Clothing and Age in Fairy Tales and their Modern Adaptations (MW).

Fairy tales represent an important site where relationships between age and gender are shaped and materialized by the use of clothing. Adulthood, body and age conceptions have recently been a central focus in scholarship on children's literature. Clothing in fairy tales is informed by the undressing and dressing of characters crossing different developmental stages: Cinderella's dress not only denotes a new social boundary but depicts her as having developed into a potential mating partner for the prince. This project examines fashion in folkloric and literary fairy tales and looks at age boundaries expressed by different modes of dress. Age represents one of the cardinal formative forces in fairy tales and decides how characters unfold in the course of the narrative. It is exactly the intersection between age and gender that drives the development of the characters in literary and folk tales. Clothing not only contributes to the construction of age and gender in fairy tales, but also marks a social distinction between the child's and the adult's body (Joosen 2018). In scholarship about age and gender in fairy tales, clothing has been rarely analyzed. While Catherine Orenstein, Lori Baker-Sperry, Liz Grauerholz and Carol Scott mention that clothing becomes the agent of many kinds of magical transformations of identity, they do not look at the relationship between age and clothing and their effect on gender identity. While Vanessa Joosen examines the construction of age and bodily conceptions in fairy tales, and Christina Bacchilega and Alessandra Levorato look at gender questions in fairy tale literature, there has been a complete gap in bringing the question of age and gender into discussion when looking at the use of clothing and accessories in fairy tales. The meaning that we attach to certain bodily features is socially and culturally determined (Ferguson 1994; Fraser and Greco 2004; Lesnik-Oberstein 2007, Joosen 2018). When thinking about age in children's literature, clothing represents new social and historical benchmarks. One might think of clothing as a social skin (Joosen 2018). Textile features and bodily features come into play when it comes to reading the body in terms of the social categories that constitute stages of life (Joosen 2018). This research project offers the first systematic, international, interdisciplinary and gender-connoted study of clothing and accessories in international folkloric fairy tales. Clothing informs new developmental stages of social and gender identities in fairy tales, while undressing as a form of unmasking in fairy tales often introduces the desire to pervert the process of aging in order to become young again; it refers back to jumping nakedly into the fountain of the youth in the 18th and 19th century (Just 204). The way people use and consume clothing as a process is fairly studied in sartorial studies (Turney & Franklin 2014, Almila 2016,) but has barely been examined and connected with respect to the study of fairy tales.

Keywords:CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, AGEING PROCES, FASHION STUDIES, FOLKLORE

Disciplines:Gender studies, Modern literature, Literary criticism