White As Snow (Fairy Tale) Read Free

and fear that attend the queen’s realization that as she and Snow White both get older, she must lose. That is why the major feeling invoked is not jealousy but envy: to make beauty that important is to reduce the world to one in which only two people count.” The queen’s actions are attributed to vanity-run-amok, but perhaps also fear and self-preservation. She is a woman whose power derives from her beauty; it is this, the tale implies, that provides her place in the castle’s hierarchy. If the king’s
attention turns from his wife to another (or even his daughter, as it does in stories like Allerleirauh), what power is left to an aging woman? Witchcraft, the tale answers. Potions, poisons, and self-protection. In the Grimms’ tale, an enchanted mirror serves not only as a clever plot device and a useful agent of information, but as a symbolic representation of the queen’s insecurity, solipsism, and growing madness. Snow White, too, is a mirror—a reversed mirror of the queen, reflecting all she is not. Each day she becomes more lovely, more good—as the queen becomes the opposite. Snow White’s father, the king, is notable only by his absence, his apparent indifference, and his failure to protect his own child. Yet, as Angela Carter once pointed out in a comment about Cinderella’s father, the king in Snow White is also “the unmoved mover, the unseen organizing principle. Without the absent father, there would have been no story because there would have been no conflict.”
    Blood is a recurrent image in this story, warm red blood against virgin white snow. Three drops of blood symbolize Snow White’s conception. And the death of the (good) mother in childbirth. And menstruation: the beginning of both sexual maturation and the (bad) mother’s hatred. The queen demands blood on the knife of the hunter as proof that her daughter is dead, as instructed. The bloody meal she then makes of the heart carries the echo of ancient pagan beliefs in which ingesting an enemy’s flesh is a method of claiming their strength and their magic. Fairy tale writer Carrie Miner reflects that as children come forth from a mother’s womb, “it seems as though some women feel they ‘own’ their child—that it’s nothing but an extension of them. This theme is beautifully wrought in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved . The consumption of the apple by Snow White seems to mirror the stepmother’s desire to consume her daughter—to take Snow White’s very essence into herself.” The queen in Anne Sexton’s poem “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (from her brilliant collection Transformations ) cries: “Bring me her heart … and I will salt it and eat it. The hunter,
however, let his prisoner go and brought a boar’s heart back to the castle. The queen chewed it up like a cube steak. ‘Now I am the fairest,’ she said, lapping her slim white fingers.”
    Driven out of her home, out of her past, away from all that is harsh but familiar, Snow White makes her way through the wilderness to an unknown destination. This, as novelist Midori Snyder has pointed out, is often the fate of heroines in the arc of traditional folk narratives. Unlike sons who set off to win their fortune, who are journeying toward adventure, the daughters are outcasts, running away . The princes usually return at the end of the story, bringing treasure and magical brides. Princesses do not return; they must forge new lives, new alliances. Snow White’s journey begins with the huntsman—who is the queen’s henchman in the Grimms’ and the queen’s lover in other versions of the tale. He defies his mistress and does not slay the girl, but he is no true ally, merely a coward. He declares that Snow White is too beautiful to kill, but note that he does not lead her to safety; he abandons her in the forest, aware that wolves will soon finish his job. Yet even here, the girl’s blossoming beauty, the agent of all of her troubles at home, begins to