Fairy Tales on the Teen Screen: Rituals of Girlhood by Athena Bellas (review)

Fairy Tales on the Teen Screen by Athena Bellas looks at how television and film of the past decade have created subversive and empowering images of young womanhood. This book provides a well-researched look at how the modern popular media has portrayed women who are in the liminal phase of their teenage years. Bellas uses a postfeminist and folkloric lens to examine how contemporary teenage-driven films and television shows have shifted classic fairy-tale narratives to represent a subversion of traditional gender roles and stereotypes. Looking at contemporary television and film, such as the Cw drama Gossip Girl (2007–12) or The Twilight Saga films (2008–12), Bellas shows how these texts shift the rite-of-passage narratives embedded in classic fairy tales and enable the protagonists to become more agentic in their narratives. Deep analysis of each text is combined with historical backgrounds on various iterations of the folktales to which Bellas is comparing them, as well as scholarship on fairy tales, gender, and media studies. Her attention to detail, as well as her ability to outline overarching themes, enables Bellas to deconstruct the fairy-tale genre through contemporary trends in popular culture and gender. In this way, Fairy Tales on the Teen Screen feels both grounded and relevant.

Bellas begins with Catherine Hardwicke's Little Red Riding Hood (2011), analyzing how the film provides an alternative, more powerful version of female adolescence than the Grimm's or Charles Perrault's versions. The forest serves as a liminal space where the protagonist, Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), can expose and rework "dominant patriarchal narratives" (39). Hardwicke, Bellas argues, employs gothic genre to expose the darkness as the suffering that women experience when forced to follow traditional gender dynamics. She also cites Valerie's voice narrating the story as a way to give her a voice (marking her as more active) and inverting the male gaze. These themes of agency, gaze, voice, and subversion of patriarchy are common throughout all the texts that Bellas analyzes. As such, this works as a strong initial chapter that focuses on deconstructing a text and serves as a prototype for the remainder of the book.

Chapter 3 examines how The Twilight Saga films incorporate the Sleeping Beauty tale in a way that undercuts the traditional, heteronormative ending of the films. Looking at Bella's (Kristen Stewart) fantasy sequences, Bellas argues, casts Edward (Robert Pattinson) in the role of the beauty and makes Bella more active in the story. In Bella's fantasies about the beautified male vampire, the male gaze is switched, and Bella delays her route to wife and mother, though she ends there eventually. In this way, Bella has inverted the Sleeping Beauty narrative and become an agentic heroine.

Bellas uses the teen drama Pretty Little Liars (2010–17) as an example of Perrault's Bluebeard tale as a locked-room mystery that differs from other modern iterations because it focuses on a group of girls versus a lone female. She cites the girl-group communitas as being a primary impetus that enables the protagonists to "enact socially meaningful action against the status quo" (108). The television soap format allows for a retelling in which the group of girls are not punished for taking action in solving their friend's disappearance. She also examines the way that Bluebeard's bride and the female detective figure are rewritten into resistant heroines who are empowered by their support of one another.

Chapter 5 employs Sarah Projansky's feminist optic to look at performance in the television show Gossip Girl. Rewriting the Cinderella story, Bellas posits that Gossip Girl uses sartorial transformations and masquerade to disrupt the heteronormative, feminine figure of other iterations of Cinderella. The beautification process of Cinderella so as to secure a heterosexual coupling in most versions is rewritten in Gossip Girl by the DIY fashions created by the female protagonists. This enables them to employ more agency while also publicly challenging the male...