If you’ve read some of my other blog posts on fairy tales in general, and Snow White in particular, you’ll know that I’ve invested some time into researching variants of classic fairy tales for my course on Fables and Tales. I start each unit asking my students to revisit something that’s likely familiar – a classic fairy tale with a prominent place in American culture – but to bring a new critical and analytical perspective to it. I then further complicate our discussions by introducing students to different variations on the story — sometimes older origins, sometimes new adaptations, and often parallel tales from another culture or geographic region. For Snow White, for example, I knew I wanted compare multiple film versions (the Disney classic, with the updated adaptations in Snow White and the Huntsman and Blancanieves), alongside the foundational Grimm fairy tale, and a tangential but intersecting story by Straparola called “Biancabella and the Snake.” But the most interesting intersection I discovered came entirely by serendipity. I read numerous books of folktales from various countries looking for materials, and quite by accident I came across a story in a collection of African tales that strongly evoked the story of Snow White, but confounded my ability to map the narrative logic of one onto the other. Continue reading
fairy tales
Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves and the Sordid Subtext of Snow White
When it comes to Pablo Berger’s 2012 cinematic interpretation of the classic fairy tale, the Snow White story has never been creepier.
Except…no. It turns out, it’s always been that creepy. And that is precisely Berger’s point.
Echoes of Snow White in Straparola’s “Biancabella and the Snake”
The Norton volume of fairy tales, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, edited by Jack Zipes, includes two tales under the thematic heading “Virtuous Queens.” They are two variants of a story sometimes referred to as “The Girl without Hands,” or “The Armless Maiden” – a tale of a girl who is attacked and disfigured, but whose worth is proven by her body’s mystical ability to cause precious objects to appear. The two versions collected here, however, are united not only by parallel plot structures, but also by the appellation of our maimed but magical heroine: Straparola’s “Biancabella and the Snake” and Jean de Mailly’s “Blanche Belle” both feature a maiden who takes her name from her fair features; in de Mailly’s tale, she is explicitly noted to have been named for her very white skin.
At the time I encountered this volume, I was prepping a class on Fables and Tales, and had been on the lookout for variants of the classic tale of Snow White, so the names of these stories caught my eye. Continue reading
Fairy Tales and Family Resemblance
For the last couple of years, I have taught a course called Fables and Tales, a class that most students take to meet a general education requirement in the humanities at San Francisco State University.
Fables, fairy tales, and folklore are not exactly my area of expertise, though I find the topic fascinating. The first time I taught the course I spent nearly a hundred hours prepping – mostly in background research, exploring sources and looking for creative and interesting readings and assignments – and enjoyed every minute of it. For a comparatist, the intersecting and overlapping nature of folklore is fertile ground. And from a pedagogical standpoint, the more connections I can make between stories, the better able I am to create a climactic arc for my course – to give students the sense that each part of the course is building on the last, that they are moving ever-closer to a goal. As both a scholar and a teacher, my impulse to look for literary connections and convergences kicks into overdrive.
My students, on the other had, tend to be a bit more circumspect, seeing connections between texts less readily than I do. I often open up discussions by asking students to test the limits of the relationships between stories, posing questions like, “Would you call this a Cinderella story?”, “Are Snow-drop (Schneewittchen) and Snow White really the same person?”, “Is Biancabella more similar to Snow White or Cinderella?”, etc. While they sometimes make interesting and unexpected connections between stories, a sizable chunk of them will tell me they don’t see any connections at all. They’re particularly skeptical of more abstract connections, where the details of the story are adapted to emphasize particular thematic concerns, such as the interpretation of Bluebeard as a serial adulterer.
As they have challenged me on my own comparative impulse, I’ve thought more deeply about the relationships between texts, and my own agency as a scholar in asserting and depicting those relationships. I’ve also explored ways to clarify and support the relationships I identify for my students. As I searched for a framework to make these relationships more compelling, I remembered my study of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblances, which seemed in many ways uniquely suitable.
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