Starting with snow white



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american fairy tales



STARTING WITH 
SNOW WHITE:
DISNEY’S FOLKLORIC 
IMPACT AND THE TRANSFORMATION 
OF THE AMERICAN 
FAIRY TALE 
A Dissertation 
Submitted to 
the Temple University Graduate Board 
In Partial Fulfillment 
of the Requirements for the Degree 
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 
by 
Dana M. DiLullo Gehling 
May 2018 
Examining Committee Members: 
Miles Orvell, Advisory Chair, English & American Studies 
James Salazar, English 
Sue-Im Lee, English 
Paul Swann, External Member, Film & Media Arts 


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ii
© 
Copyright 
2018 
by 
Dana M. DiLullo Gehling 
All Rights Reserved 


iii
ABSTRACT 
 
Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, critical scholarship concerning the fairy tale 
genre has done much to address the social, historical, cultural, and national motivations 
behind transformations of the fairy tale from a European starting point. However, the 
fairy tale’s development in the United States, including 
both
its media-based adaptations 
and literary extensions, has been given limited attention. While the significance of Walt 
Disney’s animated films to the American fairy tale tradition has been addressed (by 
literary and film scholars alike), an interdisciplinary study drawing together Disney’s 
European and early twentieth century precursors (from literature, stage, and film); his 
own influential, modern debut; respondent literary and animated work of his immediate 
successors; and postmodern and twenty-first century adaptations has not been done. By 
examining the trajectory of a single tale, 
Snow White 
(or for Disney, 
Snow White and the 
Seven Dwarfs
), this dissertation aims to acknowledge the scholarly attention given to 
Disney’s animated films, while further examining attributes which I suggest have enabled 
Disney to have a “folkloric impact” on the fairy tale genre in the United States. Disney’s 
work stands upon the bedrock of not only European but American 
Snow White 
variations 
and makes these “new” through an innovative deployment and unification of word or 
language, sound, and image, unimagined prior to the debut of 
Snow White and the Seven 
Dwarfs 
(1937). The effects of Disney’s influence, as a master storyteller, on both the 
fairy tale genre and commercial market were so profound that this particular version of 
the tale refuses to be forgotten, its shadow haunting successors who aimed to counter or 


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redefine its understanding of fairy tale in light of shifting American values and culture.
Therefore, even as the fairy tale is frequently understood to have moved beyond its 
folkloric “origins” (I use this term loosely, as the origins of fairy tale are surrounded by 
controversy), using the critical framework of folklorists Steven Swann Jones and Linda 
Dégh, as well as filmic folklorists, Sharon R. Sherman and Juwen Zhang, I explore how 
Disney’s patchwork of tradition, new technology, and media generated an easily 
recognizable and communicable tale, one that would be recalled, repeated, and reformed 
through adaptation by generations of audiences. These subsequent storytellers, in turn, 
extend American fairy tale tradition and lore still further.

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