Starting with snow white

Snow White 
“classic.”
Although the next anticipated critical leap is toward Disney’s “classic,” for the 
purposes of this study’s historicization of the 
Snow White 
tale and, more specifically, its 
American tradition, I needed to better understand what happened between the Grimms’ 
“Sneewittchen” (“Little Snow White”)
 
(1812-1857) and Disney’s 
Snow White and the 
Seven Dwarfs 
(1937)
.
Chapter 3: “Translating Content Across Contexts: Finding One’s 
Purchase on the American Fairy Tale Through 
Snow White
” therefore recalls the 
transformations of the European 
Snow White 
tradition into an 
American 
context, the 
United States. Because literary translations did not show significant departures from the 
European tradition throughout the first three and a half decades of the twentieth century, I 

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instead turn toward the alternate contexts of stage and screen, wherein the tale had begun 
to evince 
American 
elements. In Marguerite Merington’s 
SNOWWHITE And the SEVEN 
DWARFS: Fairytale Play, with incidental Music, for Children: Founded on 
‘Schneewittchen’ by Goerner, and the Fairy Tale Plays of the Brothers Grimm
(1910), 
Jessie Braham White’s 
“SNOW WHITE”: A Fairy Tale Play From the Story of the 
Brothers Grimm
(1912) and 
SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS: A Fairy Tale 
Play Based on the Story of the Brothers Grimm, 
with music by Edmond Rickett and 
numerous illustrations by Charles B. Falls (1913), and Winthrop Ames’ 
Snow White
(1916), one can begin to detect distinguishing American characteristics, many of which 
are thought of as Disney’s cultural innovations—romance and humor, ideals of equity 
and democracy, gendered models, and consumeristic desire. Rather than looking toward 
Disney as the founder of the 
Snow White 
tradition in the United States, I guide a critical 
engagement with these earlier models which productively lent to a cultural 
transformation of the tale and its use leading toward Disney. In other words, I gesture 
toward the endeavors of these early American creators to generate a culturally conducive 
national model and subsequently lay claim to ownership over the tale, enabling their own 
rise toward success. The latter, as well, aligns these American precursors with Disney, 
displaying the significance of buying, selling, and stamping the fairy tale as one’s own, 
an external condition of success, perpetuating the 
Snow White 
tradition in the United 
States. By investigating the successes and failings of Disney’s American influences, I lay 
the groundwork for inspecting his melding of European and American folkloric traditions 
to produce an American “classic.” 

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While Chapters 2 and 3 provide the historical groundwork (European and 
American) to explore aspects of the tale leading toward Disney’s pre-eminent adaptation, 
they likewise encourage a reading of 
Snow White
’s history which inspects the multiple 
layers of transformation across media (from literature to children’s literature, to the 
American stage, and onto the silent screen) and types of audience engagement (children 
and/or a cross-population of children and adults). These contextual changes—at the 
levels of nation, media, and audience—represent the historical evolution of the 
Snow 
White 
tale in the United States, as well as the means for Disney’s version to succeed. 
Chapter 4, “