Starting with snow white

Snow White
. With Basile then, the spoken (folkloric) text gives way to the oft-conceived 
more credible 
literary
form, granting the 
Pentamerone
,
 
and within it, “The Young 
Slave,” a sense of worthiness as a “classic,” essential to the fairy tale canon. Yet, these 
folkloric, stylistic, and cultural elements do not stand for or readily adapt to all publics 
and societies.
Although Basile’s text resounds in a scholarly canon, it is more or less unknown 
popularly. While Jack Zipes gestures toward the reasons why Basile’s tales may have 
reached this type of audience in his day—attending to issues concerning the “corruption 
in the courts” and vying for “the country folk […] and their need and drive for change 
and the acquisition of better living conditions”—the “social and political problems 
depicted in their tales” lost their relevance for a modern audience (
Fairy Tales
18, 27). In 
essence, the tales only remained truly alive for a wider audience, so long as they 
maintained cultural currency. Because the issues they present are largely demonstrative 
of the societal problems of Italy in Basile’s day, these tales are marked by their time and 
not easily transposed into suitably modern issues. Another reason for this disconnect and 
fall from favor in a wider market is the manner in which the audience is addressed. As 
Marina Warner notes, of both the works of Basile and his earlier contemporary, 
Straparolla,
their adult material flows through baroque, sophisticated, yet demotic prose, 
packed with fanciful imagery and proverbial turns of phrase; mandarin ironies, 
high-flown emotions fuse with crude jokes and japes to create a hybrid text where 

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preposterous entertainment meets lacerating cynicism about humankind. (51)
Given these qualities, there is something for the modern academic audience as well as the 
wider public audience of Basile’s day to appreciate. However, as the fairy tale tradition 
transformed into one which would be absorbed by not only a range of adults, but a cross-
population of adult and child readership, these (graphic, bawdy, and sometimes lewd) 
tales, generated for a more sophisticated imagination, failed to prove adaptive. Where the 
folkloric, stylistic, literary, and cultural significance of Basile’s “The Young Slave” give 
it credence as a significant precursor to the 
Snow White 
tradition, enabling one to see how 
and why it fits in this context, its inflexibility toward adaptation limits its modern-day 
reach. Thus, having investigated these multiple layers or attributes informing the tale, I 
argue that one can more readily position Basile’s version in the 
Snow White 
tradition 
and 
see why it has not been recognized as 
the 
precursory or “classic” 
Snow White. 
2.
 
J.K. Musäus’ “Richilda”
18
 
Turning toward J.K. Musäus’ “Richilda,” one finds a stronger 
Snow White
precursor, in part because of the way this version helps to position the most influential 
successor to the Italians, the Grimms.
19
Because it contains most of the episodic actions 
that Jones views as contributing to a tale’s folkloric credence within the 
Snow White
tradition and is enveloped by those negative attributes of vanity and jealousy, this “tale” 
18
In the following analysis of this primary text, “Richilda” is cited, rather than Musäus. Per David 
Blamire’s 
Telling Tales
, “Musäus made his entry into English anonymously. Neither his name nor that of 
the translator appears on the title page of