Adapting Snow White: Tracing Female Maturation and Ageing Across Film, Television and the Comic Book

Abstract

This thesis analyses 21st century filmic, televisual and comic “Snow White” adaptations. The research is interdisciplinary, bringing together scholarship on gender, childhood, ageing, adaptation, media and fairy tales. The first half of the thesis contextualises the broader historical and sociocultural conversation “Snow White” tellings are immersed in by nature of their shared culture and history. It also identifies the tale’s core and traces the tale’s formation as a tale type from the seventeenth to the twenty–first century. The second half of this thesis moves to an analysis of two films (Mirror Mirror, 2012; Snow White and the Huntsman, 2012), a television series (Once Upon a Time, 2011–present) and a comic book series (Fables, 2002–2015). It considers the kinds of stories about female growth and ageing different media adaptations of “Snow White” enable, and contemplates how issues of time and temporality and growth and ageing play out in these four versions. In analysing the relationship between form and content, this thesis illustrates how a study of different media adaptations of “Snow White” can enrich fairy–tale scholarship and the fairy–tale canon. It also details the imaginative space different media adaptations of “Snow White” provide when engaging with dominant discourses around female growth and ageing in the West. Using “Snow White” as a case study, this thesis centrally facilitates a dialogue between ageing, childhood, fairy–tale and adaptation studies.