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
ProQuest Number:
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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
iv
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.