CHAPTER 10: The Strongest of the Fairies: Reworking Gender and Villainy in Walt Disney's Maleficent.

In keeping with feminist critiques of the representation of women as evil, together with a growing tendency to humanize villains and give them psychological complexity, some recent adaptations of fairy tales--both literary and cinematic--retell the stories from the point of view of the female villain. The reworking of this fairy-tale character is most patent in the case of 'Sleeping Beauty', whose villainess has evolved from nameless character in Charles Perrault's 'Sleeping Beauty in the Woods' (1697) to title character in Walt Disney's 2014 film Maleficent. The purpose of this chapter is to examine Disney's characterization of the evil fairy in both the 1959 and the 2014 adaptations, as well as the ideological shift between both versions. We examine how, in an attempt to satisfy the expectations of modern audiences who demand more complex and positive female characters, in Maleficent Disney revises its own previous adaptation of 'Sleeping Beauty', which polarized women into virtuous but passive, and active but evil. On the other hand, we also argue that this new revision of the evil fairy is not without its problems, for it seems to be part of a trend that might be leading us towards undesirable justifications of villainy in fiction for the young. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]