‘No, she’s not going anywhere’: Subversions of Virtuous Passivity and Condemned Agency in Modern Retellings of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Snow White’

Abstract

This thesis examines how the depictions of femininity found in traditional versions of the fairy tales ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Snow White’ are challenged in modern retellings from the 20th and 21st centuries. Analysing Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s version of these tales in their historical context, this thesis details how portrayals of femininity are reduced to the archetypes of the passive angelic heroine and the villainous assertive woman, to fit a socialisation process by the German middle class. Comparing Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) and Soman Chainani’s Beasts and Beauty: Dangerous Tales (2021) with the traditional tales demonstrates two vastly different approaches to using retellings as a mode to criticise the virtuous association to passivity and the punishment following an act of agency in female-led fairy tales. Carter uses erotic and pornographic elements to emphasise the imbalanced power structures between men and women seen in the traditional tales, whilst Chainani offers a more direct solution to the removal of the passive heroine with the inclusion of intersectionality and society’s role on the perception of identity. The main theoretical framework consists of using Marxist literary criticism as argued by Jack Zipes and Terry Eagleton and feminist literary criticism by Toril Moi and Marina Warner. By giving an account of their theories on how literature reflects society’s plights and the desire to rise from exploitation and how this, in turn, shape expectations of gender roles, this thesis examines how the fairy tale retelling manage to portray these struggles using the fairy tale structures without the misogynistic archetypes.