Illustrations of “Rapunzel” as Commentaries on Women’s Isolation

Schaad, Tamara

Illustrations of “Rapunzel” as Commentaries on Women’s Isolation

dc.contributor.advisor	Wagner, Martin
dc.contributor.author	Schaad, Tamara
dc.contributor.committeemember	Faivre, Cyrielle
dc.contributor.committeemember	Sigler, David
dc.contributor.committeemember	Friedman, Rachel
dc.date	2024-11
dc.date.accessioned	2024-08-14T15:53:58Z
dc.date.available	2024-08-14T15:53:58Z
dc.date.issued	2024-08-12
dc.description.abstract	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.
dc.identifier.citation	Schaad, T. (2024). Illustrations of “Rapunzel” as commentaries on women’s isolation (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1880/119392
dc.language.iso	en
dc.publisher.faculty	Graduate Studies
dc.publisher.institution	University of Calgary
dc.rights	University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.
dc.subject	Grimm Fairy Tales
dc.subject	Fairy Tales
dc.subject	Rapunzel
dc.subject	Myth and Folklore
dc.subject	Fairy Tale Illustration
dc.subject	Illustrations
dc.subject	Mieke Bal
dc.subject	Narratology
dc.subject	Focalization
dc.subject	Narrative Perspective
dc.subject	Point of View
dc.subject	German Cultural History
dc.subject	European History
dc.subject	Adrienne Rich
dc.subject	Gender
dc.subject	Women
dc.subject	Motherhood
dc.subject.classification	Literature--Germanic
dc.subject.classification	Folklore
dc.subject.classification	History--European
dc.subject.classification	Art History
dc.subject.classification	Gender Studies
dc.subject.classification	Women's Studies
dc.subject.classification	Animal Culture and Nutrition
dc.title	Illustrations of “Rapunzel” as Commentaries on Women’s Isolation
dc.type	master thesis
thesis.degree.discipline	Languages, Literatures and Cultures
thesis.degree.grantor	University of Calgary
thesis.degree.name	Master of Arts (MA)
ucalgary.thesis.accesssetbystudent	I do not require a thesis withhold – my thesis will have open access and can be viewed and downloaded publicly as soon as possible.