Propp outlines a basic structure found in fairy-tale texts (also commonly translated from the Russian as wonder tales).21 This basic structure includes thirty-one functions that are the building blocks from which fairy tales are made. Not all functions are necessarily present in all tales, but the ones that are present generally

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occur in the order Propp has laid out: a harmonious initial situation is marred when villainy occurs or a lack (or interdiction) manifests, the hero sets out to fx what is wrong and is aided by a donor and/or magical helper who tests the hero and provides aid themselves or through magical objects, the hero struggles with and defeats the villain and/or ameliorates the lack. Upon the hero’s return home, the hero’s identity may be challenged by a false hero, but ultimately the hero is recognized, is transfgured, achieves union with the other, and takes on some higher or greater role than in the initial situation.22 Propp himself acknowledges that his model maps best, of course, onto, the corpus of Russian fairy tales with which he worked, but he also asserts the generalizability of the model, noting that “the very same structure is exhibited, for example, by certain novels of chivalry.”23 This base model is adaptable in a variety of ways. Functions may, for example, be trebled, and whole sections may be repeated, creating multiple moves within a larger tale. Scholars continue to use Propp as a tool for comparison of texts and plots that come from different places and appear in different media. Propp’s model remains particularly useful for examining the structure of contemporary retellings and adaptations, which, even when represented as realistic stories, adhere to the pattern of functions defned by Propp. It helps readers to see and to name the aspects of a text that feel familiar and universal and the aspects that feel new and innovative. As my analysis will show in chapters 8 and 9, recent adaptations of familiar fairy tales and new fairy-tale stories often create ludic space by destabilizing the audience’s expectations about the roles of the dramatis personae, the main stock characters Propp catalogs: hero, love interest, villain, magical helper, and so on. In DisneyPixar’s Brave, for example, the role of villain is occupied by different characters in different phases of the story—by Merida’s mother, by Merida herself, and also by Mor’du. This division of the villain’s role across characters has implications for the message of the text.24 The Types of the International Folktale was frst compiled by Anti Aarne and Stith Thomson in the early twentieth century and revised by Hans-Jörg Uther in the early twenty-frst century. It groups stories into tale types based on their underlying plot structure. The entry for the familiar Cinderella story looks like this: 510A Cinderella (Cenerentola, Cendrillon, Aschenputtel.) A young woman is mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters [S31, L55] and has to live in the ashes as a servant. When the sisters and the stepmother go to a ball (church), they give Cinderella an impossible task (e.g. sorting peas from ashes), which she accomplishes with the help of birds [B450]. She obtains beautiful clothing from a supernatural being [D1050.1, N815] or a tree that grows on the grave of her deceased mother [D815.1, D842.1, E323.2] and goes unknown to the ball.

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A prince falls in love with her [N711.6, N711.4], but she has to leave the ball early [C761.3]. The same thing happens on the next evening, but on the third evening, she loses one of her shoes [R221, F823.2]. The prince will marry only the woman whom the shoe fts [H36.1]. The stepsisters cut pieces off their feet in order to make them ft into the shoe [K1911.3.3.1], but a bird calls attention to this deceit. Cinderella, who had frst been hidden from the prince, tries on the shoe and it fts her. The prince marries her.25

This abstracted plot identifes the common elements of stories that we, the audience, would recognize as being “Cinderella stories,” regardless of the name of the hero at the center of the plot—the punishing stepmother, the magical helper, the expiring magic that makes her leave the ball in a rush, the shoe left behind. Part II of this monograph will look at several variants and versions of this story and the way they conform to or innovate on this basic plot structure. These tools have their limits. The people who created them were European men, so they tend to be Eurocentric, and the majority of tale types are abstracted from stories common to European cultural spaces, but they also help readers and researchers to describe, analyze, and compare tales they read from other cultures, including our contemporary stories on page and screen. When scholars use Propp’s morphology and the ATU index, we emphasize the universal nature of fairy tales and reinforce the sense of familiarity that readers value.

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FAIRY TALES ARE FANTASTIC The third component of my broad defnition of the term “fairy tale” is a recognition that the marvelous, the magical helpers and magical objects in Propp’s model, can be manifested in many forms as the reading (and viewing) public’s attitude toward the real and the marvelous has varied over time. In “Marvelous Realities: Reading the Merveilleux in the Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tale,” Lewis Seifert draws on Todorov and Flahault to argue that the marvelous, as a defning feature of the fairy tale, is highly variable and “adapted to the cultural contexts in which it is evoked and, particularly, to its prevailing cultural discourses of the ‘real.’”26 Suzanne Magnanini concurs. In her discussion of Fairy Tale Science, Magnanini regards the marvelous in Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s tales of The Pleasant Nights in sixteenthcentury Italy as a response to the “steady erosion of facts on which Early Modern European society founded various beliefs,” an erosion happening in the sciences just as the Reformation began to fragment the Christian church.27

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Magnanini asserts that Straparola and, later, Giambattista Basile wrote during historical moments characterized by the pervasive presence of the marvelous in everyday life: previously unknown objects arriving from far-off lands, microscopes and telescopes opening the limina of the known world, and the proliferation of scientifc areas of knowledge. In this environment, wonders would have been legitimate subjects for inquiry, and fairy tales were “actively engaged in dialogue with the scientifc tradition” of the day.28 The description of the audience in early modern Italy offered by Magnanini is remarkably similar to the audience of the twenty-frst-century United States, who, judging by movie theater marquees and book shop displays, have a similarly strong appetite for the marvelous. Both audiences are largely urban or suburban, have “deep hopes for material improvement,” daydream of a better life, and, therefore, enjoy fairy tales as “illusions of happiness to come.”29 Both audiences also live amid the swift advancement of scientifc theory. Within the traditional American canon of tales, marvelous elements like a fairy godmother, an enchanted pumpkin, or the use of magic help create a discursive space for the tale by moving the characters into an extraordinary setting that makes exploration possible or by challenging the hero to perform beyond his or her normal capacity. Earlier, in the medieval romances, marvelous elements were incorporated in symbolic ways that brought them into the realm of the miraculous, like the holy grail or the Green Knight’s beheading game.30 Today, contemporary adaptations which claim the label of fairy tale generally preserve marvelous elements as fantastic, as we shall see in the remaining chapters. However, contemporary novels and flms, that appear to be verisimilar and yet are built on Propp’s structure, often lack magic entirely. The supernatural and the miraculous are almost entirely absent from this body of texts. In Marvelous Geometry, Jessica Tiffn asserts, “Even those that are not explicitly magical, however, retain classic fairy-tale logic.”31 The magical objects of the fairy-tale canon have been replaced by coincidence and technology, like Google and the smartphone. In the 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail, the then-cutting-edge system of chat rooms and e-mail via America On-Line creates the discursive space in which two characters meet and fall in love.32 Meanwhile, the role of the magical helper, endemic to the traditional canon in the form of the fairy godmother or talking animal, has been occupied by the wise outsider. In Universal Picture’s 2011 romance Leap Year, the wise outsider role is flled by three older men: the boat captain, the station master and bed-and-breakfast owner, and the priest. In Lionsgate’s 2001 drama Chocolat, the wise outsider role is fulflled by both an elderly woman and a Romani handyman.33 Black characters who exist solely to be the wise other are suffciently widespread in Hollywood to have been dubbed The Magical Negro.34 They can be seen as the housekeeper, the nanny, the cab

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driver, the janitor, all service professions that put them in contact with the non-Black hero of the story in a logically verisimilar way. Although these modern substitutes are no longer magical, they do continue to fulfll the same narrative roles previously occupied by glass slippers and enchanted mice. As in Straparola’s tales, the marvelous in modern fairy tales “hold[s] out a promise of fortune before the eyes of the unfortunate.”35 Elements of the modern marvelous aid the protagonist in overcoming obstacles on their journey, act as tokens of recognition, reward success, and sometimes punish the villain. In Fox 2000 Pictures’ 2008 comedy 27 Dresses, the main character’s Filofax containing her calendar, address book, to-do list, and the slips of paper that support all of those functions is the tool that enables her to keep abreast of her uncannily busy life. When she loses it, things start to fall apart, and her antagonist uses the Filofax to further test her.36 Although they are no longer magical, the roles of helper and key object remain in these verisimilar texts built on fairy-tale structures.

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FAIRY TALES ARE SIMULTANEOUSLY CONSERVATIVE AND RADICAL The word “tradition” is often used in conjunction with fairy tales to talk about the many variants of a single tale type, which have been created through time. Tradition is a helpful label because it describes a cultural phenomenon that is simultaneously conservative (less subject to change) and variable (adaptive to changes in the environment). Each new variant or version of a fairy tale participates in that fairy tale’s tradition in the same way that each new Thanksgiving dinner participates in that holiday’s tradition.37 In How Tradition Works, Michael Drout argues that from one iteration to the next, there must be a critical mass of sameness in order for the tradition to be recognizable as such, though there is inevitable variation introduced by the growth and change of the participants, the passage of time, and changes in cultural context.38 This is evident when one reads multiple variants of the same fairy tale, which are recognizable as being related despite the changes in the protagonist’s name, the different means of access to the marvelous, and the treatment of the stepmother and sisters in the endings. In the minds of readers, the participants in the tradition, the search for similarity goes only as far as the previous iteration.39 My Thanksgiving menu is very different from my great-grandmother’s Thanksgiving menu, but not because one year I decided to break with a long-established tradition. The large difference between my habit and hers comes from a series of small innovations as kitchen technology, availability of foods, and American tastes have changed. Over time,

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small changes in each iteration can become large changes in the long history of a tradition.40 Nevertheless, Drout reminds us, “behaviors marked as traditional are often less subject to change than other behaviors.”41 Families gathering for holiday meals and audiences who choose to engage with fairy tales will tolerate only modest modifcations to the tradition they expect to fnd. This capacity on the part of fairy tales to balance conservative preservation and creative adaptability means that they can continue to evolve with their cultural context. In her discussion of the simultaneous creativity and formulaic nature of folk and fairy tales, Anna Tavis delves more deeply into analysis of how fairy tales strike this balance. She draws on Juri Lotman to posit that creativity functions differently in “different types of texts in different cultures.”42 Lotman’s schema contrasts folk and fairy tales with texts like the nineteenthcentury novel, which are inherently heteroglossic. That is, they tend to use a variety of voices and perspectives to destabilize the assumptions that readers bring to the text. In contrast, Lotman claims that folk and fairy tales tend to follow a single system of rules which govern both form and content, such that all information is familiar to the audience.43 Rather than deconstructing what is known or believed, folktale creativity comes from I-to-me auto-communication, or communication within a community, that serves as a reminder of things community members already know.44 This is a kind of creativity that delights in familiarity at least as much as it delights in innovation. In her monograph A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon concurs with both Tavis and Drout.45 Hutcheon writes, “Like ritual, [adaptation’s] repetition brings comfort, a fuller understanding, and the confdence that comes with the sense of knowing what is going to happen next.”46 Each time a tale is read and enjoyed, or each time it is rewritten and appreciated, it becomes more likely that the tale will be read or rewritten again. Hutcheon goes on to argue that the familiarity Tavis emphasizes is only one aspect of the audience’s enjoyment of an adaptation. The other important aspect is the way in which “the dialogue with the past, for that is what adaptation means for audiences, creates the doubled pleasure of the palimpsest: more than one text is experienced and knowingly so.”47 Viewers who were very familiar with Disney’s 1950 animated Cinderella, for example, brought this familiarity with them to the 2015 live-action remake. For them, the motivations revealed by Cate Blanchett’s Lady Tremaine shed light on the animated stepmother’s actions. The earlier animated flm played in the mind’s eye as the live-action flm played on the screen, and knowing viewers delighted in the similarities. These same knowing viewers reacted to the differences—interiority for the stepmother, Cinderella and the prince meeting in the woods before the ball, the fairy godmother’s personality—with either appreciation or disdain. Regardless of their reaction to the differences, though, part of the pleasure

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of viewing the new flm is judging it against the palimpsest of the older flm. Each new encounter with a fairy tale reminds the audience of previous encounters with variants of that tale type as well as with other fairy tales, and even as tales adapt and change, they retain some of the motifs of previous variants in the tradition. Hutcheon also points out that sometimes changes made to a text in the process of adaptation are dictated by a shift in medium.48 No feature flm, for example, can faithfully reproduce every word in a novel in the time allotted. Though audiences love to criticize the extensive changes made in adaptations that cross media, particularly book to flm adaptations, the space between the adapted text and the newer adaptation can be put to a variety of purposes ranging from humor to social commentary. The most masterful adaptations use the humor or dislocation in the new text in service to social commentary. I would argue that it is the conservative nature of fairy tales that allows them to be radical. The radical suggestions about ways the world could be different come in the middle of the story when the protagonist(s) are fghting villainy. These moments are framed by a harmonious initial situation and a resolution of order that contain the radicality. When my children were little and wanted to stop watching because they were frightened of the monsters and villains in Disney’s oeuvre, I would reassure them that the scary part would end, the monster would lose the battle, and everything would be okay. And it always was because that is how fairy tales work. Similarly, the restoration of orderly family units with marriages or more recently in Moana, Brave, and Frozen with parent-child or sibling relationships reassures the audience that was disturbed by the destabilization of familial norms in the messy middle of the story.49 The restoration of order, though, does not undo the destabilization of the messy middle. Moana’s return to her family at the end of the flm does not erase her defance of her father’s instructions. The restoration of order is an inherently conservative impulse, but this restored order is one that has been affected by the radical destabilization of the messy middle. The protagonists, and the audience, have been changed by the adventure. FAIRY TALES ARE INTERTEXTUAL In literary criticism, intertextuality is a concept that focuses on the way a given text relates to other texts. It was frst coined by Julia Kristeva in 1960, and has since been refned by a number of other scholars of literature.50 For the purposes of this discussion, the most important aspect of intertextual criticism to consider is the bidirectional gaze it reminds us to have. When reading for intertextual connections, the audience is looking for the quotes, allusions, and infuence from other texts that the creator may have incorporated,

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consciously or unconsciously. At the same time, the audience is looking for the ways that they can connect this new-to-them text with other texts they have consumed, even those created later than the text under consideration. Like metaphors, fairy-tale texts enrich the audience’s understanding of that which they describe through analogy.51 Walt Disney’s journals and professional records indicate that his early fairy-tale flm adaptations drew most heavily on collections from Grimm and Perrault. A viewer who knows “Aschenputtel” and “Cendrillon” can see this infuence in the 1950 animated Cinderella. For many Americans, however, Disney’s animated flms are their frst encounter with fairy-tale stories. In class discussions of fairy tales, my students often talk about the Disney animated flms as the “originals.” Some of them are surprised to learn how many variants and retellings preceded Disney’s project. When they read earlier versions, particularly the Grimm and Perrault stories, they read the chronologically earlier text with the palimpsest of the later flm in mind. An intertextual critical eye highlights the conversations that happen among texts. In Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales, Vanessa Joosen analyzes the dialogic and mutually infuential relationship between fairy-tale criticism and creative production in the “fairy-tale renaissance” in Germanand English-speaking countries from the 1970s onward.52 She fnds that particularly mid-twentieth-century feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to fairy tales share the same concerns that are evident in creative adaptations from that period. It is, of course, almost impossible to know which creative adapters were reading which critics, if they were reading criticism at all, but it is possible to see common concerns in the scholarly conversation and in artistic production.

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CONCLUSION This chapter started with an acknowledgment that the label “fairy tale” is diffcult to defne. At this point, what we can say is that fairy tales are texts— stories, poems, novels, flms, picture books—that move the characters and the audience from a harmonious initial situation through a messy middle that imagines a different-from-the-known world to arrive at a restoration of order that has been impacted by the adventure. This basic plot structure allows fairy tales to be simultaneously conservative and radical. Further, we can say that the fairy tales we are telling today participate in a pattern of mutual infuence between literary culture and oral (or popular) culture that we can trace back to, at least, the early medieval period in Europe. Fairy tales around the world share a remarkable level of similarity in the building blocks that form these stories—character types, motifs, and plot sequences—even as they are

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responsive to and representative of the various cultures where they have been created. This universal familiarity and our habit of retelling the same stories over and over create a complex web of intertextual connections in the minds of authors and readers.

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NOTES 1. Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Les Contes des fées (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1697). For a well-constructed review of how scholars have defned the fairy tale in the twentieth century, see Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix, “Introduction: Envisioning Ambiguity: Fairy Tale Films,” in Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity (Logan, UT: Utah State University, 2009), 1–22. 2. Niles, Homo Narrans, 2. 3. Arabian Nights. Tales of 1001 Nights, trans. Malcolm C. Lyons and Ursula Lyons, 3 Vols. (London: Penguin Classics, 2008); Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, ed. Peter E. Bondanella and Mark Musa (New York, NY: Signet, 2010); Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Dean Benson (New York, NY: Houghton Miffin, 1987); Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2003); Royall Tyler, The Algerian Captive, Or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2002). 4. My thanks to Peter Elbow for this concise way of naming the reader’s attitude. 5. See, for example, addressing Norwegian national consciousness and the fairy tale: Marte Hvam Hult, Framing National Narrative: The Legends Collections of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003). My thanks to Shaun Hughes for this suggestion. 6. Jack Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), xii. 7. Schenda, “Telling Tales—Spreading Tales,” 89. 8. Paradiž, Clever Maids; Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice and the Fairy Tale Tradition (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 4. 9. Александр Николаевич Афанасьев, Народные русские сказки, Вып. 1–8 (Москва: К. Солдатенков и Н. Щепкин, 1855–1863). 10. See “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” Aleksandr Nikolayevich Afanas’ev, Russian Fairy Tales, trans. Norbert Gutemann, ed. Roman Jakobson, 2nd edition (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1973), 439–47. According to Maria Nikolajeva, (“Afanasyev, Aleksandr,” in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western Fairy Tale Tradition from Medieval to Modern, ed. Jack Zipes [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 4–5 at 4), Afans’ev’s contribution to the feld of fairy-tale studies is his “collection, description, and classifcation of material.” His eight-volume collection not only draws on stories Afanas’ev himself collected but also represents the work of other folklorists and the archive of the Russian Geographic Society (4).

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11. Giambattista Basile, The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones, trans. Nancy L. Canepa (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 41–42. 12. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 42. 13. Carl G. Jung, Aspects of the Feminine, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982) discusses fairy tales in terms of the self’s quest for union with the gendered other (144–51). Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972) identifes the fairy-tale protagonist with the hero of the monomyth, everyself’s quest for individuation and maturity. Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales: A New History, 107. 14. Nancy L. Canepa and Antonella Ansani, “Introduction,” in Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairytale in Italy and France, ed. Nancy L. Canepa (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 9–33 at 10. 15. Canepa and Ansani, “Introduction,” 14, 16. 16. Jan Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2007), 93–124. 17. Ludwig Arnim and Clemens Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte Deutsche Lieder (Köln: Anaconda, 2015); Giuseppi Pitrè, Faire, Novelle e racconti popolari siciliani, 4 Vols. (Palermo: L. Pedone Lauriel, 1875); Giuseppe Pitrè, Catarina the Wise and Other Wondrous Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales, trans. and ed. Jack Zipes (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). 18. The Alaskan Native Knowledge Network offers a discussion of this dynamic in their “Guidelines for Respecting Cultural Knowledge,” ANKN Website, adopted February, 2000, last accessed February 4, 2020, http:​/​/www​​.ankn​​.uaf.​​edu​/p​​ublic​​ation​​ s​/kno​​wled​g​​e​.htm​​l. Children’s literature activist Debbie Reese also frequently discusses related issues in her blog American Indian Children’s Literature and in her use of Twitter. These are just two examples. This conversation is widespread in spaces that have a history of colonization by European nation-states. 19. Exceptions are Hungarian and Finnish, which are not descended from ProtoIndo-European. For an overview of the study of language families, see Tore Janson, The History of Languages: An Introduction (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012). 20. For a recent overview of this science, see David Begun, The Real Planet of the Apes: A Study of Human Origins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 21. Vladimir Jakovlevič Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, 2nd edition, ed. Louis A. Wagner (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990), frst published as Морфология сказки, Государственные институт истории искусств: Вопросы поэтики 12 (Ленинград: «Academia», 1928). 22. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 25–31. 23. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 100. 24. See chapter 9 of this monograph. 25. Hans-Jorg Uther, The Types of the International Folktale: A Classifcation and Bibliography, Based on the System of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, 3 Vols. (Helsinki: Suomalanen Tiedeakatemia, Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004). 26. Lewis C. Seifert, “Marvelous Realities: Reading the Merveilleux in the Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tale,” in Out of the Woods: The Origins of the

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Literary Fairytale in Italy and France, ed. Nancy L. Canepa (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 131–51 at 131. 27. Suzanne Magnanini, Fairy-Tale Science: Monstrous Generation in the Tales of Straparola and Basile (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 11. 28. Magnanini, Fairy-Tale Science, 9. In support of this thesis, Magnanini offers the argument that it would not have been unusual for men of letters to participate in scientifc debate, nor for scientists to be also literary (see discussion of Renaissance men, Fairy-Tale Science, 16), especially since it is only in the seventeenth century that doing science shifts from a philological process of mining the classical texts to an experimental/experiential process based on observation. In contrast, Ruth Bottigheimer regards the marvelous in Straparola’s fairy tales as a means of escape offering the possibility for upward mobility to a “newly emerging reading public” of “literate urban artisans and craftsmen” who struggled with economic instability in sixteenth-century Venice because their prosperity was threatened by increasing industrialization and a sharp divide between rich and poor (Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather, 31–32). This line of reasoning, however, leads Bottigheimer into speculative territory: “In such an economy, marrying into great wealth was just about the only way to avert the fearsome prospect of poverty, and that, clearly, could only be achieved by magic” (Fairy Godfather, 34). 29. Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales: A New History, 13. 30. See Colin Manlove, “The French Quests del Saint Graal,” in Christian Fantasy: From 1200 to the Present (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 1–20. 31. Jessica Tiffn, Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and Metafction in Modern Fairy Tale (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 7. 32. You’ve Got Mail, directed by Norah Ephron (1998; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros). 33. Leap Year, directed by Anand Tucker (2008; Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures); Chocolat, directed by Lasse Hallström (2001; Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate). For an analysis of contemporary representations of the magical helper role, see Jeana Jorgensen, “A Wave of the Magic Wand: Fairy Godmothers in Contemporary American Media,” Marvels & Tales 21, no. 2 (2007): 216–27. 34. For a discussion of this trope in contemporary American flm, see Cerise Glenn and Landra Cunningham, “The Power of Black Magic: The Magical Negro and White Salvation in Film,” Journal of Black Studies 40, no. 2 (November 2009): 135–52. 35. Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather, 35. 36. 27 Dresses, directed by Anne Fletcher (2008; Los Angeles, CA: Fox 2000 Pictures). 37. The word “variant” refers to an innovative branch within a tale type tradition. “Cendrillon” and “Aschenputtel” are different variants of the 510A tradition. The word “version” refers to an edition, translation, or retelling of a specifc variant, though it may or may not blend elements from multiple variants. Disney’s 1950 Cinderella flm, for example, claims to be a version of Perrault’s “Cendrillon” variant, but also includes elements of Grimms’ “Aschenputtel” variant.

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38. Michael C. Drout, How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies [ACMRS], 2006), 11. I disagree with Drout’s recent public statements on social media regarding continued usage of the racist term “Anglo-Saxon.” Nonetheless, I have chosen to cite his work here because of the critical role it played in my thinking at early stages of this project. 39. Drout, How Tradition Works, 28. 40. Drout, How Tradition Works, 27. 41. Drout, How Tradition Works, 28. 42. Anna Tavis, “Fairy Tales from a Semiotic Perspective,” in Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 195–202 at 195. 43. Tavis, “Fairy Tales,” 196. 44. Tavis, “Fairy Tales,” 197. 45. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edition (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013). My thanks to Ellen Rees for recommending Hutcheon’s work. Hutcheon’s concept of adaptation is broad, encompassing a wide variety of intertextual interactions. Julie Sanders offers more nuanced defnitions of intertextual interaction in her introduction to Adaptation and Appropriation:

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“Quotation can be deferential or critical, supportive or questioning; it depends on the context in which the quotation takes place. Citation, however, presumes a more deferential relationship; it is frequently self-authenticating, even reverential, in its reference to the canon of ‘authoritative,’ culturally validated texts. . . . But citation is different again to adaptation, which constitutes a more sustained engagement with a single text or source than the more glancing act of allusion or quotation, even citation allows. Beyond that, appropriation carries out the same sustained engagement as adaptation but frequently adopts a posture of critique, even assault” ([London: Routledge, 2006], 4).

46. Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 114. 47. Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 116. 48. Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 34–36. 49. Moana, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker (2016; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Animation Studios); Brave, directed by Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman (2012; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studio); Frozen, directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee (2013; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Animation Studios). 50. See Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1980); and Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” in Sēmeiōtikē: recharges our one sémanalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969). For more recent discussion of intertextuality and fairy tales specifcally, see Vanessa Joosen, Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2011); and Elaine Martin, “Intertextuality: An Introduction,” Comparatist 35 (May 2011): 148–51. 51. Niles, Homo Narrans, 4. 52. Joosen, Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales, 4.

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Part II

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CINDERELLA TRANSFORMED IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

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Cinderella’s Subtypes

The Cinderella tale is one of the most widely attested and widely studied tale types. In her Transformations poem about this story, Anne Sexton references this universality with the refrain of “That story”:

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the plumber with the twelve children who wins the Irish Sweepstakes. [. . .] That story.

That story is nearly universal. That story of the righteous being lifted from abjection to prosperity appears in the corpus of fabulous stories of almost every culture around the world. Indeed, Marian Roalfe Cox, the frst folklorist to publish a catalog of variants, came up with 345 in 1893.1 Later researchers have expanded that catalog as they have looked in areas not accessible to Cox. In 1951, Anna Birgitta Rooth’s The Cinderella Cycle analyzed 700 versions, focusing on the ones that “blur the lines between tale [sub]types,”2 and R. D. Jameson’s research in China in the 1980s engaged with a rich tradition of this tale type, rivaling the Western world’s 345.3 That story gets told and retold and adapted to ft new contexts and appeal to new audiences. When Sexton repeats the line “That story,” readers in the United States know exactly what she means. Cinderella’s universality is not the most interesting thing about her, though. What is most interesting is her mutability, the way her story changes to refect the context in which it is being told.4 Every people that tells a Cinderella story modifes it to match their society not only in superfcial ways like setting, clothing, and foodways but also in deeper ways that refect the shared values of the creator and the audience. Ultimately, all of these Cinderella stories are 65

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stories of how the hero responds to her own abjection, stories of what the hero does when she loses the things necessary for success in her society. When we really pay attention to what we are seeing on the page (or the screen) in front of us, we can see that the vast majority of variants in the Cinderella tradition start with the daughter of a man who has both wealth and status. The hero’s hard work and magical help are not pulling her up from the poverty into which she was born; they are restoring her to the position of rank and privilege from which she had been forced. Nevertheless, more recent retellings of the tale place greater socioeconomic distance between Cinderella and the prince, and American idiom continues to use the phrase “Cinderella story” as shorthand for a rise from poverty and servitude to wealth and privilege. Part 2 of this monograph seeks to interrogate the contemporary American love affair with the Cinderella tale type. This frst chapter offers an overview of the variety of stories in the Cinderella tradition with a précis of available schemata for grouping tales into subtypes and brief defnitions of the common subtype labels. The second chapter follows with an examination of three signifcant shifts in Cinderella’s evolution in contemporary American popular culture: elision of the undesirable marriage and love-like-salt subtypes in favor of the punishing stepmother subtype, evolution from complex to compact tales, and transformation of the punishing stepmother subtype from a restoration tale to a rise tale. As Julie Sanders notes, “It is usually at the very point of infdelity that the most creative acts of adaptation and appropriation take place,”5 and the third chapter in this section will offer a close examination of signifcant changes in the tale type in order to elucidate how the Cinderella story has become confated with the American dream. As researchers grapple with the astounding number of tales within the Cinderella tradition, they have created differing schemata for grouping Cinderella tales into subtypes. In her 1893 collection, Cox identifed four named categories—(A) Cinderella, (B) Catskin, (C) Cap o’Rushes, and (D) Hero Tales—plus an additional catchall category, (E) Indeterminate. In 1951, Rooth’s schema privileges Cox’s Indeterminate category as her Type A while folding Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap o’Rushes into Types B and B1. The divisions within these schemata refect, of course, the differing projects of the researchers, and they have had differing degrees of usefulness to the broader scholarly community. Most widely used is the schema of Uther’s The Types of the International Folktale with its three categories: the punishing stepmother (ATU 510A), the undesirable marriage (ATU 510B), and love like salt (ATU 510B and ATU 923), which correspond to Cox’s categories of Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap o’Rushes, respectively. Additionally, I would argue that the maiden without hands (ATU 706) also belongs in this constellation of tales. Like those of subtype 510B, the 706 daughter is forced into abjection by an undesirable marriage, although the nature of her grotesque

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abjection is severed hands rather than a coat of untanned skins.6 In each of these subtypes the hero is made abject through her loss of some critical ingredient for success in the society in which the fairy tale is set, but each Cinderella responds to this abjection differently. The 510A Cinderella retains her identity and her connection to her ancestral home, but is cut off from the social class in which she grew up by being forced to do the work of a household servant, and this punishing stepmother subtype is the story that most Americans associate with the name Cinderella. In this tale, a widower remarries, and his new wife forces the daughter from his frst marriage into abjection and servitude within the household. Her restoration is accomplished with the intervention of a magical helper (fairy godmother) who enables her to attend a ball where the prince falls in love with her. The villainy here is generally laid at the feet of the stepmother as the father is either himself dead or absent from the home. Subtype ATU 510B, while also the story of a girl suffering abjection, implicates the widowed father directly. In these stories, the father, often acting on his late wife’s order to marry only a woman as beautiful as she, or with hair like hers, or who can wear her ring or her glove, decides to marry his daughter. When her efforts to put him off by demanding the impossible fail, the hero fees this undesirable marriage, makes herself abject by donning a garment of untanned skins (“Peau d’Âne” [H227], “Allerleirauh” [H221], “Prinzessin Mäusehaut,” “Catskin”[H242]),7 and hides as an outcast servant in another castle. In many variants of this subtype, the girl’s value is ultimately recognized through her exquisite cooking or her textiles. Allerleirauh (H221) cooks better soup than the palace cook, and leaves golden tokens of a ring, a spinning wheel, and reel in the bowls on three different nights. Perrault’s Peau d’Âne (H227) makes cake for the prince, also leaving a ring inside the cake. When the 510B hero sheds her untanned skins to attend the ball, she dons unreal dresses: woven of sunbeams, the color of the noontide sky, the color of moonlight (e.g., H222, H228). In contrast to a 510A Cinderella who is forced into abjection at the hands of the members of her own household, the 510B hero is a Cinderella who chooses to hide in abjection and then chooses to reveal herself later through her service. The daughter of the undesirable marriage and love-like-salt subtypes is cut off from her community and made abject by her chosen disguise and her adoption of menial work. In tales of the love-like-salt subtype (ATU 510B, 923), the implication of incest is subtle, with the king, like Shakespeare’s Lear (H321), trying to fgure out which of his three daughters loves him the most. When he throws the youngest out of the kingdom for saying that she loved him like salt, she disguises herself as an old woman (“Lu Scartozze de Sale” [H307], “OcchiMarci” [H305], “Like Good Salt” [H302], “Die Gänseheirtin am Brunnen” [H308]) or makes herself a garment from the rushes outside the castle (“Cap

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o’Rushes: The Suffolk King Lear” [H323], “Cap o’Rushes” [H324]). The plot then follows the 510B model of the hero’s abjection, recognition, and marriage in a different kingdom. In this variant, it is the protagonist’s outspokenness that reveals her worth to the king whose household she joins as a servant. The wedding feast often includes reconciliation with the princess’s father as well as a restoration to her appropriate social station. Though Uther places it in a different category entirely, I would argue that the maiden without hands (ATU 706) also belongs with this subtype. In this tale, a father cuts off the hands of his daughter when she will not marry him (or the devil). Though she does not become a servant, she is usually presented as a pitiable creature similar to Allerleirauh or Catskin. The women of the undesirable marriage subtype wear their abjection in the form of untanned skins that make them repulsive to polite company. These cloaks of anonymity can, however, be removed at will, and it is the hero’s choice to remove the garment that allows her to be recognized as a worthy member of society. The maiden without hands, in contrast, retains all of the visible markers of her former station in life. She is, instead, made grotesque by bloody stumps where her wrists should be. This hero is separated from her community and is unable to do women’s work (textiles, cooking, etc.), but is still able to participate in polite society in a new kingdom, and she remains desirable as a wife despite her missing hands.8 Collectively, these tale subtypes are all concerned with how the hero responds to her own abjection and how she eventually regains both her station and her ability to be a fully functioning member of her society. Although all four of these subtypes of Cinderella tales can be found throughout the story’s history, their distributions relative to one another are not constant. In medieval romance, for example, the undesirable marriage and maiden without hands subtypes dominate with stories like the Breton lai Emaré,9 Marie de France’s Lai Le Fresne,10 Griselda in Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale” and Boccaccio’s Decameron “10:10,”11 and Constance in Book Two of Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Chaucer’s “The Man of Law’s Tale.”12 The early Western European fairy-tale collections of Basile, Perrault, and the Grimms each contain versions of multiple variants. Basile includes “Cenerentola” 1:6 (510A, H16), “L’Orza” 2:6 (510B, H195), “La Penta Mano-Mozza” 3.2 (706). Perrault wrote both “Cendrillon” (510A, H38) and “Peau d’Âne” (510B, H227). Madame d’Aulnoy writes only a 510A “Finette Cendron” (H39). The Grimms’ 1857 edition includes “Allerleirauh” (Grimm 65; 510B, H221), “Aschenputtel” (Grimm 21; 510A, H30), “Das Mädchen ohne Hände” (Grimm 31; 706), and “Die Gänsehirtin am Brunnen” (Grimm 179; 923, H308). This breadth of narratives in all the subtypes offers the Early Modern audience a variety of Cinderella heroes who respond to abjection in a range of ways from pitiable passivity to brilliant cunning.

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Later adaptations from these foundational European collections, do not maintain this level of variety. In twenty-frst-century popular culture in the United States, tale type 510A predominates. I would argue that this is due to the personality of the main character in the Perrault and Grimm variants and subsequent adaptations. As the close reading undertaken later in chapter 5 will show, 510A Cinderellas are usually rewarded for goodness, patience, piety, and diligent work, which makes them excellent role models for both male and female members of the lower and middle classes who dream that hard work will raise them up to a better life in the United States. At the same time, 510A Cinderellas’ diligence is carried out despite the mistreatment they receive at the hands of those in power; thus they reinforce the image of the obedient female subordinate who does not rock the boat. This narrative does not seek to subvert the system, but to restore the system to its proper functionality, removing the corrupt (stepmother) from power and rewarding the righteous (Cinderella). Thus, Cinderella’s disobedience, like Robin Hood’s theft, is subversion in response to decay within the system, not subversion that seeks to overthrow the system itself. In contrast, the main characters of 510B tales almost always engage in manipulation and deception. They frst attempt to defect the father’s undesirable marriage through manipulation, asking for impossible things (dresses like the sun, moon, and stars [H227] or a coat to which every animal in the kingdom has contributed a piece of fesh [H222]) or precious things (the skin of the king’s prize donkey [H228]). Once out of the father’s house, these Cinderellas work to mask their own identities, deceiving the people who offer them shelter and sustenance by claiming the place of a servant rather than that of a princess. While Charles Perrault’s 510B variant “Peau d’Âne” continues to be produced in picture books for French children to this day, this tale type is relatively obscure in contemporary American popular culture. “Donkeyskin” does appear in Andrew Lang’s Grey Fairy Book, a classic fairy-tale collection in English, but the incest motif is obscured by making the girl an adopted daughter and having the king married to a widow before their reconciliation at the end.13 Fantasy authors Robin McKinley14 and Mercedes Lackey15 each have a full-length fantasy novel for adults based on the Donkeyskin variant, but these are among the least well known of these authors’ works. One striking exception to this elision of 510B is Jean Webster’s 1912 epistolary novel Daddy Long Legs and its flm adaptations of the same title in 1919, 1931, and 1955.16 In each of these, an intelligent and diligent orphan girl is given tuition, room, and board at a private school by an unnamed benefactor to whom she writes regular letters. Because of these letters, the benefactor meets and woos the girl without disclosing his identity to her. While both novel and flm are adaptations of the 510B subtype, each minimizes the role of incest in the story. Beyond shifting the relationship from

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father-daughter to benefactor-ward, the novel has Judy meet and fall in love with her benefactor while she remains unaware of the position of power he holds in her life.17 The 1955 flm adaptation starring Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron further works to minimize the transgressive nature of the relationship between benefactor and ward: she is of age when he frst sees her, her Frenchness and the stereotype of French licentiousness excuse her from censure, and he is personally uninvolved in her care and does not read her letters for most of the time that he is responsible for supporting her. In both the novel and the flm, the girl and the benefactor father-fgure marry, having fallen in love despite the social taboos against such a happily-ever-after. The marginalized presence of 510B tales in contemporary American popular culture suggests that this subtype still has some relevance for today’s audiences despite our apparent discomfort with it. Perhaps the 510B type is marginalized because manipulation and deception are sins generally reserved for the villains of fairy tales, perhaps because American heroes of either gender are expected to be beautiful, or perhaps because the threat of incest carries too strong a taboo. In his book Why Fairy Tales Stick, Jack Zipes uses meme theory and relevance theory to analyze the way that some tales and some motifs and plot events circulate within and among cultures over time. His basic point is that memes are units of culture that replicate themselves through human cultural production as long as they continue to be relevant.18 The converse, of course, is also true. Memes cease circulating when they are no longer relevant to a community. In a United States of third-wave feminism, women are expected to be able to support themselves, as are all individuals. In the 510B memeplex, the daughter’s sense of being under duress is predicated on her dependence on the father fgure for maintenance, and her abjection is a foregone conclusion once she leaves his house. In contrast, in the 510A subtype, the Cinderella character has a transactional relationship with her stepfamily. Although she is dependent upon them for the meager food, shelter, and clothing they offer her, they are equally dependent on her for the service work she does within the household. Viewing the 510A Cinderella in this way problematizes the tendency to regard women in fairy tales as passive objects. Even as 510A elides the other subtypes, however, it does not itself remain unchanged. Over time, popular versions of this story have tended to shift from complex to compact and from restoration to rags-to-riches. In the introduction to Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairytale, Elizabeth Waning Harries identifes the distinction between complex tales— heteroglossic and intertextual—and compact tales, which display a sort of constructed simplicity and claim foundational status.19 The summaries in the previous section emphasize the compactness of the tales under discussion, and they refect perhaps the broad market share enjoyed by Perrault’s and the Grimms’ tales. The Grimms especially revised to create increasingly compact

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tales, favoring simplifed plots even as the tales got longer over the course of editorial revisions throughout the nineteenth century.20 Harries reminds us, however, that “the literary fairy tale has taken a number of shapes in its history, shapes now often seen as aberrant or subversive.”21 The early French conteuses, who were contemporary with Perrault, offered complicated plots, and it was in their complexities that these stories offered a discursive space for subversion of the patriarchal social model. D’Aulnoy’s “Finette Cendron,” for example, is complex both in terms of plot structure and in terms of characterization. This variant combines the 510A Cinderella motifs—ashes, hard work, help from the fairy godmother, and identifcation via a slipper lost at the ball—with the Hansel and Gretel motif of abandonment by the mother and also with the Jack and the Beanstalk motif of climbing into the ogres’ realm.22 Beyond the complex plot, the complexity of the characters in “Finette Cendron” is also noteworthy. The entire royal family loses its status in an economically driven fall as they “managed their affairs badly” and then sold their things to support themselves. When they run out of assets to sell, they create a plan to work “catch[ing] birds in the woods and fsh in the sea.” The parents then decide to get rid of all three daughters because “they are lazy minxes” and the king and queen are unable “to give them the fne clothes they would desire.” In contrast to the stepfamily of many Cinderella stories, this group is a nuclear family: father and mother plan to lose the children they have in common, and two of the sisters abuse their third sister. As a group, this family regresses to increasingly primitive states of socioeconomic existence: from nonworking nobility, to members of the mercantile class (buying and selling), to hunter gatherers.23 Thus, the third sister, Finette, is made further abject by the punishment inficted on her by her own family, and d’Aulnoy’s presentation of this hero combines active and passive character traits. She gathers ingredients for cake and meats for a feast as gifts for her godmother, to whose house she travels on her own for advice. Finette also warns her sisters of their parents’ plans and helps them to return home even after her godmother has warned her not to, and she outsmarts the ogre and the ogress. Finette, however, stays with the sisters who abuse her, motivated in part by their suspicion that the father loves her best. She is ever truthful and kind to her family, and this character even shows evidence of interiority with her remorse over having killed the ogre and ogress. D’Aulnoy’s presentation does not exhibit the sort of interiority one would expect from twentieth- and twenty-frst-century novels, but Finette’s refections on her own choices (to give information to her sisters or withhold it, to kill the ogres or not) is evidence that fairy-tale narratives in the Early Modern period are not necessarily the simplistic, patriarchy-inscribing tales commonly found in later editions of Kinder- und Hausmärchen and the Langs’ color-named fairy books.

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The second major change to the 510A subtype is a shift from restoration tale to rags-to-riches tale. In Fairy Godfather, Bottigheimer defnes restoration tales as those in which a royal or noble character is frst made abject by villainy and then restored to his or her original social station through magic.24 Rags-to-riches tales, in contrast, feature a protagonist who begins in a low social station and is able to rise out of abjection thanks to some combination of piety and pluck. It was a shock the frst time someone pointed out to me that “Cinderella” is not a rags-to-riches story.25 We Americans tend to think of it that way. In that form, after all, it is the story of us, the fairy-tale representation of the American dream. In her article “America’s Cinderella,” Jane Yolen argues that what most Americans consider Cinderella to be is out of sync with the long tradition of this tale type. In response to Rosemary Minard’s criticism of Cinderella as insipid, Yolen writes:

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Ms. Minard reads the fairy tales incorrectly. Believing—rightly—that the fairy tales, as all stories for children, acculturate young readers and listeners, she has nevertheless gotten her target wrong. Cinderella is not to blame. Not the real, the true Cinderella. Ms. Minard should focus her sights on the mass market Cinderella. She does not recognize the old Ash-Girl for the tough, resilient heroine. The wrong Cinderella has gone to the American ball.26

Yolen’s alignment of old tales with true tales and new mass market, American versions with false or aberrant tales is problematic. As she herself notes, every culture adds its own bits to the story,27 and the way in which Cinderella receives reward and recognition from society for her long-suffering walk on the moral high ground is as much a part of the Americanness of the story as is the rags-to-riches shift of focus. In The American Dream: The Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, Jim Cullen looks to the dogged persistence of Puritan colonials to fnd “the cornerstone of what became the American Dream. Things [. . .] could be different.”28 The Puritans were, of course, looking to God for their reward in this world and the next, but even as their dream became the dream of upward mobility for succeeding generations, the means of reward remained external. Hard work in the “realms of human aspiration” like industry, education, and the arts29 must be recognized, valued, and rewarded by consumers in order to result in material success. For what, then, is Cinderella being rewarded? Yolen’s answer is “Hardy, helpful, inventive, that was as the Cinderella of the old tales, but not of the mass market. [. . .] The mass market books have brought forward a good, malleable, forgiving little girl and put her in Cinderella’s slippers.”30 Over time, the personality traits and behaviors for which Cinderella is rewarded have changed. Early Cinderellas in the 510A tradition, like their sisters in the 510B subtype, do indeed display both cunning and agency. This cunning,

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however, often depends upon deception, a tool more commonly associated with villains in contemporary popular books and flms in the United States. Being a woman who is both hardworking and honest, the more recent 510A Cinderella often appears to also be a passive woman “waiting for something external to transform [her life].”31 Patience—enduring the fckle demands of overbearing stepmother and stepsisters—is not, however, a personality trait. It is a pattern of behavior that results from repeated choices to respond to violence with kindness. One can, I would argue, be both active and patient. Quoting Elizabeth Cook’s The Ordinary and the Fabulous, Yolen describes Cinderella as a story about “the stripping away of the disguise that conceals the soul from the eyes of others.”32 This beautiful image fts the restoration tales Yolen focuses on, but I would argue that it is applicable to rags-to-riches tales as well. If one believes in meritocracy, being born into unprivileged circumstances may be a “disguise that conceals the soul from the eyes of others.” If all souls have the potential for greatness, then abjection in any form is a disguise.

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NOTES 1. Marian Roalfe Cox, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin and Cap-o’-Rushes, Abstracted and Tabulated, with a Discussion of Mediaeval Analogues, and Notes (London: David Nutt, 1893). 2. Heidi Anne Heiner, Cinderella Tales From Around The World (Nashville, TN: Sur La Lune Press, 2012), 3; Anna Birgitta Rooth, The Cinderella Cycle (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1951). 3. R. D. Jameson, “Cinderella in China,” Dundes 71–97. For a complete discussion of scholarship on the Cinderella variants around the world, see Heidi Anne Heiner, “Searching for Cinderella,” in Cinderella Tales from Around the World (Nashville, TN: SurLaLune Press, 2012); and Alan Dundes, “Introduction,” in Cinderella: A Casebook (New York, NY: Wildman Press, 1982), iii–vii. See also Armando Maggi, “The Creation of Cinderella from Basile to the Brothers Grimm,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales, ed. Maria Tatar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 150–65. 4. For more in-depth examinations of Cinderella’s mutability across cultures, see the brilliant essays in Martine Hennard Dutheil De La Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Woźniak, eds., Cinderella Across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2016). 5. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 20. 6. For a chart mapping the categories of the Cox, Rooth, and ATU schemata, see Heiner, Cinderella Tales, 4. On the “Beauty and the Beast” page of The Cinderella Bibliography (http:​/​/www​​.lib.​​roche​​ster.​​edu​/c​​amelo​​t​/cin​​der​/c​​i​nint​​r​.htm​, last updated November 23, 2011, last accessed September 5, 2015), Russel A. Peck argues that stories of that type should be considered alongside Cinderella stories, particularly

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those of type 510B, as the Beast’s disguise within the animal form is a gendered reversal of the untanned skin. 7. H### in this section refers to the number given to each of these tales in Heidi Anne Heiner’s Cinderella Tales. Heiner’s work as an independent scholar in folklore and fairy-tale studies collects public domain versions of these tales and makes them available in a single volume for ease of access and comparative reading. Titles of particular tales differ across translations and editions, so I’ve chosen to include Heiner’s numbers here as a key. 8. For an analysis of the Grimms’ versions of this fairy tale grounded in disability studies, see Ann Schmiesing, Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2014), 80–110. 9. Emaré is a late fourteenth-century Breton lai composed in Middle English, which appears in the Auchinlek Manuscript (NLS Adv MS 19.2.1). In this story, the wrongfully lustful father presents his daughter with a tapestry-woven coat depicting scenes of famous lovers from antiquity, and the poem spends ninety-fve lines on the description. This coat is as grotesque in its opulence and subject matter as Allerleirauh or Peau d’Âne’s are in their untanned flthiness. She is cast out of her father’s house into a boat without oars and frst taken in by a kind knight and then married to a king who recognizes her worth through her kindness and her talent at silk embroidery. After being cast out of her husband’s house due to her mother-inlaw’s duplicity, Emaré is reunited with both father and husband on their separate pilgrimages to Rome. See, Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, eds., The Middle English Breton Lais (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995). 10. In Lai Le Fresne, a late twelfth-century romance in Anglo Norman by Marie de France, a mother abandons one of her twin daughters in order to save face after she criticized a neighbor for giving birth to twins. This daughter becomes servant and mistress to a powerful lord in the region. Despite his inclination, he is unable to marry her because of her lack of station. Le Fresne prepares the marriage bed for her lord’s bride, and before the marriage is consummated, the bride’s mother recognizes the coverlet as the fabric in which she had wrapped the twin she abandoned. The mother comes clean, Le Fresne is reunited with her birth family, and her restoration to the social rank into which she was born allows Le Fresne to marry her lover. See Marie de France, The Lais of Marie de France: Text and Translation, trans. and ed. Claire M. Waters (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2018). 11. Griselda’s story takes place entirely within the marriage household, so she does not share the undesirable marriage threat from her father with 510B and 706 heroes. She does, however, share in the persecution that they, 706 heroes in particular, experience within the husband’s household. In both Chaucer (thirteenth-century Middle English Hengwrt [NLW MS Peniarth 392D] and Ellesmere [Huntington MS EL 26 E 9] Manuscripts) and Boccaccio (fourteenth-century Florentine Italian) Griselda is lifted from the abjection of poverty to marry into the landed aristocracy, agreeing to live according to her husband’s wishes. To test this promise, her husband hides both of the children she bears, letting her believe they have died. He later brings them back to the household, presenting the daughter as a bride to replace Griselda, who is threatened with a return to abjection. When all is revealed, she rejoices, and they live happily ever

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after. See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition, ed. Larry Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. and ed. Wayne A. Rebhorn (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co, 2015). 12. The stories of Constance told by both Gower (Confessio Amantis Book 2, fourteenth-century Middle English) and Chaucer’s “Man of Law’s Tale” add the valance of race to the basic plot as Constance is a Christian woman whose undesirable marriage is betrothal to a Syrian sultan. After she is cast out of his house, like Emaré onto the sea, she comes ashore in the lands of a pagan king who converts to Christianity and marries her. Cast out again, Constance sojourns in Rome until she is reunited with her husband. See, John Gower, Confession Amantis, Vol. 1–3, ed. Russel A. Peck (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006). 13. Andrew Lang and Leonora Blanche Lang, “Donkey Skin,” in The Grey Fairy Book (London: Longmans, Green, 1900), 1–15. On Andrew and Leonora Lang’s colored fairy books and their lasting contribution to children’s literature, see Glenn S. Burne, “Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book: Changing the Course of History,” in Touchstones: Refections on the Best in Children’s Literature, ed. Perry Nodelman, 3 Vols. (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985–1989), 2 (1987), 140–50. WorldCat lists 662 holdings for The Grey Fairy Book’s 55 editions. For an analysis of 510B stories through time, see Jeana Jorgensen, “Sorting Out Donkey Skin (ATU 510B): Toward an Integrative Literal-Symbolic Analysis of Fairy Tales,” Cultural Analysis 11 (2012): 91–118. 14. Robin McKinley’s Deerskin (New York, NY: Ace Books, 1993) was nominated for the Mythopoetic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. Unlike most of McKinely’s other retellings, Deerskin was published and marketed as adult fantasy rather than as a young adult book, despite which it was reviewed by Cathy Chauvette, “Book Reviews: Adult Books for Young Adults,” School Library Journal 39, no. 9 (September 1993): 261. This 510B variant is remarkable in its stark and graphic depiction of the father’s violence and the daughter’s recovery. WorldCat lists Deerskin as having 799 library holdings for its eight editions. Robin McKinley’s Newberryaward-winning The Blue Sword (New York, NY: Greenwillow Books, 1982), in contrast, is listed as having 2,249 holdings for thirty-one editions. McKinley’s more recently published Pegasus (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010) has 967 holdings for eight editions. 15. Mercedes Lackey, Unnatural Issue: An Elemental Masters Novel (New York, NY: DAW, 2011), is Book 7 of her Elemental Masters series, in which each book is based on a different fairy tale. This variant of 510B adopts the distancing trope by which the father is absolved of some culpability because he does not meet his daughter until she is already an adult. WorldCat lists Unnatural Issue as having 830 library holdings for nine editions. Meanwhile, The Gates of Sleep (New York, NY: DAW, 2002) (Elemental Masters Book 3), based on “Sleeping Beauty,” is listed as having 1051 library holdings for nineteen editions, and The Serpent’s Shadow (New York, NY: DAW, 2001) (Elemental Masters Book 2), based on “Snow White,” has 1046 listings for twenty editions. 16. Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs (New York, NY: Grosset and Dunlap, 1912); Daddy Long Legs, directed by Marshall Neilan (1919; Los Angeles, CA:

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Mary Pickford Company); Daddy Long Legs, directed by Alfred Santell (1931; Los Angeles, CA: Fox Film Corporation); and Daddy Long Legs, directed by Jean Negulesco (1955; Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation). 17. On the issue of guardian-ward incest in literature, see Ellen Pollak, Incest and the English Novel, 1684–1814 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 92 ff. 18. Jack Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006). See also, Jack Zipes, “What Makes a Repulsive Frog so Appealing: Memetics and Fairy Tales,” Journal of Folklore Research 42, no. 2 (May–August 2008): 109–43 and Michael Drout’s concept of “word to world ft” in How Tradition Works, 16. 19. Harries, Twice Upon a Time, 18–19. 20. For an overview of revisions to editions of Kinder-und Hausmärchen over the course of the nineteenth century, see Siegfried Neumann, “The Brothers Grimm as Collectors and Editors of German Folktales,” in The Reception of Grimms’ Fairytales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions, ed. Donald Haase (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 4–40. For brief analysis and examples of changes, see Jack Zipes’s introduction to The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, xvii–xxxi. 21. Harries, Twice Upon a Time, 13. 22. Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy, “Finette Cendron,” in Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment, ed. Jack Zipes (Kent: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2018), 400–16. 23. My thanks to Jeff Turco for this insight. 24. Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather, 1. 25. My thanks to Alina Israeli for this conversation. 26. Jane Yolen, “America’s Cinderella,” Children’s Literature in Education 8 (1977): 21–29 at 22. The reference is to Rosemary Minard, “Introduction,” in Womenfolk and Fairy Tales, ed. Rosemary Minard (Boston, MA: Houghton Miffin, 1975), vii–xi. 27. Yolen, “America’s Cinderella,” 22. 28. Cullen, The American Dream, 15. 29. Cullen, The American Dream, 60. 30. Yolen, “America’s Cinderella,” 25. 31. Colette Dowling, The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence (New York, NY: Summit Books, 1981), 31. 32. Yolen, “America’s Cinderella,” 21. The reference is to Elizabeth Cook, The Ordinary and the Fabulous: An Introduction to Myths, Legends and Fairy Tales for Teachers and Storytellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 177.

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Chapter 5

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Cinderella Variants and Versions

For most people in the United States, contact with the Cinderella tale type comes frst through Disney’s flms—1950 animation, the 1997 live-action television flm, and the 2015 live-action feature flm—and through the use of “Cinderella story” as a shorthand for the rags-to-riches rise of a hardworking, good-hearted protagonist. Disney’s flms draw most heavily from the source material provided by Perrault’s “Cendrillon” and the Grimms’ 1857 “Aschenputtel,” but they each make signifcant changes. Among these many changes rung upon the 510A tale type, the most salient for understanding the contemporary love affair with this tale type are, frst, the Cinderella character’s social status at the beginning of the text, second, the qualities or actions for which the text seems to be rewarding her, and third, the portion of the narrative on which emphasis is placed through extended description. This chapter will frst examine three infuential European printed versions of the 510A tale type before looking at several modern versions created in the United States in a variety of media. The trend of change in contemporary U. S. retellings has been to lower Cinderella’s initial social status, to reward her for hard work, and to spend more narrative space on her period of abjection. In Giambattista Basile’s “Cenerentola,”1 one of the earliest extant text in the Western canon to associate the Cinderella character with ashes and a stepfamily, she is the daughter of a prince who is rewarded for cleverness and steadfastness in a story that emphasizes not her abjection but the ongoing relationship with the magical helper who enables her restoration. First published in Naples in 1634, Basile’s Il Pentamerone, or Lo Cunto de li Cunti features a frame narrative in which ten women each tell one tale a day for fve days in an effort to entertain a demanding princess. “Cenerentola” is tale six on day one of the telling.2 This variant has a complex beginning. Zezolla (the title of the tale is not this protagonist’s name) colludes with her seemingly 77

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wonderful governess to murder her frst abusive stepmother, thereby paving the way for that governess to marry Zezolla’s father. Once the governess achieves the status of princess, though, this new stepmother begins

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to raise to all heights six daughters of her own whom she had kept secret up until then. And she worked her husband over so well that as his stepdaughters entered into his graces, his own daughter fell from his heart, and from one day to the next Zezolla ended up being demoted from the royal chamber to the kitchen and from a canopied bed to the hearth, from sumptuous silks and gold to rags, from the scepter to the spit.

Basile emphasizes Zezzola’s fall here with four phrases in series contrasting the station which she was born; royal chamber, canopied bed of state, sumptuous silks, scepter; to her abject state; kitchen, hearth, rags, spit. Basile does not, however, work his descriptive magic to illuminate Zezzola’s period of abjection for the reader. After this emphasis on Zezzola’s initial station in life and the process of her relegation to the ashes, the narrative advances directly to an explanation of Zezzola’s access to the Dove of the Fairies in the Island of Sardinia through an enchanted date tree and her use of this magic to attend balls at the king’s palace three times. Throughout the text, Zezzola participates actively in the narrative, killing her frst stepmother, making the match between her father and the second stepmother, asking her father to convey her regards to the Fairies of Sardinia, and distracting the servants who try to follow her home from the evening parties. Thus, the cunning Zezzola learns from her governess/stepmother brings frst her abjection and then her restoration. At frst this cunning is a means of transgressing social and moral order, as Zezzola and her governess commit murder and then the governess turns against her student to advance herself. Once Zezzola has been made abject, however, her cunning becomes a tool for the restoration of social order. In this version, the magical helper does not appear, as Disney’s fairy godmother always does, only in Cinderella’s moment of great need. The Fairies of Sardinia make contact with Zezzola before she needs their help. It is her remembrance of them via her father that brings their gift of a date tree, and it is her nurturing of the tree that brings the gifts of the magnifcent dresses she wears to three balls on three nights. Thus, their help, which allows her to disguise herself in order to regain her place as a lady at court, is part of an ongoing relationship. It is not a gift, but a reward for Zezzola’s having acted appropriately toward them in the absence of need. After Zezzola has been recognized by virtue of the high-soled cork slipper, the stepsisters are neither punished nor rewarded because when Zezzola is crowned as the new queen, “the sisters nearly died of anger, and, not having the stomach to stand this heartbreak, they quietly stole away to their mother’s house.”3 This character

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came to abjection because of her trust in the false friendship of her governess and second stepmother. She achieves restoration through right relationship with the good Fairies of Sardinia. Charles Perrault’s 1695 “Cendrillon” translated as “Cinderella or The Glass Slipper”4 makes Cendrillon the daughter of a gentleman living in the prince’s city. This story includes an extended description of Cendrillon’s period of abjection in order to showcase the goodness, patience, and compassion for which she is rewarded. Not only is Perrault’s variant arguably the most famous of the Western Cinderella stories and more popular for translation and retelling than variants of Cinderella from other cultures, it has eclipsed its French contemporaries, such as Mme. d’Aulnoy’s complicated 1697 story of female compassion and cunning “Finette Cendron.” Perhaps, as Canepa and Ansani have suggested, “Cendrillon” and Perrault’s other tales have become the most canonical because he is the least subversive. The social commentary is muted, because Perrault

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did not use his tales to comment so explicitly and in such detail on the culture in which they were written and [. . .] the content of his tales was (and is) more in line with the dominant ideology of the time.5

Cendrillon is the daughter of a gentleman living in the prince’s city. From the beginning of the story, she is described as devout and good, just like her late mother. Patient, genuinely helping her sisters to prepare for the ball despite their ill treatment of her, she is also “a thousand times more beautiful in her shabby clothes than her sisters.”6 Perrault’s Cendrillon lacks any cunning of her own, and once the fairy godmother arrives to transform ordinary objects like pumpkins and mice into coach and horses, Cendrillon cedes her agency, following the fairy’s instruction to bring her a pumpkin, although she was “unable to guess how a pumpkin would enable her to go to the ball.” Thus, she allows the fairy to take as much charge of her restoration as the stepmother had of her abjection. Yet, Cendrillon also retains some agency. She is the one who thinks of a rat to become a coachman, for example. Throughout the tale, she also retains a commitment to exercising compassion. Perrault tells us that she “offered to dress their [her sisters] hair for them” when anyone else “would have messed up their hairdos,”7 She sits with them at the ball unrecognized and shares the gifts the prince had given her, and after her success, she brings them with her to the palace and has “them married the very same day to two great noblemen of the court.” Perrault’s narrative rewards Cendrillon for her goodness, patience, and compassion, and with this shift in the qualities for which the main character is praised, the Cinderella tradition moves toward the didactic. As with the animal fables of Aesop or The Golden Ass, Perrault appends morals to the end of his tales in Histoires

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ou contes du temps passe. At the end of “Cendrillon,” he addresses himself to young women directly, calling out the necessary combination of innate gifts like beauty, intelligence, and good breeding with the fairy gift of graciousness. Graciousness, of course, is a habit of behavior that can be learned and cultivated. The bloodiest narrative in the Western Cinderella tradition, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms’ story “Aschenputtel” appears in the frst 1812 volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, but undergoes signifcant modifcation over the course of Wilhelm’s revision before reaching its canonical form in the 1857 edition.8 In this tale, Aschenputtel is the daughter of rich man living in the king’s city. As in Perrault’s version, this story spends narrative time on her abjection in order to showcase her praiseworthy qualities. Like Cendrillon, Aschenputtel is a good person who does what her stepfamily tells her. Like Zezzola, she has the help of the birds and tree with whom she has built a relationship. She is a resourceful Cinderella, actively drawing on the help of the birds and climbing through pigeon houses and pear trees to get home from the ball on time, but she does not have the sometimes sinister cunning of Basile’s Zezzola. On her deathbed, Aschenputtel’s mother instructs her to be good and pious, and the narrator tells us that she remained so. This text offers a detailed catalog of the sorts of tasks Aschenputtel was set to, emphasizing the hard work of her abjection, getting up before dawn to tend the fre and get water and sleeping on the hearth because there was no bed for her. In contrast to Perrault’s silently suffering Cendrillon, Aschenputtel makes her desire to go to the ball known to her stepsisters, who set her the interminable tasks of sorting frst lentils, then seeds, then peas. Despite Aschenputtel’s successful completion of the task with the help of pigeons and turtledoves, the stepmother does not allow her to attend the festivities.9 Three nights in a row, however, Aschenputtel shakes the tree10 growing from her mother’s grave, and the clothes that fall out of the tree enable her to dress in splendor and go to the ball in a waiting carriage. On the third night Aschenputtel loses track of the time and drops one of her golden slippers as she fees to beat her midnight curfew. The same doves, who provided her fnery, help the prince discover the stepsisters’ feet bleeding from freshly trimmed toe and heel. In the revised version in the seventh edition of 1857, the text contrasts Aschenputtel as the true bride with her false sisters. She is rewarded for her goodness and piety while her sisters are punished with not only the lameness resultant from their missing bits of feet but with the blindness that results from the doves’ feasting on their eyes.11 The text does not dirty the hands of Aschenputtel and the prince with this columba ex machina punishment, which is jarring from the olive-branch-wielding symbol of peace. From a secular perspective, the reward of one sister and the punishment of the others might be said to refect their relative levels of honesty. Aschenputtel does not represent herself as

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other than what she is, and when she is dressed for the ball by the magic of the date tree, she occupies the station in life to which she was born. Although her initial situation was not royal, it was much closer than contemporary American Cinderellas usually are and, therefore, does not represent a radical rise in social status. In contrast to Aschenputtel’s honesty, the stepsisters lie directly to the prince in claiming to be the woman with whom he danced at the balls. G. Ronald Murphy sees the contrast between Aschenputtel as true bride and her sisters as false brides as the “spiritual problem” of the text.

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Which human being is the right human being for the love of the King’s son? Whom does the slipper ft? [. . .] The dominance of the idea of only certain souls being the “right” ones to be the brides of Christ, and the punishment of the others may refect a Calvinist emphasis on predestination from the Grimms’ Reformed upbringing.12

Murphy’s reading of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen as a product of Reformed Calvinism is dissonant with the Romantic project identifed by George Williamson in his introduction to The Longing for Myth in Germany, which positions the Grimms’ collection as part of a broader project to create a mythology from Aryan and German sources. Despite the tensions between these two perspectives, both are valid, and the juxtaposition of the nationalistic impulse and the Calvinist heritage in the tales is evidence of how diffcult it is to read fairy tales in only one way or to identify and differentiate various infuences on the narratives. What we can see clearly, however, is the shift over time in the values emphasized by retellings of this story. These three early iterations of tales in the 510A tradition all place the protagonist at a suffciently high station in life that she would be a viable candidate for the hand of the prince or king. She is either royal herself or a member of the royal court. They then, to varying degrees, emphasize the distance she falls in terms of her status, her drudgery, and the degree of marvelous involvement in her restoration to her former station. These tales are inherently conservative, working to restore the social order that was broken by the punishing stepmother. In contemporary retellings and adaptations, in contrast, there is a trend toward lowering Cinderella’s initial station in life relative to her stepfamily and the prince along with a foregrounding and extension of the period of her abjection and her work. Concomitantly, she is lifted from abjection less by steadfast piety and goodness than by personal character development and individuation. Thus, in the contemporary moment, at the turn of the twenty-frst century, the story becomes more progressive as it depicts Cinderella moving up the socioeconomic ladder from lower to higher station. Nevertheless, even these more progressive tales reinforce the value of

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the structure itself. Most contemporary Cinderellas do not destroy the ladder, they merely manage to climb it. For many in the contemporary United States, the canonical version of the Cinderella story is Disney’s 1950 animated flm. This version emphasizes an extended period of abjection showcasing Cinderella’s hard work and patience. The initial social rank of the family is somewhat ambiguous. The opening credits claim that this flm is from “the original classic by Charles Perrault,” reinforcing the idea that there is a true version of the fairy tale.13 Interestingly, though it does largely follow the plot outlined by “Cendrillon,” it also includes some elements from the Grimms’ “Aschenputtel,” like the tree, which serves as the site of magical transformation, and Cinderella’s relationship with the helpful birds, whom she speaks with like friends.14 Disney also adds new elements to the story. In Perrault’s “original classic,” Cendrillon has an ongoing relationship with her godmother, who happens to be a fairy, but the mice, rats, and lizards who are transformed into horses, footmen, and coachmen are strangers to her. In this flm, however, Cinderella has an ongoing relationship with all of the wild and domestic animals at the château. Not only do they ultimately become the horses, driver, and footman to take her to the ball, but they have been her daily companions, constructed a ball gown for her, and worked together to free her when the stepmother locked her in the tower. These actions are not presented as magical powers. They are normal animals who solve human problems with innovative engineering. The audience sees them speaking English to one another, but they communicate with Cinderella through pantomime and animal sounds. They are a help to her because she is kind to them, but they are not presented as being magical. While the flm does display Cinderella’s work ethic as she completes all the chores set for her and patience as she tolerates harsh treatment at the hands of her stepsisters without retaliation, much more narrative time and space is spent on establishing Cinderella’s kindness and connection with these animals.15 In contrast, the appearance of the fairy godmother on the bench under the willow tree is a surprise to the despairing girl, and the fairy godmother’s bumbling (can’t fnd her wand at frst, nearly forgets that Cinderella needs a new dress), which provides entertaining comic relief, minimizes the power of magic, and brings this version of the tale into a form more in harmony with the verisimilar art and literature of its American postwar cultural context. This de-emphasis of magic persists in future Disney retellings and lays the groundwork for verisimilar adaptations in the genres of romantic comedy, drama, and biography. Even as Disney’s 1950 Cinderella has remained a beloved flm since its release, the number and variety of contemporary retellings of the 510A subtype have grown exponentially since Cox’s catalog of 345,16 and each of these

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contemporary variants depends on the audience’s knowledge of the 510A subtype. An exhaustive catalog is beyond the scope of this monograph, but I would like to highlight three representative variants for their individual innovations. The 1998 Newberry Honor recipient Ella Enchanted invites its audience to spend time with a familiar source of hope and entertainment and achieved suffcient public regard to be adapted for flm in 2004. In contrast, the novel Ash challenges its audience with an innovative commentary on the tradition, and has not achieved widespread regard. Disney’s live-action Cinderella (2015) capitalizes on the success of the Disney brand to reclaim authority over the tale.17 By making a few key changes to the narrative, the studio has been able to tell a story that is much the same as the 1950 flm in plot and visual program. In her 1997 novel, Ella Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine presents a Cinderella character, Elinor (Ella), who is the daughter of a merchant who frequents the king’s court in the city of Frell.18 The narrative emphasizes personal character development over innate characteristics like beauty and goodness. As a member of the court community, Ella is, like the earliest Western Cinderellas, an appropriate bride for the prince only modestly below his station in the social hierarchy. Levine, however, makes two major narrative innovations in her contribution to the Cinderella tradition. The frst is Ella’s fairy gift-cum-curse of obedience:

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Anyone could control me with an order. It had to be a direct command, such as “Put on a shawl,” or “You must go to bed now.” A wish or a request I was free to ignore “I wish you would put on a shawl,” or “Why don’t you go to bed now?” But against an order I was powerless. If someone told me to hop on one foot for a day and a half, I’d have to do it. And hopping on one foot wasn’t the worst order I could be given. If you commanded me to cut off my own head, I’d have to do it. I was in danger at every moment.19

This curse makes it possible for her stepmother and stepsisters to turn Ella into a scullery maid who does their bidding. Levine’s second narrative innovation is to intertwine Ella’s quest for control of her own choices with a romance based on a mostly epistolary courtship with Prince Charmant, who, lacking his own quest, takes on the role of beloved object and becomes the prize at the end of Ella’s quest to break the curse of obedience. By shifting the hero’s motivation for remaining in service to her stepfamily from the Cinderella’s piety and goodness to Ella’s compelled obedience, Levine transforms the tale into a narrative of personal development rather than one of recognition. This framing of Ella’s service to her stepfamily as compelled obedience invites the reader to reevaluate other familiar adaptations that reward the main character’s hard work and patience.

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Tommy O’Haver’s 2004 flm of the same title goes even further in adapting the canonical Cinderella narrative by pairing Ella’s personal development with a parallel quest for Prince Charmant (Char). Like many contemporary American adaptations, O’Haver creates distance between his female hero’s initial situation and the prince’s by turning Ella’s hometown of Frell into a backwater a great distance from the royal city of Le Mere and citing economic diffculties as the widowed father’s reason for remarrying. Ella and Char meet as young adults when Char and his regent-uncle stop in Frell as they are touring the kingdom, and Prince Char becomes a literary foil for Ella. The latter is constantly conscious of being compelled to be obedient to everyone who issues a direct command, while the former is obedient to the wishes of his uncle, who serves as regent, because he is unaware of that man’s duplicity and unconscious of his own ability to lead. Ella uses the venue of Char’s presentation to the populace to stage a protest of the regent’s mistreatment of ogres and giants within the kingdom, which Char had up to this point accepted as the way of things. Ella’s quest to no longer be obedient initially takes the form of a search for her godmother, and this search moves the action of the flm through the entire kingdom, which opens Char’s eyes to the unfavorable conditions under which the regent has forced ogres, giants, and elves to live since the last king died. Though it is not until the fnal moments of the flm that Char embraces the quest to rescue the country from the ruthlessly power-hungry regent, the personal connections he made during this journey become critical assets in the confrontation. Each of these paired protagonists has a quest to complete that requires character development, and their individual quests are interdependent such that each is advanced as the two help each other. Furthermore, Ella and Char’s personal quests for individuation offer support to the oppressed groups within their society as they break free of compelled obedience to the tyrannical regent. In choosing to marry Ella despite her low social status, Char is making a radical choice made more palatable to the court because of her heroism in exposing the regent’s duplicity. Although it presents a veritable revolution of outcasts, the flm is nonetheless conservative as the revolution restores the former, harmonious order, which had been damaged by the regency. In both the novel and the flm, much of the narrative space is consumed, not by abjection in the kitchen of her stepfamily, but by Ella’s quest to fnd her fairy godmother and convince her to take back the curse of obedience. It is, however, the adventures which befall her along the way that give her the opportunity to develop the autonomy to break the curse for herself, and the climax of Ella’s quest is the moment that she looks into her own soul and orders, “You will no longer be obedient.”20 Ultimately, Ella, in novel and in flm, is rewarded for her persistent pursuit of her independence while also showing compassion for others. She is a new kind of Cinderella who

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represents the contemporary American values of independence and personal responsibility. Malinda Lo’s 2009 novel Ash is a largely conservative retelling of the 510A Cinderella story in terms of setting and plot structure.21 It returns to the idea of a powerful fairy gift giver as in the earlier Europeans tales. Lo is, however, radical in her presentation of two potential romantic partners for Ash, one a malevolent fairy, and the other a human woman. Like O’Haver’s flm variant of the tale, Lo places Ash and her family in a small village remote from the king’s city, and fnancial instability is one of the reasons her father remarries. It is her father’s posthumous debts that her stepmother cites as the reason for replacing the cook and scullery maid with Ash and for moving the family to her own house near the royal city. In the frst half of the novel, Ash’s drudgery is made bearable by her unusual friendship with a fairy whose love for her keeps him from drawing her to her death in fairyland. In the second half of the novel, Ash’s friendship and budding romance with Kaisa, the king’s huntress, sustains her. Throughout, when these two friendships interfere with Ash’s duties, she suffers punishment and physical abuse at the hands of her stepmother. Though the fairy has a sort of godfather role in providing Ash the means to attend several court functions, his gifts come at the price of Ash’s future. He tells her, “There is a price for everything. [. . . ] You shall be mine. That is the oldest law between your people and mine.”22 It is only when she boldly attends a ball as herself that Ash is able to break free of the fairy’s control, leave her stepmother’s household, and begin a happily-ever-after with Kaisa. Lo’s Ash breaks free not only of the stepmother’s unjust control and the fairy’s steep bargain, but most importantly of the expectations of a society that push her toward a life and a romance that is untrue to herself. Thus, this Cinderella is not rewarded for repairing or upholding the social order into which she had been born, but for having the courage to break out of that order entirely. The Disney corporation has released two live-action remakes of the Cinderella story in 1997 and 2015. The 1997 release was an adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical produced especially for the television program The Wonderful World of Disney. The stage musical already included an innovative plot addition that has Cinderella meet the prince anonymously before the ball, and to this Disney’s team added colorblind casting, a stronger central character, and a fairy godmother who emphasizes personal action and decision-making before supplementing Cinderella’s action with magic. The production garnered a mixed response, with much criticism focused on the portrayal of Cinderella, the fairy godmother, and the queen by Black actors, Brandy, Whitney Houston, and Whoopi Goldberg, respectively. Criticism also engaged with the more feminist portrayal of the title character. This version of the story has not become a popular video classic for at-home

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viewing as Disney’s animated features have, and Brandy’s Cinderella has not been part of Disney’s princess culture. The 2015 live-action remake similarly includes an anonymous meeting with the prince before the ball and a strong protagonist, but tempers these innovations on the tradition with a return to an overwhelmingly white cast. This version further retreats from the feminist innovation of the 1997 flm by replacing the Whitney Houston fairy godmother’s wisdom with the dying mother’s injunction to “have courage and be kind,” which Cinderella repeats to herself throughout the flm. The 2015 live-action Cinderella, is, in many ways, a faithful retelling of the story they told in the 1950 animated Cinderella. Many familiar elements are present: the helpful mice, the feisty cat, Cinderella’s attic bedroom. Three key changes to the presentation of Cinderella’s character, however, update the story for a twenty-frst-century audience. The frst is an extended depiction of young Ella and her parents as a happy family, despite their isolation from the court by distance and social rank. This initial setting includes a deathbed scene in which her mother tells her to “have courage and be kind” because “you have more kindness in your little fnger than most people possess in their whole body. And it has power, more than you know. And magic.”23 This parting wish is compelling not because it emphasizes the inherent values of courage and kindness but because it validates the person that Ella already is and encourages her to be true to herself. The second change to the story is Ella’s meeting the prince in the forest before they meet at the ball. Rather than their encounter at the ball when she is enchanted and he is surrounded by the trappings of power, it is their anonymous conversation with one another here that ignites the spark of attraction between them. Unlike the prince and Cinderella of Brandy’s 1997 portrayal, these characters in 2015 each recognize the person from the woods when they meet at the ball. The third key change to the presentation of Cinderella’s character in this live-action flm is her words of forgiveness to her stepmother as she walks out of the house. Ella looks at the twicewidowed Lady Tremaine, all of whose plans for supporting herself and her children have fallen to pieces around her, and says simply, “I forgive you.”24 By making courage and kindness Ella’s guiding principles, this flm turns Cinderella into the story of a woman who stayed true to herself despite being made abject by the circumstances of her life. This chapter’s brief survey of print and flm versions of the 510A subtype of Cinderella explores only a slim portion of the many Cinderella stories catalogued by researchers like Cox, Rooth, Jaemson, and Heiner. It does, however, capture a couple of important trends in this tale type, particularly in the U. S. context. In contrast with Early Modern 510A heroes, contemporary Cinderellas tend to start their story at a lower socioeconomic states relative to their romantic other before falling even further into abjection within the story.

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These stories also tend to incorporate contemporary narrative techniques like interiority and feature the main character’s personal development as a key to their success. This brief survey also noted that versions which are more radical in the changes they make tend to have less commercial success.

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NOTES 1. Translated as “The Cinderella Cat,” The Tale of Tales, trans. Canepa, 83–89. 2. The frst edition of the 5 Vols., 1634–1636 only have the title Lo Cunto de li Cunti. Il Pentamerone is frst used in the Naples edition of 1674. 3. “The Cinderella Cat,” The Tale of Tales, 89. 4. Charles Perrault, “Cinderella or The Glass Slipper,” in Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment: Classic French Fairy Tales, trans. and ed. Jack Zipes (Kent: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2018), 25–30. A French version is available at http://clpav​.fr​/lecture​-cendrillon​.htm. 5. Canepa and Ansani, “Introduction,” 12. 6. Perrault, “Cinderella or The Glass Slipper,” Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment, 25. 7. Perrault, “Cinderella or The Glass Slipper,” Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment, 26. 8. Grimms, “Cinderella (Aschenputtel),” The Original Folk and Fairy Tales, trans. Jack Zipes, 69–77. 9. The stepmother’s violation of a verbal contract with the Cinderella character and of an implied contract with the father (that as his wife, she will care for his family and home as he would) is a recurring idea. This adds to the Cinderella character’s claim on the moral high ground as she continues to provide the service, which she has agreed to do (under duress) even without receiving the promised remuneration. 10. A connection with nature in some form seems to be a common motif to the Cinderella tradition. Zezzola’s access to the Fairies of Sardinia is via a date tree, Cendrillon’s transportation comes from the garden, and this green world as locus for contact with the marvelous continues into contemporary variants of this subtype. In “The Juniper Tree,” another of the Grimms’ Kinder-und Hausmärchen, the tree functions as marvelous space throughout the plot. G. Ronald Murphy, The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: the Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) examines the connections between the marvelous in Christianity and in the Grimms’ fairy tales based on Wilhelm’s notes “in his personal copies of the Bible and in his texts of the medieval epics which he taught” (vii). Murphy notes, “In a very strong polemic, Calvin argued for the soul’s continuing consciousness, something that could easily have prompted the Grimms’ insertion of the mother’s promise to look after her child after death, and justifying the depiction of the mother’s abiding awareness of her daughter in the symbolic tree growing above the grave” (101). My thanks to Jeff Turco for suggesting this tale and Murphy’s book to me. 11. “Cinderella,” The Complete Fairy Tales, trans. Jack Zipes, 86–92 at 92. See also: Murphy’s reading of this symbolism in The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove.

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On the problematic nature of disability as punishment, see Schmiesing, Disability, Deformity, and Disease. 12. Murphy, The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove, 149. 13. Cinderella (1950) 00:16. For more on Cinderella and flm, see Zipes, The Enchanted Screen, 172–92. 14. Cinderella (1950), 42:02 and 04:25. 15. Cinderella (1950), 22:55, 26:35–27:52 and 30:40–31:10, 32:55–33:10. 16. Cox, Cinderella. For an overview of “some of the better known treatments by authors and other artists,” see Heide Anne Heiner’s “Cinderella|Modern Interpretations,” SurLaLune Fairy Tales, Last updated Spring 2020. For an exhaustive compendium, see Peck, The Cinderella Bibliography. 17. The 2015 live-action Cinderella follows on the success of the live-action Malefcent feature flm, which tells the Sleeping Beauty flm’s story from the villain’s point of view. In its opening weekend, June 1, 2014, Malefcent grossed $69.4 million in the United States and £6.6 million in the United Kingdom. As of February 28, 2015, the flm had grossed $241.4 million (IMDb). In its opening weekends in March 2015, Cinderella grossed $67.8 million dollars in the United States and €259,000 in the Netherlands. As of August 23, 2015, the flm had grossed $201 million (IMDb). Audiences can expect that, with these successes on the books, Walt Disney Pictures will be releasing more such live-action fairy-tales flms. 18. Gail Carson Levine, Ella Enchanted (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1997). WorldCat lists 3,400 holdings for the forty-seven editions of Levine’s Ella Enchanted, which was a Newberry Honor book in 1998. 19. Levine, Ella Enchanted, fyleaf. 20. Levine, Ella Enchanted, 226; and O’Haver, Ella Enchanted, 1:15:38. 21. Malinda Lo, Ash (New York, NY: Little Brown, 2009). WorldCat lists 1,106 holdings for nine editions of Ash and 750 holdings for the 7 editions of its sequel Huntress. 22. Lo, Ash, 162. 23. Cinderella (2015), 05:26–05:40. 24. Cinderella (2015), 1:37:05.

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Cinderella as Shorthand

Americans’ love for the Cinderella story is exemplifed by its continual replication in popular fction beginning with dime novels in the nineteenth century and continuing through contemporary serial genre fction, especially romances, though also Westerns and mysteries. Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick, frst published in 1868, tells the rags-to-respectability story of a bootblack whose honesty lifts him out of poverty. The vast majority of Alger’s hundred-plus subsequent “bouncy little books for boys” are variants of this story that emphasize “honesty, hard work, and cheerfulness in adversity.”1 These books were wildly popular at the turn of the twentieth century, selling millions of copies annually by 1910, and Alger’s name became synonymous with the idea of upward mobility.2 Standing in counterpoint to these books that center the lives of adolescent boys, the romantic novels of Grace Livingstone Hill generally feature a hardworking and pious young woman who is lifted from poverty when she is met by a wealthy, often slightly older, man who decides to woo and to marry her.3 A contemporary equivalent to this earlier formula fction is the serial romance genre published by Harlequin Press, whose online catalog lists 573 titles including the word “Cinderella” published since 2003.4 There may indeed be more Cinderella adaptations that are not titled as such in their catalog. The widespread popularity of Alger, Hill, and the Harlequin company’s popular fction is too often neglected by scholars of literature. Its formulaic predictability and emotional sentimentality is viewed as insuffciently serious. Alger’s work gets dismissed even among studies of children’s literature, itself a marginalized feld, and Hill’s and Harlequin’s publications are regarded as “chic lit” or sometimes “soft porn for housewives.” The problem with this dismissiveness is that it leads scholars to ignore the texts being read widely by the general population. The distinction between high and low 89

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culture, between chic lit and literary fction, is an artifcial one.5 Judging by our reading habits, the Cinderella story is one that Americans will choose to tell and to hear (read) over and over, and scholars should be studying it alongside the texts considered literary fction for that reason. The previous two chapters focused on versions that made overt reference to the Cinderella tradition while retelling the tale in its entirety. Over time, these stories have each modifed the 510A tale type to participate in the cultural conversations of their particular moments. We tell and retell this tale type because of its adaptability to showcase desirable personal qualities like beauty and piety (Perrault), hard work and humility (Disney 1950), kindness and courage (Disney 2017). These wholesale retellings help their communities to establish norms and reinforce adherence to those norms. The fairy tales of the Western canon, particularly those popularized by the Disney corporation, function this way for people who make their lives in the United States from the second half of the twentieth century to the present moment. Despite the tales’ white patriarchal heteronormativity, this status as shared stories transcends divisions of race, ethnicity, language, religion, and nationality. Stories, however, do not need to remain whole in order to function this way. Anne Sexton’s fairy-tale poetry, penned in the 1970s, offers an excellent literary example of the ways in which the narratives we encounter in our consumption of texts become the building blocks for our own expression. Elizabeth Harries notes that “Sexton returned to the Grimms’ fairy tales repeatedly. And [. . .] she had known them since childhood, when her greataunt read them to her.”6 Sexton uses this familiarity with the Grimm fairytale material to turn narrative into discursive space, in this case reframing 510A as a challenge to the happily-ever-after ending. Sexton’s 1971 poem “Cinderella” offers a condensed version of the Grimms’ “Aschenputtel” interspersed with wry commentary. This shortened tale skips over the injunction to goodness and piety from a dying mother and offers no description of the kind of work or criticism Cinderella must bear. Instead, Sexton shifts the focus entirely to the getting of the prince and extends the ending of the story in the last stanza of the poems, which tells us that they live happily ever after, but “never arguing,” not bothered by the minutiae of life, not suffering the indignities of aging.7 This explication of “happily-ever-after” makes it a state that seems stifingly static and wholly unappealing. It might be preferable to sleep “on the sooty hearth.”8 She challenges the value of the story as a whole by challenging the value of the happy ending. What is the point of all that hard work and patience if rising up the socioeconomic ladder results merely in arrival at a different kind of unhappiness? Sexton’s last line refers the reader back to the frst four stanzas of the poem, which each present another variant of “that story”: a plumber who wins the lottery, a nursemaid who marries into the family, a milkman who

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does well on some real estate deals, and a charwoman who benefts from the insurance settlement after an accident. Although in the main narrative of Sexton’s poem, Cinderella is the daughter of a rich man as she was in the versions of the story by Perrault and the Grimms, in these prefatory narratives, the Cinderella characters begin at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and are carried to the top, and the brief mention of Cinderella’s father’s wealth is overshadowed by the parallelism of these stories with her own, leaving the reader with the overall impression of a rise from poverty to wealth, “that story.” This confation of the canonical Cinderella restoration tale with everyday rags-to-riches stories is widespread in American parlance. Indeed, Cinderella has gone beyond the status of a mere fairy-tale character to become a word,9 although common usage completely elides the beginning of the story, and the fact that Cinderella began her life in a high station is not part of the idiom as we use it in America today. Our story, the American dream story, is one of upward mobility, and the phrase “Cinderella story” is commonly applied to texts which themselves make no claim to the Cinderella tradition, but share the rags-to-riches elevation of Sexton’s prefatory narratives. One example is Michael Lewis’s biography of Michael Oher, The Blind Side, which reviewer Janet Maslin describes as a “strange Cinderella story” that takes Oher from his poor Black family on one side of Memphis “into the bosom of the white Tuohy family on the other side of town” and transforms him into an “Ole Miss football hero.”10 This biography garnered suffcient public interest to be made into a flm of the same title in 2009. In her analysis of the flm, Erin Ash notes that the adaptation centers attention on the matriarch of the Tuohy family, exaggerating Oher’s need for a white savior fairy godmother fgure.11 Similarly, the label of Cinderella man has been applied to Walt Disney himself. Jack Zipes argues, Disney felt drawn to fairy tales because they refected his own struggles in life. After all, Disney came from a relatively poor family, suffered from the exploitative and stern treatment of an unaffectionate father, was spurned by his early sweetheart, and became a success due to tenacity, cunning, and courage and his ability to gather talented artists and managers like his brother Roy around him.12

Oher and Disney’s personal stories are remarkable, possibly even marvelous. Though these are not the story of Cenerentola or Cendrillon or Aschenputtel, they are American Cinderella stories built on the rise-tale pattern, with a hero who climbs from the abjection of poverty to wealth and renown through hard work and pluck. The 1990s and the 2000s saw a fourishing trade in verisimilar flms built on the 510A Cinderella structure. Most of them do not use the Cinderella name,

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but they may include some familiar motifs—a protagonist who is a good person but occupies a low socioeconomic status through no fault of their own, an antagonist who has power over the protagonist and uses it capriciously, a helpful group of friends or a wise adviser (often an older person), a big event, and recognition through a lost object (sometimes it is even a shoe). The rags-toriches Cinderella story is particularly common in the flm genres of musicals and romantic comedies. On the “Movies and Television” page of his online Cinderella Bibliography, Russel A. Peck discusses the ways in which the flms Like Water for Chocolate, Love Actually, Maid in Manhattan, My Fair Lady, and An Offcer and a Gentleman incorporate elements of the Cinderella story.13 Public fgures also shape their stories to ft the U. S. version of the 510A Cinderella story. Recent candidates for president have tried to connect with voters by narrating their rise from abjection to success. Barack Obama’s stories about his own life tend to emphasize his single mother and his Kansas farmer grandparents, glossing over the facts that his mother was remarried and his grandparents were white-collar workers in Hawaii for most of his childhood.14 Similarly, Donald Trump presents himself as a man who started his frst business from nothing, glossing over the start-up funds and professional network he received from his father.15 These self-representations by politicians campaigning for offce are meant to appeal to voters who see themselves the same way—either as people who have climbed the socioeconomic ladder thanks to hard work and persistence or as people who have the potential to do so. This pattern to cast our public fgures as rags-to-riches Cinderella heroes who achieve their success through hard work and good moral character has implications for the way Americans see our own lives. The American dream asserts that upward mobility is possible, and the Cinderella story offers a model for how to do it. The dominance of these two stories in public discourse—both news and entertainment—means that Americans who are struggling, those who have not achieved upward mobility, those who are barely avoiding downward mobility, view this as a personal failure, as the result of not having worked hard enough, of not having been good enough. The way out of abjection, Cinderella’s story tells us, is to keep working hard within it. The Cinderella stories we tell, these rags-to-riches flms, books, and memoirs, communicate several overarching messages: 1. Hard work as an individual is the answer. 2. Patience and kindness are virtues. 3. Persistent hard work and a patient attitude will be rewarded. On the surface, these seem like good messages. In general, of course, we want to teach our children to be kind, to be patient, and to be persistent. We

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want to teach them to work hard at the tasks life sets in front of them. But these messages can also be problematic, particularly when they propose individual solutions to systemic problems. In the United States in the twenty-frst century, it is possible to work diligently and persistently and remain at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. The American dream of upward mobility is increasingly diffcult to realize. Our love affair with Cinderella stories, however, keeps us diligently and persistently working hard within a broken system rather than working for a new equitable system. This attitude on the part of many Americans ignores the research that shows capitalism in the United States is currently stacked against upward mobility.16 Americans’ pattern of thinking that success is tied to individual effort prevents the analysis and reform of systems of exploitation and oppression that keep the rich rich and the poor poor. In “A Primer on the ‘30s,” American novelist John Steinbeck summed up this phenomenon: “The trouble was that we didn’t have any self-appointed proletariat. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.”17 Steinbeck pithily captures the lack of class solidarity among those at the lower levels of the socioeconomic hierarchy. A “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” is likely to make choices that favor the wealthy at the ballot box rather than challenging the structures that perpetuate inequality. Contemporary audiences’ consumption of repeated retellings of the ragsto-riches rise-tale version of Cinderella works to reinforce the idea that individual effort, individual adherence to the principles of good character, and individual access to luck or magical help are the solutions to abjection. To interrupt this dynamic, Americans need to start engaging with Cinderella and with other beloved fairy-tale characters more analytically. Creatives need to tell her story differently. Perrault, the Grimms, and Disney are the primary source texts for many contemporary adaptations of this tale type, but the tradition is so much richer than these stories. D’Aulnoy, Basile, and Pitrè offer Cinderella characters who are crafty and cunning. We can, and should, create literature and flms that offer collective rewards for cooperative work and value character traits like honesty, empathy, and compassion. Many people in the United States struggle to imagine what those stories would look like because the stories they have encountered on pages and screens their whole lives have created expectations for what a story should be. At the same time, audiences need to consume Cinderella’s story differently. When something is labeled as an adaptation, viewers tend to judge it against its stated source text(s) or against the version they are most familiar with and to tolerate only small amounts of change. The conversation that will happen in the press and on social media is predictable as soon as an adaptation project is announced. Audiences anticipate the new creative team ruining the book as they put it on screen or making too many changes to the familiar

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story they love. This predictable conversation privileges fdelity to existing texts over modifcations to the plot and to the message, and it misses the productive work that change can do in updating familiar stories to grapple with current issues. I challenge you, the next time you sit down to watch or read an adaptation, to frst encounter the adaptation as a new text on its own terms. Ask yourself: What is the message of this new text? How does it convey that message? Only after that, turn to the question of how this new text’s message is different from its sources. Third, scholars need to study Cinderella stories, and other fairy-tale stories, differently. Among the narratives of this broad corpus, Cinderella has been one of the more widely adapted and excerpted tales. Like all long-standing, human traditions, the Cinderella tale type has had great staying power over time because the narrative has adapted and changed to appeal to the audience it meets, and these changes matter. The 510B subtype is rare in contemporary American popular culture, and the 510A subtype has over time become increasingly compact while also morphing from a restoration tale to a ragsto-riches tale. Particularly striking are the changes made to the hero’s initial station relative to the prince and the treatment of the (step)family in the end of the tale. Each of the retellings examined in this section blends conservation of social structures and values with innovation in response to social issues within the communities where they fnd their respective audiences.

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NOTES 1. Carl Bode, “Introduction,” in Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward (New York, NY: Penguin, 1985), ix–xxi. 2. For a fuller discussion of this phenomenon and of publication numbers, see Gary Scharnhorst, “Introduction,” in Horatio Alger, Jr., Ragged Dick and Risen from the Ranks (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2017), 11–41 at 23–24. 3. For more on Hill’s life and her oeuvre of 119 books published between 1877 and 1949, see Jean Karr, Grace Livingstone Hill: Her Story and Her Writings (New York, NY: Grosset & Dunlap, 1948). 4. This search was performed on Harlequin’s website on January 25, 2020, http:// books​.harlequin​.com​/search#​?p​=Q&​​lbc​=h​​arleq​​uin​&u​​id​=70​​86458​​43​&ts​​=ajax​​&w​=ci​​ ndere​​lla​&m​​ethod​​=and&​​view=​​grid&​​af=​&i​​sort=​​date.​ 5. For a discussion of the use of fairy-tale pastiche in postfeminist chic lit, see Georgina C. Isbister, “Chick Lit: A Postfeminist Fairy Tale,” Working Papers on the Web 13 (September 2009). 6. Harries, Twice Upon a Time, 122–23. 7. Anna Sexton, “Cinderella,” in The Complete Poems (Boston, MA: Houghton Miffin, 1981), 258. 8. Sexton, The Complete Poems, 256.

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9. The American Heritage Dictionary defnes Cinderella as “one that unexpectedly achieves recognition or success after a period of obscurity and neglect.” The etymology is listed as “After Cinderella, the fairy-tale character who escapes from a life of drudgery and marries a prince, translation of French Cendrillon.” Houghton Miffin Harcourt Publishing Company, The American Heritage Dictionary Entry, https://ahdictionary​.com/, accessed February 11, 2020. 10. Maslin, “An End Run Out of Poverty, Into an NFL Trajectory.” See Lewis, The Blind Side. 11. Erin Ash, “Racial Discourse in The Blind Side: The Economics and Ideology Behind the White Savior Format,” Studies in Popular Culture 38, no. 1 (2015): 85–103. On the topic of the white savior in flm more generally, see Hernan Vera and Andrew M. Gordon, Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefeld Publishers, 2003). 12. Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth, 81. Stone also discusses Disney’s life in fairy-tale terms (Some Day Your Witch Will Come, 26). 13. Russel A. Peck, ed., “Movies and Television,” in The Cinderella Bibliography (Rochester, NY: The Robbins Library, University of Rochester, 1995 and ongoing), https​:/​/d.​​lib​.r​​oches​​ter​.e​​du​/ci​​ndere​​lla​/t​​ext​/m​​ovies​​-an​d-​​telev​​ision​; Like Water for Chocolate, directed by Alfonso Arau (1992; Mexico City: Arau Films Internacional); Love Actually, directed by Richard Curtis (2003; Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures and Studio Canal); Maid in Manhattan, directed by Kevin Wade (2003; Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures); My Fair Lady, directed by George Cukor (1964; Los Angeles, CA: Warner Brothers); An Offcer and a Gentleman, directed by Taylor Hackfrod (1981; Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures). 14. See Barack Obama’s two works of memoir: Dreams from My Father (New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 2009), and The Audacity of Hope (New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 2009). For analysis of Obama’s self-representation, see Azza Ahmed Heikal and Heba Mohamed Abdel Aziz, “African Identity, Self and Other, in Obama’s Dreams from My Father,” Advances in Language and Literary Studies 7, no. 1 (2016): 248–52; and David Mastey, “Slumming and/as Self-Making in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father,” Journal of Black Studies 40, no. 3 (January 2010): 484–501. 15. For an analysis of Trump’s use of this trope, see Russ Buettner et al., “11 Takeaways From The Times’s Investigation Into Trump’s Wealth,” The New York Times (October 2, 2018), NYTimes​.com​, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​018​/1​​0​/02/​​us​/po​​ litic​​s​/don​​ald​-t​​rump-​​wealt​​h​​-fre​​d​-tru​​mp​.ht​​ml. 16. For an overview of this topic, see Heather Wyatt-Nichol, “The Enduring Myth of the American Dream: Mobility, Marginalization, and Hope,” International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior 14, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 258–97. 17. John Steinbeck, “A Primer on the ‘30s,” Esquire (June 1960): 85–93.

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Part III

OLD WINE IN NEW WINE SKINS

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CONTEMPORARY FAIRY-TALE PASTICHE ON FILM

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Chapter 7

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Fairy-Tale Pastiche, a Rising Trend in the Twenty-First Century

In our exploration of the Cinderella tale types in the previous 3 chapter, we saw the incredible variety of variants and versions of that story over time. Though no other tale type has as many versions, similar chapters could be written about other favorite tales. Indeed, an earlier outline for this project included a similar exploration of Beauty and the Beast. Instead, though, I would like to take our conversation in a different direction and look at a growing trend in popular culture—the fairy-tale pastiche. As I outlined in chapter 3, the term “fairy tale” is diffcult to defne, but we can say that this body of stories has several general characteristics. Fairy tales are fantastic narratives that are universally familiar, in large part because they tend to have a high degree of intertextual allusion to other fairy tales. They function as a discursive space into which authors and readers carry the issues of their own time to explore possibilities in a fantastic otherworld. Fairy tales are simultaneously radical and conservative. The protagonist’s adventure often breaks down social structures, defes rules, or thwarts expectations in radical ways, but this radical exploration is tempered by the restoration of order at the end of the story. The order at the end, though, is always different from the order of the initial situation. The characters themselves and the society in which they live have changed as a result of the adventure. In any single act of adaptation, the changes tend to be modest, but over time, signifcant evolution can occur within a single tale type. Contemporary fairy-tale pastiche engages both playfully and self-critically with fairy-tale material and has enabled experimentation and innovation in fairy-tale narratives for adults, in picture books for children, and in animated family flms.1 In this mode of storytelling, interaction with fairy tales goes beyond faithful adaptations and inversions of canonical tale types like those 99

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innovative Cinderellas examined in chapter 6 in order to imagine “a future that differs from what now exists.”2 Artists and authors working in a variety of creative media break the familiar fairy-tale canon to pieces and appropriate dramatis personae, motifs, and plot sequences to create new tales that problematize the defnition of fairy tale even as they remain within the genre. In The Enchanted Screen, Jack Zipes notes that cinematic creative teams choose “recognizable fairy-tale characters, motifs, and topoi” in order “to participate in discursive patterns ‘across a body of flms’ and to make a mark of some kind that will alter our view of the fairy tale, quite often to address social and political issues in the flmmaker’s society and culture.”3 I would argue, however, that the criticism of social and political issues goes both ways. Fairy-tale pastiche frequently interrogates and comments on the both the norms of the genre and of the audience’s lived reality. These new texts built of familiar fairy-tale material are able to participate in the broad fairy-tale tradition while also commenting on some of its norms: pastoral image of nature, patriarchal control of the family, and marriage without real choice. Thus, they respond to criticisms of the fairy-tale genre from within the genre itself. This kind of conscious self-criticism should change the conversation about fairy tales from one of “accept or reject” to one of “ways to accept and modify.” Too often, though, in contemporary discourse these newer, more innovative fairy tales are criticized for the sins of their forebears. While there is certainly more progress to be made at crafting inclusive stories that challenge heteronormativity, binary gender, ableism, and white supremacy, the fairy-tale stories on pages and screens in the early twenty-frst century are markedly different from those of the mid twentieth. This partial progress does not, of course, deserve accolades, but it does warrant study as a refection of changing values in American society more broadly. The internal conficts, interpersonal issues, and character traits that contemporary creators and audiences engage with in fairy tales, while not a verisimilar refection of reality, can point to the cares and concerns of the moment. Pastiche is not a new way of creating art. In Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature, Ingeborg Hoesterey offers a comprehensive overview of the tradition of pastiche from its roots as an Early Modern Italian “genre of [imitative] painting of questionable quality” to the “rebirth of pastiche in the spirit of postmodernism [that] has taken place across the spectrum of the arts.”4 Hoesterey describes the early-twentieth-century concept of Proustian pastiche as “the coming to grips of a writer with the work of revered authors. [. . .] It is this dialogical mode of pastiche that becomes a major focus of cultural production in postmodernism,” wherein “pastiche is about cultural memory and the merging of horizons past and present.”5 In her chapter on

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cinematic pastiche, Hoesterey examines the way that flm in the end of the twentieth century

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marks a departure from what we have come to consider, mutatis mutandis, the “classical” Hollywood flm [. . .] a visual narrative that created as fully as possible the illusion of reality on the screen, an illusion in which the viewer remained caught up from beginning to end. Continuity editing rendered all junctures invisible, which resulted in a tight, self-absorbed work that did not refer to itself as a medium or constructed artifce.6

The pastiche flms of the contemporary era break through the illusion of reality on the screen by self-refexively “quoting the tradition and rewriting it” and by “compris[ing] a complex medley and layering of different styles and motifs.”7 Fairy-tale pastiche, I would argue, creates a specifc subset of cinematic pastiche because of its content and its status as a genre. Unlike a cinematic adaptation of a single literary work or a pastiche parody of the canon of space movies, fairy-tale flms, Jack Zipes points out, often have no single source text, pulling instead from the rich variety of source material available to the director, screenwriters, actors, and animators or set and costume designers.8 Further, in quoting and rewriting its tradition, fairy-tale pastiche must also contend with the vexed status of fairy tales themselves as a genre that society both censures and consumes. Hoesterey’s description includes the idea of dialogue with the work of revered authors, but, as we saw in the Introduction to this book, the fairy tale both pervades the popular culture of the United States and remains marginalized in scholarly study of literature and flm. “Revered” is, perhaps, not an apt descriptor for fairy tales. In some ways, choosing this unprivileged genre might be said to allow for greater creative freedom because less is at stake. Although fairy tales have always been written for adult audiences as well as children’s audiences, the term “fairy tale” carries a strong association with children’s literature and media. This association with the disenfranchised demographic of children brings with it labels like “unimportant” or “less than,” as seen in the comparison Tolkien made between fairy stories and furniture relegated to the nursery or as seen in bookstores and libraries that marginalize fairy-tale fction into its own separate section.9 When a fairy-tale text makes pointed social commentary, it can be dismissed by those whom it has made uncomfortable because the text under critique is, after all, “just a fairy tale,” an unimportant artifact belonging to the nursery, not the salon. This marginalization, however, means that the fairy tale is also a ludic space open to experimentation even when a new pastiche is not intended for children. Fairy-tale texts that are marketed to adults frequently receive the same dismissal as “just fairy tales.”

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In any artistic adaptation of a familiar story, it is the changes that are most revelatory, and fairy-tale pastiche is no exception. When the viewer or reader encounters an unexpected change in the narrative, they experience a momentary dissonance, which may elicit joy or consternation. Regardless of the audience’s response to the dissonance, though, these moments matter. Whether feeting or sustained, these moments of dissonance pull the audience up short and ask them to consider the change in comparison with other familiar versions of the story.10 Because fairy-tale pastiche builds new stories out of pieces of many stories, there are many potential moments of dissonance created by the juxtaposition of familiar elements from different stories and by the modifcation of those stories. The creative genre of fairy-tale pastiche exists in multiple media today: children’s picture books; novels for young readers (The Sisters Grimm series11), teens, and adults; television series for adults (Once Upon a Time and Grimm12); and flms (Shrek, Brave, Enchanted). Across these media, the genre of the fairy-tale pastiche has four common elements. First, it references the fairy tale canon broadly, including scholars like Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm among the dramatis personae of the new stories, and drawing characters, motifs (the glass slipper, the fnger pricked on a spindle), or constellations of motifs from different tale type traditions. Some, like Brave, as we shall see, do this in a limited way. Others, like The Sisters Grimm and Once Upon a Time, delight in mashing up elements from as many tales as possible. Once Upon a Time has even kept up with current animated releases, adding new characters as they become popular in other media. Elsa, a character from Disney’s late 2013 flm Frozen, arrived in Storybrooke in September of 2014 and remained for twelve episodes of the 2014 broadcast season. Second, while making use of fairy-tale plots and motifs, the pastiche is also critical. This criticism might be directed toward a particular tale type or a theme common to the genre such as gender inequity in a patriarchal system, or the lack of character development for both male and female heroes, or the operability of magic. Third, the fairy-tale pastiche imports contemporary American norms into the fairy-tale genre. This interpolation sometimes serves to criticize the fairy-tale genre, but criticism is also aimed at the twenty-frst-century norms. Fourth, the characters of the narrative may not correspond directly with the Proppian dramatis personae of the traditional fairy-tale canon. Someone who carries out the functions of the donor or helper may also be the love interest. The role of villain is often unclear in contemporary fairy-tale pastiche; someone who appears to be a villain may be redeemed when new information is revealed, or some other character may carry out an act of villainy while also occupying another role. The next two chapters will explore two different kinds of pastiche—overt and covert. Like the “classic Hollywood flm” Hoesterey describes, covert

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pastiche presents a story that is a unifed whole with an intact fourth wall that separates the performance from the audience. In this case, however, the unifed whole of the storyworld is built from the pieces of fairy-tale stories. The covert fairy-tale pastiche transports the audience to another world and remains there until the end of the story. This otherworld is stable and generally follows an internally consistent set of governing rules. When norms are challenged, they are presented as interpersonal confict among the characters. Allusions to the broader canon of fairy tales are intended for the pleasure of the audience and tend to go unacknowledged by the characters. In contrast, overt pastiche celebrates its status as a text assembled from other pieces, drawing the audience’s attention to the fragments that have been pieced together. The setting is frequently unstable, moving from one storyworld to another, bringing multiple familiar tales into the same time and place, or breaking through the fourth wall to address the audience directly. It presents characters who represent systems of norms and beliefs that are in confict with one another. Everyone—creator, audience, and characters themselves— is aware that the text is made up of building blocks drawn from other texts. As this analysis of overt and covert pastiche will show, the fairy tale is a generative genre, which allows authors and flm studio creative teams to use the dramatis personae and motifs of the fairy-tale canon to build new fairytale narratives. These self-critical versions of fairy tales have the potential to become canonical. Unlike sacred scripture, which tends to form closed canons that resist additions once codifed, secular scripture in the form of the fairy tale is open to the inclusion of newer adaptations, sometimes even preferring newer versions to older ones, as with the dynamic by which contemporary Americans tend to be more familiar with the animated fairy-tale flms than with the Grimm’s versions in Kinder- und Hausmärchen. If the fairy tale is our secular scripture, the cinema screen is our stained glass window, the medium that allows us to tell our important stories in pictures for audiences to view en masse. One of the most popular self-critical fairy-tale pastiches has been DreamWorks Pictures’ Shrek and its sequels.13 Cinema scholar Kristian Moen closes his monograph Film and Fairy Tales with a discussion of the Shrek series, noting, Shrek celebrates an earthy, folkloric set of fantasies, such as the pleasures of the grotesque body, the bonds of friendship and high spirits. A certain idea of the old-fashioned and sentimental fairy tale becomes the subject of parody and ridicule: iconic fairy-tale characters are rounded up and exiled from their magic kingdom by an evil lord, the archetypal plot of a prince saving a princess is made to seem less a rite of passage and more an unwelcome task, and the climactic scene of transformation celebrates beastliness over beauty.14

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In a variety of ways, as Moen enumerates, the creative team behind Shrek inverts the expectations for fairy-tale stories. They also, however, take the opportunity to criticize twenty-frst-century values, particularly the toxic beauty standards that are damaging to people of all genders. The frst flm in the series includes a moment of signifcant dissonance for both the characters and the audience when true love’s kiss resolves Princess Fiona into her nighttime ogre form rather than her daytime human form. This moment of consternation for the character sets up the sequels, which continue the characters’ grappling with issues of identity and unrealistic standards for beauty. Much like the critics of modern literature and art who focus on the stark and dark, however, Moen does not discuss contemporary fairy-tale flms that feature princesses as the main heroes and are marketed primarily to young children, preferring instead to focus on flms marketed to adults. Unlike Moen, I believe princess flms marketed to children are critical to our understanding of contemporary American textual culture and subsequent chapters will offer close readings of two flms, Enchanted and Brave, which engage in the creative and critical process of pastiche while also offering their audiences “Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation.”15 The next two chapters focus on two Disney flms because of their prominence in American popular culture, but it should also be noted that these family flms are part of a larger trend toward playful mixing of fairy-tale elements to create new stories. Fairy-tale pastiche, in both its overt and covert forms, also shows up as a means of examining intersectional issues of patriarchy and misogyny, postcoloniality, disability and race. Books and flms that are marketed to adults tend, in general, to be more radically exploratory in all of these areas, though many texts limit their criticism to just one or two. Briefy here I offer sketches of several examples of fairy-tale pastiche marketed to adults, each radical in some ways and conservative in others. In her analysis of Nalo Hopkinson’s short story collection Skin Folk, Cristina Bacchilega fnds creolization of themes, language, and genre. This mixing across traditional literary boundaries, Bacchilega argues, shows the tales as a prism producing refractions rather than a mirror refecting a static image of culture.16 This story collection places new versions of familiar tale types alongside new fantastic stories that make liberal use of fairy-tale elements. “The Glass Bottle Trick,” for example, retells Blue Beard, a tale type which features a young and innocent woman who realizes that her new husband is a serial murderer when she fnds the bodies of his previous wives. In Hopkinson’s version, Samuel is motivated to kill his wives once they become pregnant because of the colorism that has taught him to be disgusted by the idea of babies with his deeply dark skin. This intrusion of internalized white supremacy into the fairy-tale family is countered by Caribbean folklore. Hopkinson’s Beatrice is saved not by her brothers, as

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is common in this tale type, but by the souls of her predecessors as duppy when the glass bottles they had been trapped in are broken. In Hopkinson’s mixing of pieces of stories and cultures, Miasol Eguíbar Holgado fnds a body of work in which contemporary Afropolitan, Afro-Caribbean, and African-Canadian identities, all derived from the forced migration of the middle passage, mix to form a complex conversation about the process of transculturation.17 This mixing allows Hopkinson to offer nuanced commentary on fairy-tale norms, hegemonic white supremacy, and the national cultures she draws from. Like Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor builds fantastic narratives, many of them covert fairy-tale pastiches, to explore the interaction of hegemonic and postcolonial cultures in the contemporary world. In Okorafor’s work, this exploration often happens as the hero moves from one cultural space to another. In her article “Organic Fantasy,” Okorafor writes that “for [her] fantasy is the most accurate way of describing [the] reality” of moving between cultures, in her case between her life in the United States as the child of immigrants and her family’s periodic trips to Nigeria. The novella Okorafor cowrote with Alan Dean Foster, Kabu Kabu, which starts off a short story collection of the same title, relates the adventure of a woman who is traveling from her home in Chicago to Nigeria for a family event.18 The cab Ngozi gets into for a ride to O’Hare International Airport turns out to be a magical one that takes her all the way to her fnal destination, but requires her to tolerate several side trips. Throughout the journey, Ngozi remains skeptical of the driver’s promises to get her where she is going safely. Even in the moment she looks out the window and recognizes Port Harcourt, the village where her sister’s wedding will take place, she has trouble believing what she sees. This narrative captures the stress of long distance, international travel—concern about making connections, anxiety over losing necessary documents, surrendering of control to drivers and pilots, the dislocation of leaving familiar spaces, fellow travelers who seem threatening. It also captures the particular culture shock of movement between American and Nigerian spaces. Through Ngozi’s thoughts, words, and actions, Okorafor addresses Nigerian patriarchal attitudes, issues of language and identity, and beings from Nigerian folklore, and she also uses a particularly Nigerian means of transportation, a kabu kabu or unlicensed cab, to aid the hero on her quest. Okorafor is a prolifc and multitalented writer whose list of publications includes comic books, screenplays for flm and television, short stories, and novels for children and for adults. Across this body of work, as Sandra Lindow notes, Okorafor creates intersectional, womanist, anti-racist narratives that depict women battling issues of community, prejudice, and identity in fantastic spaces.19 These fantastic narratives draw heavily both from specifcally Nigerian folktales and from the patterns and tropes of folk and fairy

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tales more broadly in order to accurately describe the reality Okorafor shares with all of us. In his Oscar-winning 2017 flm, The Shape of Water, director Guillermo del Toro combines elements from a variety of familiar fairy-tale stories in service to telling a wholly new story, a covert pastiche, marketed as “an otherworldly fairy tale,” in which the plans of the white supremacist patriarchy are thwarted by a disabled white woman, a Black woman, and a gay white man.20 In their analysis of representation of disability in the flm, Alison Wilde, Gill Crawshaw, and Alison Sheldon fnd that though the flm is “not without its faws,” it is also a powerful “recognition of the validity of disabled people’s lives” as it depicts Elisa as a person with agency, determination, and leadership skills.21 The core of this flm is a Beauty and the Beast story in which the beauty, Elisa Esposito, is a janitor in a government lab who makes a connection with an aquatic beast imprisoned there for experimentation and exploitation. The researchers control him with physical intimidation and electric shock, but Elisa is able to communicate with him through sign, body language, and gifts. Over the course of many interactions, Elisa and the creature form an emotional bond, and she ultimately helps him to escape captivity. This presentation of Beauty and the Beast is complicated by two other tale types. Like many Little Red Riding Hood protagonists, Elisa is presented as a person on the cusp of maturity. She is childlike in her physical embodiment of modest femininity and in the caretaking that her friends show, and she is also womanly in her awareness of her own sexuality and her organization of the plan to break the creature out of the lab. The association of Elisa with this tale type is further supported by her choice of red headband, shoes, coat, and hat and by the wolf-like aggressiveness of the antagonist, who threatens her both sexually and physically. Like the Little Mermaid once she reaches land, Elisa is able to hear but not to speak, and she has a strong affnity for water throughout the flm. The other characters attribute her lack of verbal speech to the inexplicable scars on either side of Elisa’s neck, which were already present when she was found in the river as an infant. In the fnal scene of the flm, the creature takes a wounded Elisa into the bay with him, where, in addition to healing her recent wounds, his power reopens the scarred-over gills on her neck and restores her to aquatic life. With this ending, the flm subverts the expected Beauty and the Beast transformation, as the creature remains physically the same. It also subverts the familiar Little Mermaid endings—Elisa does not die as Hans Christian Andersen’s mermaid does, but neither is she transformed into an abled human, as Ariel is in Disney’s animated version.22 The transformation of the scars on Elisa’s neck to functional gills invites the audience to consider whether she was human to begin with, or whether the water is her true home and her time on land had been a kind of exile. This ending creates questions about ability, impairment, and humanity, and

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conversation about this flm in both scholarly and popular press has taken up these questions. These three examples of contemporary fantastic texts marketed toward adults typify the power of fairy-tale pastiche to push boundaries. These fairytale texts engage with the questions adults grapple with in their everyday lives—particularly issues related to race and postcolonial power structures, feminism and patriarchy, and disability—by bringing these questions into fantastic spaces where the characters explore answers that might not be possible in a verisimilar storyworld. Any single text tends to focus its commentary on a limited number of social norms, so they appear radical in some ways, while remaining conservative in others. Similarly, as the analysis of family flms in the next two chapters will show, the creative teams at Disney use Brave and Enchanted to explore feminist issues related to self-determination, but these explorations are presented within predominantly white, heteronormative, Anglo-American spaces. They are, on the whole, less radical than the books and flms sketched above, and this is simultaneously disappointing and understandable. Nonetheless, the ways that these two flms interact with the canon confrms the pervasive presence of fairy tales in contemporary American culture. Enchanted is able to draw on a variety of fairy tales for humor and commentary because the creative team could depend on the audience’s knowledge of the stories. Brave is able to tell a new story that fts into the canon because its creative teams made use of the building blocks of that canon. Each of these flms engages with the canon in order to place discourse and commentary in the space between the audience’s existing knowledge about fairy tales and these new pastiche fairy tales. Although they engage in the process of creating fairy-tale pastiche differently, the flms Enchanted and Brave each offer a functional model of this contemporary genre. It is by virtue of the fact that the fairy tales of the canon have become contemporary America’s secular scripture that the creative teams behind Brave and Enchanted could accomplish these goals in this way. NOTES 1. For a survey of innovative and experimental fairy-tales flms around the world starting with the advent of flm, see Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011). In their introduction to Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity, Greenhill and Matrix offer a précis of Bengt Holbek’s characteristics of fairy tales with particular focus on their non-elite status and their adult audience (4). My analysis rejects the dichotomy of elite and popular cultural production. The same people who criticize fairy tales are also consuming them. 2. Niles, Homo Narrans, 2. 3. Zipes, Enchanted Screen, 14.

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4. Ingeborg Hoesterey, Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 1, ix. I cannot claim “fairy-tale pastiche” as an original phrase; though I came up with it on my own during the process of this research, it was already in use elsewhere, see Jorgensen, “A Wave of the Magic Wand.” 5. Hoesterey, Pastiche, 9, ix. 6. Hoesterey, Pastiche, 45. 7. Hoesterey, Pastiche, 46. 8. Zipes, The Enchanted Screen, 8. 9. Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy-Stories, 44. 10. On the pleasure of the palimpsest, see Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 116. 11. In Michael Buckley’s The Sisters Grimm (New York, NY: Amulet Books), which consists of a set of nine novels published 2005–2012 plus The Sisters Grimm: A Very Grimm Guide (New York, NY: Amulet Books, 2012), two sisters learn that they are descendants of the Brothers Grimm and become detectives in an unassuming upstate New York town inhabited by fairy-tale characters. 12. ABC Studios’ Once Upon a Time television series, which is not marketed to children, brings together a cast of characters drawn from fairy tales around the world to deal with issues of gender and power, reality versus fantasy, and honesty. In NBC’s Grimm series fairy-tale characters add complication to an otherwise classic detective drama. 13. Shrek, directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson (2001; Glendale, CA: DreamWorks Animation). 14. Moen, Film and Fairy Tales, 211–12. 15. Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy-Stories, 59. Enchanted is a 2007 Disney flm starring Amy Adams and Patrick Dempsey, directed by Kevin Lima. It grossed $127 million in theaters over a four-month run (IMDb). Brave is a 2012 Disney animated feature voiced by Kelly Macdonald, Billy Connoly, and Emma Thompson. It grossed $237 million in theaters over a six-month run (IMDb). 16. Nalo Hopkinson, Skin Folk (New York, NY: Open Road Media, 2018); Cristina Bacchilega, “Refections on Recent English-Language Fairy-Tale Fiction by Women: Extrapolating from Nalo Hopkinsons’s Skin Folk,” Fabula 47, no. 3 (2006): 201–9 at 205. 17. Miasol Eguíbar Holgado, “Transforming the Body, Transculturing the City: Nalo Hopkinson’s Fantastic Afropolitans,” European Journal of English Studies 21, no. 2 (2017): 174–88. For Hopkinson in her own words, see interview articles by Jené Watson-Aifah and Dianne D. Glave in Callaloo 26, no. 1 (2003): 146–59 and 160–69, respectively. 18. Nnedi Okorafor, “Organic Fantasy,” African Identities 7, no. 2 (May 2009): 275–86 at 279; Nnedi Okorafor, Kabu Kabu (Germantown, MD: Prime Books, 2013). 19. Sandra Lindow, “Nnedi Okorafor: Exploring the Empire of Girls’ Moral Development,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 28, no. 1 (2017): 46–69. 20. The Shape of Water, directed by Guillermo del Toro (2017; Los Angeles, CA: Fox Searchlight Pictures).

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21. Alison Wilde et al., “Talking about The Shape of Water: Three Women Dip Their Toes In,” Disability & Society 33, no. 9 (2018): 1531–32. This article offers a very brief précis of the conversation about this flm in the disabled community and cites other key articles. 22. Hans Christian Andersen, Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Parts I and II, illustr. Anne Anderson (Alcester, Warwickshire: Pook Press, 2010); The Little Mermaid, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker (1989; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Feature Animation).

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Chapter 8

Manhattan Meets Andalasia, and Both Are Changed

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Overt Fairy-Tale Pastiche in Disney’s Enchanted

In some ways, Disney’s 2007 Enchanted is like any other romantic comedy as it tells the story of a woman and a man who fall in love despite mutual misunderstandings and vastly different worldviews. Their shared experiences signifcantly change the courses of their individual lives. On the way to telling this familiar rom-com story, however, Enchanted engages with issues about the fantastic and the real, especially in regard to the question of whether fairy tales should be met with skepticism or belief. This flm successfully deploys overt fairy-tale pastiche for social commentary. Twenty-frst-century popular culture revels in creative adaptations that offer audiences repetition with a change. Fairy-tale pastiche is a recombination of fairy-tale material that has four defning characteristics: it makes clear allusions to the fairy-tale canon with which audiences are familiar, it offers criticism of fairy-tale norms and/or twenty-frst-century American norms, it imports twenty-frst-century American norms into the fairy-tale story, and it complicates the stock character roles of hero, princess, and villain. Fairy-tale pastiche flms retell familiar stories or offer heretofore unknown perspectives on the story, capitalizing on audiences’ well-established love for characters they already know.1 As an overt pastiche, Enchanted celebrates its allusions to other well-established fairy-tale flms and uses a hybrid setting—both animated and live-action—to engender conversations about both contemporary American norms and fairy-tale norms. Enchanted’s narrative begins in an animated space when the voiceover narrator leads the viewers into a pop-up storybook. The storybook takes the audience to the animated land of Andalasia where we meet half of the cast of characters. We watch as the humble maiden Giselle meets Prince Edward, but before they can marry, Edward’s wicked stepmother Narissa pushes Giselle 111

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into a wishing well that transports her to Manhattan, “a place where there are no happily ever afters.”2 Giselle is followed frst by Edward who wants to fnd her, Nathaniel who is sent by Narissa to keep them apart, the chipmunk Pip who wants to thwart Nathaniel’s plans, and ultimately by Queen Narissa herself when Nathaniel fails. Once in Manhattan, these fairy-tale characters meet Morgan, a young girl without a mother, her father Robert, and his fancé Nancy. Robert is a high-powered divorce lawyer who believes in neither love nor fairy tales, and he discourages Morgan from reading fairy tales herself, giving her instead a book of biographies of accomplished women like Rosa Parks and Marie Curie. Just as Andalasia is a caricature of fairy-tale space, Robert’s Manhattan is a caricature of contemporary American space, and ultimately the flm concludes with the fairy-tale maiden and the Manhattan lawyer having negotiated a middle ground between skepticism and belief in fairy tales. It is not by chance that the bulk of the plot is set in New York City. Once in Manhattan, the Andalasian characters continue their interpersonal drama on the streets of the city, brushing up against anonymous New Yorkers intermittently, and the city, for the most part, ignores their medieval-esque clothing and odd behavior. Independent of each other, Andalasia and Manhattan are each a viable setting for what Hoesterey describes as a “classical” Hollywood flm in which “the illusion of reality of the screen” is total,3 and each of these settings comes with its own set of expectations for plot and characters. Enchanted’s creative team, though, puts these two very different settings in conversation with one another. The Andalasian characters bring their expectations about the world and their habits of interacting with other people into Manhattan where they are confronted with an environment and people who do not match their expectations. It is not unusual, of course, for a narrative to move characters out of their home space into a setting that is remarkably other. The concept of the green world is well documented in literary criticism. The green world usually describes plots in which the urban characters move into a natural space, like a garden or a wood, which robs them of the social and societal structures that constrain their behavior. For example, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the four lovers encounter fairies and love potions in the wood; in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, Tiana and Naveen leave the city for the bayou in order to fnd help regaining their human forms.4 In Enchanted, however, the characters move out of the green world, from animated Andalasia into live-action Manhattan. From the perspective of the American audience, Manhattan is a real space, and Andalasia resembles spaces that function as the green worlds of our entertainment. Thus, Enchanted’s movement of Andalasian characters from their animated home into our liveaction one is a reversal of the conventional pattern of movement from urban

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space into a discursive natural space. This movement from the animated woodland of Andalasia to the middle of a very live-action Manhattan, fails to relieve them of their Andalasian social structures. Instead, it sets them up for confrontation with a wholly different set of strict social structures. This unfamiliar environment, unlike a sparsely populated green world, is teeming with people. As the Andalasians interact with the Manhattanites, both groups of people are forced to reexamine their assumptions about the world and how it works. Thus, Enchanted creates a discursive space that questions the norms operational in both Andalasia and Manhattan. The spatial shift that the Andalasians experience in being transported to Manhattan is accompanied by a profoundly physical one as their animated bodies become live-action ones. The frst time this happens, the audience sees the process in action. As Giselle falls through the wishing well space toward the manhole cover that opens onto a Manhattan street, bits of glitter in the air adhere to her animated body. Giselle is shocked by this and initially shies away from the sensation it creates, but ultimately, the process overwhelms the animated maiden, and she is transformed into the corporeal Amy Adams.5 Giselle’s body language communicates that this transformation is not a comfortable one, but neither she nor the Andalasians who follow her react to this process with anything other than acceptance. To them, the fantastic is not unexpected. As they navigate this new space with new skin, the fairy-tale characters respond to their dislocation differently. Nathaniel and Narissa, who have the most complex and selfsh motivations, are quickly able to make sense of navigating Manhattan, and Prince Edward succeeds by the sheer power of his ego, remaining largely unconscious of the mismatch between his behavior and the expectations of those around him. Giselle, the most naïve and trusting of the Andalasian characters, in contrast, struggles to make sense of this urban space. Accustomed to the way Andalasian community faces dangers collaboratively, she expects people to help her with information and advice. When Giselle frst arrives in Manhattan, the crowd ignores her despite the oddness of her dress and behavior, and she is swept down into the subway and out again in a different part of the city. When a homeless man makes eye contact with her, Giselle assumes he will be helpful because he is old, but instead he steals her tiara.6 She approaches a dwarf for help, but he rebuffs her.7 Her efforts to uphold fairy-tale norms in the face of twenty-frst-century New Yorker indifference marks her as other, as possibly mentally unstable, or as an actor engaged in performance art. Her naiveté also puts her in danger as when she walks into traffc in the middle of Times Square because she does not know not to.8 Not all critics share my assessment of Enchanted’s successful creation of a discursive space for criticism of both fairy tale and contemporary cultural

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norms; the flm has come under fre for being insuffciently feminist and insuffciently radical in its reworking of the fairy-tale form. In “Disney’s Enchanted: Patriarchal Backlash and Nostalgia in a Fairy Tale Film,” Linda Pershing and Lisa Gablehouse tar Enchanted with the same brush that criticized earlier Disney flms for their representations of women and reinforcement of the patriarchal structure. Pershing and Gablehouse point out

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In the flm, the female protagonist seeks personal fulfllment through romance. The outcome—a happy ending in marriage—follows the heroine being subjected to a threat or danger, rendered vulnerable, and fnally rescued. By no means a self-actualized feminist Enchanted’s main character Giselle (Amy Adams) fnds her one true love and becomes a heteronormative role model for her future stepdaughter. Nancy (Idina Menzel), her hitherto feminist counterpart and rival for the affections of lawyerly—if not princely—Robert (Patrick Dempsey), retreats at the flm’s end from the real world to the make-believe realm of Andalasia, giving up her professional career to become a fairy tale princess and a bride.9

There are several problems with Pershing and Gablehouse’s characterization of the flm here. First is their presentation of Giselle as a helpless “heroine being subjected to a threat or danger, rendered vulnerable, and fnally rescued.”10 A second problem with Pershing and Gablehouse’s assessment of Enchanted is their characterization of Nancy as a feminist who regresses. In Pershing and Gablehouse’s analysis, the paired marriages in Manhattan and Andalasia that end the flm typify the problem. Analysis in this chapter will show, however, that Enchanted presents more complicated character development and motivation for both Giselle and Nancy than critics of the flm have given it credit for. Overall, the structure of Enchanted is a canonical animated fairy-tale opening, a messy middle, and an evolved ending. Within this macro structure, several fairy-tale tropes are presented in a similar pattern: a traditional instance in which the trope occurs as expected in Andalasia, a failed occurrence in Manhattan, and an evolved occurrence where Andalasian and Manhattan values have achieved some kind of harmony. One such traditional-failed-evolved trope is that of falling and catching, in which the female love interest is caught by the hero after falling. This trope is endemic to fairy-tale flms because it provides visual evidence of the lead characters’ confrmation to gendered body standards of male strength and female willowy thinness. The frst instance of this trope in Enchanted occurs in Andalasia when Giselle is being chased by a troll. She drops from the tree, and Price Edward catches her.11 Giselle falls again in Manhattan, but while Robert breaks her fall, labeling this “catching” would be generous.12 The third

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time a fall occurs, it is Giselle who catches Robert as he falls from the Empire State Building.13 The connections among these moments in the flm are made clear frst by the director’s choice to make the visual presentation of the character in danger the same all three times: she or he is hanging from a cylindrical object with only the fngers bearing the body’s weight. In all three scenes, the camera zooms in specifcally on the hands.14 Then, in the third presentation of this trope, the flm makes a self-referential comment on its evolution in the voice of the evil queen, “Oh, my. This is a twist on our story. It’s the brave little princess coming to the rescue. I guess that makes you [Robert] the damsel in distress, huh, handsome?”15 This moment confrms that the creative team responsible for crafting Enchanted as an overt fairy-tale pastiche were having fun with their presentation of fairy-tale tropes. They are, in essence, saying to the audience, “We just want to make sure that you know that we know what we’ve been doing throughout this flm,” with a wink. Similarly, the trope of the wicked stepmother recurs in the pattern of traditional, failed, and evolved. Powerful step-parents in the fairy-tale canon advance themselves at the expense of their step-child, who becomes a servant in their own household or may be forced to leave it entirely. In Andalasia, the audience sees Queen Narissa for the power-hungry wicked stepmother that she is, though Prince Edward and Giselle are unaware of her embodiment of this trope until the end of the flm. The failed instance of the wicked stepmother is Nancy, Robert’s newly minted fancé. When she learns of the engagement, Robert’s daughter Morgan is worried about Nancy’s potential to become a wicked stepmother. The flm does not give Nancy and Morgan an opportunity to try out this relationship because for the fve years that Robert and Nancy have been dating, he has kept her at a distance from Morgan. Giselle, however, steps into a surrogate mother role in relationship to Morgan before she is romantically involved with Robert, and the flm shows them as an integrated and supportive family-like unit—Giselle cares for the physical space of the apartment, tells Morgan a bedtime story, and shares a family meal with Robert and Morgan—in the same ways that any parent would. This positive (step-)mother-daughter relationship between Giselle and Morgan is one of mutual beneft. Morgan guides Giselle through Manhattan’s foreign-to-her environment when they spend the day shopping in preparation for Giselle to attend the ball. Further, rather than driving a wedge between parent and child, as a traditional fairy-tale stepmother frequently does, Giselle’s embodiment of fairy-tale love and kindness helps Robert and Morgan to become closer. As Robert’s skepticism is tempered, he is able to engage with the stories Morgan craves. In its closing musical montage, Enchanted presents Giselle as the lead designer at Andalasia Fashions, where bluebirds and rats work alongside Giselle’s human employees, and where Morgan and her friends throw a princess-themed party.16 The expression on Robert’s face

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in this scene indicates that he is a willing participant in this party, which is a sharp contrast to the attitude toward fairy tales that he expressed in the early scenes of the flm. Two other fairy-tale tropes, the hero’s ability to communicate with animals and the ability of song to embody magic, receive extended treatment in Enchanted. Like Disney’s animated Cinderella, Giselle has a strong affnity with all the animals of her community. When the audience meets her in Andalasia, the powerful magic of Giselle’s song brings friendly animals to help her build her mannequin prince (fgure 8.1).

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Figure 8.1  author.

Giselle’s Mannequin Prince in Andalasia (04:05). Source: Screenshot by

In the domestic space of Giselle’s cottage, communication with the animals of Andalasia is reciprocated, and the animals are able to speak in words that Giselle and the audience can understand. Beyond being friendly with Giselle, the animals are at peace with one another within the cottage; the chipmunk and mice are not threatened by the owl, the fox, or the badger. Once she meets Prince Edward in the forest of Andalasia, these animals help Giselle create her wedding dress overnight, putting on the fnishing touches as she arrives at the palace.17 In Manhattan, Giselle’s use of song to communicate with local animals is less successful. While she is able to summon animals to help her clean Robert and Morgan’s apartment, these animals—mice, rats, pigeons, and cockroaches—are rougher and dirtier than her companions in the animated world (see fgure 8.2).

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Manhattan Meets Andalasia

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Figure 8.2 

117

Giselle’s Work Party in Manhattan (25:59). Source: Screenshot by author.

Within the space of “A Happy Working Song,” Giselle and the animals thoroughly clean the bathroom; gather laundry; clean up a table littered with newspapers and take-out containers; and wash, dry, and put away more than a sinkful of dishes. In contrast to her inability to navigate the public space of Manhattan, this song shows that Giselle is able to make suffcient sense of the domestic space of Robert and Morgan’s apartment to accomplish the tasks of cleaning. The power of Giselle’s song to put creatures normally considered to be flthy to work cleaning an apartment makes for good comedy. The roaches cleaning the tub parody the old Scrubbing Bubbles commercial.18 I am labeling this a failed instance of the trope, however, because the power of Giselle’s communicative magic is limited, and the ultimate result of this cleaning project is increased disharmony with Robert. Although the animals in Manhattan can respond to Giselle’s instructions with appropriate action, they cannot speak in a way that is comprehensible to her or to the audience. Further, the song that leads them in cleaning the apartment lacks the power to create a safe space for predators and prey to interact, and one of the pigeons munches a cockroach. Although the pigeons, rodents, and cockroaches help Giselle make the apartment cleaner and tidier than it had been when they started, the pigeons break some of the dishes they are trying to put away, and the rats use the toothbrushes to clean the toilet. When Robert wakes up to fnd these animals inside his home, he responds like any New Yorker, immediately ushering all of the disease-ridden vermin out of the apartment.19 It is, however, remarkable that Giselle’s song works at all.20 She is no longer in her native environment and is unable to function among the people of this new society on her own, yet she can fnd help from the fauna present

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in this urban space in a limited way. The eagerness of the animals’ response and, in a later song, the way that some of the people in Central Park respond to Giselle’s singing suggest that the magic is latent in the space of Manhattan, requiring only that someone believe in it and call it forth. Central Park thus functions as a smaller green space situated within and contained by the urban space of Manhattan. The collaboration with musicians and dancers who join her song in the park gives Giselle confdence in the power of her own magic, and she is able to communicate with a pair of doves, who successfully carry out her instructions to deliver fowers to Robert’s fancé. Giselle: (to the doves) Take these fowers to Nancy, please. Robert: Are you crazy? They’re birds. They don’t know where she lives.21

Giselle ignores his skepticism and returns to singing and dancing with the people in Central Park. Shortly thereafter, Robert’s cell phone rings, and Nancy thanks him for the fowers. In the next scene Robert and Giselle are in Nancy’s fashion studio.

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Nancy: I love them so much. Robert: Really? Nancy: Yeah. Usually you send those e-mail cards with the digital fowers. These are exquisite. Where do you fnd live doves in New York City?22

In this instance of the trope, the birds do exactly what Giselle has asked without incident, and the result is the restoration of harmony between Robert and Nancy, who had argued when Nancy found Giselle in his apartment. There is a limit to Giselle’s ability to access this song magic, however. Notably, she did not use it when she frst arrived in Manhattan, nor in the Italian restaurant when Pip the chipmunk is being chased by diners alarmed at the presence of a rodent in their midst. Magic song, it seems, cannot function as a general cry for assistance; Giselle is only able to use it when she has confdence in the outcome she is looking for. These moments in which Giselle is able to use singing successfully in Manhattan, then, function as a barometer of her adjustment to this new and strange space. In the environments—the home and Central Park—and the tasks—tidying up and romance—that seem most similar to her experience in Andalasia, her sense of displacement is diminished, and she is able to apply her skills to these situations. Giselle’s inconsistent access to magic song is in sharp contrast with Narissa’s total control of her magic even outside of Andalasia. The flm does not reveal why Narissa is familiar with Manhattan, but it is clear that her understanding of this space and confdence in her power allow her to access it at will. In Enchanted the power of song also connects to the trope of recognizing one’s true love. In Andalasia’s traditional instance of this trope, Giselle’s

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song is heard by Prince Edward who is hunting nearby. When he answers, the harmony of their duet is a signal to the two of them that they are meant to be together. They sing, Edward: You’re the fairest maid I’ve ever met. You were made Giselle: To fnish your duet.23

Although they have only just met, they sing together like a well-matched and long-practiced duo, not only about this moment of meeting but also about their shared vision of the future. The key and range suits both of their voices, there are no awkward gaps between lines as one singer stops and the other starts, and the words that they sing show that they are in agreement with one another. Because of this harmonious duet, Giselle and Edward believe that when they kiss for the frst time, they will be bound by true love, another powerful trope. This love is fated, based on external criteria (unspecifed beyond the duet) rather than on any kind of deep knowledge of one another. It is their belief in this love that motivates their actions throughout the messy middle of this flm while Giselle is waiting for Prince Edward to rescue her from being stranded in Manhattan. When Giselle explains to Robert that she is waiting for Prince Edward, her prospective groom, to come fnd her, he is incredulous.

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Robert: So what’s the deal with you and this prince? How long have you been together? Giselle: Oh, about a day. Robert: You mean it feels like a day because you’re so in love? Giselle: No, it’s been a day. Robert: You’re kidding me. A day? One day.24

The lawyer scoffs at planning a life based on a song and a kiss, encouraging Giselle to date Edward and get to know him before marrying.25 Robert and Giselle talk at each other but largely fail to communicate, which is representative of most of the conversations they have on the frst day of their acquaintance. This conversation highlights the degree to which their differing worldviews make it diffcult for Robert and Giselle to understand one another. For Giselle, the idea of meeting someone one day and marrying them the next is perfectly logical. This is the way things work in her world, and she cannot imagine a different way of getting to the altar. For Robert, in contrast, such haste is completely illogical, and he tries to make sense of her statements within his own frame of reference—concluding that either Giselle is being hyperbolic or she is joking. This moment in the flm prompts each of these characters to start considering that their norms might not be the only way. The love’s duet trope has two failed instances in the messy middle of the flm. The frst is while Giselle is singing in Central Park. Even though Prince

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Edward hears and recognizes her song, he is unable to navigate the unfamiliar space to reach her, in part because the people living their daily lives in the park do not make way for him, as his royal ego leads him to expect they should.26 When Edward fnally does fnd Giselle in Robert’s apartment the next day, the duet falters:

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Edward: I’ve been dreaming of a true love’s kiss and the miss I have begun to miss. [. . .] Somewhere there’s a maid I’ve never met who was made . . . Giselle: . . . . Edward: Who was made . . . Giselle: What’s wrong? Edward: You’re not singing. Giselle: Oh. I’m not. Well, I’m sorry. I was thinking. Edward: Thinking? Giselle: Before we leave, there is one thing I would love to do. Edward: Name it, my love, and it is done. Giselle: I want to go on a date. Edward: A date! What’s a date? Giselle: Well . . . we go out to dinner. And we talk about ourselves. Our likes and our dislikes. Our interests. A date.27

In this scene, the fact that Giselle is thinking rather than singing is as bizarre to Prince Edward as Giselle’s singing in Central Park was to Robert, and this is a signifcant moment in Giselle’s character development. Her asking “what’s wrong” indicates that not singing was not a conscious decision on her part. She is still operating under the expectations of Andalasia, that song would just come upon her in the presence of her true love and his half of the duet. She does not notice that she’s not singing until Edward points it out to her. At the end of this scene, her request to go on a date, as Robert has explained is the norm in Manhattan, shows that her experience is changing her. What none of the characters present in this scene seem to notice is the change in Prince Edward’s part of the duet. This time, he sings, “Somewhere there’s a maid I’ve never met.” Clearly, Giselle is not that maid. As Giselle and Edward have their date in New York City, it becomes clear to the audience, and to them, that they are not as well-matched as they thought. For the audience, the increasing awkwardness between them contrasts with the growing ease between Giselle and Robert. The fnal, evolved instance of the true love’s duet trope in Enchanted occurs while Robert and Giselle are dancing at the ball. Robert, who had earlier in the flm asserted that he does not dance and does not sing, sings to Giselle as they dance:

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Now you’re beside me, and look how far we’ve come! So far, we are so close.28

Despite never having danced together, they are well suited as partners, and they dance so harmoniously that the other couples cede the dance foor to them. At the conclusion of the dance, they part, each returning to the partner with whom they arrived at the ball. Nancy and Edward, however, seem to be aware that something has changed in the foursome. The new connection between Robert and Giselle becomes critical when Queen Narissa poisons Giselle with an apple. Prince Edward’s kiss is ineffective, and it is Robert who revives Giselle, revealing himself to be her true love, not because of fate, but because they have gotten to know one another and each has infuenced the other’s personal development. Over the course of the flm, Enchanted’s creative team make allusions to multiple tale types, particularly to Disney’s animated feature versions of these fairy tales. For example, the following appear: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (the wicked stepmother, the poisoned apple, the dwarf, the mannequin prince), Cinderella (animals making the dress, the glass slipper, the ball), and Sleeping Beauty (Giselle dreams of the prince before she meets him, she meets him in the woods, she is woken by true love’s kiss, the villain turns into a dragon). These pervasive and varied allusions put the flm in conversation with the traditional Western fairy-tale canon broadly. Enchanted’s pattern of presenting fairy-tale tropes in their traditional form, a failed instance, and an evolved instance allows the flm to criticize the canon while still participating in the fairy-tale traditions familiar to contemporary American audiences and creating a discursive space for issues of gender and relationships alongside the “Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation” of family entertainment.29 Unlike the model of the Shakespearean green world that offers characters a break from the rules of their regular lives, Enchanted moves its fairytale characters from the green world of Andalasia into the urban space of Manhattan and forces them to learn to navigate the rules present there. The flm, however, also spends time criticizing contemporary American culture, particularly for its lack of imagination. All of the Andalasian characters accept New York City for what it is: an otherworld to which they have somehow been transported. None of them expresses the idea that it must be a dream or an illusion. Giselle sings, What a strange place to be till Edward comes for me. My heart is sighing. Still, as long as I am here, I guess a new experience could be worth trying.30

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With these two lines of song, Giselle puts into words the attitude of curiosity with which the Andalasians approach their displacement. The Manhattanites, on the other hand, think that the Andalasians are delusional. When Prince Edward thrusts his sword through the roof of a city bus in a valiant effort to free the peasants from the “steel beast,” the only way the driver and passengers can make sense of him is as a person with some sort of mental illness.31 Beyond this disbelief in the possibility of physical otherworlds, Robert discounts the value of imaginative otherworlds. When his daughter Morgan asks for a book of fairy tales, Robert gives her a book of biographies of famous women, telling her, “I know it’s not that fairy-tale book you wanted, but this is better. Look at this. See? Rosa Parks. Madam Curie. She was a remarkable woman who dedicated her life to research.”32 Robert values rationality over “crazy romantic whim[s]” and cannot see how fairy tales are good for anyone.33 When they frst meet Giselle, Morgan accepts Giselle’s story and believes her to be a princess. Robert, however, cannot comprehend this possibility; furthermore, Robert denies the possibility of things which are already happening: people joining Giselle’s song in Central Park, the birds fnding Nancy to deliver the fowers, and Prince Edward fnding Giselle.34 Not only does Robert not believe in fairy tales, he struggles to see the everyday unexpected around him. The two-part setting of the flm in Andalasia and Manhattan allows the creative team to establish fairy-tale norms in the former and then challenge them in the latter. These norms include the hero rescuing the love interest, the wicked stepmother, the hero’s ability to communicate with animals, and true love’s duet. In a reversal of the literary convention of urban characters moving into a green world, Enchanted moves characters from an animated natural space into an urban space. Throughout the flm, Enchanted’s creative team uses the tensions between fairy tales and contemporary America to criticize both, ultimately moving its main characters toward a compromise that draws on aspects of each. Robert helps Giselle learn to think for herself, to look to the real women in the book of biographies Robert had given to Morgan as role models, and to see the negative in life as well as the positive. Giselle meanwhile infuses Robert’s life with love, dreams, and music. Although Robert does rescue her from the dangers of Manhattan—a city familiar to him and unfamiliar to her—and from the poisoned apple, it is Giselle who rescues Robert from the evil queen, a villain from her native land, and arguably, Giselle who rescues Robert from his own cynicism. The Robert depicted in the closing montage of the flm, for example, smiles easily, dresses casually, and participates in the games of childhood, none of which the dark-suited, high-powered lawyer of the beginning of the flm would have done.

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In the inverse of the flm’s transformation of Giselle’s story, Enchanted’s ending restores to Prince Edward the canonical story of the prince at the ball that was interrupted by Narissa’s plotting and Giselle’s choice to opt out, and critics have focused on this aspect of the flm as anti-feminist. While in Manhattan’s urban otherworld, Edward unexpectedly meets a beautiful woman, Nancy, falls in love with her while dancing, takes her back to his kingdom, and marries her. Throughout the flm, Nancy has been looking for the romance that Robert refuses to believe in. She enthusiastically gushes over the doves, fowers, and tickets to the ball that Robert sends, noting “this is so unlike [him].” She also appreciates Prince Edward’s sincere expression of romance at the ball.35 Pershing and Gablehouse write that Nancy is “giving up her professional career to become a fairy tale princess and a bride.”36 The assumption embedded in this criticism is that once in Andalasia, Nancy will become the stereotypical milquetoast fairy-tale heroine. The model of partnership with the gendered other that the flm has established with Giselle and Robert, however, is one of mutual support and development. Given the flm’s detailed portrayal of interdependent character development, I read this ending with the expectation that Nancy will have as much infuence on Edward and Andalasia as Giselle has had on Robert’s New York. The question for critics and audiences is whether Nancy is allowed to choose romance and marriage in Andalasia and still be a twenty-frst-century feminist. Critics, like Pershing and Gablehouse, have found fault with the fact that these two female characters marry in the end of the flm. I can agree with the idea that not all fairy tales need to end in marriage, and I am happy that Disney’s oeuvre in the twenty-frst century has been shifting away from marriage as the happy ending. As examples, Brother Bear, Frozen, Brave, and Moana all end with restorations of order that do not involve marriage, but these flms also featured plots whose villainy and complications were not related to marriage. In contrast, from the frst time we meet them in Enchanted, Giselle and Nancy are thinking about marriage, so an ending without marriages would not satisfy the restoration of order that audiences expect from fairy tales. The question, then, is not “should flms end in marriage,” but “should we have flms that are about getting married.” My answer is yes. Marriage is a choice that millions of early twenty-frst-century Americans make every day. In fact, marriage is so important in the culture of the contemporary United States that gallons of ink have been spilt arguing successfully for the extension of this right to millions more couples with any combination of genders. It should be no surprise that the texts of our popular culture feature this rite of passage as often as they do. In addition to continuing to make flms that do not feature marriage and flms that feature the marriage of cis-het characters, Disney, and other production companies, also need to make flms that tell the marriage stories of couples who are not

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cisgender and heterosexual. Contemporary American culture needs those texts because without them we are not telling the truth.37 Our popular culture, however, will change gradually, lagging behind change in our lived practice. Audience frustration with limited progress on changing social norms, by this flm and others, is understandable, but must be tempered with awareness of the two interdependent dynamics—the conservatism of the capitalist marketplace and the incremental nature of change within tradition. The realities of the commercial marketplace mean that family flms aimed at a broad audience will not lead change. Blockbuster flms question norms and propose only incremental change. Proposals for radical change come with niche circulation, and texts that do depict non-heteronormative couples do not achieve broad appeal. Malinda Lo’s Ash, for example, is a masterfully told story of a Cinderella who goes home from the ball with the prince’s huntress rather than the prince. Although Ash has seen some popularity within liberal and LGBTQ+ communities, its engagement with homosexuality has meant that this text is not included in many classrooms and libraries around the country. In a blog post titled “Have your books been banned?” Malinda Lo address this question, which she felds frequently. She remarks that although she has experienced few direct challenges to her books, she has had:

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a number of experiences with a quieter kind of censorship. Over the last fve years, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to many teachers [. . .] about my books. [. . .] Teachers often tell me that they are afraid to acquire certain books for their classroom because they’re worried that parents will object. Often, the books they’re afraid to include are mine, or other books like mine that have LGBT characters. [. . .] If the books never make it into the library or classroom, there’s no way they can be “banned,” but make no mistake: censorship is still happening.38

In 2012, I had to ask my local Barnes and Noble to order a copy of Lo’s Ash for me because they did not have it on their shelf because of censorship efforts in my community, a university town in central Indiana. What Lo describes, and what I found when I tried to buy Ash, is a kind of circulation censorship. Teachers and bookstore managers are choosing not to buy books in anticipation of backlash that has not yet occurred. Though it is certainly not as iconoclastic as Lo’s Ash, Enchanted is not the same old Disney. Giselle meets her fairy-tale prince, and then she chooses not to marry him because her character development over the course of the flm has made them incompatible with one another. In the end, she becomes not only a wife and a mother but also an artist and a business owner. As Michael Drout argues in his analysis of How Tradition Works, “Change within the narrow bounds of elbow room is interpreted as stability,”39 and in the case

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of commercially produced fairy tales, stability allows new versions to capitalize on the fame and familiarity of previous ones. Thus, traditions evolve slowly because there must be a critical mass of sameness in order for participants (audiences of written and cinematic texts) to recognize the connection between this iteration and the previous ones. There is a limit to the amount of innovation any single fairy tale can introduce, and Enchanted spends most of its allotted innovation on the ludic interplay of settings and allusions. For the purposes of this study, Enchanted serves as an excellent example of an overt fairy-tale pastiche. It is conscious of its own status as a pastiche, and revels in making allusions to multiple tale types. The two-part setting, and the resolution that brings Andalasia and New York City into harmony, work to criticize elements of the cultures endemic to each place.

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NOTES 1. Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 116. 2. Enchanted, 10:02. 3. Hoesterey, Pastiche, 45. 4. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Erstine, The Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Editions, 2020, https​:/​/sh​​akesp​​ eare.​​folge​​r​.edu​​/shak​​espea​​res​-w​​orks/​​a​-mid​​summe​​r​-​nig​​hts​-d​​ream/​; The Princess and the Frog, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker (2009; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Animation Studios). See Harry Berger and John P. Lynch, Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988); Jonathan Z. Kamholtz, “Ben Jonson’s Green World: Structure and Imaginative Unity in ‘The Forrest,’” Studies in Philology 78 (1981): 170–93; Stephen D. Roxburgh, “‘Our First World’: Form and Meaning in The Secret Garden,” Children’s Literature in Education 10 (1979): 120–30; and Alfred K. Siewers, “Pre-Modern Ecosemiotics: The Green World as Literary Ecology,” in The Space of Culture—The Place of Nature in Estonia and Beyond (Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 2011), 39–68. 5. Enchanted, 10:20. 6. Enchanted, 13:52–14:30. 7. Enchanted, 12:55. 8. Enchanted, 12:20. 9. Linda Pershing and Lisa Gablehouse, “Disney’s Enchanted: Patriarchal Backlash and Nostalgia in the Fairy Tale Film,” in Fairy Tale Films, ed. Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix (Logan, UT: Utah University Press, 2010), 137–56 at 138. 10. Pershing and Gablehouse, “Disney’s Enchanted,” 138. 11. Enchanted, 6:45–6:50. 12. Enchanted, 19:05–19:10. 13. Enchanted, 1:35:05. 14. Enchanted, 06:42, 19:05, 01:35:01.

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15. Enchanted, 1:32:49. 16. Enchanted, 1:37:30–1:37:50. 17. Enchanted, 8:22. 18. Enchanted, 26:35. 19. Enchanted, 26:55–28:19. 20. My gratitude to Erin Kissick for this insight. 21. Enchanted, 26:35. 22. Enchanted, 52:40. 23. Enchanted, 07:05. 24. Enchanted, 44:53. 25. The creative team at the Walt Disney Animation Studios returns to criticism of such instantaneous true love in the 2013 animated feature Frozen, in which Princess Anna plans to marry Prince Hans after knowing him for only one day. Her sister Queen Elsa refuses to grant permission, and Kristoff, a down-to-earth ice cutter, expresses incredulity at her plans: “Wait, you got engaged to someone you just met that day? . . . Hang on, you mean to tell me you got engaged to someone you just met that day? . . . Didn’t your parents ever warn you about strangers?” (40:50). 26. Enchanted, 50:20. 27. Enchanted, 50:20. 28. Enchanted, 49:55, 1:22:02. 29. Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy-Stories, 59. 30. Enchanted, 27:13. 31. Enchanted, 35:02–35:07. 32. Enchanted, 16:12. 33. Enchanted, 15:40. 34. Enchanted, 48:00, 50:44, 1:04:55. 35. Enchanted, 53:17, 1:19:50. 36. Pershing and Gablehouse, “Disney’s Enchanted,” 138. 37. This is a paraphrase of Dhonielle Clayton’s statement about why we need diverse books. Clayton et al., “How Diverse Books Can Open Minds and Change the World.” 38. Malinda Lo, “Have Your Books Ever Been Banned?,” MalindaLo​.c​om Blog (September 26, 2014). 39. Drout, How Tradition Works, 33.

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Chapter 9

Challenging the Patriarchy and Restoring Interpersonal Harmony

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Covert Pastiche in Disney-Pixar’s Brave

Brave, Disney-Pixar’s 2012 animated feature, uses covert fairy-tale pastiche to create a story audiences had never experienced before.1 The flm presents a cohesive fairy-tale story, in a fctionalized Scottish highlands setting that, like Hoesterey’s classic Hollywood flm, constitutes an “illusion of reality on the screen . . . in which the viewer remain[s] caught up from beginning to end.”2 Within this cohesive illusion of reality, however, Brave draws characters, topoi, and plot events from the breadth of the corpus of fantastic literature, including fairy tales, sagas, and medieval romances. This flm spends its allotment of innovation on shifting the focus from the traditional fairy-tale goal of creating a relationship with the gendered other to maintaining relationships within the nuclear family. The creative team’s choice of a female hero allows this shift in focus to foreground female power structures within the family and to challenge the fairy-tale norms governing marriage: that the father controls the daughter’s hand and that he can bestow that hand on the suitor who triumphs in a test of arms. To accomplish this narrative goal, the creative team behind Brave does not overtly reference a single tale type. Rather, they build their story on the foundation of wonder tale quest structure using the fairy-tale building blocks of the princess, the contest for the princess’s hand, the witch’s spell, and the quest to right a wrong, thus creating a new narrative that nonetheless feels familiar to an audience steeped in the Western fairy-tale canon. This chapter will use the story structure and dramatis personae of Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale to identify the moments where Brave departs from it and to consider the impacts of these innovations.3 In brief, Propp’s basic fairy-tale structure features a hero trying to restore order after it has been broken, either by an act of villainy or a violation of an interdiction by the hero. To restore order, the hero must leave home to get 127

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something (help or a magical object), and, in order to do that, the hero must pass tests, solve problems, or face challenges. In the end, a transformed hero returns home, restores order, and, most often, gets married. Brave’s initial situation depicts a family in harmony having a picnic outdoors. Fergus is the strong and powerful king of a group of clans in the Scottish highlands. Elinor, his queen, is a poised and beautiful helpmeet whose levelheadedness maintains order even when Fergus’s impetuosity threatens it. Their marriage exemplifes the happily-ever-after achieved by harmonious union with the other, and in this scene, their young daughter Merida is eager to learn from both her parents: storytelling and legends from Elinor, archery and animal husbandry from Fergus. Their picnic is ruined by Mor’du, a bear who attacks the party and takes Fergus’s leg, setting up the expectation that the confict of the tale will be human against bear.4 Mor’du, however, is not the villain or even the main complication. Brave is a fairy tale without a single villain. Once Mor’du destroys the idyllic picnic scene and shatters the image of happily-ever-after perfection, Brave reveals to its audience the tensions in the lives of these characters. Merida’s nuclear family leads a group of clans structured along patriarchal lines, with Fergus as the leader of the clan leaders. The partnership among these clans is new and still tense, and all are looking forward to strengthening the cohesion among them via the peaceweaver-like marriage of Fergus’s daughter to the frstborn son of one of the other lords.5 A contest of arms will decide among the three frstborn sons. Merida and Elinor have differing views about the place of women within this patriarchal structure. Elinor upholds the stability of the system by excelling at all the aspects of the feminine—decorum, appearance, dress, textile arts. Merida, in contrast, excels at the activities normally coded masculine: archery, horseback riding, fshing, woodlore, and climbing. Meanwhile, she resents the more traditionally feminine activities and norms of behavior Elinor tries to impart. As her voiceover narrates our introduction to the family, Merida says, I can never get away with anything. I’m the princess. I’m the example. I’ve got duties, responsibilities, expectations. My whole life is planned out, preparing for the day I become, well, my mother. She’s in charge of every single day of my life.6

In an extended montage, the audience observes a litany of interdictions Elinor gives to Merida regarding how to be a princess. A princess should have good posture, be able to speak and be heard in a large space, be knowledgeable about her kingdom, play music, not doodle or chortle, rise early, be compassionate, patient, cautious, clean, and should strive for perfection.7 Merida rejects these values, preferring instead the active and unconstrained life of horseback riding, mountain climbing, and archery. Although Merida is the protagonist, and the audience is invited to identify with her, the flm challenges Merida’s

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assessment of her mother’s values, clearly showing Elinor using these qualities to guide the family as it leads the clans. Although Fergus behaves much like the triplet sons, lacking impulse control and reveling in scatological humor, he seems to recognize the need for the balance his wife offers. Merida, however, resents what she interprets as tightfsted control for the sake of control. Merida is an unlikely candidate to join the ranks of Disney princesses. Most fairy-tale princesses do not have to struggle to be princess-like. Rather, they inherently live by the interdictions Merida resists. Disney’s 1950 Cinderella, for example, rises early and exemplifes patience and compassion, even in her abject state. Merida, in contrast, occupies the social space of the princess of the realm while actively resisting acquisition of these qualities, as though “princess” is a job she can choose to do or not to do rather than a position to which she has been born. She views a day off from lessons as a day off from being a princess, “A day I can change my fate.”8 Elinor views Merida’s resistance as a wildness that must be tamed. However, far from the impetuous wild child that Elinor takes her for, Merida can be conscientious and precise. She excels at making diffcult shots from horseback while riding at high speed through the woods, she decorates her bow with beautifully detailed wood carving, and she climbs the challenging Crone’s Tooth crag with agility.9 Merida excels at the talents she has chosen to cultivate; they are just not the expected talents for a princess. Merida’s resistance to patriarchal norms of femininity engenders a motherdaughter battle for control that is largely waged on the ground of her body. When we meet the teenaged Merida, her hair is wild and her clothing is comfortable (fgure 9.1).

Figure 9.1  Merida Arrives (5:45). Source: Screenshot by author.

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Merida’s clothing is both modest and feminine, but the fabric and cut of the dress, particularly the sleeves split at the elbow, allow the freedom of movement necessary for the activities Merida prefers. In the next scene, however, Elinor’s efforts to tame Merida’s hair and bind her into formal clothing physically manifest the effort to force her to conform to the role of peaceweaver within the patriarchal clan structure. Elinor: You look absolutely beautiful. Merida: I can’t breathe Elinor: Shush! Give us a turn. Merida: I can’t move. It’s too tight. Elinor: It’s perfect.10

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For most Disney princesses, the acquisition of the fancy gown is a celebratory moment. They smile, they move with ease, they pirouette simply to watch the dress swirl around them. Merida does not come to this moment with that attitude, and the particular clothes in this scene don’t help. The clothes that Elinor has chosen for Merida are more constraining than Elinor’s own, even covering more of her body and her hair, and Merida’s movements become effortful (fgure 9.2).

Figure 9.2  Dressing Up Merida (16:55). Source: Screenshot by author.

In this dressing scene, Merida totters from one foot to the other as she turns, and in the next scene bending to sit down requires concerted thought.11 Although no further words are said about the dress, Merida’s distinctive mane

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of curly red hair continues to be a point of resistance. During the dressing process, one errant curl escapes the wimple, and Elinor tucks it in. Having sat down in the throne room, Merida works the curl back out, and Elinor again tucks it away.12 As a further act of resistance, this dress will later be ripped apart at the seams as Merida claims the role of champion in addition to that of princess.13 This battle on the ground of Merida’s body continued into the merchandising realm of the Disney empire. Shortly after Brave left theaters, the Disney corporation redrew all of the animated Disney princesses, Merida included, blurring the distinctions between animation styles to create a cohesive cadre of women who could appear together in a unifed marketing campaign. Each of these redrawn princesses is depicted in the fanciest clothes she wears in her flm, Merida included. Brave fans, who identifed with the wilder, more casual and comfortable Merida, protested this change vocally. This fancy, restrictive dress did not represent the Merida who mattered to them. Fancy dress Merida was not their hero. Over the course of the flm, Merida’s resistance to Elinor’s effort at education and control shows up in three acts of rebellion: she asserts the right to fght for her own hand, she tears Elinor’s family portrait tapestry, and she enlists the aid of a witch to change her fate by changing her mother. In the frst two acts of rebellion, Merida rejects her mother by aligning herself with her father’s skills and tools. In the third act of rebellion, though, Merida rejects her mother by using the lore her mother had taught her. Together, these three acts constitute Merida’s complete rejection of Elinor’s model for femininity and, in Propp’s model, the violation of interdiction. Elinor has repeatedly given Merida instructions on how to behave as a princess generally and specifcally as the princess whose marriage will further bind the loyalties among the clans which can be distilled to: “Don’t be yourself. Be the princess I want you to be.” Merida’s frst act of rebellion is to compete against the other three clans’ suitors for her own hand. When Elinor reminds the lords of the agreement that “only the frstborn of each of the great leaders may be presented as champion, and thus compete for the hand of the princess of Dun Broch,” the audience sees the beginning of a plan in Merida’s face.14 Although, the daughter for whose hand the sons are competing gets to choose the mode of competition, Merida’s choice of archery is an unexpected one as the traditional choices for a contest of arms or strength in the context of the highland games would have been something along the lines of caber toss, stone put, or hammer throw. This choice puts the other clan leaders’ sons into competition on turf where Merida feels comfortable. After the three have completed their abysmal shots, Merida, with wild hair fowing, steps out and declares, “I am Merida, frstborn descendant of Clan Dun Broch. And I’ll be shooting

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for my own hand.”15 Here she is applying the language of the agreement among the clans in an unexpected way. Everyone else has understood the idea that the frstborn of each clan will vie for her hand to mean the frstborn sons of each of the other clan leaders. Merida claims the label of frstborn for herself—she is, after all, the frstborn child of her parents—in order to also claim the right to decide for herself whom, if anyone, she will marry, and when. Beyond violating Elinor’s interdictions regarding princessly behavior, this act challenges the patriarchal structure upon which harmony among the clans has been built since their alliance is to be maintained by the princess’s marriage to one of the sons of the other clan leaders. In this moment, Merida also rends the physical constraints of the dress Elinor has used to bind her when it hinders her ability to move her arm backward to draw the bow. Saying, “Curse this dress!” Merida moves sharply enough to rip the fabric and gain freedom of movement.16 Walking along the line of targets, she shoots at each of the backstops the suitors shot at, her arrows landing in the center of each bullseye. The third of these splits that suitor’s arrow in half and is buried in the backstop up to the fetching.17 This frst act of rebellion breaks the harmony within the family and threatens the alliance among the clans. In most fairy-tale plots, it is the villain who is responsible for the breakdown in harmony either through the villain’s own direct action or through coercion of another character. In this case, it is the hero herself who is responsible for this aspect of the villainy. It is Elinor, not Fergus, who reprimands Merida for this act of rebellion, not only against her parents but against the traditions of the clans, and their argument in Elinor’s chambers leads to Merida’s second act of rebellion: the destruction of Elinor’s tapestry. This tapestry is a large wall covering, taller than Elinor herself, and the embroidery worked on its surface depicts a young Merida standing between her parents and holding Elinor’s hand. Merida: Aughhh! This is so unfair. Elinor: Unfair? Merida: You’re never there for me. This whole marriage is what you want. Do you ever bother to ask what I want? No. You walk around telling me what to do, what not to do, trying to make me be like you. Well, I’m not going to be like you. Elinor: You’re acting like a child. Merida: And you’re a beast. That’s who you are. [points sword at the center of the tapestry]18 Elinor: Merida! Merida: I’ll never be like you. [starts to pierce the fabric] Elinor: No, stop that!

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Merida: I’d rather die than be like you! [slashes the tapestry between the mother and the daughter, cutting through their clasped hands] Elinor: [gasps] Merida, you are a princess, and I expect you to act like one. [shakes her, takes away the bow] Merida: Mum! Elinor: [throws the bow into the freplace]

Merida’s tearing of the cloth is an act of unmaking which rends the fabric of the literal family even as it parts the one fgured in the stitches, and it is matched by Elinor’s act of unmaking in burning the bow.19 While Merida’s frst two acts of rebellion are carried out by the skills her father taught her, bow and sword, it is the belief in magic and fate imparted by Elinor that leads to Merida’s third act of rebellion. When will-o’-the-wisps in the woods lead Merida to a witch’s cottage, she asks for a spell that will change her fate by changing her mother. She gets more than she bargains for, however, with a spell that transforms her mother into a bear.20 The creative team’s choice of bear for Elinor’s transformation is an interesting one. Bears are able to stand on their hind legs and adopt an approximately human silhouette, and this is how bear-Elinor insists on moving through the world, signaling that though she may look like a bear, she is nonetheless human on the inside. Later in the flm, Elinor’s adoption of a more bear-like gait on four paws is a signal that she is losing the connection to her humanity. Merida, who observed the transformation and knows the reason for it, is able to see her mother inside the bear body; however, Fergus, for whom all bears are mortal enemies to be hunted, is not. Because of Fergus’s animosity toward Mor’du specifcally and bears generally, the fact that Elinor becomes a bear, as opposed to a deer or a rabbit, works to further rend the bonds of this family unit. Not only do Merida’s three acts of rebellion break the mother-daughter relationship, but Elinor’s resulting transformation into a bear threatens all the relationships in the family. Fergus leads the gathered lords hunting his wife, bear-Elinor, through the castle, and the father-daughter bond is broken when Merida puts herself between Fergus and this bear. Fergus does not believe Merida’s explanation that this bear inside the castle is his wife.21 Merida’s three acts of rebellion destroy the harmony of the initial situation, a task generally belonging to a villain. Merida is the hero of her own story, but she is the villain in Elinor’s story. Almost immediately upon Elinor’s transformation, Merida realizes her mistake, and as she attempts to put things to rights, she also realizes the magnitude of having lost her mother’s support. Once her quest becomes one to restore harmony, she is acting like a hero. With the patriarchal structure of the family in shambles, Merida and bear-Elinor are the only two who understand the situation completely, and they must learn to communicate

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clearly with each other in order to set things to rights. Once mother and daughter are depending on one another out in the forest, each learns to value the other’s knowledge and experience. When Merida despairs at fnding the witch because the wisps do not appear when she needs them, Elinor’s take-charge attitude leads them to the right part of the woods for Merida to recognize the path to the cottage, for example. On this second visit to the witch’s cottage, Merida and bear-Elinor learn that at the second sunset, the spell will become permanent, but that until then it can be reversed if they can interpret the witch’s cipher, “Fate be changed, look inside, mend the bond torn by pride.” Merida reasons that this means she must mend the gash in the tapestry in order to transform Elinor back into a human. For all the risk they take to retrieve the slashed tapestry, however, Merida’s mending of it does not reverse the spell.22 Rather, it is the interpersonal bond between the two women that they must work to mend, and the audience observes this happening as the two of them collaborate to navigate the forest and the castle. When Elinor gathers nightshade berries and wormy water because she doesn’t know how to survive outdoors, Merida teaches her to fsh for better sustenance. In a moment of despair, Merida sees a childhood memory in which she was scared by a storm and hid under the tapestry depicting the family as Elinor was embroidering. Elinor’s words, “My brave wee lassie, I’m here. I’ll always be right here,” offered her comfort and safety.23 This and other childhood memories recast Merida’s impression of Elinor’s lessons, and she begins to see the value in her mother’s knowledge and rules. In order to get back into the castle to mend the tapestry, they combine Merida’s knowledge of the castle and Elinor’s bear strength to break through the castle defenses and get to Elinor’s room undetected. In the hall through which they must pass, the lords’ feasting has degenerated into a melee, and because bear-Elinor cannot walk through the melee to stop them. Merida recalls all her mother’s lessons in princessly bearing and walks through the fghting, carrying herself just like Elinor had when the lords arrived, and, just as they had for Elinor, the men cease their brawling and pay attention to Merida’s words. Merida begins by telling a story of the consequences of family disharmony that we had seen Elinor tell her earlier in the flm. When Merida’s ideas falter, she is able to channel her mother more directly, reading bear-Elinor’s pantomime from the back of the hall.24 The audience sees the bond between these two women being mended over the course of these adventures even as they continue to disagree. Ultimately, it is Merida’s admission of fault that breaks the curse. As the rays of the second sunset reach them, Merida sobs, “No. I don’t understand. I . . . Oh, Mum, I’m sorry. This is all my fault. I did this to you. To us. You’ve always been there for me. You’ve never given up on me. I just want you. . . . I want you

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back, Mummy. I love you.”25 These powerful words of apology and affection do mend the bond, and as the sun’s light bathes them completely, Elinor’s transformation is reversed. This mended bond is demonstrated in the representations of Merida and Elinor in the coda of the flm as their battle over Merida’s clothing and behavior is resolved in images. When Merida fnally takes her mother’s lessons to heart and subdues the brawling clansmen, she is wearing her preferred comfortable clothes, and her hair is unbound. Signifcantly, though, the Elinor presented in the fnal scene has her own hair loose and appears to be more relaxed than she had been before her transformation. In this fnal scene, Merida and Elinor are working together on a new tapestry depicting Merida and bear-Elinor dancing.26 Their adventure together in the messy middle of the story resulted in character development for both of them. Almost as iconic as the princess in the Western fairy-tale canon is the villain, whose job it is to damage the harmony of the initial situation, to threaten the life of the hero and/or the romantic love interest, and to test the hero’s prowess through combat or tests. Snow White had a wicked stepmother with a magic mirror, a poisoned apple, and the ability to transform herself into a crone; Sleeping Beauty’s villainy was carried out by Malefcent, the fairy who felt slighted by the royal family; and Cinderella’s very human wicked stepmother manages to coerce and control without the use of magic. In Brave, in contrast, the narrative role of the villain is divided among the other characters, who carry out isolated acts of villainy intentionally and unintentionally and with and without regret, much like fesh-and-blood human beings. Merida’s depiction of her own life places her mother in the role of villain: a person who is coercing her to be a polished princess and a respectable representative of her family. Conversely, if we look at the narrative through Elinor’s eyes, Merida is villainous: selfshly defying her mother’s instructions and breaking the traditions of the clan. In Fergus’s view, bears are the enemy, and for most of the flm, his anger is directed toward the bear Mor’du; however, Fergus himself takes on the role of villain when he locks Merida in her chamber and tries to kill bear-Elinor in the castle. This dispersion of the acts of villainy among the characters whom the flm otherwise has invited the audience to love and identify with turns them into complex characters rather than the cardboard cutout stock characters who sometimes dominate the fairy-tale canon. In the end, it means that happily-ever-after does not include the death or exile of the one villain who caused all harm. It is Merida’s apology and her acceptance of responsibility for the villainy she committed that restores the bonds of harmony within the nuclear family. Because no villains are executed or exiled, the villainies these characters have committed against one another remain part of their happily-ever-after. The next phase of these characters’ lives will include the memory of the villainies they have each committed.

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It seems that, in this case, at least, the Disney Animation Studio has fnally heeded the criticisms of scholars like Kay Stone that their canon overemphasized the romantic aspect of fairy tales when in actuality “the ‘happily ever after’ meaning of fairy tales is not about fnding one’s prince or princess, but about fnding oneself.”27 This flm uses the fairy-tale structure to tell a story about the importance of bonds, the dangers of tearing those bonds, and the necessity of mending them once rent. It is innovative in that it is not occupied with the formation of a new bond between the hero and the romantic other. Rather, it concerns itself with maintaining bonds among the members of a nuclear family and among the families within the larger clan structure, and the words “bond,” “tear,” and “mend” pervade the script.28 Thus, bearElinor’s defeat of Mor’du, the putative villain from the flm’s opening scene, is not the climax, and this flm does not end with a wedding. In Brave, the restoration of the nuclear family structure is the happy ending offered by the creative teams at Disney-Pixar as they continue the work to create truly modern fairy tales that engage contemporary issues.

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NOTES 1. Brave, directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman, and Steve Purcel (2012; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studio). 2. Hoesterey, Pastiche, 45. 3. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale. 4. Brave, 00:01–04:00. 5. The term “peaceweaver” refers to high-ranking women who were married outside their family’s domain in order to create kinship ties that would, theoretically, lessen political strife. For more on peaceweavers, see Carol Parrish Jamison, “Traffc of Women in Germanic Literature: The Role of the Peace Pledge in Marital Exchanges,” Women in German Yearbook 20 (2004): 13–36. 6. Brave, 05:28. 7. Brave, 6:00–6:48. 8. Brave, 7:05. 9. Brave, 07:15, 07:55, 08:10. 10. Brave, 16:50. 11. Brave, 17:50. 12. Brave, 16:50–18:00. 13. Brave, 26:20. 14. Brave, 22:20. 15. Brave, 26:15. 16. Brave, 26:20. 17. Brave, 27:02. This moment is visually reminiscent of Robin Hood’s besting of his opponents in an archery contest in Robin Hood, directed by Wolfgang Reitherman (1973; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios). It also, however, calls up allusions to

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Brunhild’s assertion that she will only marry a suitor who could best her with spear, stone, and leap in The Nibelungenlied (ed. Francis Gentrys and James K. Walter, German Epic Poetry: The Nibelungenleid, The Older Lay of Hildebrand, and Other Works [New York, NY: Continuum, 2006], 46). 18. In this scene, it is the interplay of spoken words and actions that furthers the plot, so I have included my own notes about what the characters are doing in the square brackets. 19. Brave, 27:40–28:23. Elinor, however, almost immediately regrets her rash act and pulls the bow out of the fre (28:35). This scene in which the mother and daughter destroy their bond by each destroying the other’s creative labor resonates with Brynhild’s act of unmaking when she destroys the tapestry that she had created depicting Sigurd’s deeds in Chapter 31 of The Saga of the Volsungs: The Norse Epic of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer, trans. Jesse L. Byock (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1990), 85. In this fairy-tale flm, however, unlike in the saga, the two women are able to work together to mend their bond. 20. Brave, 33:44, 39:25. The Disney Animation Studio has explored folkloric idea of kinship between bears and humans before. In the 2003 animated feature Brother Bear, after the young hunter Kenai is told that his totem is the bear, he is transformed into one after killing a mother bear who he believes to have killed his brother. At the climax of this flm, Kenai has to choose between remaining a bear and staying with the orphaned cub or returning to human form and rejoining his tribe. Kenai elects to stay a bear, but in the fnal scene, the tribe’s medicine woman and Kenai’s remaining human brother guide bear-Kenai through the tribe’s ritual of adulthood while the orphaned bear cub and the members of the tribe look on. 21. Brave, 1:11:59. 22. Brave, 1:10:00, 1:20:00. 23. Brave, 52:12. 24. Brave, 1:04:17, 1:07:15. 25. Brave, 1:20:30. 26. Brave, 1:23:18. 27. Stone, Some Day Your Witch Will Come, 25. Jennifer Rome agrees with me. In her 2013 MA thesis from the University of Nebraska at Omaha entitled Disney Princess “2.0”: A Feminist Critique of Disney’s Newest Generation of Princesses, Rome argues that Disney’s most recent princesses “move the protagonist in strong, new direction, not with glimpses of girl power but replete with a strong feminist agenda” (abstract). 28. The key to breaking the spell that transformed Elinor into a bear is “mend the bond torn by pride.” The agreement among the clans is their bond: “Our kingdom is young. Our stories are not yet legend, but in them our bond was struck. Our kingdoms were once enemies, but when invaders threatened us from the sea you joined together to defend our lands. You fought for each other.” (1:05:45). Merida acknowledges what she has done in terms of this bond: “But I’ve been selfsh. I tore a great rift in our kingdom. There’s no one to blame but me. I know now that I need to amend my mistake and mend our bond” (1:06:50). Emphasis in original captions.

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Conclusion

At the earliest stages of European colonization of the Americas, settlers shared a regard for Christian sacred scripture, but today that is no longer the case. The Unites States in the twenty-frst century is home to a diverse mix of religious faith communities—Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists. This is not an exhaustive list of faiths, and each of them is further divided into denominational communities. Within each of these faith groups, a body of sacred scripture works to shape community identity. In addition to their faith identity, members of each of these religious groups and people who are members of no religious group share the community identity of “American.” My experiences teaching undergraduate courses in medieval and Early Modern world literature showed me that twenty-frst-century students do not have the biblical literacy that European and American authors from these time periods expected their readers to have. This research has been driven by my desire to identify the body of texts contemporary American audiences share knowledge of. This monograph has shown that fairy tales play a signifcant role in the textual production of the contemporary United States as whole plots adapted for a contemporary audience, as brief allusions from new versions of canonical tales to older ones, or as motifs used to build wholly new tales. The focus on these pages has been on flm and books, but contemporary transmedia modes of consumption mean that trends and patterns in these media fow into other kinds of media, a topic worthy of its own monograph. Indeed, I have argued that the corpus of fairy-tale stories constitutes a secular scripture that provides a common language of allusion and metaphor in a society that is increasingly diverse in terms of religious identities, as well as identities connected to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. Fairy tales pervade contemporary popular culture in the United States.

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Conclusion

Our fairy tales offer contemporary American culture a wealth of narratives to serve as a secular scripture with which to maintain our social cohesion. These function as the shared stories from which we build new stories and within the discursive space of which we engage in debate about what it means to be American in the twenty-frst century. Among the narratives of this broad corpus, Cinderella has been one of the more widely adapted and excerpted tales. As the centerpiece of this contemporary secular scripture, the uniquely American rags-to-riches variant of the 510A Cinderella tale type shapes our view of the world and our place within it as individuals. When we are the creators and when we are the audience, we take our problems with us into our art, music, literature, and cinema. Not only do we use these creative media to explore things as they are, but also to experiment with how things could be. The narratives of the Western fairy-tale canon function as the shared stories from which we build new stories and as the discursive space within which we engage in debate about what it means to be American in the twenty-frst century. Scholarly conversations have tended to be dominated by the question of origins, trying to trace a story’s lineage back to its earliest sources, or by criticisms of fairy tales that highlight their problematic messages, without acknowledging that people continue to read and watch and retell these stories anyway. Modern literary and cinematic study tends to be dominated by examinations of what I call the stark and dark—realistic fction that claims to depict life as it is, but emphasizes the negative aspects of modernity. While much of the stark and dark is excellent and important, it is not the only entertainment that contemporary U. S. audiences consume. Fairy tales and other fantastic artistic production—superhero comics and movies, romance novels, science fction, and fantasy—need to be studied in conversation with the stark and dark. We need our literature and cinema to show us life as it is, but we also need it to offer us entertainment, escape, and discursive space for trying on new possibilities. For most Americans, this use of fairy tales for purposes of creating and maintaining secular culture is largely unconscious. Often audiences do not notice the fairy-tale plot structures and motifs underlying verisimilar narratives. Indeed, even as the United States is producing and consuming fairy-tale texts in vast quantities, we are also denigrating their value and questioning their truthfulness. This phenomenon needs more attention from scholars, and contemporary fairy-tale texts must be studied alongside and in conversation with modern and postmodern literature. Our scholarly analysis is incomplete if we fail to attend to the conversation between the stark and dark and the fantastic and escapist. The scope of this monograph has been quite broad. It considers relationships among medieval, Early Modern, and modern texts, as well as relationships among texts which are considered high art and those which are routinely

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derided as popular drivel. This broad work is a beginning, and opportunities for further research abound. Even as the broadly defned genre of fairy tale persists in the creative artifacts of American culture, the form continues to evolve in fascinating ways. In this monograph, I have noted the shift from plots centered on union with the gendered other to plots concerned with the restoration of rifts within families or among friends. In my own future work, I would also like to examine shifts in the treatment of the love interest from merely the object of the hero’s quest to a necessary partner for success who also has his or her own quest to complete. This shift has been visible within the contemporary canon in the United States over the last decade with flms like The Princess and the Frog and Tangled. In “Cinderella Transformed in the Twenty-First Century,” I discussed the elision of the 510B undesirable marriage subtype of Cinderella tales, and I stand by the assertion that this tale is largely unknown among contemporary audiences in the United States. However, this and other less common tales do appear in the adaptations and retellings by members of marginalized groups such as survivors of abuse or members of LGBTQ+ communities. All of these shifts are important and deserve greater attention in scholarly examination of flm and of literature. I hope some of you, readers, will agree with me. I hope you will follow the model in part II of this book to look at changes within a tale type over time and to consider the implications of these changes. I hope you will follow the model in part III to look at the way fairy-tale pastiche uses the building blocks of familiar fairy tales to tell new stories. I also hope some of you disagree with me. I hope you challenge my assertions and turn this conversation in more new directions. As an able-bodied, cis-het, white woman with a PhD and investment account, I am aware that my positionality on these axes of privilege and oppressions informs my analysis. While I have cited and engaged with voices of scholars whose positionality is different from mine, I am sure that my analysis continues to overlook important aspects of fairy tales’ role in contemporary society in the United States. This monograph does not, however, intend to be the fnal word. I hope you, reader, will fnd the inevitable gaps in my research and fll them with brilliant scholarship. I look forward to the conversation.

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Index

Aarne, Anti, 51–52 Afanas’ev, Aleksandr Nikolayevich, 47, 49 agency, Cinderella and, 70, 72–73, 79, 80, 84–85 Aladdin (Disney), 8 Alaskan Native Knowledge Network, 59n18 Alger, Horatio, 89 “Allerleirauh,” 67, 68. See also Cinderella All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Berman), 31 American dream, fairy tales and, 9, 33–34, 69, 72–73, 91–94; Cinderella and, 69, 72–73, 91–94 The American Dream (Cullen), 72 animals, in fairy tales, 80, 82, 116–18 Ansani, Antonella, 49, 79 “Aschenputtel” (Grimms), 47, 57, 68, 77, 80–81, 82, 90. See also Cinderella Ash (Lo), 85, 124 ATU index, 51–52 Bacchilega, Cristina, 6, 104–5 Basile, Giambattista, 13, 46, 47, 48, 49, 53, 68, 77–79 Baum, L. Frank, 30

Beauty and the Beast (Disney), 8 Beauty and the Beast story, 106–7 Berman, Marshall, 31 Bettelheim, Bruno, 9–10 Bible. See scripture BIPOC, fairy tales and, 7, 12, 37, 104, 107, 139 The Blind Side (Lewis), 35, 91 Blue Fairy Book (Langs), 31 Boccaccio, 68 Book of Common Prayer, 23–24 books of hours, 21–24 Bottigheimer, Ruth, 47, 48, 60n28, 72 Bradstreet, Anne, 26–27 Brave (Disney), 13–14, 36, 51, 56, 102, 123, 127–36 Brother Bear (Disney), 123, 137n20 Buckley, Michael, 108n11 Campbell, Joseph, 48 Canepa, Nancy, 49, 79 Cap o’Rushes, 66, 67–68. See also Cinderella Carpenter, Charles, 28 “Catskin,” 66, 67, 68, 69. See also Cinderella “Cendrillon” (Perrault), 47, 57, 68, 77, 79–80, 82. See also Cinderella 157

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Index

“Cenerentola” (Basile), 47, 68, 77–79. See also Cinderella Certain Women (L’Engle), 6 Channeling Wonder (Greenhill and Rudy), 9 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 68 Chaves, Mark, 21 children: fairy tales and, 9–10, 12, 31, 35, 38, 101, 104; literature for, 24–25, 27–28, 29–31, 35, 89 Chocolat, 53 Christian Fantasy (Manlove), 29 Cinderella, 63–94; agency of, 70, 72–73, 79, 80, 84–85; and American dream, 69, 72–73, 91–94; 510A subtype of, 47, 51–52, 66, 67, 68–69, 70–73, 77–81, 94; 510B subtype of, 66, 67, 68, 69–70, 72, 94, 141; as rags–to–riches, 35, 72, 77, 91–94; social status and, 35, 66, 69, 71, 72, 77, 81–82, 90–94; variations of, 13, 65–87 Cinderella, animated flm (Disney), 35, 55, 57, 77, 82, 121 Cinderella, live action flm (Disney), 8, 55, 77, 85, 86 Cinderella, live action television program (Disney), 77, 85 “Cinderella,” poem (Sexton), 65, 90–91 The Cinderella Cycle (Rooth), 65 Cinderella story, trope of, 35, 51–52, 65–66, 90–94 city symphony flms, 31–32 classifcation, of fairy tales, 50–52 Clayton, Dhonielle, 7, 126n37 Clever Maids (Paradiž), 47 colonialism, fairy tales and, 49–50 conservative, fairy tales as, 54–56, 81–82, 99, 124–25 Constance, story of, 68, 75n12 Cook, Elizabeth, 73 Cox, Marian Roalfe, 65, 66, 82 Crawshaw, Gill, 106 Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales (Joosen), 57

Cullen, Jim, 9, 72 Daddy Long Legs (Webster), 69–70 The Dark Fantastic (Thomas), 7 d’Aulnoy, Marie–Catherine, 45, 68, 71, 79 David, King, 6, 23 de France, Marie, 68 del Toro, Guillermo, 106–7 Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Schmiesing), 7–8 disability, fairy tales and, 7–8, 106–7, 139 Disfgure: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space (Leduc), 8 Disney, Walt, 32–34, 35, 57, 91 Disney corporation, 8–9, 12, 30–31, 32–35, 36, 57, 82, 85–86, 131 Disney Culture (Wills), 32 The Disney Middle Ages (Pugh), 38 “Disney’s Enchanted” (Pershing and Gablehouse), 114, 123 “Donkeyskin,” 69. See also Cinderella Drout, Michael, 54–55, 124 Duffy, Eamon, 22 Ella Enchanted (Levine), 83–85 Ella Enchanted (O’Haver), 84–85 Emaré, 68, 74n9. See also Cinderella Enchanted (Disney), 13–14, 102, 111– 25; criticism of, 113–15, 123–24 Enchanted Hunters (Tatar), 9 examples, moral, 12, 20, 36–37, 45 Fairy Godfather (Bottigheimer), 72 fairy godmother, trope of, 53, 71, 79, 82, 84 Fairy Tale as Myth, Myth as Fairy Tale (Zipes), 34 fairy tales: American dream and, 9, 33– 34, 69, 72–73, 91–94; classifcation of, 50–52; criticism of, 3, 10, 37–38; and family, 14, 36, 56, 86, 115, 123– 24, 127, 134–36; in flm, 8, 30–31,

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32–33, 35, 82–83, 85–87, 101, 111– 25; and marginalized communities, 6–8, 12, 37, 104–7, 124, 139, 141; origins of, 45–50; as scripture, 3, 9, 11–12, 37–38, 140–41; structure of, 36, 51, 56, 99, 114, 127–28 Fairy Tale Science (Magnanini), 52–53 The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (Holmes), 27 family, in fairy tales, 14, 36, 56, 86, 115, 123–24, 127, 134–36 the fantastic, 7, 11, 32, 52–54, 99, 104–7, 140 Faust (Goethe), 5, 19–20 fction: veracity topos in, 10, 46–49; verisimilar, 10, 31–32 flm, fairy tales and, 8, 30–31, 32–33, 35, 82–83, 85–87, 101, 111–25 Film and Fairy Tales (Moen), 38, 103–4 “Finette Cendron,” 68, 71, 79. See also Cinderella 510A subtype of Cinderella, 47, 51–52, 66, 67, 68–69, 70–73, 77–81, 94 510B subtype of Cinderella, 66, 67, 68, 69–70, 72, 94, 141 folk origins, of fairy tales, 46–49 Foster, Alan Dean, 105–6 Frozen (Disney), 36, 56, 102, 123, 126n25 Frye, Northrop, 11

Grimms, Jacob and Wilhelm, 46, 47, 48, 49, 68, 70–71, 80–81, 82; “Aschenputtel,” 47, 57, 68, 77, 80–81, 82, 90; Kinder–und Hausmärchen, 31, 34, 47, 71, 80–81, 103 Griselda, story of, 68, 74n11. See also Cinderella

Gablehouse, Lisa, 114, 123 “Die Gänseheirtin am Brunnen,” 67, 68. See also Cinderella Genesis, Book of, 20, 28–29 godmother. See fairy godmother Goethe, 5, 19–20 Gottschall, Jonathan, 19 Gower, John, 75 Greenhill, Pauline, 9 the green world, 87n10, 112–13, 121–22 Grey Fairy Book (Langs), 69 Grimm, television program, 102, 108n12

incest, 67–68, 69–70 intersectionality, fairy tales and, 104–7 intertextual, fairy tales as, 56–57 Islam, 21

happy ending, trope of, 90–91, 114, 123, 136 hard work, trope of, 33–34, 35, 66, 69, 71, 72, 80, 82, 83, 89–90, 92–93 Harlequin Press, 89 Harries, Elizabeth, 9, 70, 90 Harris, Benjamin, 24 Heiner, Heidi Anne, 74 helper. See magical helper hero, trope of, 33, 51, 65–66, 111, 122, 127–28, 133–34 Hill, Grace Livingstone, 89 History of American Schoolbooks (Carpenter), 28 Hoestery, Ingeborg, 100–101, 112 Holgado, Miasol Eguíbar, 105 Holmes, David, 27 Hopkinson, Nalo, 104–5 hours, books of. See books of hours How Tradition Works (Drout), 54–55, 124–25 Hutcheon, Linda, 55–56

Jameson, R. D., 65 Job, Book of, 5, 6, 19–20, 25–26 Joosen, Vanessa, 57 Judaism, 20–21, 27 Jung, Carl, 48 Kabu Kabu (Okorafor and Foster), 105–6

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Karabell, Zachary, 21 Kristeva, Julia, 56

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Lacey, Lauren, 11 Lackey, Mercedes, 69, 75n15 Lai Le Fresne, 68, 74n10. See also Cinderella Langs, Andrew and Leonora, 31, 69 Leap Year, 53 Leduc, Amanda, 8 L’Engle, Madeleine, 6, 10–11 Levine, Gail Carson, 83–85 Lewis, C. S., 10 Lewis, Michael, 35, 91 LGBTQ+ folks, 12, 37, 85, 124, 141 “Like Good Salt,” 67. See also Cinderella Lindow, Sandra, 105 Little Mermaid story, 106–7 Little Red Riding Hood story, 49 Lo, Malinda, 13, 85, 124 The Longing for Myth in Germany (Williamson), 81 Lotman, Juri, 55 love like salt, 66, 67–68 ludic space, fairy tales as, 11, 51, 101, 125 “Lu Scartozze de Sale,” 67. See also Cinderella “Das Mädchen ohne Hände,” 68. See also Cinderella magical helper, trope of, 51, 53–54, 78–79, 92 “The Magical Negro,” 53–54 magical object, trope of, 51, 52–53, 92, 128 The Magic School Bus, 35 The Magic Tree House, 35 Magnanini, Suzanne, 52–53, 60n28 maiden without hands, 66, 68 Malefcent (Disney), 8, 88n17 Manhatta, 31–32 Manlove, Colin, 29

Index

marginalized communities, fairy tales and, 6–8, 12, 37, 104–7, 124, 139, 141 Marking the Hours (Duffy), 22 marriage, trope of, 13–14, 56, 66–67, 68, 69, 100, 114, 123–24, 127, 128, 141 Marvelous Geometry (Tiffn), 53 Marvels & Tales (Seifert), 8 McBride, Spencer, 27–28 McKinley, Robin, 69, 75n14 Moana (Disney), 36, 56, 123 Moen, Kristian, 38, 103–4 The Morphology of the Folktale (Propp), 50–51, 127 Mulan (Disney), 8 Murphy, G. Ronald, 81, 87n10 mythology, 11–12, 28–29 Nathanson, Paul, 21 national identity, fairy tales and, 46, 49–50 Nelson, William, 10 The New England Primer, 24–25, 27, 28 Nietz, John, 28 Niles, John, 11 Norris, Kathleen, 39n16 Obama, Barack, 92 object. See magical object “Occhi–Marci,” 67. See also Cinderella O’Haver, Tommy, 84–85 Oher, Michael, 35, 91 Okorafor, Nnedi, 105–6 Old Textbooks (Nietz), 28 Once Upon a Time, 102, 108n12 origins, of fairy tales, 45–50 origin stories, 12, 20, 28–30, 36–37 “L’Orza,” 68. See also Cinderella Ostwalt, Conrad, 21 Out of the Woods (Canepa and Ansani), 49 Over the Rainbow (Nathanson), 21 Paradiž, Valerie, 47

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Index

pastiche, fairy–tale, 13–14, 99–107, 111 Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature (Hoesterey), 100–101 patience, trope of, 30, 33, 69, 73, 79, 82, 83, 90, 92–93, 128 Peace Be Upon You (Karabell), 21 peaceweaver, 128, 136n5 “Peau d’Âne,” 67, 68, 69. See also Cinderella Peck, Russel A., 92 “La Penta Mano–Mezza,” 68. See also Cinderella Perrault, Charles, 47, 67, 68, 69, 71, 77, 79–80, 82 Pershing, Linda, 114, 123 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 5–6 Pinocchio (Disney), 35 Pitrè, Giuseppe, 49 Postmodern Fairy Tales (Bacchilega), 6 princess, trope of, 68, 69, 78, 86, 104, 111, 115, 122, 123, 127–31, 135 The Princess and the Frog (Disney), 112, 141 “Prinzessin Mäusehaut,” 67. See also Cinderella Propp, Vladimir Jakovleviĉ, 50–51, 127–28 Prothero, Steven, 27 Psalms, 22–24 Pugh, Tison, 33, 34, 38 Pulpit and Nation (McBride), 27–28 Puritans, 24–27, 72 race, fairy tales and, 6–7, 12, 37, 104–5, 107, 139 radical: fairy tales as, 54–56, 99, 124–25; pastiche as, 104–7, 124–25 Ragged Dick (Alger), 89 rags–to–riches trope, 35, 72, 77, 89, 91–94 Rainbow Fairy Books (Langs), 31 Reese, Debbie, 59 Religious Literacy (Prothero), 27

161

restoration, theme of, 56, 66, 69, 72, 84, 127–28, 133–36 Robinson, Roscoe, 25, 30 Rome, Jennifer, 137 Rooth, Anna Birgitta, 65, 66 Rowlandson, Mary, 25–26, 30 Rudy, Jill Terry, 9 rules for living, 12, 20, 36–37 Sanders, Julie, 61n45, 66 Schenda, Rudolph, 10, 47 schoolbooks, 24–25, 27–28, 29–30 scripture: biblical, 5–6, 19–21, 25–28, 29; fairy tales as, 3, 9, 11–12, 37–38, 140–41; functions of, 12–13, 20, 28–29, 36–37; United States and, 5–6, 21, 25–28 The Secular Scripture (Frye), 11–12 Secular Steeples (Ostwalt), 21 Seifert, Lewis, 8, 52 Sexton, Anne, 9, 65, 90–91 The Shape of Water, 106–7 Sheldon, Alison, 106 Shrek (DreamWorks), 102, 103–4 The Sisters Grimm (Buckley), 102, 108n11 Skinfolk (Hopkinson), 104–5 Sleeping Beauty (Disney), 8, 35, 88n17, 121, 135 Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (Disney), 30–31, 32–33, 35, 121, 135 social status, Cinderella and, 35, 66, 69, 71, 72, 77, 81–82, 90–94 song, trope of, 116–21 The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (Rowlandson), 25–26 Steinbeck, John, 93 stepmother, trope of, 66, 67, 69, 115 Stone, Kay, 33, 34, 136 storytelling, 3–5, 9–11, 19–21 The Storytelling Animal (Gottschall), 19 Straparola, Giovanni Francesco, 46, 47, 49, 52–53, 60n28 Tanakh, 20

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Tatar, Maria, 9 Tavis, Anna, 55 television, fairy tales in, 8–9 A Theory of Adaptation (Hutcheon), 55–56 Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth, 7 Thomson, Stith, 51–52 Tiffn, Jessica, 53 Time Sanctifed (Wieck), 22 Tolkien, J. R. R., 10, 32, 38, 101 tradition, 54–55, 124–25 Trump, Donald, 92 27 Dresses, 54 Twice Upon a Time (Harries), 70 The Types of the International Folktale (Aarne, Thomson, and Uther), 51–52, 66

Webster, Jean, 69–70 We Need Diverse Books, 7 Why Fairy Tales Stick (Zipes), 46, 70 Wieck, Roger S., 22 Wilde, Alison, 106 Williamson, George, 41n35, 81 Wills, John, 32 The Wizard of Oz (Baum), 21, 30 Woolf, Virginia, 31 work ethic. See hard work Yenika–Agbaw, Vivian, 7 Yolen, Jane, 72, 73 You’ve Got Mail, 53 Zezolla. See “Cenerentola” Ziolkowski, Jan, 49 Zipes, Jack, 11–12, 34, 36, 46, 70, 91, 101

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United States: reading in, 24–28; scripture in, 5–6, 21, 25–28. See also American dream The Uses of Enchantment (Bettelheim), 9–10 Uther, Hans–Jörg, 51–52, 66

“Vasilisa the Beautiful” (Afanas’ev), 47 veracity topos, in fction, 10, 46 villain, trope of, 51, 111, 132, 135 Virgin Mary, 22–23 von Arnim, Achim, 49

Koppy, Kate Christine Moore. Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture : How We Hate to Love Them, Lexington Books,

About the Author

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As an early-career scholar who is precariously employed in twenty-frstcentury academia, Kate Koppy studies the interaction of narrative and community while teaching, applying for jobs, and parenting two teenagers. She completed revisions on this book during the 2020 pandemic while making her own international job transition and supporting her children in their transitions from high school to college. Currently, she is a non-tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Languages at the New Economic School in Moscow. The constants in her life are knitting, books, and snark.

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Koppy, Kate Christine Moore. Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture : How We Hate to Love Them, Lexington Books,

Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Koppy, Kate Christine Moore. Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture : How We Hate to Love Them, Lexington Books,