I Will Not Be a Monster": Revising the Fairy-Tale Witch"

Abstract

The image of the evil, ugly, old woman with dangerous magical powers has long been the dominant representation of the fairy-tale witch. But, in recent years, an alternative tradition has been gaining ground. In this dissertation, I ask: How have modern authors revised and rehabilitated the character of the fairy-tale witch? What narrative strategies have they created in the process of adapting this familiar character? How do they attempt to transform cultural attitudes toward the fairy tale and its witch? In Chapter 1, I draw on Brian Attebery’s theorization of fuzzy generic sets, Marek Oziewicz’s interpretation of cognitive scripts, and Jack Zipes’s application of cultural memes to argue that fairy tales and their witches are clear, yet flexible, cognitive categories that influence cultural behaviors and beliefs. In Chapter 2, I focus on Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch (1993). I argue that Donoghue undermines the dichotomy between wicked witch and virtuous princess. As a result, she queers cultural understandings of the fairy tale. In Chapter 3, I take Neil Gaiman’s “Snow, Glass, Apples” (1994), Barbara Walker’s “Snow Night” (1996), and Mercedes Lackey’s The Sleeping Beauty (2010) as case studies for essentialist fairy-tale texts: narratives in which morality is fixed and absolute. In Chapter 4, I analyze ABC’s television drama Once Upon a Time (2011–2018) as a non-essentialist text: a narrative in which morality is flexible and dynamic. I argue that essentialist witches reinforce an older moral framework that imagines black-and-white distinctions between virtue and villainy, while non-essentialist witches encourage us to reconsider our inherited ideas about goodness and wickedness. Ultimately, this project explores the ways in which modern authors and artists have combined the traditional with the subversive in order to shape a new landscape for the fairy-tale witch.