Starting with snow white

Snow White 
tradition, particularly one of stage and screen. 
However, Kay Stone, while beginning from these conservative understandings, 
provides an opening for the folkloric form’s function within film. Stone begins with the 
premise that “The oral medium […] provides a potentially direct bridge between tellers 
and listeners that encourages the ongoing re-creation of the story in an infinite variety of 
emergent texts, each with unique texture and content” (Stone 56). Where the medium of 
print narrows this “bridge,” she suggests, Disney’s animated film “isolates creators and 
receivers and offers them even less possibility of interaction since it furnishes sights, 
sounds, and motivations” thereby providing “the narrowest bridge of all” for interaction 
and audience response (Stone 58, 60). Nevertheless, Stone concludes that the filmic form 
does not preclude audience response and/or renewal (Stone 63). I not only agree with 
Stone but suggest in the chapters that follow that folkloric transmission of the 
Snow 
White 
tradition, and more particularly, the American 
Snow White 
tradition, pre-Disney, 
via Disney (and even beyond), seems to indicate a necessity to employ innovations in 
media or a range of multiple media in order to productively forward the tale and 
reinvigorate its progress over time.
Critical methodologies within the field of folklore have been reluctant to advance 
toward examinations of “filmic folklore” (discussed in Chapter 4). However, more recent 
discussions which reevaluate folklore within film, paired with the more traditional 
structural patterning of folklorists, such as Steven Swann Jones, provide clarity to my 

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positioning of Disney’s film as a folkloric model and justify analyses of versions from his 
American folkloric precursors produced in alternate media contexts (the theater).
Contemporary literary/folkloric critical discussions have similarly come to 
acknowledge the value in cross-media representations of fairy tale/folklore, engendering 
new conversations concerning fairy tale adaptations. In 
Fairy Tales Transformed?:
Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder
, Cristina Bacchilega 
explores adaptations for young adults and adults from television, comics, visual art, 
drama, literature, and film, prioritizing the last two, finding these to be “the media 
platforms that have the broadest distribution and visibility within the fairy-tale web as 
well as the most power within the articulation of what the critical field of fairy-tale 
studies is and does” (16). Through explorations of these contemporary adaptations 
Bacchilega “aim[s] […] to reflect on the linked and yet divergent social projects that 
fairy-tale adaptations imagine” (16). Maria Tatar similarly recognizes that “These days, 
fairy tales are passed on to us through what the media gurus call multiple ‘delivery 
systems’”—variants in literature, film, television, and enhanced through online 
participation (“Preface” xvi). Through these multiple means of engagement, earlier and 
contemporary fairy tale and folklore can be engaged and further transformed. While 
studies of this interplay between media seem to represent a more contemporary scholarly 
lens for the fairy tale, this dissertation, in its historical inspection of the same—
throughout the twentieth century—contributes to these conversations. By generating a 
lineage of the American 
Snow White 
tradition which presents the dynamic movement 
between literary, staged, and filmic (silent and animated) arenas before moving back to 

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the literary and filmic spheres (where the trend continues on), I also explore this cross-
media folkloric usage as a broader American trend.
Where I have endeavored to represent this phenomenon from a relatively neutral 
disciplinary stance (to enable a more balanced perspective), I have utilized a folkloric and 
literary base to trace lines of traditional and national influence and have layered on 
studies of theatre (from the turn of the century), film, and popular culture. Although film 
weighs heavily into this exploration, and Disney’s film particularly, it would be 
inaccurate to position this historical narrative as framed specifically for film or Disney 
Studies. Similarly, despite my analyses of plays or films as “texts,” it would be equally 
inaccurate to position the project as purely contributing to the literary and/or folkloric 
spheres. Both critical fields or lenses are too narrow to appropriately account for the 
innovations in media and technology also pertinent to the 
Snow White 
tale’s success and 
forward movement in the United States. Because of the twists and turns this “classic” 
tale has taken on its journey through American culture—from stage to screen and back 
into literature, before returning to the screen, once more—one must carefully inspect the 
folkloric/fairy tale aspects of the story itself (as text) 
and 
address the alternate forms of 
media employed to further the American tradition of 
Snow White
. Together, these 
interweaving parts generate an interesting narrative concerning the tale’s American 
adaptations, linkages between owners, and understandings of how one movement of 
influence promotes the next. 
To inspect the folkloric attributes of the 
Snow White 
tale and tradition, I utilize the 
episodic structure and patterning of Steven Swann Jones, delineated in 
The New 

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Comparative Method: Structural and Symbolic Analysis of the Allomotifs of “Snow 
White
.” This has been recognized as the most comprehensive folkloric study of the tale, 
and although I note (in Chapter 2) that it has some limitations toward the effect of 
identifying the 
Snow White 
“classics,” I ultimately find that it provides a useful baseline.
Essentially, this model offers a nine-point pattern which responds to the question: what 
should a 
Snow White 
variant look like? Jones also layers on a thematic analysis which 
proves productive for understanding those “classics” whose structure does not quite seem 
to fit.
Paired with this more formal means of analysis, I draw on Linda Dégh for her 
expertise and broadened view of folklore in mass media, as well as Sharon R. Sherman 
and Juwen Zhang, leading scholars addressing folklore in film. These additional critical 
perspectives further aid my examination of the folkloric inner workings of the tale,