Starting with snow white

Fairy Tales
).
Similarly, the company’s revisionary marketing has in recent years been deployed 
to redefine and speak to its present-day princesses. A “Dream Big Princess” campaign 
was launched in 2016 (supposedly) to promote alternate pathways for young girls. A few 
of the young girls presented within these commercials are featured swimming, dancing, 
or doing gymnastics, not unconventional activities for young girls, nor are they difficult 
to match a Disney “classic” princess image or scene to. These scenes are, of course, 
interspersed with a young girl as scientist, another reading, a few practicing social 
activism, another graduating, a leader/speaker, and an astronaut. The latter are apparently 
the images meant to reshape young female impressions of what is possible. However, the 
tagline at the commercial’s end seems to offer a different message. “For every girl who 
dreams big, there’s a Princess to show her it’s possible” (Disney). But what have the 
princesses poised in their various scenes shown? Several of them are dancing (often with 
male counterparts), singing, or twirling. There is nothing ground-breaking conveyed 
through these actions. While on the surface, these productions 
seem 
to support young 
women pursuing alternate paths and roles, the company’s own “classic” princesses, as 
well as the tagline at the close remind viewers what the more conventional Disney 
Princess should be. Once again, one needs only to look toward Disney’s “classics” to 
secure an appropriate model. In this way, Disney continues to groom audiences, if not 

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familiar, to become familiar with its traditional tales and princesses, including Snow 
White, in the name of contemporary values.
Although these examples of projections geared toward children might be 
understood as Disney maintaining continued control over the 
Snow White 
tale and its 
American representations, the earlier mentioned postmodern and contemporary versions 
combined with the reappearance of their central concerns or troubling of the “classic” 
Snow White 
tradition seem to signal a new cycle of influence even in children’s literature.
Chris Colfer’s recent “multimillion-selling series” of children’s books exemplifies the 
same (Kit).
Colfer’s 
The Land of Stories 
series (first published in 2012, with the most recent 
and final book produced in 2017) is one of the latest popular representations of the 
“fractured fairy tale,” weaving magic into the reality portrayed within. Despite the 
number of fairy tale characters and versions of their stories presented or alluded to, the 
first book, 
The Wishing Spell
,
 
centers around the trouble of Snow White’s stepmother, the 
“Evil Queen.” Before the story proper even begins, there appears a “Prologue” entitled 
“The Queen’s Visit,” wherein Snow White meets with and interrogates her stepmother in 
the cell where she suffers for her crimes. As with earlier postmodern and contemporary 
renditions of the tale, a reader is primed to reconsider the “Evil Queen’s” position, pre-
Snow White
narrative, and motives complicating this generally typified, one-note 
character. The difference between this version and those earlier adaptations recasting the 
Queen’s disturbing representation of femininity is, at least in part, audience. Where 
postmodern literary unmakings of the 
Snow White 
tale which strove to reinterpret and/or 

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justify the actions of the villain typically spoke to adult (or potentially young adult) 
audiences, here, 
child
readers are engaged in the process of recuperating or productively 
reconstructing the restrictive gendered views imparted by the fairy tale. As a result, new 
systems of value and ideologies are being produced and conveyed to a wider audience, 
gradually reshaping American understandings of