Feminist criticism and the fairy tale

In the large corpus of fairy-tale scholarship since the 1960s, feminist criticism has contributed substantially to analysing, interpreting and evaluating the Grimm tales. At the same time, fairy tales have been rewritten countless times with an explicit or implicit feminist agenda. A comparison between ‘Snow White’ adaptations and emancipatory criticism shows that fairy-tale criticism and fairy-tale retellings have often addressed similar issues. Garrison Keillor's ‘My Stepmother, Myself’, for instance, shares with Andrea Dworkin a distrust of the prince's fascination with Snow White (both accuse him of necrophilism), and with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar shares a defence of the stepmother as a victim of patriarchy. In retellings like Keillor's, a double intertextual dialogue can be reconstructed. On the one hand, there is the explicit intertextual link with and a critique of the Grimm tale of ‘Snow White’. Due to the fact that Keillor expresses issues raised by Dworkin and Gilbert and Gubar, the reader can establish a second, implicit intertextual link between Keillor's text and feminist fairy-tale criticism. However, Keillor's feminist agenda is ambivalent. Although his retelling definitely raises readers’ awareness about problematic issues in the Grimm tale, it can also be read as a critical parody of overtly polemical or self-reflexive feminism.