Daughters of the Fairy Tale : Reclaiming the Monstrous-Mother in Contemporary Feminist Fictions

Ormond, Jo and Spooner, Catherine (2026) Daughters of the Fairy Tale : Reclaiming the Monstrous-Mother in Contemporary Feminist Fictions. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis identifies a new wave of fairy tale retellings in the 2010s that coincide with, and reflect, some of the contradictions of fourth-wave feminism. These texts across a variety of media, primarily aimed at teenage girls and young women, are often framed with an apparently feminist goal: to disrupt rigid gender binaries, challenge patriarchal violence, and amplify marginalised voices. However, they frequently complicate these aims by positioning the ‘monstrous mother’ in opposition to the youthful heroine’s empowerment through physical action. Employing Barbara Creed’s theories of the ‘monstrous feminine’ as a unifying and empowering figure across the chapters, the thesis explores how the embrace of the monstrous-feminine can function as a collective mode of resistance. It argues that it is precisely through reading monstrosity as a site of possibility that they open space for a powerful mode of feminist agency. Central to the inquiry of the thesis is to what extent texts resist, or are complicit with, prevailing ideologies and the scope they open for reclaiming the monstrous-feminine as resistance. The chapters explore this through the portrayal of sexual violence in films Snow White and the Huntsman (Sanders, 2012) and Maleficent (Stromberg, 2014); villains and victims in Helen Oyeyemi’s novels White Is for Witching (2009), Mr Fox (2011), and Boy, Snow, Bird (2014); the female body as a site of resistance in the film Red Riding Hood (Hardwicke, 2011); and participatory reinterpretation of fairy tales in Mattel’s transmedia Ever After High franchise (2013–2017). The thesis concludes that contemporary retellings achieve their most radical feminist potential when they reclaim the ‘monstrous mother’ through storytelling, embracing monstrosity as a shared condition, a form of collectivity that constitutes a more powerful mode of feminist agency than physical action alone.