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For every hero, there is a villain, and for every villain there should be a story. But, how much do we really know about the villain? Gender and Female Villains in 21st Century Fairy Tale Narratives: From Evil Queens to Wicked Witches seeks to fill a gap in the field of gender representation and character evolution, with chapters centred on female villains in the fairy tale narratives of the twenty-first-century media.

This book aims to bring together a collection of interdisciplinary research on the evolution of female villains from television and film, the impact of these characters on filmmaking, storytelling, narrative structures and considerations with regard to gender representations.

Within the realm of fairy tale study, the characters of princesses, princes, heroes and the damsels-in-distress have been researched extensively. However, the female villain has rarely been the central focus of academic study. This book is the first collection of chapters based on female villains in the twenty-first century fairy tale narratives.

A strange phenomenon among women writers of the late eighteenth century, both conservative and liberal minded, was the predominance of female villains in their novels. While this can be seen as an after-effect of masculine patriarchal discourse, particularly for those women writers who possessed a more religious-based ideology, why was it prevalent among feminist writers of the time who should have been aware of misogynistic stereotypes? Two such writers who emulated this strange paradox were Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith. Both these women had been vilified by the Anti-Jacobin British 18th press as notorious and corrupt ‘female philosophers’ who followed in the footsteps of Mary Wollstonecraft. This chapter will conduct a historical feminist close comparative reading of Robinson's novel, Walsingham, and Smith's novel, The Young Philosopher, based on feminist scholarship on eighteenth-century female writers. It will examine how the female villains in the novels overpowered even the male antagonists and were often the cause behind the misfortunes, directly or indirectly, of the heroines/heroes. While these villains did serve as warnings against inappropriate behaviour, they illustrated the disaster for women when there is a lack of female community. Specifically, in the case of Robinson, her Sadean villains illustrated that no one is spared from the corruption of power and that the saintly female figure is nothing but an illusion of the male imagination. They were fallen Lucifers, rebels who relished in their freedom and power despite their damnation and punishment. The patriarchal system was temporarily demolished by them.

In this chapter, I explore how the queer-coding, gendering and policing of the monstrous female villain figure of twenty-first-century fairy tale media is interrogated and renegotiated in the transformative narrative tradition of femslash fan-fiction. With fan studies often focusing on the most popular, vocal fandom spaces and cultures, femslash (female-female) fan-fiction has been undertheorized in academic scholarship, just as queer female desire is routinely invalidated by the mainstream media properties that inspire femslash fans (Cranz, 2016; Gonzalez, 2016; Ng & Russo, 2017; Stanfill, 2017). By romantically and sexually pairing female villains with the heroines against whom they are canonically cast as antagonists, femslash fans of Once Upon a Time and The Devil Wears Prada subvert the heteronormative and anti-feminist plot machinery that pits women against each other. The engagement of femslash fan authors with the depiction of the characters Regina Mills and Miranda Priestly as literal and figurative ‘Evil Queens’ in their source texts highlights the extent to which both women are situated as ‘villains’ because of their position as ‘unhappy queers’ who obstruct heteronormative happy endings (Ahmed, 2010; Pande & Moitra, 2017; Strauch, 2017). While in the Swan Queen fiction somewhere, someone must know the ending (maleficently, 2012), Regina is only the Evil Queen in her son's imagination, as he tries to make sense of her infidelity, The Lily and the Crown (Telanu, 2013) recasts Miranda Priestly as Pirate Queen Mír, guilty of mass-murder, rather than merely acerbic barbs (as in the film). Through close readings, I argue that the way these texts ask their readers to consider the limits of both villains' desirability, by playing with the terms of their respective criminality, shows the extent to which nuancing and negotiating the ‘evil’ of these ‘queens’ is structurally embedded in these femslash fandoms. The femslash fannish investment these texts reflect, in both the figure of the queer female villain and those who desire her, proposes an alternative version of happiness to the heteronormative happy ending, one that does not attenuate the queer codes that position these ‘Evil Queens’ as monster-outsiders to it, but embraces that monstrosity as a site of power, progress and futurity.

Fairy tale narratives have placed significant emphasis on depicting female and male protagonists through a binary understanding of gender roles. Major male characters are portrayed with traits associated with hegemonic masculinity, reinforcing concepts that uplift masculine superiority, such as independence, exercise of power, authority, and strength. Conversely, female protagonists are often represented in ways that emphasise hegemonic femininity, aiming to disempower and marginalise them by highlighting traditional feminine traits like passivity, dependence, and helplessness. Any female characters deviating from these norms and depicted as powerful and dominant are positioned as villains in relation to the main female protagonist, embodying non-hegemonic feminine characteristics.

The representation of women in these ways primarily serves one purpose: to uphold masculine superiority. Hegemonic femininity portrays women as damsels in distress, awaiting rescue. On the other hand, non-hegemonic femininity manifests through villainous women performing antagonistic acts towards conforming female protagonists, thus forcing them into a helpless position. This is the critical juncture where the main male protagonists' step in – rescuing the helpless female protagonists and defeating the female villains – reinforcing masculine values in both scenarios.

However, the 21st century fairy tale narratives have challenged this ideology. I argue that recent fairy tale narratives have adopted the technique of ‘Feminist Quest Heroine’ to challenge and deconstruct male characters' heroism through the re-portrayal of female and male characters. The selected fairy tale narratives include Frozen (2013) and a comparative analysis of Sleeping Beauty (1959) and its cinematic adaptation Maleficent (2014). The findings suggest that these fairy tales rework the representation of male characters in three ways: the application of post-feminist masculinity, the modification of heteronormative temporality, and the prominence of sisterhood upon the critique of patriarchy.

The mere sight of Disney villains have struck fear into the hearts of many a child. From the Evil Queen, to Maleficent, to Ursula. From the black flowing capes to the ashen skin and pointy horns, the aesthetic of these villains alone is often enough to evoke a sense of dread in the audience. Ursula from The Little Mermaid (1989) may not be officially a queen in the Disney universe, but she is a notorious villain amongst fans. Although The Little Mermaid was released in 1989, the film, and thus Ursula, have a fanbase that has evolved and grown up to now, despite the film not being remade into a live-action version as yet. This chapter will analyse the comments of three fan-made YouTube videos regarding Ursula, and will examine the fan comments, with specific focus on the comments regarding Ursula's physicality or any positive comments about her. This will show fan positivity towards a villainous character, despite what may be depicted as a negative body image. Ursula, an octopus, looks quite different from other villains. The primary research methodology will include participatory culture and discourse analysis in order to understand why fans adore her, and how they do not necessarily accept her as a villain, but that there is an outpouring of positivity towards her body image.

The fairy tale is a genre popularly associated with characters that inhabit opposite extremes in the axis of good and evil, such as the brave prince, the beautiful princess and the wicked witch. From the tension between the two extremes emerges the familiar narrative: as Dallas Baker has remarked, the death of the monstrous villain often precedes ‘heterosexual fulfilment’ (2010, p. 8), and thus the classical script is laid out.

This chapter will investigate how lesbian and bisexual retellings deconstruct that script and collapse the insurmountable distance between good and evil, hero and villain, queering fairy tale paradigms and upending genre expectations. Sam Miller declared in 2011 that ‘there are no more queer monsters’ (p. 222) in horror films, making the fact that they still lurk in fairy tale retellings all the more remarkable, although they often do so disguised as, or otherwise fused with, well-known childhood heroines. In this way, Lauren Beukes’s The Hidden Kingdom (2013) aligns a bisexual Rapunzel with Sadako, the vengeful spirit from Japanese horror film Ringu (1998); The Sleeper and the Spindle (Gaiman, 2014) features a Snow White who must save the Sleeping Beauty, here an evil witch guarded by zombie-like sleepers; and ABC's Once Upon a Time (2011–2018) features a bisexual Little Red Riding Hood who transforms into a dangerous werewolf. This chapter thus explores the significance of resilient, queer monstrosity in contemporary fairy tales, these authors' interpretation of the conservative archetype of the queer villain, and the potential of these retellings to enact subversive fantasies of empowerment for queer readers.

The Wicked Queen in both the Grimm and Disney versions of Snow White exists as a cautionary tale of female vanity. Despite these nefarious beginnings, contemporary versions of the character in children's and young adult fiction reimagine the Wicked Queen as pitiable. She is still a villain, but her actions are explained as the result of loneliness, parental abuse, and a persistent belief that she is not beautiful enough to be worthy of love. This change in the Wicked Queen's motivations from innate to circumstantial is reflected in the tagline for Valentino's Disney Villains series, ‘Evil Is Made, Not Born’. My reading of these new sympathetic depictions of the Wicked Queen builds on Cristina Santos's discussion of patriarchy and reproduction, as well as other critical discussions of fairy tales and gendered bodies. Focusing specifically on the magic mirror as metaphor, I discuss these new depictions of the Wicked Queen in the context of body dysmorphia. While these novels undo the good/bad and maiden/crone dichotomies of the fairy tale, these readings also shift much of the blame for the Wicked Queen's actions from innate failings of her gender (vanity) to the cultural structures surrounding female body image (dysmorphia). As contemporary reworkings of fairy tales seek to disrupt these narrative patterns and move away from harmful portrayals of gender, sexuality, aging, and physical disability, they risk falling into existing patterns linking mental illness to violence or evil.

The Evil Queen is a staple character in many fairy tales, but perhaps one of her most famous incarnations is as Snow White's evil stepmother. In order to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of gender and morality in this story, this chapter analyses three different versions of the fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: the Brothers Grimm's nineteenth-century text, Disney's 1930s film adaptation, and The Snow Queen's Shadow, a contemporary novel based loosely on a mix of well-known European fairy tales. The chapter explores what, exactly, marks the Queen as evil in the different versions, how her morality interacts with questions of gender and cultural context, and how the different versions portray the relationship – and often the moral dichotomy – between the Evil Queen and Snow White.