I read an article about remediation of a folk/ fairy tale, which in this case was the popular story of Snow White. I thought this would be an interesting aspect to study, as the remediation of a tale is the main subject I will be dealing with. For centuries storytellers have retold tales in their own
ways, embellishing the plot' with details peculiarly representative of both
the individual teller and his [or her] time' (Bacchilega, 1988, pp. 1). The aim for the narrator/ story teller in a revision of the folk tale is to 'reinvigorate' the tale for their audience, 'making it somewhat "real" for them' (Halden, 1981).
In this article, Bacchilega compares and contrasts three retellings of the classic tale: The Snow Child by Angela Carter, The Dead Queen by Robert Coover, and Bartheleme's Snow White.
Barthelme's version can be seen as yet another 'retelling of the
traditional fairy tale.' It is also a reading of it which, like The Snow Child and The Dead
Queen, is 'grounded in a new understanding of metaphor and ideology
in that traditional tale' (pp. 2). It reflects the period and situation from which the author/ teller comes.
In The Dead Queen, the tale of Snow White is retold through the medium of flashbacks. These are seen by the prince, Charming, the day after marrying Snow White and is now gazing speculatively at her dead stepmother in the glass coffin which once contained his wife. This develops an interesting relationship between the past and the present, and acts almost sequential to the original fairy tale, rather than changing it.The use of past tense, in a 'quasi-existentialist and reflective mode, lends itself to comic effects and parody' (pp. 7).
Charming's questions about Snow White 'challenge the truthfulness of the process of female initiation, as the traditional tale presents it, and ask us to re-examine the meaning of her name, that is, the metaphor around which that same tale is built.'
Marriage has always played an important role in folktale. In this example, their marriage intensifies their differences, and it 'magnifies the "frozen" and ideological nature of Snow White as a metaphor; an anthropomorphism, "a frozen void named Snow White"' (pp. 8). Snow White is condemned to be a heartless and unconscious child who cannot change and who has no understanding of her name (pp. 9).
Barthelme's Snow White amplifies a narrative segment of the tale of Snow White; the heroine's stay with the dwarves. The novel has three parts (utilizing the significance of the Rule of Three in folklore), which represent on a narrative level Snow White's three-fold nature and the three phases of her traditional initiation process. It is told by several narrators, including Snow White, thereby dismembering the voice and authority of the traditional omiscient narrator (pp. 11). It it dissimilar to The Dead Queen in this way, because the narrative belongs not only to a male character.
Barthelme systematically refuses to provide a linear narrative with a satisfying ending (pp. 12); it presents multiple in-conclusive possible endings. In Barthelme's Snow White 'language, structure, and style, then, are already a challenge to the conventions which regulate its intertext.' 'Snow White's beauty, which in the traditional tale reflects her inner qualities, is described in such a literal way that its symbolic significance is lost' (pp. 13). 'The movens of Barthelme's fragmentary plot is Snow White's dissatisfaction with language: "Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear" Snow White is fully aware of being a prisoner of her own fiction' (pp. 15) Snow White wishes to escape from the voices articulating her existence, and instead speak her own dialogue and take control of her own actions.
The Snow Child proposes no romantic ideals, no magic transformation; moving firmly away from its intertext. According to Angela Carter, myth and 'mythic versions of women' are 'consolatory nonsense' (pp. 16).
The tale is set in 'midwinter' because of its strong transitional and symbolic resonance. Midwinter is strong and invencible, and the white snow is immaculate. This conforms to the Marchen's use of abstractly symbolic elements of nature. ,
The Snow Child has as its intertext not the Grimm version of "Snow White," but instead the one explicitly presenting the heroine's birth as the outcome of her father's desire rather than the mother's (pp. 17). Portrayed in a complex game of refracted and reverse images where sexual, social, and economic relations are explicitly linked together. disruption of the Marchen's cultural norms takes place: She picks a rose, the 'eternal' symbol of femininity in its mystical and sexual connotations; "pricks her finger on the thorn," somewhat mirroring Sleeping Beauty's coming of age; and "bleeds; screams; falls" (BC, pp. 117). Having physically come to completion (i.e., puberty), the Snow Child is ready for the Count who rapes "the dead girl" just as, in a seldom told version, Sleeping Beauty is raped in her sleep, rather than romantically kissed. As far as the Count is concerned, the Snow Child has lived her life and fulfilled her function as object of his desire: because of him, she has experienced some sexual and social transformation, but no psychological growth. And the absence of such growth in this version makes the inherent shallowness of her traditional cycle of transformation all the more dramatically visible (pp. 18).
There is no promise of happiness in the end of this tale, and there is no well-made narrative we can look back upon to confirm our ideas of what the world should be like. The Snow Child takes on the abstract style of the Marchen deliberately so as to undermine it. Unlike Coover's and Barthelme's revisions, Carter's does not employ any modern point-of-view techniques and relies on the mirror exposing its own fraud once a context is provided for it. in other words, Carter style mimics that of the folktale and finds in that mimicry its very difference. In spite of its use of some of the Marchen's stylistic features then The Snow Child forms a relentless critique of its intertext's ideology (pp. 19).
Snow White's story symbolizes the process of sexual, psychological, and social development in women - that is, female initiation (pp. 3). We are most familiar these days with the Grimm version because it is grounded in the nineteenth-century European dominant discourse about women and the bourgeois cult of domesticity, and so was permitted to become popular and widespread in a patriarchal society. The evil Queen's threatening and 'unnatural' craftiness must be punished with death because it is an expression of her physicality and her assertive creative energy. The heroine's socialization occurs through her relationship with men (the huntsman, the dwarves as miniature men, the Prince (pp. 4). Halden concludes that the character and story of Snow White resonate so deeply in our Western imaginations because they constitute a crystal clear metaphor of both sexual reproduction and narrative production as authorized by a traditional ideology of representation (pp. 6,7)
The 'plausible' tale of Snow White fulfills 'le contract tacite entre I'oeuvre et son public' and implicitly reassures its readers of the value of their cultural and narrative norms; these twentieth century revisions of Snow White systematically violate the 'grammar of motives' typical of legitimate, plausible narratives, and yet do not provide any other explicit norms to account for their socially and narratively transgressive strategies, other than a supposed desire to begin to imagine female initiation and its narratives anew.
Halden, J. (1981). Barthelme's Snow White: The Making of a Modern Fairy Tale. Southern Folklore Quarterly, 45, p.145.
