“A Stepchild That Was Treated Mighty Bad,” collected by Marie Campbell around 1935 and published in Tales from the Cloud Walking Country. 1976. Rpt. Athens: U of GA P, 1999. This Kentucky tale is quite similar to "Snow White," except that the narrator expresses skepticism about the existence of a magic mirror. "A Stepchild That Was Treated Mighty Bad." Haviland, Virginia, ed. North American Legends. New York: Collins, 1979. This collection emphasizes the blending of cultures and folklore traditions in America, and includes notes on the sources. Willa: An American Snow White. Dir. Tom Davenport. Screenplay by Gary Carden, et al. Videocassette. Davenport Films, 1996. 85 minutes. Longer and more sophisticated than Davenport's earlier fairy tale films, this one blends a fairy tale plot in innovative ways with other literary motifs and elements of rural life in 1915. Davenport’s initial screenplay, titled The Stepchild, was based on “A Stepchild That Was Treated Mighty Bad,” a Kentucky tale collected by Marie Campbell around 1935 (see above). The final screenplay by Gary Carden and other collaborators weaves through the fabric of the old tale a number of historical, intertextual and metadramatic threads that highlight the psychological, emotional, and artistic development of a young actress. There are fascinating parallels with Sunset Boulevard, Great Expectations, and Shakespeare, as well as details of rural folklife in 1915. Willa flees from her Virginia mansion when her jealous stepmother Regina, an aging actress, turns murderous like Snow White’s stepmother and Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. Instead of keeping house for seven dwarfs, Willa travels with three rural medicine men, raising the levels of the morals they live by and the entertainment they offer to the public. The head pitch man also acknowledges that she “gladdened our hearts” before she leaves with a young English filmmaker headed for Hollywood. This Romeo who riles Willa’s surrogate fathers by stealing their audiences and their star has been attracted by her strong ethics and her talent, as well as her beauty.
The New Snow White by R. Rex Stephenson. Unpublished script for The Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre. Ferrum, VA, 2000. Although this play written and produced in southwestern Virginia does not use Appalachian settings or language, Stephenson was influenced by Campbell's Kentucky folktale (see above) and other variants from different parts of the world. This revision of the traditional folktale gives Snow White's father a more prominent role in raising and rescuing her, while the jealous villain is not Snow White's stepmother, but her mother, the evil Queen Mother. See also Daughter of the Sun is a Cherokee tale online at Stonee's Web Lodge, from James Mooney's work collecting myths of the Cherokee. It contains helpful Little Men and Uktena, the water monster. It is like the Greek myths of Demeter and Persephone (or Ceres and Proserpine), and Orpheus and Eurydice, and a little like "Snow White," when seven men carry Sun's daughter from the ghost country in a box they must not open, but she convinces them to open the box, escapes and becomes a redbird. Thereafter, people can never bring others from the ghost world. Sun is a cruel and sad old woman until the people's dances cheer her up at the end. Compare with many variants of "Snow White" from different countries. Detailed background and a hypertext comparison of 36 different versions are found on Kay Vandergrift's Snow White Web Pages. The Annotated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Annotated text (from Grimm Brothers, Household Tales. Margaret Hunt, translator. London: George Bell, 1884) with background, illustrations and links to related tales and literature, at Sur La Lune Fairy Tale Pages by Heidi Anne Heiner. Last update: 02/26/07 |
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