Starting with snow white

Snow White
tale. Where the Grimms rose to an 
explicit cultural call, Disney generated a tale from this “classic” to speak to 
his
culture 
purely of his own volition, based on what he had 
seen
of the fairy tale’s magic.
Nevertheless, the time was ripe for each in unique ways, and the ways in which each 
employed folklore, cultural awareness, formal techniques, and adaptive artistry made 
these representations of the 
Snow White
tale (and others) timeless “classics.”

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68
CHAPTER 3 
TRANSLATING CONTENT ACROSS CONTEXTS: FINDING ONE’S PURCHASE 
ON THE AMERICAN FAIRY TALE THROUGH 
SNOW WHITE
Investigating the history of a uniquely American fairy tale tradition is tricky 
business. Does this mean first engaging America’s folklore, in the ways that one might 
begin an historical study of the European fairy tale tradition? Does it mean looking 
toward the first printing of fairy tales in periodicals? Or, does it mean examining the 
point at which a distinction began to occur, once the “classic” European tales floated 
across the pond to the United States? For the purposes of this study, centered on 
Snow 
White
, the third question proves most significant. If this were primarily a study of 
folklore, the first question would prove most significant. If I were advancing an 
argument concerning literature for children (frequently printed in periodicals) or 
examining the development of new national myths and tales, I would investigate the 
second. However, my purpose is to begin to unravel and see more clearly the folkloric, 
literary, staged, and cinematic threads that have been purposefully woven together, to 
form and inform the “classics” in an 
American way.
Where the previous chapter casts a 
backward glance on the makings of 
Snow White 
as a European classic, this chapter 
identifies and investigates the precursors leading toward the 
American 
fairy tale classic, 
Walt Disney’s 
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 
(1937).

Because my project argues that Disney extended the folkloric origins of the tale in 
an American context, I must first lay the groundwork for his artistry by positioning those 
uniquely American stepping stones that enabled Disney’s rise to recognition and 

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69
glorification as 
the storyteller 
in the United States. Disney’s work did not emerge from a 
vacuum, nor did it flow directly from the European tradition upon which the Grimms 
placed their indelible imprint (even though some conferences with Disney, or critic’s 
reflections on the same, might indicate otherwise).
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While I would not argue that the 
Grimms’ “classic” largely informed Disney’s, the animator’s 
Snow White 
is also marked 
by the folkloric footprints of two earlier American precursors who also stamped their 
names onto the tale, Marguerite Merington and Winthrop Ames. To ignore this part of 
the cultural progression means denying the early 
American Snow White 
tradition a space 
in this tale’s historical trajectory, even when investigating the same in a national context.
Further, one misses the insights which this earlier tradition offers into the adaptive 
formula for an America “classic.”
I therefore suggest that a more apt beginning for interpreting the movement of 
Snow White 
in the United States is with the transition whereupon fairy tale translations 
from the European tradition began surfacing in this new culture and setting, during the 
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hoyle). Given that Disney did not produce 
his animated “classic,”