On Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Media by Claudia Schwabe

Abstract

On Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Media by Claudia Schwabe Johanna M. Broussard (bio) Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Media by Claudia Schwabe. Wayne State University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780814346013. Hardcover, paperback. It is good to be evil. At least that is what many villains who enter the cultural zeitgeist of the United States have learned in recent decades. From the cool, enigmatic power of Darth Vader to the sexy vengeance of Maleficent to the charming, seductiveness of Lucifer Morningstar, U.S. popular media is filled with villains as popular and beloved as they are evil. However, as fairy tales and myths have routinely depicted, villains and monsters are markers of otherness—an otherness to be avoided, to be feared, and, often, to be destroyed. The villains mentioned here fit the traditional role of “evil other,” and yet something about these individuals and their monstrous kin has earned admiration and sympathy from U.S. audiences. In Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale [End Page 287] Figures in American Pop Culture, Claudia Schwabe sets out to answer the question of why this has occurred. Schwabe begins by discussing the impetus for writing this book: seeing Mattel’s collection of “freaky fab” Monster High Dolls, which depict high school girls who are related to the famous monsters of myth, legend, and literature, such as the young vampire Draculaura, which led to an inquiry on the marketability of monstrosity as “cool.” Her work produced a study in four parts, each focusing on U.S. film and television adaptations of a particular monster type from German folkloric and literary fairy tales of the Romantic period, such as the automaton/golem, the witch/evil queen, the big bad wolf, and the dwarf, respectively. And while each chapter has its own themes, the central theme Schwabe discusses is how U.S. adaptations often focus on humanizing and redeeming these monstrous, “evil” figures. Drawing on both her German heritage and her work as a German scholar, Schwabe’s book has many strengths, including the depth of research into the prevalence of tales involving these creatures in both the German canon and in U.S. popular media, well-written prose and carefully crafted arguments, and the meticulousness of her analysis. Her chapter on the automatons reveals how the once-menacing other that has an uncanny but unnatural resemblance to a living person has been rehabilitated into a sympathetic and tragic figure (Edward Scissorhands), a lens through which to view sexism and male chauvinism (Stepford Wives), and a reminder of anti-Semitism (The X-Files); the creation that once stood as a monster to destroy humanity through its violence now destroys humanity through a revelation of our own monstrosity. In her chapter on witches and evil queens, her analysis depicts an almost chronological shift in U.S. perception of the figure from the evil hag as presented in Disney’s Snow White, to a complicated and insecure figure in Mirror, Mirror, to a multifaceted and redeemable character in Once Upon a Time. Schwabe argues that this shift in depiction rises from the “hypothesis that villains are made and not born,” making it conceivable that they could be “unmade,” or redeemed (146). Her chapter on the Big Bad Wolf focuses on themes of “de-cursing” the wolf and lycanthrope and recasting their otherness in positive ways. Her chapter on dwarves casts recent changes to their depiction, such as Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, in light of the U.S. civil rights movement and the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, arguing that recent depictions of dwarves praise U.S. diversity through a blending of ordinary and extraordinary physicality. [End Page 288] While the breadth of texts analyzed is a strength of Schwabe’s book, it also leads into one if its weaknesses: depth of analysis. Though there is merit and logic to focusing on film and television adaptations, questions arise as to how Schwabe’s analysis would hold when such characters are adapted for use in comic books, video games, or tabletop role-playing games. While the book does an admirable job of providing deep readings and analyses of...