Fairy Tale and Film

Transformations
), 
that Snow White is destined to become just like her nemesis, refer-
encing the Grimm’s murderous wedding scene as the site where the 
heroine not only despatches her rival but also proves herself less than 
innocent:
And so she danced until she was dead,
subterranean figure,
her tongue flicking in and out 
like a gas jet.
Meanwhile Snow White held court,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut
and sometimes referring to her mirror
as women do. (Qtd in Meider, 1985: 159)
The assertion is that Snow White shares the same flaws as her predeces-
sor, namely vanity, yet 
Mirror Mirror
suggests that she also acquires a 
level of cunning, finally learning to look after herself. We may not get 

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Postmodern Revisions 
147
the ending we might want, particularly given the heroine’s investment 
in a dubious love interest (even lying to her father about the prince’s 
character, affirming he helped fight the queen rather than serving as her 
consort, and ignoring his attempt to kill her!) yet we can still applaud 
the fact that she takes an active role in her destiny, and ensures her 
self-preservation. If a character long conflated with virginal innocence 
can become ruthless (keeping a dagger in her wedding dress) without 
detracting from her heroism, perhaps there is a means of bypassing 
the usual dichotomy of approved femininity. All that remains is to 
overcome the rivalry that narratively pits women against one another, 
which involves telling different stories. 
It is female sexuality, rather than rivalry, that ‘Red Riding Hood’ 
(ATU 333) chiefly concerns itself with, yet, as Catherine Orenstein notes 
of its heroine, ‘over the years she has been cloaked according to social 
and ethical fashion, in countless meanings and morals, warnings and 
winks’, often depicted either as victim or vamp (2003: 13). In Angela 
Carter’s collection 
The Bloody Chamber
(1979) the tale is explored via 
three versions – ‘The Werewolf’, ‘Wolf-Alice’ and ‘The Company of 
Wolves’ – the last of which she helped to adapt as the film, 
The Company 
of Wolves
(Neil Jordan, 1984). Zipes regards the result as a landmark in 
cinematic treatments of ‘Red Riding Hood’, inaugurating greater experi-
mentation in the heroine’s response to her encounter with a ‘wolf’, 
including ‘desire, rage and revenge’ (2011: 147). Desire is at the heart 
of Carter’s original tale, which has its heroine happily succumb to the 
‘wolf’, although her cinematic counterpart behaves far more coyly. With 
its playful questioning of reality and illusion (framed as a dream yet 
with reality bleeding through amid a collapsing set), its variety of tales 
and time periods, and its intertextual retelling of ‘Red Riding Hood’ (via 
Angela Carter, with a nod to Charles Perrault), this is a quintessential 
postmodern film, yet not without its flaws. Its intent to subvert expec-
tation is announced at the start, when the heroine asks, in response 
to her sister’s death in the woods, ‘why couldn’t she save herself?’ The 
question sums up Carter’s feminist revisionism, calling to mind oral 
forebears such as the young woman in ‘The Story of Grandmother’ who 
does indeed save herself. In the same vein, the film’s closing striptease 
(when the heroine arrives at granny’s cottage, realises the huntsman/
werewolf has won his wager, and starts to throw her clothes on the 
fire) affirms a confident female coming-of-age, in keeping with Carter’s 
eroticised version of the tale (in which the girl makes no attempt to 
escape but eagerly joins the wolf in bed). However, the film does not 
go as far as Carter’s fearless heroine, who is last seen sleeping ‘sweet 

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