Starting with snow white

Snow White 
version, these successors would not be able to avoid responding to 
the American 
Snow White 
tradition, or its guardian of the tale, Walt Disney. Whether 
willingly or unwillingly, in their responses, Gág and Clampett began a new American 
tradition of folkloric patterning for the 
Snow White 
tale, one that may or may not heed the 
Grimms’ precursory work, but was inextricably tied to the Disney version. 

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CONCLUSION: 
TRANSFORMING DISNEY: RECUPERATIVE POWER AND POSSIBILITIES IN 
POSTMODERN, CONTEMPORARY, AND FUTURE 
SNOW WHITE 
ADAPTATIONS 
Snow White
, or in an American context, 
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 
has 
proven itself a timeless tale, but only a couple of creators have adapted it in such a way as 
to transform it into a “classic.” In this dissertation, I have endeavored to signal toward 
the ways in which powerful, folkloric aspects, or properties of the story generated to 
perpetuate its retelling, gave the 
Snow White
versions of the Brothers Grimm and Walt 
Disney prominent positions in the European and, later, American traditions of the fairy 
tale. Moreover, in the American tradition, I gesture toward the folklore present within 
Disney’s version to make a case as to how and why his 
Snow White 
tale has proven 
foundational to the nation’s continuation of the fairy tale. In American versions 
following Disney, successors necessarily began to generate adaptations responding to this 
master storyteller and animator’s “classic,” either affirming or rejecting its model.
However, more recent adaptations have displayed further departures from the Disney 
version, potentially signaling a new or revised pattern of influence.
In some ways, Disney could be said to have usurped America’s vision of the 
Snow White 
tale, first, by means of his (Walt Disney’s), and eventually, its (the Disney 
Corporation’s) influence. Further, Disney’s more recent self-reflexive responses to its 
own “classic” might be thought to signal the company’s continued, irrefutable stronghold 
on the tale and its American tradition. However, in the ways that some of these new 

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adaptations play into contemporary uses of the tale, one might alternately find that an 
insular, “classic” version of the 
Snow White 
tale is simply not enough to engage 
contemporary audiences. A brief examination of postmodern and contemporary 
successors that have employed or broken from Disney’s 
Snow White and the Seven 
Dwarfs 
(1937) might therefore display possibilities for transformation both within and 
outside of the Disney sphere. 
Postmodern adaptations of the 
Snow White 
tale in literature and film appear to 
have utilized Walt Disney’s 
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
and made their mark upon 
the tale
 
by unmaking the “classic’s” conventions. Donald Barthelme’s 
Snow White
(1965), Anne Sexton’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1971), Robert Coover’s 
“The Dead Queen,” (1973), and Michael Cohn’s film, 
Snow White: A Tale of Terror 
(1997) represent this pattern, employing various strategies to do so. Barthelme voids the 
tale’s narrative and characters of meaning, such that the metafictional strategies or “self-
reflexivity” of the unreliable narrator that Jaroslav Kusnir gestures toward only further 
confuse plot, its progression, and the tale’s overall purpose (36, 39). For Coover, the 
expected narrative structure has likewise been broken and remade to give voice to a 
highly-emotive Prince, now positioned as narrator. As in Barthelme’s version, Snow 
White is sexualized, and the dwarfs, although appearing comic at times, are also 
understood to have sexually exploited the young Snow White. Sexton’s “Snow White 
and the Seven Dwarfs” withdraws from Disney’s sentimentality and romance entirely to 
insert images of brutality, violence, gore, and sexuality in their place, all in the language 
of consumer-driven material culture. Cohn’s version too opposes that of Disney in its 

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depiction of the tale in darker and more horrific terms. Yet, Andrea Wright argues that 
Cohn also advances a new representation of the female villain, positioned in “a scenario 
whereby [her] life crumbles because she