Where do modern retellings of classic fairytales stick to their source texts and where do they differ? Inspired by ABC’s fairytale drama Once Upon a Time, my reimagining project was born. I originally became obsessed with Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen character both through this television series and through the character’s titular story, and after that, grew to love many of his tales from the nineteenth century. It has been two hundred years since Andersen was writing, and thus society has changed in ways potentially unimaginable in Andersen’s time. I have taken three of his stories— “The Snow Queen,” “The Little Mermaid,” and “Thumbelina”—and analyzed them through feminist and queer theory. With this knowledge, I have written my own modern, updated versions of these three stories utilizing feminist and queer lenses to increase the intersectionality in each story. The end goal is to increase intersectionality in fairy tales because they, as worlds meant to represent our own in uncanny manners, do not traditionally accomplish this
