Approximating the Hypertextual,Replicating the Metafictional_ Textualand Sociopolitical Authority InGuillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth

KRISTINE KOTECKI

Approximating the Hypertextual,Replicating the Metafictional: Textualand Sociopolitical Authority inGuillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth

In an interview on The Charlie Rose Show, Alejandro González remarked thathis friend and fellow filmmaker Guillermo del Toro keeps a floor-to-ceiling li-brary packed with everything fairy tale, fantasy, and magic. If for González thismeans his son would prefer to switch fathers, for film viewers it means that DelToro’s intimacy with multiple and wide-ranging references in the fantastic hasresulted in the richly layered El laberinto del fauno (2006), released in Englishas Pan’s Labyrinth. In addition to drawing imaginatively on the Spanish civilwar, the film alludes to texts in a variety of genres and media. It referencesfairy-tale films like Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, literary fairy-talecharacters like Karen from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes,” andmultiple versions of fairy-tale types like “Snow White” and “Little Red RidingHood.” It also contains echoes of mythological characters like satyrs andreligious themes like the trinity. On the official website for Pan’s Labyrinth,Del Toro claims to pull widely from history, mythology, and fairy-tale studies,including the work of Maria Tatar, Jack Zipes, Vladimir Propp, and BrunoBettelheim.

In this essay I suggest that Pan’s Labyrinth’s blend of fairy-tale motifsand references to popular film and culture displays a “hypertextual” aesthetic.Set in fascist Spain—an environment highly relevant to the current “war on

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terror,” according to Del Toro in his DVD commentary—this fairy-tale film’shypertextuality displays resistance to some of the constructs assumed in the“canonical” literary fairy tales penned by Perrault and the Grimms as well as insome early twentieth-century fairy-tale films like Walt Disney’s Snow White andthe Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Cinderella (1950). Furthermore, while Guillermodel Toro is one among several contemporary fairy-tale filmmakers who resistsreplicating those fairy-tale stereotypes associated with patriarchal authorityand who rely on a “hypertextual” aesthetic, Pan’s Labyrinth stands out amongthem for its overt sociopolitical framing. This article thus explores how thisfilm’s use of both filmic hypertextuality and tropes from print textuality mediatefairy-tale content toward social and political critique.

A critical foundation for this study is Donald Haase’s article “HypertextualGutenberg: The Textual and Hypertextual Life of Folktales and Fairy Tales inEnglish-Language Popular Print Editions,” in which he discusses the effects ofhypertextual media on print fairy tales. Haase deploys two concepts, the Lawof Approximation and the Law of Replication, to conceptualize how older andnewer media influence each other formally. An older medium displaying char-acteristics of a newer one approximates the new; an example of the Law of Ap-proximation would be a sequence of framed images in a print fairy tale approx-imating the newer filmic medium. A newer medium appropriating elementsof an older one replicates the old; an example of the Law of Replication wouldbe a book being opened on screen in a filmic adaptation of the older printmedium (223).

Haase acknowledges that an older form approximating a newer one canproduce an innovative effect; his study focuses primarily on the Law of Ap-proximation, but he invites his readers to ask whether newer media might alsoinnovate through replications of older media. In this essay I consider Haase’sLaws of Approximation and Replication in relation to fairy-tale films in orderto explore how some of these films adapt both formal elements of older mediaassociated with fairy-tale texts that are judged to be authoritative and formalelements of the newer hypertextual medium. Fairy-tale films emerged early infilm’s development, and the technological innovations of the new cinematicmedium produced a viewing environment conducive to magic, or wonder.1

This capacity for creating wonder aligns film with fairy tales; the newness ofthe medium, however, did not necessarily equal newness in the tales presentedthrough it. The early fairy-tale films of Walt Disney, for example, reproduceconservative patriarchal values as they simultaneously showcase innovativetechnological wonders.2 I argue that this conservative sociopolitical track de-rives in part from the relative weakness of the cinematic medium’s positionin relation to the perceived authority of the “original” tales being adapted, anauthority-from-origin emphasized in the print fairy-tale collections of Charles

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Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. In contrast, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’sLabyrinth integrates motifs from multiple sources into a hypertextual metafic-tion that benefits from elements of both the older print textuality and thenewer hypertextuality. The film deploys both the authority of “ancient” origin,as Perrault’s and the Grimms’ print collections do, and the potential of fluidorigin, as hypertext allows. This double movement of replication and approxi-mation contributes to the sociopolitical slant of Pan’s Labyrinth, allowing thefilm to interrogate the concept of authority and the history of fairy tales with aseriousness that avoids discounting the historical and potential power of fairy-tale texts, as many contemporary fairy-tale film parodies do, and that claimsthis power for its filmic fairy tale through pointed sociopolitical critique.3

Adaptation and Authority

The rhetoric used to evaluate adaptations across media often implies a loss inthe transfer from the source to the newer text; this holds particularly true inadaptations from print to cinematic media. Film scholar Robert Stam arguesthat terms like “ ‘infidelity,’ ‘betrayal,’ ‘deformation,’ ‘violation,’ ‘bastardization,’‘vulgarization,’ and ‘desecration,’ ” commonly used in discussions of adapta-tions, reflect a didacticism heavily weighted against the newer production (3).Valuations informed by this language inscribe print texts, particularly thosevalued as being literary ones, with a superior position in relation to film. In asimilar argument, although not one focused specifically on film adaptations,translation scholar Lori Chamberlain critiques the violent language also usedin some translation studies as being a form of patriarchal privileging of pater-nity and fidelity (314–29). Both of these scholars highlight how notions of fixedorigin radiate into a devaluation of productions that aesthetically emphasizetheir relations with other texts.

In contrast to language that privileges “origin,” aesthetic techniques thatemphasize intertextuality might be said to celebrate its diffusion. If adaptationbasically is an intertextual form, this intertextuality is further complicatedwhen the source text is not a literary “original” but a story that has circulatedboth orally and in print in multiple versions and languages. Discussing the his-torical adaptations of oral folktales into print fairy tales, a phenomenon alsorelevant to the study of fairy-tale films, Donald Haase shows that such adapta-tion to print replicated the older oral forms in order to claim some of theirpower: “[because oral tales have] been granted an aura of authenticity and au-thority, the new technologies have often attempted to maintain a semblanceof the old form of production” (“Hypertextual” 223). Examples of print fairytales being associated with an idealized and age-old folk knowledge includetechniques like illustrations of children gathered around a storyteller, or the

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transcription of the oral convention of framing a tale with “Once upon a time.”In “Yours, Mine, or Ours? Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and the Ownership ofFairy Tales,” Haase argues that for some people these print texts did indeedcapture the perceived authority of the folk origin; texts by Perrault or theBrothers Grimm have thus assumed some of the authority associated with anidealized folk origin (353). These literary adaptations of oral tales obscuretheir diffuse origin, thus becoming doubly authoritative though their descentfrom “authentic” oral folktales and from their presentation within a printmedium associated with class power.

The transition from print or cinematic adaptations being read as replica-tions of an older medium’s “authentic” original text toward being read as au-thoritative sources in their own right did not occur smoothly. For instance, in“The Arabian Nights, Visual Culture, and Early German Culture,” Haase pointsto Herman Hesse’s criticism of print and cinematic technology as being re-sponsible for the decline of oral storytelling (264). This critique exemplifieswhat Stam argues is a privileging of more established media, what he calls “thea priori valorization of historical anteriority and seniority: the assumption, thatis, that older arts are necessarily better arts” (4). Just as the language surround-ing the oral tradition and the development of the printing press privileges theformer, so the language surrounding film adaptations privileges the print text.This privileging does not necessarily invalidate the newer medium’s adapta-tion, however. Both Jack Zipes and Donald Haase argue that tales by Perraultand the Grimms succeeded in claiming the authority of “sacred” folktales fortheir print texts (Zipes, “Breaking” 337; Haase, “Yours” 353). Walt Disney thenclaimed these print texts’ authority for his filmic fairy tales.

Walt Disney’s vulnerable position as an emerging artist in the then devel-oping medium of cinema cannot be discounted as an element informing his fi-delity to the version of Snow White printed in the Grimms’ text. While fairytales as a general category can be viewed as “public domain” rather than as asingle-authored literary text, Disney officially presents his version of the tale asbeing an adaptation of the Grimms, with “Adapted from the Grimms’ FairyTales” as a subheading in the opening frame of the film.4 Similarly, Disney’s1950 film Cinderella lists Perrault’s version as its source. As a filmmaker work-ing within the early period of cinema, Disney’s position in relation to theGrimms and Perrault might be clarified through Haase’s Laws of Approxima-tion and Replication. The cinematic already replicates certain elements of theoral performance medium. Oral tales, however, did not exert the same author-ity as print texts would have in the United States in the early twentieth century,and particularly not the authority of print texts originating in Europe and con-sidered to be classics. As such, the Old World Grimms’ fairy tales as literarysource furnished cultural capital, in John Guillory’s sense of canonical litera-

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ture as cultural capital, for an animator drawing from the perceived authorityof the tale’s folk origin. As Linda Hutcheon notes, “One way to gain re-spectability or increase cultural capital is for an adaptation to be upwardly mo-bile. Film historians argue that this motivation explains the many early cine-matic adaptations of Dante and Shakespeare” (91). Rather than draw from asingle work of “Literature,” Disney adapted a tale associated with both thecanonical Grimms and with the authority of the folk and their age-old wis-dom. “Snow White” in its Grimms’ version was supposed to be the best-knownversion of the tale, the “authentic” tale. Disney’s Snow White replicates the printmedium in its opening scene, a shot of a storybook being opened followed bythe first three pages of the tale being projected on the screen before the ani-mated sequences appear. His dependence on the authority of his source text isalso exemplified by the fidelity with which the Grimms’ Snow White characteris transcribed into the newer medium.5 Disney’s choice to adapt a widely circu-lated print version of “Snow White” can be read as a negotiation of his positionwithin an emerging cinematic medium and his dependence on the older andmore authoritative print medium for credibility.

Disney’s Snow White negotiates the power of the newer medium and theinscription of the older one. The order and control with which the sequencesand animation play out reflect a carefully plotted world, one that includes forDisney a dependence on realism in what Zipes notes as “the precise drawingand manipulation of the characters as real people” (“Civilizing” 207). Zipesalso comments on the animator being presented as a magician or “demigod”who creates wonder (197). Contributing more specifically to the present dis-cussion, however, is Haase’s highlighting of “the Disney model as legal copy-right holders” (“Yours” 361). As an adapter of texts in the common domain,rather than strictly authored literature, Disney achieves legal status as the au-thorial source by copyrighting the adaptation. Here, the filmmaker’s poten-tial to move beyond being a faithful illustrator of print texts and into being acinematic auteur gains form and recognition.

For Walt Disney, the cultural status of the Grimms’ tale may have allowedhis tale to reach a wider audience and to eventually achieve its status as one ofthe classics of cinematic history. The potential for innovation that the mediumallowed him technologically, however, did not equally extend to innovationwith regard to the ideological framing of the Snow White character. The in-scription of the Grimms’ source text into the film and the cultural meaning as-cribed to it can be read in the film’s portrayal of Snow White’s passivity. Thereplication in Disney’s version of her passivity and dependence on male gen-erosity is one instance of this film’s dependence on its source text. For Zipes,Disney fails by “retain[ing] key ideological features of the Grimms’ fairy talethat reinforce nineteenth-century patriarchal notions” (“Civilizing” 204). One

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of the problems resides precisely in Disney’s Snow White’s fidelity to the kind ofpatriarchy seen in the Grimms’ text, most explicitly with the Snow White char-acter, at the expense of what Zipes presents as being the more communalnature of the oral tale.

With Snow White Disney establishes authority for his work within theemerging medium of animated film, but his success derives both from histechnological innovation and from his dependence on the cultural value of theGrimms’ text. Although Disney gained credibility as a filmmaker through hisanimation, the novelty of his film’s length, and the copyrighting that reinforcedhis “authorship,” he nonetheless created a film that required little of the audi-ence but to extend their acceptance of the canonicity of the Grimms’ text andof the patriarchal values it reinforces. In this sense the film does not achievewhat Haase proposes as a model for meaningful fairy-tale retellings. Accordingto Haase, “[I]f we avoid reading fairy tales as models of behavior and normalcy,they can become for us revolutionary documents that encourage the develop-ment of personal autonomy” (“Yours” 361). While Disney did not move hisideological framing for the Snow White character beyond a representation inline with the Grimms’ “Snow White,” Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) shiftsaway from a literary adaptation model and toward a hypertextual one, allowinghis fairy-tale protagonist, Ofelia, greater possibilities.

Hypertextuality in Fairy-Tale Films

Twentieth-century filmmakers like Disney achieved credibility within thenewer medium by replicating print tropes and maintaining the appearance offidelity to an authoritative “source.” However, the degree to which later cine-matic productions maintain an appearance of loyalty to their print “sources”also determines how much innovation becomes possible. Linda Hutcheonpoints out that even in a recent film like Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone(2001), the director, Christopher Columbus, believed the book’s fans requireda close-to-the-source film adaptation. She quotes him as saying, “People wouldhave crucified me if I hadn’t been faithful to the books” (123). Here, fidelity tothe print text affected the making of the film in a way the director describes asbeing a burden. The concept and strategies of hypertextuality provide a usefulway to think about a different model of adaptation across media, one thatHaase recognizes in his “Hypertextual Gutenberg” metaphor.

Reading some films as “hypertextual” destabilizes the rhetoric of “sourcetext” and “the violence of adaptations” used to portray the literary-to-filmtransfer. Here hypertextuality is not meant to replace concepts like “intertextu-ality” or “dialogism,” but can instead be read as a useful metaphor for thinkingabout these concepts in the context of the materiality of media. In Haase’s dis-

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cussion of the relations between texts and their technologies, he highlightshow more powerful media can economically and stylistically overshadow lesspowerful media. As a result, something like intertextual mediation occurs,whereby the less powerful medium intertextually incorporates “replications”or “approximations” of formal elements of the more powerful medium. Whilethe term “intertextuality” connotes a wide history of formal practices, Haaseemphasizes the intertextuality of media, of material technologies. For this rea-son, his discussion of “hypertextuality” focuses on a more concrete set ofmedia practices than the more general “intertextuality.” For my discussion ofthe thematic and formal intertextuality in Pan’s Labyrinth, I also employ “hy-pertextuality” as a term that more concretely connotes the material relationsinforming adaptations across media while it metaphorically exemplifies alter-natives to the paternal adaptation model exemplified in Disney’s early films.

Literary scholar George Landow, in a nod to theorists who question no-tions of fixed origin, aligns the computer science term “hypertextuality” withJacques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction. Landow defines a hypertextualsystem as one that employs “one-to-many linking, which permits readers toobtain different information from the same textual site . . . [and] . . . multipliesthe reader’s choices” (13). Many will be familiar with this as the World WideWeb model, with the hypertextual website linking to other texts. In Landow’sargument, the hypertextual medium creates a system where the Derridean em-phasis on “textual openness, intertextuality, and the irrelevance of distinctionsbetween inside and outside a particular text” becomes evident (33). Withinthis model, multiple directions and layers of citability allow any referent to berecontextualized. The burden of fidelity to a source authority thus loses impor-tance in the multiplied intertextualities webbed together. Hypertext need notonly apply to literary theory and computer science. As a medium where theauditory and visual channels already run alongside the narrative, film’s multi-track and multiformat structure allows for the possibility of conflicting andlayered messages to be presented simultaneously in something akin to hyper-text. Not all films actualize this potential, but films that approximate hypertex-tual elements destabilize a reductive rhetoric that invokes “the violence ofadaptations” to characterize the print-to-film transfer. As such, the filmmakercan be imagined as being a hyperlinker rather than simply an adapter whotakes an original, or several authoritative sources, to then transfer to a newmedium. The filmmaker as hyperlinker is not replicating print tropes as muchas linking multiple references and allusions, without assuming one textual au-thority as its origin; the filmmaker as hyperlinker has a wider range availableto him or her than does the faithful adapter of a source text.

Hypertextual work runs through the multiple tracks of the filmic me-dium. The visual, the audio, and the temporal unroll different layers of narrative,

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each effecting various intertextual links. This concept of multiple citations andtracks can be further connected with Gérard Genette’s concept of transtextual-ity. According to Genette, “[T]he subject of poetics is transtextuality, or the tex-tual transcendence of the text,” which he defines as “all that sets the text in arelationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts” (1). Of Genette’sfive subcategories of transtextuality, the three most relevant to this essay aremetatextuality, which comments on a given text “without necessarily citing it(without summoning it), in fact sometimes even without naming it”; paratex-tuality, which includes messages outside the text’s diegesis; and, of course, hy-pertextuality (1–5). For Genette, however, the term “hypertextuality” mostspecifically applies to genres like pastiche and parody (8) and thus proves toolimited a concept for a more digital model of the hypertextual, at least in theWorld Wide Web sense of the term. The digital “hypertextual” includes ele-ments of metatextuality and paratextuality rather than being distinct fromthem, as Genette’s sense of hypertextuality would have them. For this reason, Iremain closer to Landow’s sense of hypertextuality than to Genette’s. Genette’sgeneral arguments about hypertextuality nonetheless prove useful for thisstudy of adaptation in fairy-tale films. He allows hypertextuality to mean “anyrelationship uniting a text B ([ . . . ] the hypertext) to an earlier text A ([ . . . ]the hypotext)” where a transformation or imitation occurs (5–7). Here, thelanguage of “transformation” and “imitation” aligns with the language of “ap-proximation” and “replication,” used to refer to adaptation across media.

Films can draw from their intertexts in an adaptation model or a hyper-textual one. For example, Disney’s Snow White adapts an older source text, theGrimms’ “Snow White” (fig. 1). The Grimms’ version also can be read as an

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Fig. 1. Disney’s Snow White as Adaptation

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adaptation of oral versions of the tale. In this model Disney’s film is primarilyread as an adaptation. The film also links to paratexts like the movie postersadvertising the film or the newspaper articles about the film’s success. Theparatextuality of later films might also include film trailers, DVD covers, cred-its, and the various documentary choices available to viewers on most DVDmenus. Although some hypertextuality exists in the film, Disney’s Snow Whiterelies most heavily on the authority supplied by claiming the Grimms’ “SnowWhite” as a source text.

Films that offer multiple hypotexts do not privilege fidelity; references tomultiple “sources” recontextualize these sources rather than depending onthem to delimit established meanings. The layers of influence and linking thusdiffuse the sources’ authority, expanding the constructive possibilities for thefilmmaker and the interpretive possibilities for the audience. As Landow ar-gues, “Hypertext does not permit a tyrannical, univocal voice. Rather the voiceis always distilled from the combined experience of the momentary focus, thelexia one presently reads, and the continually forming narrative of one’s read-ing path” (36). Just as an authoritative source need not limit the filmmaker’snarrative, so the audience must pull from their own repertoire to recognizeand process the various links being presented to them.6 This hypertextualityruns rampant in Pan’s Labyrinth, engaging the film’s audience with a networkof links to follow and metatextual commentaries to process.

Pan’s Labyrinth treats themes of fascism and resistance while incorporatinga gothic setting and fairy-tale motifs. Set in Spain during the Spanish civil war(1936–1939), the film stages the struggle between Francisco Franco’s Nation-alists and the Republican army (www.panslabyrinth.com). The political au-thoritarianism of Franco’s fascist regime is exemplified in Captain Vidal, whoheads one of the new military posts established after the civil war to “extermi-nate the resistance,” according to the film’s opening text. Vidal’s tyrannical po-litical authority parallels and at times supersedes his patriarchal authority. Inan example of the two running parallel, Vidal’s insistence to his wife’s doctorthat his son will be a boy, telling the doctor, “Don’t fuck with me!” when hesuggests the child could be female, is reinforced in the following scene whenVidal brutally kills a local man who claims to be hunting rabbits for his sickdaughters, immediately after killing the man’s son. His political authority su-persedes his patriarchal authority when he later kills the doctor for disobeyinghis orders by euthanizing a Republican fighter. Killing the doctor reinforces hispolitical authority, in its fascist construction, but threatens his patriarchal posi-tion by endangering his unborn son and his wife, Carmen, who must deliverthe child without a doctor present.

The political violence enacted by Ofelia’s new stepfather, Vidal, serves asthe backdrop for her experience of resisting his patriarchal dominion. Vidal’s

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patriarchal authority enforces contradictory orders such as first demandingthat Carmen undertake a long journey that could be dangerous at her latestage of pregnancy so that the baby will be born near him, then forcing herinto wheelchair confinement immediately upon the journey’s completion sothat she will not endanger the child by walking from the car to the house.Carmen accepts Vidal’s authority without resisting, then channels his prefer-ences into her own disciplining of Ofelia. If Vidal publicly humiliates Carmenat a dinner party when she tries to tell the story of how they met, discountingthe importance of tales, then Carmen discourages Ofelia’s interest in fairy tales,responding to her daughter’s claims that she has seen a fairy by chastising herfor dirtying her shoes. She later gives Ofelia a gift of a dress instead of a bookbecause, she says, “I want you to be beautiful for the captain.” Finally, in re-sponse to Vidal’s disapproval, she burns the mandrake that Ofelia had placedunder her bed, a destructive act that then appears to lead to Carmen’s owndeath. While the fascist political context that Vidal enforces parallels Ofelia’sexperience of her oppressive familial context, the ways that these also parallelher magical experiences reveal the potential in fairy tales for political and so-cial critique. In a review of the film, Jack Zipes argues that this juxtaposition ofthe fairy tale with gruesome wartime experiences works precisely because thefairy tale (film) “offers a corrective and more ‘realistic’ vision of the world incontrast to the diversionary and myopic manner in which many people see real-ity” (236). Ofelia’s experiences in the magical story-world are thus shaping andshaped by the political circumstances framing them, and by the social circum-stances, a shaping further informed by the layers of fairy-tale and sociopoliticalreferences throughout the film.

The extensive intertextual links between Pan’s Labyrinth and other films,fairy tales, and historical events produces an aesthetic excess; these links alsolink to each other, recontextualizing their meanings in relation to each otherthematically and in relation to the film as a film, thus reinforcing the film’s hy-pertextual approximation. The film’s references to Disney’s Alice in Wonderland(1951) include the multiple appearances of pocket watches, rabbits, and rab-bit holes. Like Alice’s white rabbit, Vidal owns a watch, but his is cracked andrequires obsessive care to maintain. In addition to holding a broken watch,Vidal also steals two rabbits from the hunter whom he kills and then eats therabbits, an act that foreshadows his later murder of the doctor, who most di-rectly links to the Alice rabbit by the identical glasses and waistcoat that theywear. The doctor also gives Carmen the vials of medicine that put her to sleep,a doping that parallels her silencing under patriarchy, but that also recalls thevials of liquid that Alice consumes. The vials thus also allude to the kind ofawakening that Alice may have experienced, and that Ofelia enacts as a char-acter who sees through Vidal, or behind the looking glass of sociopolitical

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structures. In the end, Ofelia slips Vidal the vial of medicine that puts himto sleep long enough for the Republicans to definitively silence him. WhileCarmen loves the Alice in Wonderland dress that she gave Ofelia to wear, Ofeliadirties this one and wears another at the final scene of her coronation, alongwith red shoes descended from MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) and from HansChristian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes.” These shoes allude to red shoes’ sym-bolism as artifice in the print tale—a print tale presented as within the “au-thentic” and “age-old” fairy-tale genre—and of the power of spectacle in thefilm, but they are also recontextualized within Pan’s Labyrinth. In this film theylink back to the pile of shoes within the horrific pale man’s lair, where shoesfunction as metonymies for the children consumed and also point to his role asan ogre in the fairy-tale world. This then links to a historical situation wherethe most beautiful shoes have no use or power for some, and where artificeand spectacle can both be used for darker enchantments by others. The pile ofshoes links to the Holocaust and to fascism. It alludes to the various Holocaustdepictions of piles of victims’ clothing, as documented in various testimonialsand as portrayed in Elie Wiesel’s novella Night and in films like Steven Spielberg’sSchindler’s List (1993) and Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella,1997). The pale man as a child killer thus links to both fairy-tale ogres and theHolocaust, but also connects within Pan’s Labyrinth to the fascist Captain Vidaland his murder of the child Ofelia. The film’s metatextual commentary on fas-cism further links to the post-9/11 “war on terror,” according to Del Toro in hisDVD commentary (fig. 2).

The hypertextual linking here disseminates source authority, thus empha-sizing the filmmaker’s creative engagement with multiple cultural references.However, multiple sources, or hypotexts, do not necessarily mean an absence ofauthority, a point that reflecting on Ofelia’s trajectory as a character exemplifies.

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Fig. 2. Pan’s Labyrinth as Hypertext

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Ofelia resists the fascist Captain Vidal throughout the film, yet the content ofher actions is still inscribed by referents provided by her source authorities—the “real” world’s Vidal, the “imaginary” world’s faun, and the authors and il-lustrators of her fairy-tale book. Ofelia’s reality includes meanings provided bythree source authorities, placing her in the hypertextual, but she is still limitedby these authorities. She conceives of fairies only by linking them to the ArthurRackham illustrations in her fairy-tale book, requiring a magical insect to takethe illustrated fairy’s form as her imaginary world develops. Similarly, her mag-ical book creates an illustration for one of her quests that is modeled on therabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, thus shaping Ofelia’s own world’s appear-ance based on this hypotext. Ofelia’s real world is also shaped by CaptainVidal, as he refers to her unborn sibling as a boy. As Paul Julian Smith pointsout, Vidal greets Ofelia and her pregnant mother with the masculine plural, Bi-envenidos, instead of the feminine plural, establishing the unborn child as male(6). Thus, Vidal authors the child’s gender for Ofelia. Finally, Ofelia reads themoon-shaped birthmark on her shoulder as a mark of royalty only because thefaun has interpreted it as such, a reading that he later destabilizes by question-ing her royal identity. Ultimately, the hypertextual linking with which Ofeliaengages does not prevent her death under patriarchy. Vidal kills Ofelia afterboth symbolically and literally causing her mother Carmen’s death, so that hewould have a male heir and so that heir would be born near him. Yet the maleheir is ultimately denied Vidal when the Republicans take the child and attestthat he will not even know Vidal’s name. While Ofelia cannot fully escape thesociopolitical limits imposed by Vidal, the literary and artistic fairy-tale historyof her book, or the limits of her imagination and the faun, she nonetheless re-contextualizes them in relation to one another in order to construct an alter-nate narrative for herself and her brother. For although the Republicans do notwin according to historical texts, in Ofelia’s world they do, and even thoughher mother married Vidal, Ofelia refuses to call him “Father.” Finally, eventhough the fairy-tale book and faun claim Ofelia will be princess if she willsacrifice her brother, she refuses to be a part of that narrative.

“The End”: Replication and Approximation in Pan’s Labyrinth

Fidelity to a source authority, with all the patriarchal implications of that lan-guage intact, can limit the narrative, in both its construction and its reception.The hypertextual form, in contrast, privileges multiplicity, recontextualization,and choice. According to Landow, “[A] full hypertext system . . . offers thesame environment to both reader and writer” (6). Similarly to how a source-adaptation relationship can be limiting, a potential equality between the film-maker and viewer requires that the viewer follow each and every link. As such,

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the acts of reception and production generally fail to mirror each other. The ac-tive reception process of deciphering codes and references would be accessibleneither to viewers whose limited points of reference prevented them from fol-lowing the links in the film, nor for those viewers who simply followed thelinks, without then integrating the hypotext’s relevance back into the film’sbroader argument.7 Rather than viewing the hypertext as a text written by thefilmmaker and decoded by the audience, it therefore proves more fruitful to de-part from Landow and approach the text as an infinitely interpretable reposi-tory of choices, in Seymour Chatman’s sense of textuality (77–82). In thissense audiences in contexts differing from the filmmaker’s might derive linksand hypotexts beyond a “real” authorial intent. Rather than the text being readas necessarily pointing to an ultimate set of intertexts and thus leading to anoverarching shift in meaning, the text as hypertext can also be read as a con-structed text, disseminated for the audience to reconstruct following poten-tially different links. Here, Pan’s Labyrinth’s filmic replication of print textualityturns in its favor, as the emphasis on constructedness that a book’s binding andthe literary “end” trope provide might be replicated in film to emphasize theconstructed contextualization of the hyperlinks and the audience’s potential todisseminate and alternatively construct its effects.

The physical boundaries of a print text are clearly marked; the book’sbinding encases the story, and the print begins and ends where the readershould start and stop. These limits extend only so far, because whether the taleis being read or listened to, it moves beyond the physical text and into thestory world, blurring the boundaries between the magical and the structures ofreality. One of the literary tropes for marking the end to this blurring and forsignaling the move back out of the story world is a “The End” formula writtenafter the final words of a story, hypothetically followed by closing the book. Ina more patriarchal and authoritarian variation on this trope, Charles Perrault’smorals at the end of his fairy tales signal to the reader, or listener, to discard themagical elements of the tale as illusory in favor of the discourse that can beapplied as rules and lessons.

Where a hypertext might theoretically continue ad infinitum, “The End”as trope delineates a narrative’s boundaries. This tropic transitioning effectmetafictionally acknowledges the literary artifice having been created by sepa-rating the magical experience of it from whatever is considered to be “real” ex-perience. Metafictional forms of the “The End” trope have also informed filmicapproximations of the literary. An obvious replication of metafictionality mightbe an actual “The End” written across the film’s screen. A more nuanced, andmore distinctly filmic, metafictionality occurs when an acknowledgment of theanimation process breaks up the narrative, as when, for example, the animationappears to be erased and drawn in front of the viewer. Alice in Wonderland’s

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spectral Cheshire cat, with its disappearing and reappearing limbs, would beone instance of this acknowledgment of the magical potential involved in theconstruction of animated film. The special effects in Wizard of Oz are also re-flected upon in the Wizard character, who hides from view but manipulatesthe machinery that creates the spectacle, or the film. These metafictional, ormore precisely, metafilmic, acknowledgments of the special effects and anima-tion used to create Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland ultimately emphasizethe constructedness of these films. The magical experience made possible bythe animation and special effects is only an illusion; both films’ protagonistswake up from “the dream” that they, and the audience, have experienced. Bothcharacters desire to return to more predictably structured realities, which alsoentails a return to realities where the ability to resist those structures does notfunction as freely as through the magical, or illusory. The audience’s experiencethen parallels that of the characters; the camera or DVD stops spinning, the vi-sual and sound tracks are cut out, and indeed, for the viewer, it must have alsoall been a dream (fig. 3).

The metafilmic closing off of the film experience replicates a “The End” lit-erary effect that highlights the text’s constructedness. When combined with hy-pertextuality, this acknowledgment of the narrative’s framing blurs, signaling toechoes and links outside of the filmmakers’ contained text. The DVD formatalso perforates the film’s boundaries. The DVD features in Pan’s Labyrinth, forexample, include a feature-length director’s commentary, a series of documen-tary featurettes on the making of the film, including The Charlie Rose Show inter-view cited at the beginning of this article, and access to the entire script, alongwith DVD-ROM interactive features. Some especially interesting elements in-clude an actual link to the film’s Web page—a literal hypertextuality—and a se-ries of comic strips with limited animation titled “The Giant Toad,” “TheFairies,” “Pan,” and “The Pale Man,” a replicated comic textuality. The DVD fea-tures even explicitly acknowledge the film’s constructedness, such as in the“Making of . . .” segments, which detail the filmmaking team’s decision-makingprocesses with regard to costume and set design. Viewers’ access to the script

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through the film’s website further highlights the story’s flexibility, as what isscripted does not always end up being what is filmed. A particularly relevantdeparture from the script occurs in Ofelia’s final scene with Pan, where thescript details how Pan should try to persuade Ofelia to sacrifice the child byholding up her storybook and claiming, “Look inside—! Then you will knowI’m telling the truth! Go on, look at the future—your future.” Ofelia choosesto resist the storybook’s narrative in refusing Pan’s demands, in an instanceof willed infidelity to the text. It is notable that here the film Pan’s Labyrinthalso deviates from the script, omitting the storybook prop and the dialoguesurrounding it entirely, although not the idea of Ofelia rewriting the story.

Along with the expanded paratext, Pan’s Labyrinth also metafilmicallycomments upon its limits and constructedness within the layers of the filmictext. This emphasizes the metatextual commentary written into the film and itspotentially directive function. The film opens with the sound of Ofelia’s dyingbreaths juxtaposed with a lullaby being sung. This audio track is followed byprint text scrolling down the screen, detailing the Spanish civil war, in an in-stance of both print and historical authority. This is then followed by audio ofa male voice-over narrating the fairy tale of a princess who transgresses the pa-triarchal order, a tale concurrently dramatized via the visual track. As scholarLaura Hubner notes, “The final images of a flower opening and insect are ac-companied by the same male voice-over,” and the princess (Ofelia) ultimatelyends up back in the father’s realm (3–5). Both the historical text about fascismin Spain and the narrated fairy tale are contained within the narrative frame ofthe lullaby, suggesting that the history and the fairy tale both function as an“opiate of the masses,” a soothing of fears through stories that define them. In-deed, the kind of silencing by patriarchy, or through fidelity to a source au-thority, that occurs in Snow White also plays out with the young Ofelia and hermother, Carmen, in Pan’s Labyrinth, as addressed earlier. Carmen most closelyreplicates the kind of subservience to the patriarchal “voice in the mirror” ofDisney’s Snow White characters.8 The layering of various tracks and sources canbe read as increasing the tale’s authority, but it can also be read as being unre-liable, as being competing narratives, each one constructed according to theboundaries of the genre and medium.

Just as the film points to multiple paratexts, as in the DVD and websitefeatures, and multiple hypotexts, as in the framing, the character Ofelia alsoechoes multiple predecessors. Her fairy-tale film hypotexts, Snow White, Wiz-ard of Oz, and Alice in Wonderland, have already been established. In additionto these, Hubner identifies Ofelia’s roots as being in girls’ folkloric rites of pas-sage into womanhood (5). Smith recognizes in Ofelia the heroine from artfilmmaker Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (6). Zipes points out the refer-ences to Jan Svankmajer’s film Otesánek (2000) (“Pan’s” 239). Ofelia’s role as a

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counterpart of the faun, or satyr, also invites reading their relationship in rela-tion to the mythical faun Pan’s rape and dismemberment of the nymph Echo(Cotterell; “Echo”).9 That the labyrinths in Pan’s Labyrinth are scattered all overthe world, in order to increase the chances of trapping the escaping girl, hintsat the dismemberment and scattering involved in Echo’s tale, as does Ofelia’scalling out “Echo, echo” when she first enters the labyrinth. The Roman ver-sion of Pan, Faunus, and his counterpart Bona Dea offer an alternative allu-sion, as this virginal goddess is most closely associated with the freeing ofslaves (North; Jennings Rose). Here, Ofelia more closely parallels the house-keeper Mercedes, in her association with the Republicans. These and manymore references direct the viewer away from a guiding filmic authority, multi-plying contesting sources in a way that destabilizes each one’s determiningauthority and recontextualizing them in relation to each other.

The multiple sources from which the character Ofelia emerges is furthercomplicated by the multiple roles she performs within the film. Ofelia’s role asthe storyteller highlights the power of the author. She puts the eye back into anold statue, which allows a fairy to birth from its stone mouth. Later, when shefirst enters the labyrinth—constructed of the same material as the statue—thecamera zooms toward her from inside, as if she had invited movement and setthe story in motion. The book and the piece of chalk that she uses also identifyher as writer-storyteller. Beyond being a storyteller, Ofelia also plays the role ofthe reincarnating tale, the echo that the voice-over narrator claims will riseagain, just as the mythological character Echo would reappear again and again,and just as the many hypertextual links rebirth the many stories making up thefilmic one. Finally, Ofelia is also metafictionally portrayed as simply being afilm character in a story world over whom the reality of the audience hasprecedence. The viewers watch Ofelia walking through the labyrinth from anoverhead shot, knowing more than she does, looking down on her from atopof the phallic maypole. They see the faun before she does in a third-personomniscience that resists any role she plays as a creator of the narrative, or as acharacter (like Echo) in another context. Vidal responds to the camera, and theomniscient perspective that emphasizes his written-ness (as a character) whenhe stares into the camera to say, “Those sons of bitches are here and they’rewatching us,” refers as much to the audience as to the Republican fighters. Fi-nally, in one of the more glaring instances of the audience’s presence in rela-tion to the character, Ofelia does not listen to the fairies in the pale man’slair, for no more convincing reason than to provide the audience with thethrill of the chase scene that ensues. The viewers may choose to believe thatOfelia constructs her story, that her story is a magically recurring tale from thecollective unconscious, or that the implied filmmaker constructs it. Or somecombination of the three.

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Pan’s Labyrinth benefits from the combination of the approximated hyper-textual, which destabilizes notions of fidelity to a source authority, and of theprint textuality replicated throughout the film. This formal dispersal empha-sizes the film’s context and construction, thus decentering its authority as“The” authentic fairy tale. In a final and effective replication of book tropes andapproximation of hypertextual ones, Del Toro destabilizes the “The End” tropeby offering multiple links for the audience to follow at the film’s conclusion.Ofelia’s faun appears to be only a dream when Vidal does not see it, and herdeath signals an ultimate crushing by patriarchy similar to her mother’s, butboth of these endings are followed by two alternative endings: the fantasticalvictory of the Republican fighters in the political world and Ofelia’s coronation(back) into princesshood in the magical world. Here, a metafictional “TheEnd” does not definitively mark the boundaries of the imaginative story world;the coronation can be read either as a defining opiate, just-a-dream, or as theawakening of a metafictional alternative to the “real” fictions humans alwaysalready create for themselves. This hypertextualization of “The End” sidestepsan authoritative discounting of the filmic magic and signals to the audience toclaim this authority for themselves. Viewers must then determine how to ne-gotiate the power of the experience they have engaged with and determinewhether they will link to elements of it in their own “real” life engagement withconflict and resistance. The film’s disseminated hypotexts and hypertextual-ized ending signal a move away from Disney’s model of adaptation, with itsmultiple possible interpretations inviting the viewer to make Ofelia’s future asdisseminated as her origin, to make her influence exceed the boundaries of an“it was all a dream” ending. It is in what Marina Warner has termed “a practi-cal dimension to the imagination . . . [that] . . . can unlock social and publicpossibilities” (xx) that the fairy-tale film that exhibits both a metafictional ac-knowledgment of its construction and a hypertextual dissemination of sourceauthority, and thus a dissemination of possible meanings, can not only resist fi-delity to the imagined authority of an original tale but can also create the spacefor the audience to bypass that authority.

Notes

1. Katherine Singer Kovacs points to the relationship between technology and magicin “Georges Méliès and the ‘Féerie.’ ” Paul Hammond also argues, in MarvelousMéliès, that early fairy-tale filmmaker Georges Méliès produced wonder throughthe cinematic apparatus.

2. Kovacs argues that even the much earlier fairy-tale filmmaker George Mélièsproved primarily innovative in his use of technology, while he remained withinthe féeries’ thematic and structural limits when adapting this theatrical form tofilm (13). Donald Crafton also argues, in “Genre and Technology in 1909,” that

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Emile Cohl’s fantastical film Clair de lune espagnol was a technologically innova-tive perpetuation of popular and established forms of entertainment (169).

3. Many contemporary fairy-tale films display a shift away from an adaptation aes-thetic that points to a single print or otherwise “authoritative” source text. View-ers might witness a fairy-tale princess displaying her Matrix-style martial artmoves or a Napoleonic Prince Charming enjoying Gladiator-style entertainment.Parodic reframings of fairy tales abound in contemporary films, as seen in theseexamples taken from the Shrek trilogy, as well as in other recent films like En-chanted (2007) and Hoodwinked! (2005).

4. In later contexts, Walt Disney claims that Snow White was inspired by a filmic ver-sion he saw in 1916 and that this also informed his experience of the tale (“Mak-ing of”).

5. In the DVD version of Disney’s Snow White, the “Scene Selection” is labeled“Chapter Selection,” in a motion toward print storybooks. The DVD then displaysa storybook opening to the selected “chapter” (scene). Although not directly re-lated to Disney’s choices in the 1930s, this labeling nonetheless attests to thefilm’s formal engagement with print imagery.

6. It should also be noted that although I refer to “the filmmaker” throughout thisarticle, film production also involves the performers, writer(s), director(s), cos-tume designers, and others.

7. According to Stam, film reception requires “intense perceptual and conceptuallabor—the work of iconic designation, visual deciphering, narrative inference,and construction” (7).

8. See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s “[Snow White and Her Wicked Step-mother]” for an argument about how the mirror in “Snow White” represents maleauthority.

9. Although Del Toro claims that “the character of Pan was too dark and sexual toplay in a film opposite an eight-year-old girl” and that his title character is simplya faun, he nonetheless translated the film and title himself, thus choosing thePan’s Labyrinth title over the alternative The Labyrinth of the Faun (“Laberinto”). Iappreciate Donald Haase’s comment that this decision may also be related to thesimilarities that could be drawn between the alternative title and Stéphane Mal-larmé’s “L’après-midi d’un faune.”

Works Cited

Alice in Wonderland. Dir. Clyde Geronimi and Wilfred Jackson. 1951. DVD. Walt DisneyHome Entertainment, 2004.

Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Red Shoes.” Tatar 241–45.Chamberlain, Lori. “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation.” Translation Studies

Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. Florence, KY: Routledge, 1999. 314–29.Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990.Cinderella. Dir. Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton S. Luske, and Wilfred Jackson. 1950. DVD.

Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2005.Cotterell, Arthur. “Pan.” A Dictionary of World Mythology. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Oxford

Reference Online. Oxford UP. 27 Nov. 2007. http://micro189.lib3.hawaii.edu:2493.

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Crafton, Donald. “Genre and Technology in 1909.” Journal of Popular Film and Television13.4 (1986): 166–70.

“Echo.” A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Ed. Elizabeth Knowles. Oxford: Oxford UP,2006. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford UP. 27 Nov. 2007. http://micro189.lib3.hawaii.edu:2493/views.

Enchanted. Dir. Kevin Lima. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2007.“Faun.” A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Ed. Elizabeth Knowles. Oxford: Oxford UP,

2006. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford UP. 27 Nov. 2007. http://micro189.lib3.hawaii.edu:2493/views.

Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln:U of Nebraska P, 1997.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “[Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother].”Tatar 291–96.

Grimm, Brothers. “Snow White.” Tatar 83–89.Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 1993.Haase, Donald. “The Arabian Nights, Visual Culture, and Early German Cinema.” Fabula

45.3/4 (2004): 261–74.———. “Hypertextual Gutenberg: The Textual and Hypertextual Life of Folktales and

Fairy Tales in English-Language Popular Print Editions.” Fabula 47 (2006):222–30.

———. “Yours, Mine, or Ours? Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and the Ownership ofFairy Tales.” Tatar 353–63.

Hammond, Paul. Marvelous Méliès. New York: St. Martin’s, 1975.Hoodwinked! Dir. Cory Edwards and Todd Edwards. 2005. DVD. Genius Products,

2006.Hubner, Laura. “Pan’s Labyrinth, Fear and the Fairy Tale.” Fear, Horror, and Terror at the

Interface: First Global Conference. Oxford, England. 10 Oct. 2007. Available atInter-Disciplinary.net, www.inter-disciplinary.net/ati/fht/fht1/hubnerpaper.pdf.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.Jennings Rose, Herbert, and John Scheid. “Faunus.” The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Ed.

Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. OxfordReference Online. Oxford UP. 27 Nov 2007. http://micro189.lib3.hawaii.edu:2493.

Kovács, Katherine Singer. “Georges Méliès and the ‘Féerie.’ ” Cinema Journal 16.1(1976): 1–13.

Landow, George P. Hypertext 2.0. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.“Laberinto del fauno, El (2006).” Internet Movie Database. 19 Nov. 2007. www.imdb

.com/title/tt0457430.Leeming, David. “Satyrs.” The Oxford Companion to World Mythology. Oxford: Oxford UP,

2004. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford UP. 27 Nov. 2007. http://micro189.lib3.hawaii.edu:2493.

Life Is Beautiful [La vita è bella]. Dir. Roberto Benigni. 1997. DVD. Miramax Films, 1998.“Making of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Snow White and the Seven

Dwarfs. Prod. Walt Disney. 1937. DVD. Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2001.North, J. A. “Bona Dea.” The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Ed. Simon Hornblower and

Anthony Spawforth. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Oxford Reference Online. OxfordUP. 27 Nov. 2007. http://micro189.lib3.hawaii.edu:2493.

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Pan’s Labyrinth [El laberinto del fauno]. Dir. Guillermo del Toro. 2006. DVD. New LineHome Entertainment, 2007.

Pan’s Labyrinth: Official Movie Site. 30 Aug. 2005. Picturehouse. 23 May 2008.www.panslabyrinth.com.

Schindler’s List. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1993. DVD. Universal Pictures, 2004.“Shrek (2001).” Internet Movie Database. 28 Nov. 2007. www.imdb.com/title/

tt0126029.Shrek. Dir. Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. 2001. DVD. DreamWorks Home Enter-

tainment, 2001.Shrek 2. Dir. Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury, and Conrad Vernon. 2004. DVD. Dream-

Works Home Entertainment, 2004.Shrek the Third. Dir. Chris Miller and Raman Hui. 2007. DVD. DreamWorks SKG, 2007.Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Prod. Walt Disney. 1937. DVD. Buena Vista Home En-

tertainment, 2001.Smith, Paul Julian. “Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno).” Film Quarterly 60.4

(2007): 4–9.Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film:

A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.Tatar, Maria, ed. The Classic Fairy Tales. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.Toro, Guillermo del, Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González, and Charlie Rose. “A Panel

Discussion with Mexican filmmakers Alejandro González, Guillermo del Toro, Al-foso Cuarón.” The Charlie Rose Show. 20 December 2006. “Special Features.” Pan’sLabyrinth [El laberinto del fauno]. 2006. DVD. New Line Home Entertainment, 2007.

Wizard of Oz, The. Dir. Victor Fleming. 1939. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2005.Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.Zipes, Jack. “Breaking the Disney Spell.” Tatar 332–52.———. “Pan’s Labyrinth [El laberinto del fauno].” Rev. of Pan’s Labyrinth. Dir. Guillermo

del Toro. Journal of American Folklore 121.480 (2008): 236–40.———. “Walt Disney’s Civilizing Mission: From Revolution to Restoration.” Fairy Tales

and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civiliza-tion. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2006. 193–212.

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235 Approximating the Hypertextual, Replicating theMetafictional: Textual and Sociopolitical Authority inGuillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth

Kristine Kotecki

The language surrounding adaptations from print texts to film reflects a valuing of printfor its originary authority. Despite this privileging of print textuality, several recent fairy-tale films blend fairy-tale motifs and references to popular film and culture in somethingmore akin to a “hypertextual” aesthetic. This article suggests that Guillermo del Toro’sPan’s Labyrinth [El laberinto del fauno] (2006) integrates motifs from multiple sources in away that benefits from elements of both print textuality and hypertextuality, a combina-tion that mediates fairy-tale content to ward explicitly sociopolitical critique.

255 Who’s Wicked Now? The Stepmother as Fairy-Tale Heroine

Christy Williams

Robert Coover’s 2004 novel, Stepmother, takes a popular fairy-tale villain, the wickedstepmother, and turns her into the protagonist of a postmodern fairy-tale novel. This ar-ticle examines the wicked stepmother figure and explores how Coover unmakes her as“wicked” through his use of narration, characterization, and metafiction. The space leftby the removal of the stepmother as a villain is filled by the fairy-tale conventions thatCoover critiques. Additionally, Stepmother functions reflexively to comment on the act ofretelling fairy tales and, furthermore, to challenge the conventions of the genre, leadingto tension among the source, its genre, and the retelling.

272 Beautiful Maidens, Hideous Suitors: Victorian Fairy Tales andthe Process of Civilization

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

This paper examines three Victorian fairy tales (Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s “Beauty and theBeast” [1867], Juliana Horatia Ewing’s “The Ogre Courting” [1871], and Mary LouisaMolesworth’s “The Brown Bull of Norrowa” [1877]) and looks at how the tales illuminatethe fairy-tale discourse on civilization. Though these three fairy tales are very different,they were written at about the same period and testify to how Victorian women writersrebelled against traditional gender roles—even when some aspects of the narratives seemto confirm the conservative civilizing process.

297 Feminist Frauds on the Fairies? Didacticism and Liberation inRecent Retellings of “Cinderella”

Karlyn Crowley and John Pennington

Engaging Dickens’s essay “Frauds on the Fairies” (1853), which attacked George Cruik-shank’s didactic moral retellings, this article interrogates the liberating potential of femi-nist rewritings. Can feminist revisions commit a fraud on the fairies by transforming talesinto didactic narratives? What exactly makes an effective revision and for what audience?We examine three contemporary authors who take on this challenge. Barbara Walker du-plicates classical tales by adding women into the standard, formal structure of the tale,thus reinforcing limited notions of gender. By doing so, she may destroy the integrity ofthe tales and commit the very fraud on the fairies that Dickens argued against. Still, theremay be audience pleasures in these formulaic tales that cannot be dismissed entirely. Wethen examine retellings by Francesca Lia Block and Emma Donoghue to suggest howfeminist and aesthetic concerns concomitantly transform fairy tales into liberatory ones.

CONTENTS

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she was a staff member of the Typenverzeichnis project that produced The Typesof International Folktales (ed. Hans-Jörg Uther, 2004).

Seth Knox is assistant professor of German in the Department of Modern Lan-guages and Cultures at Adrian College and author of Weimar Germany betweenTwo Worlds: The American and Russian Travels of Kisch, Toller, Holitscher, Gold-schmidt, and Rundt (2006). His research involves applying cognitive linguisticsto propaganda and manipulative texts.

Kristine Kotecki is a PhD student in the English department at the University ofTexas at Austin and an assistant instructor in the English and rhetoric depart-ments. She completed an MA in English (Cultural Studies) at the University ofHawai’i at Manoa and is currently studying public feelings in contemporary lit-erature and film.

Karin Kukkonen is a doctoral candidate at the University of Mainz (Ger-many) and the University of Tampere (Finland). Her doctoral thesis, titled“Storytelling beyond Postmodernism: Fables and the Fairy Tale,” explores howthe comic book series Fables engages with traditional and postmodern fairytales.

Kirsten Møllegaard, an assistant professor of English at University of Hawai’i atHilo, specializes in myth and oral tradition. Her current research focuses onretellings and stage adaptations of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales inHawai’i.

Jennifer Orme received her PhD from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, whereshe has taught in the departments of English and Women’s Studies. Her disser-tation, “ ‘Trust Me, I’m Telling You Stories’: Storytellers and Desire in Contem-porary Fairy-Tale Fiction and Film,” examines narrative desire and the repre-sentation of storytelling in fairy-tale fiction and film produced in the last thirtyyears. She has presented at conferences in the United States and the UnitedKingdom and is the assistant review editor for Marvels & Tales.

John Pennington is professor of English at St. Norbert College. He is the editorof North Wind: The Journal of George MacDonald Studies. He has co-edited a crit-ical edition of MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (2011) as well as ananthology, Behind the Back of the North Wind: Critical Essays on George MacDon-ald’s Classic Children’s Books (2011). He has also published on Lewis Carroll, J. M.Barrie, C. S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, and J. K. Rowling.

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