Starting with snow white

content
I mean, themes, motifs, and values embedded within or evinced through the text.
38
Where 
context
is concerned, I am referring to the sphere of activity which the stage or cinema present, as 
well as the alternate environment which American culture presents.

---

77
pseudonym) (1912) and 
SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS: A Fairy Tale Play 
Based on the Story of the Brothers Grimm, 
by Jessie Braham White, with music by 
Edmond Rickett and numerous illustrations by Charles B. Falls (1913).

This play was 
then adapted to a screenplay, 
Snow White
, written by Ames and produced by the Famous 
Players Film Company (1916). In each of his versions, one can detect how Ames, 
embracing and embellishing Merington’s American alterations (without attribution), went 
on to alter the fabric of the tale so significantly that while it more pointedly reflected 
his
vision, it began to forget its folkloric origins. As such, despite Ames’ stranglehold of 
ownership on 
Snow White
, his version would not be repeatedly associated with that tale, 
but rather with fields of film and theatre. If Merington’s challenge was with context, 
Ames’ was with content, and the larger battle, which both lost, was one of rights to 
ownership, which would pass to Disney when the rights for the play were purchased in 
1937. 
Although each imbued the tale with American meaning, neither version of the tale 
had been imprinted on the American imagination in such a way that the mark of that 
particular teller (and once upon a time, owner) would remain. Nevertheless, I argue that 
an analysis of the culturally inspired content of both plays, in addition to the creative, 
self-promoting alterations of the latter (Ames’ versions), will lay the foundation for an 
American folkloric tradition of the 
Snow White 
tale, leading toward Disney’s pre-eminent 
adaptation.
39
39
Because a script of Goerner’s German version of the play is unavailable, I use attributes of the tale 
claimed to be “American” according to Disney’s usage, and map these back onto Merington’s and Ames’ 
versions, as a means of displaying the national folkloric transmission that occurred prior to Walt Disney’s 
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 
(1937). 

---

78
The Troubled Position of an Innovative, Female, Fairy Tale Playwright 
Marguerite Merington is a little-known figure in the context of the American fairy 
tale tradition. Even in the context of her contributions to the staged 
Snow White 
tradition, 
she is attributed little more than a sentence or two in articles and chapters referencing her 
theatrical work. Although Karen Merritt builds her (1988) argument concerning Disney 
from a theatrical base, she references Merington only once, as having been “engaged […] 
to adapt the play into English verse” by Herts Heniger (“The Little Girl/Little Mother” 
107). Otherwise, in the few quoted citations from Merington’s work, Merritt identifies 
Herts Heniger’s 
(the director’s) intention and purpose.
Studies regarding female playwrights in modern American drama offer Merington 
little more. Although Yvonne Shafer describes a “rush toward playwriting by women 
[…] early in the [twentieth] century, when it became apparent that it was both acceptable 
and economically rewarding, in “‘The New Path’: Nineteenth-Century American 
Women Playwrights,” Doris Abramson recognizes that “few [of these plays] are available 
today. (They appear in collections or tattered copies of Samuel French or Walter Baker 
scripts found in auctions or flea markets)” and “those that are available, signal toward 
‘female independence’” (Shafer 456, Abramson 47, 48). Merington is noted by name 
only Abramson’s study, as one such forgotten playwright. Perhaps the cause for this 
oversight is critics’ understanding of her plays as “highly conventional” (Shafer 456).
For the purposes of her text,