Browsing by Author "Schaad, Tamara"

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    Illustrations of “Rapunzel” as Commentaries on Women’s Isolation
    (2024-08-12) Schaad, Tamara; Wagner, Martin; Faivre, Cyrielle; Sigler, David; Friedman, Rachel
    The Covid-19 pandemic has brought social isolation to the forefront of public debate. Yet, social isolation is not a recent phenomenon and understanding its history can enrich the current debate. Contributing to our knowledge of the different ways social isolation has been evaluated in the past, my thesis analyzes the historical illustrations of what is, arguably, the most widely distributed German literary text on women’s social isolation, the Grimm fairy tale “Rapunzel.” My corpus includes roughly 250 illustrations from 68 German-language editions of the Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen or German-language editions based on this larger work, ranging from 1857 to 2021. While scholars have commented on the importance of isolation as a motif in “Rapunzel,” they have paid little attention to the history of illustrations of this fairy tale or to how this history reveals changing notions of women’s isolation. This gap is all the more striking as the importance of book illustrations, in general, is now widely recognized through major studies by Bill Katz, John Harthan, and others. In my thesis, I seek to establish, first, to what extent social isolation was made thematic in the illustrations, and second, how the portrayal of social isolation changed over time. I argue that recent illustrations portray Rapunzel’s isolation more prominently and recognize it as more problematic than older illustrations and that the depiction of Rapunzel’s isolation has thus changed significantly over time. These findings can shed light on the different understanding of women’s isolation and provide an important paradigm in our understanding of the social construction of women’s rights and of gender. Although the cultural history of women’s social isolation over the past 164 years cannot be studied completely through the reception history of any one text alone, the widely distributed tale of “Rapunzel” does provide one important case study of how the understanding of women’s isolation has developed.