Snow White In The 1960s: The Making Of A Postmodern Novel

In this paper, I try to approach American postmodern writer Donald Barthelme's Snow White by analyzing its cultural context, time settings, main characters and major writing techniques to identify its postmodern features.In the 1960s, America and other countries of the West entered a special period. Materially, these capitalist countries, with continuous development after the WWII, turned affluent society. However, at the same time, the western values system which had been formed by the Enlightenment and had been the impetus for the west to enter the modern time, was at stake. The irrationalism starting from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche found its descendent—Sartre and his existentialism which swept the western intelligentsia. The postmodern literature, marked by its deep skepticism of rationalism, became the pioneering yet popular type of writing during this period.Donald Barthelme is a representative of the postmodern writers during the1960s and 70s. He is influenced by Sartre and Beckett philosophically, and the content of his writing was closely related to his time. This paper takes his representative novel Snow White for a case study of postmodern writing. Formally, it adopts postmodern strategies such as rewriting, metafiction, parody and collage, and its content is also a deconstructive version of the classical fairytale of Brother Grimm's. Barthelme keeps the characters identities as princess, prince and dwarfs, but in his version, Snow White is no more the symbol of good and beauty, but a young women living in the 1960s America, sharing her sexual life with the seven dwarfs she lives with, complaining about her hollow life and waiting all the time the for prince to save her out of it. Paul, the one with"the blood"and deemed to be the prince, is a coward escapists, who's not able to fulfill his feat set by the fairytale. He is accidently killed by the poison of Jane, the role of the evil stepmother in Barthelme's version who originally plans to murder Snow White. The paper finally arrives at the conclusion that, in its content, Snow White reflects the social and cultural condition of America during the 1960s; formally, it employs many typical postmodern writing techniques. Based on all this, Snow White can be deemed as a typical postmodern novel.