Brutes, beasts, and beauties: a study of three villains and their interpretations in fairy-tale narratives from the Victorian to the Contemporary

This project explores the portrayal of villainy in fairy-tale narratives, starting in the Victorian Era and moving into the contemporary. It follows two authors in particular, Anne Thackeray and Angela Carter, maintaining the focus on women authors when moving to more recent texts. I argue that villainy in fairy-tale retellings, reworkings, and adaptations has been used to reflect upon sociocultural anxieties about the Other, functioning as an index of cultural change. In these specific contexts and through the selection of progressive female voices, the fairy-tale villain is identified as associated with a range of issues including orientalism, hyper-masculinity, and female sexuality. The villain therefore emerges as a shifting amorphous signifier, whose role in the narrative is no longer confined to being the foil to the hero, but instead exists for itself as a subject of interpretive significance. In identifying villainy in fairy-tale adaptations as index of cultural change, I suggest that by tracking the shifts in the portrayal of fairy-tale villains and villainy in those narratives, it is possible to track societal and cultural shifts as regards to the Other through progressive women authors in key historical moments. After establishing the theoretical background, my thesis is articulated via three tales—Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty—which act as case studies. Each chapter deals with one tale and investigates the antagonist in adaptations through close reading of the texts from selected frames of reference. Bluebeard is analysed through the lens of orientalism and xenophobia, while Little Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty reflect on gender prescriptivism from masculinity and aggression to femininity and monstrosity. In each case, the analysis follows a chronological order from Thackeray, then to Carter, and ends on the contemporary retellings. The chronological progression of my study does not imply that the change has also been unilinear; I contend instead for the oscillation of cultural context and the shifts that the chosen authors bear witness to. This project is perforce limited by my choice of case studies, but it is my hope that they will serve as guidelines for future scholarly work and that my findings will be applied to other tales, their villains, and their adaptations.