Author : Brandy E. Wilcox
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (142 download)
Book Synopsis Of Walt and Wald: Power and Gender in East German and US-American Fairy-tale Film Adaptations by : Brandy E. Wilcox
Download or read book Of Walt and Wald: Power and Gender in East German and US-American Fairy-tale Film Adaptations written by Brandy E. Wilcox and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fairy-tale adaptations of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's tales in the United States and East Germany expand the punishments for women who misbehave by acting contrary to expected gender roles within the gendered power hierarchy. Although fairy tales and fairy-tale film have been extensively studied in scholarship, this dissertation provides a comparative study of power and gender dynamics from the fairy tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales, or KHM) and their cinematic adaptations in East Germany and the United States. Focusing on two specific tales-"Der Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich" ("The Frog King or Iron Henry," Grimm 1812) and "Rapunzel" (Grimm 1812)-I examine the gendered dynamics of power and status as they exist within the referent Grimm tales and the adaptation of these dynamics in the fairy-tale films from the East German Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) and the US-American Walt Disney Company. Alongside a thematic analysis of power, status, and gender for these two tales across these three corpuses, I demonstrate how these power dynamics and the expanded punishments for women who defy them indicate a continued power hierarchy of gender in fairy tales which mirrors that of both the socialist East Germany and the capitalist United States. Male protagonists have power over villains and female protagonists, villains have power over female protagonists, and female protagonists have power only over animals. My study analyzes three categories of 'misbehavior' for women in these fairy tales and their adaptations-lying and deception, the wish for advancement and higher status, and the enactment of anger and rage. When a female protagonist reverses the direction of the power hierarchy-e.g., lying to a villain or deceiving a male protagonist-the fairy-tale films from DEFA and Disney present greater extremes in the protagonist's loss of bodily autonomy and atonement than what occurs in the Grimm tales. These gendered consequences for female misbehavior reflect not only the 19th-century assumptions and expectations of gender roles still present in modern fairy tales, but the expanded punishments indicate the continuity of those expectations for the behavior of women in society today.