Jacqueline Smith

Thesis Title: Fairy Tales en pointe: Ballets That Made the Tale & Tales That Made the Ballet

Supervisor: Professor Diane Purkiss

Doctoral Research: Inspired by my background as a dancer, my research investigates the exchange of influence between Romantic ballet and the fairy tale—with particular interest in how the nineteenth-century feminization of ballet affects the way these tales were/are constructed, portrayed, and consumed. While ballet can certainly be credited with giving new life to an old tale, like Perrault’s "La Belle au bois dormant" in Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, we must also recognize its ability to create a relatively original one: ballets such as La Sylphide (1832) and Giselle (1841) literally made, from an array of folkloric source material, the stories of undying love and unwitting betrayal that we know today. My thesis takes a categorical case-study approach grounded in fairy tale history and adaptation theory to fill in gaps left by previous attention to performance records for some of the most beloved ballets of the nineteenth century. This research advocates for a more nuanced perspective of originality in the arc of fairy tale retelling, where the unique advantages and limitations of a visual/auditory medium can have historical, canonical, and cultural significance.

Research Interests: British Romanticism/Victorianism; fairy tales & folklore; Romantic ballet history; literature in the performing arts; female authors, characters, & themes