Tales as Old as Time: Myth, Gender, and the Fairy Tale in Popular Culture Public
Palma, Shannan Treasure (2012)
Abstract
Abstract
Tales as Old as Time: Myth, Gender, and the Fairy Tale in Popular
Culture
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.
Table of Contents
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...59The myth of Sleeping Beauty (Briar Rose)...59
Four case studies...64
The cases in comparison...96
Conclusions...103Chapter 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...213Insights gleaned from fairy tale myths...213
The significance of fairy tale myths to gender scholars...217
Works Cited...223About this Dissertation
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