Starting with snow white

Snow White.
American literary representations for young adult and/or adult audiences in the 
twenty-first century continue to push the 
Snow White 
tale still further, subverting the 
folkloric tradition or modeling of the tale to inspect additional themes including:
disability, history, religion, sexuality, or the use of artwork in story. Although Gregory 
Maguire’s 
Mirror, Mirror 
(2003) draws together a familiar assemblage of dwarfs, in this 
adaptation they are marked by disability-infused characteristics and names (enhancing the 
display of the inferiority of individual dwarfs)—Blind eye, Lame/Gimpy, Tasteless, No 
Nose, Deaf to the World, Heartless, and Mute. This emphasis, as well as Maguire’s 
investment in developing a fictional account blended with historical elements changes 
readers’ impressions of the tale either subtly or more overtly. By imagining a 
Snow 
White 
set in Renaissance Italy, Maguire provides a fictional representation of the decline 
of the prominent Borgia family, also reckoning with the power and corruption which 
religious hierarchical orders might produce. Where historical re-imagining might not 
seem so revolutionary in terms of what a fairy tale might represent, the other comments 
of the text concerning disability and religion certainly stretch and re-form the tale. K.S. 
Trenten’s 
Fairest 
(2016) presses the boundaries of the “classic” 
Snow White 
still further, 
exploring the heroine’s sexual development from an alternate, lesbian angle, queering the 

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tale. This novel defies all readerly expectations but utilizes the fairy tale to productively 
examine the commonly understood theme of female development, from a new stance. In 
still another new inversion, Matt Phelan’s 
Snow White: A Graphic Novel 
(2016) offers a 
host of familiar motifs aligning a reader’s imagination with the 
Snow White 
tradition, all 
the while utilizing artwork in place of language to produce an alternate type of story or 
projection of folklore. Here, a reader is forced to make interpretations based upon the 
bridge which art/image creates, as opposed to that of language. The retelling itself is also 
new, gazing at 
Snow White 
through the lens of its Depression-era Manhattan setting.
While this might draw a linkage to the cultural and historical moment of Disney’s 
production, the realism of the narrative and the artwork itself have been prioritized. Each 
of these versions provides a creative revision of the 
Snow White 
tale which might turn the 
American evolution of the same just one notch further in its revaluation of the characters, 
context, underlying theme, or mode of interpretation. In so doing, it might subsequently 
enable the tale to represent a shift in cultural values. 
Throughout this dissertation, and most particularly in Chapters 2 and 4, I have 
suggested a host of means by which the “classics” were formed, and in turn informed 
popular and scholarly understandings of 
Snow White
. For the Grimms, in addition to a 
folkloric foundation, the cultural consciousness of the creator, and a distinct formal style, 
the key was adaptation, or more specifically, adapting to cultural changes, new audiences, 
and rising literary production. For Disney to remodel the “classic” in American culture, 
these same attributes were key, as was his use of innovative technology. Significantly 
through, it was not only his use of film or animation (which could by his time usefully 

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employ color and sound) but Disney’s