Snow White In Progression

The fairy tale is often associated with the children's literature and considered as unrealistic and frivolous for serious reading. However, this view is unfair and ungrateful considering the fact that the fairy tale, deriving from the time-honored oral tradition, was initially used for the socialization and education of its audience, old or young, male or female. The pairing of the fairy tale with children starts from the Romantics who collected and revised fairy tales in order to make them appropriate to children. This kind of manipulation with fairy tales still exists today in that fairy tales have been revised and reinterpreted for different media with different authorial concerns. Given that cultural context shapes both the elements and the message of a fairy tale, the variations in different versions of a specific tale are as important to its literary interpretation as the constants, or core motifs of the tale.This study explores the evolution of a fairy tale, Snow White through three major versions: the Grimm brothers'traditional version Sneewittchen (Little Snow-White), the Disney's animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Donald Barthelme's postmodern novel Snow White, with a focus to examine the socio-historical factors lying behind the variations. First of all, various schools of literary theories, such as the Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis are adopted here to examine the variations and constants of the tale in the Grimms'manuscript, their first printed edition and their standard edition of fairy tales. The symbiotic relationship between the female protagonist Snow White and the female antagonist the wicked queen is analyzed carefully in addition to various levels of interpretation of the fairy tale. Second, the Disney's film is explored as the transition between the Grimms'versions and Barthelme's novel. The nature of the new media accounts for some variations in the film. Third, Barthelme's ambivalent attitude towards cotemporary language is discussed thoroughly in this study because it is essential to the understanding of his novel, Snow White. Barthelme attributes the degeneration of...