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Signature: _______________________________________ _____________________ Shannan Palma Date Tales as Old as Time: Myth, Gender, and the Fairy Tale in Popular Culture By Shannan Palma Doctor of Philosophy Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies _________________________________________ Laurie L. Patton, Ph.D. Advisor _________________________________________ Matthew Bernstein, Ph.D. Committee Member _________________________________________ Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Ph.D. Committee Member Accepted: _________________________________________ Lisa A. Tedesco, Ph.D. Dean of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies ___________________ Date Tales as Old as Time: Myth, Gender, and the Fairy Tale in Popular Culture By Shannan Palma B.A., The Ohio State University, 2000 Advisor: Laurie L. Patton, Ph.D. An abstract of A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies 2012 Abstract Tales as Old as Time: Myth, Gender, and the Fairy Tale in Popular Culture By Shannan Palma This dissertation theorizes the contemporary political value of myth through an examination of metonymic and narrative invocations of fairy tales in primarily, but not exclusively, American popular culture. It is an interdisciplinary study that takes a feminist epistemological approach to merging twentieth-century semiotic and historico- religious theories of myth with twenty-first century scholarship on comparative media. Through close reading, semiotic analysis, and transmedia comparison of Briar Rose, Beauty and the Beast, and Cinderella in popular culture, the author shows how fairy tale myth functions as gendered cultural shorthand for narrating the splintering of possibility after the achievement of many, but not all of the goals of the 1970s feminist movement. Women in particular use fairy tale myths to reconcile the tensions between individual and collective experience, to question traditional modes of thinking about self and other, and to rethink assumptions about desirable endpoints. These case studies point to the ways cultural norms about gender remain in flux, the ways rationality-based logic and fairy tale logic occasionally come into conflict. The author argues that addressing these points of contention in the same mythic framework in which they are communicated is critical to continued feminist movement. Tales as Old as Time: Myth, Gender, and the Fairy Tale in Popular Culture By Shannan Palma B.A., The Ohio State University, 2000 Advisor: Laurie L. Patton, Ph.D. A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies 2012 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the guidance and support of my advisor, Laurie L. Patton. Her knowledge and criticism greatly enriched this project. I would also like to thank committee members Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Matthew Bernstein. I learned so much from all of you. Special thanks to Dr. Bernstein, whose line edits on my final draft were incredibly helpful in creating the polished document I submit today. All errors are mine. From the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, I would particularly like to thank Pamela Scully, Lynne Huffer, Deboleena Roy, Berky Abreu, and Alayne Wood. Over the years, each of you contributed something vital to my success in this program and to my development as a scholar. Special thanks also to my dear friends and colleagues, Angie Willey, Sarah Vitorino, Shruthi Vissa, Jen Callaghan, Sasha Smith, and Dona Yarbrough. You made Emory so much more than simply an institution where I studied and worked. You made it home. The completion of this work would not have been possible without my incredible support network: Gillian Wickwire, Brandie Littlefield, Carissa Craven, Gina Helfrich, Chris Tang, Jenny Wong, Rachel Vickers de Portillo, Os Portillo, Allison Adams, Bonnie Palma, Tina Palma, Christian Palma, Sarah Storrer, Regan Mazak, Andrew Mazak, Becky Rodriguez, Alfredo Rodriguez III, and Mackenzie Nolan. Finally, I would like to thank George Parlavantzas, Susan Lehman, and Stephen Ragan. You know already, but I’ll say it again: I could not have done this without you. This dissertation is dedicated to Salvatore Palma and Violet Marie McGraw. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………………… 1 Myth as a hermeneutic resource…………………………………………… 6 The cases that follow………………………………………………………. 9 Chapter One: The mythic work of fairy tales……………………………………… 13 The problem of the mermaid……………………………………………….. 13 Fairy tales and fairy tale studies: some relevant partialities……………….. 18 Myth and the mythologists: another partial history………………………... 22 Feminist approaches to the tales…………………………………………… 35 Some notes on methods……………………………………………………. 48 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………. 57 Chapter Two: Briar Rose…………………………………………………………... 59 The myth of Sleeping Beauty (Briar Rose) ………………………………... 59 Four case studies…………………………………………………………… 64 The cases in comparison…………………………………………………… 96 Conclusions………………………………………………………………… 103 Chapter Three: Beauty and the Beast…………………………………………….… 106 The myth of Beauty and the Beast……………………………………….… 106 The case studies………………………………………………….………….116 Conclusions: Re/Vision………………………………………………….….168 Chapter Four: “Where every Cinderella story comes true” ………………………...175 The myths of Cinderella……………………………………………….…… 175 The case studies……………………………………………………………..188 A language of aspiration…………………………………………………… 203 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..213 Insights gleaned from fairy tale myths……………………………………...213 The significance of fairy tale myths to gender scholars…………………….217 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………... 223 !" INTRODUCTION Years ago, I worked as a makeup artist and managed a small cosmetics business in a department store. I had been particularly interested in fairy tales myself since reading the Brothers Grimm in my early teens, but I was still surprised by the number of times my clients made fairy tale references during their makeovers with no prompting from me. “I had to kiss a lot of frogs,” a bride might say with a smile, “but I found my prince.” “It’s not like I can wait around for Prince Charming,” I heard from a businesswoman wanting a new look for an important interview. The references were off the cuff, meant to convey a long quest and hope in happily ever after or disillusion with rescue narratives and an embrasure of independence and ambition. Their comments assumed a shared referent with gendered components. They were using fairy tale references as a shorthand language, a way to communicate complex feelings about their experiences and expectations. I was intrigued. Eventually I began asking them questions about the fairy tales they referred to, but most of them had no idea of the folklore or literary referents. For the most part, they were thinking of animated Disney films, half-remembered children’s picture books, images and jokes and a general sense of fairy tales as a common code. I realized they were invoking fairy tales as myth. Wendy Doniger suggests conceptualizing myth on a “continuum of all the narratives constructed of words (poems, realistic fiction, histories, and so forth) — and all the various forms of narrations of an experience” (Spider 7). Myth is unique in that it accesses multiple points on the continuum. “Myths range from the most highly detailed (closest to the personal end of the continuum) to the most stripped down (closest to the artificial construct at the abstract end of the continuum); and each myth may be rendered #" by the scholar in its micro- or macro- form” (Doniger 9). But Doniger’s insight can be applied to more than just scholarly uses of myth. One of the most powerful aspects of myth is that it is not just accessible to the scholar, but also to the poet, the writer, the marketing executive, the random person on the street. “The essence of myth,” Paul Veyne writes, “is not that everyone knows it but that it is supposed to be known and is worthy of being known by all” (Veyne 45). Myth is cultural shorthand, a coded language for an in- crowd that doesn’t think of itself as an in-crowd. And just as anyone can access it (that’s why it’s myth), anyone can access its micro- or macro-form. Myth can render the personal, abstract; the abstract, personal. For contemporary women in the United States, the pervasiveness and range of fairy tales in popular culture capture a struggle over what it means to be a woman or a man at the ontological level. How do we think of gender when we aren’t “thinking”? In the