Eldridge, Brittany;
(2023)
"Sneewittchen" in Modern America: Archetypal Representations of the Mother Figure in Filmic Adaptations.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
Abstract
“Sneewittchen” in Modern America: Archetypal Representations in the Twenty-First Century examines the relationship between archetypal theory and a socio-historical approach to literary and filmic texts by focusing on the mother figure in American variations of the “Snow White” tale. As such, this study uses the Grimms’ “Sneewittchen” tale and the American adaptation by Walt Disney, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), along with the contemporary American adaptation by Rupert Sanders entitled Snow White and the Huntsman (2012). The study focuses on the representation of the mother figures within the texts selected and compares the Good-Bad socio-historical binary to that of the Good-Terrible archetypal binary. The study uses the Homeric Hymn to Demeter to reveal a connection between the “Sneewittchen” and “Snow White” tales to establish these tales and their adaptations as representative of the Feminine Psyche through the mother-daughter relationship. The following work uses the hymn and three key themes to study a possible connection between the socio-historical and archetypal approaches to literature and filmic texts through a study of the mother. The key themes are the mother-daughter relationship, the maturation cycle, and the bifurcation of characteristics between Snow White and the (step)mother figure. In doing so, this study seeks to reveal a possible link between the socio-historical and archetypal approaches through the mother figure. As it is known that the archetypal approach to literature and film has an inability to consider important socio-historical information during the analysis, the aim of this study is to establish a possibility of a combination of these two approaches through the use of the Cultural Complex theory.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | "Sneewittchen" in Modern America: Archetypal Representations of the Mother Figure in Filmic Adaptations |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2023. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > CMII |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10178015 |
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