Disenchanting the Enchantment: Feminist Fairy-Tale Retellings in Enchanted (2007) and Disenchanted (2022)
Keywords:
Retelling, Fairy tale, Disney, FeminismAbstract
Despite Disney's reputation for being the most patriarchal of all tale-tellers, the company recently began a revisionist project that questions the latent patriarchal content of its well-known stories. Disney classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Cinderella (1950) have notoriously promoted the dialectic polarity of angel woman/monster woman and female rivalry. In addition, these classics have developed gendered ideologies with the reward of passiveness and submission and the punishment of agency and independence in female characters. Nowadays, the company has challenged these conventions through new stories and the retelling of its beloved classics. In the middle of this revisionist period, Disney released Enchanted (2007) and its sequel Disenchanted (2022), which are closely related to the literary fairy-tale tradition and the Disney adaptation. This article presents an analysis of the use that these two films make of the rigid gendered conventions from the fairy-tale tradition, with the aim of evidencing if these two films have a revisionist intention or simply update the Disney classics. From a theoretical perspective, this article is based on feminist studies that deal with images of women in Western literature (Gilbert y Gubar, 2000; Aguiar, 2001) and fairy tales in particular (Lieberman, 1972; Waelti-Walters, 1982; Davis, 2015a; Banks, 2020), and with female rivalry in traditional tales (Duncker, 1992; Domínguez García, 1999).
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