White As Snow (Fairy Tale) Read Free Page A

assert itself as a form of power in the world of men. Beauty aids her once again when she finds the house of the dwarves and falls asleep in one of their little beds. Anger toward the unknown intruder turns to wonder as they watch her sleep; enchanted by physical perfection, the dwarfs decide she may stay with them. This was later revised by the Grimms, and Snow White must consent to a long list of household duties before they’ll agree to her stay. (The Disney version takes this one step further, and Snow White does the work unasked.) The change not only emphasizes the virtues of a proper work ethic, but it leads attention away from the sheer peculiarity of a ripe young girl keeping house with seven burly, earthy, and clearly unmarried men. Bruno Bettelheim, author of The Uses of Enchantment, who looked at fairy tales through a Freudian lens, claimed the dwarfs “were not men in any sexual sense—their way of life, their interest in material goods to the
exclusion of love, suggest a pre-Oedipal existence.” This reading of the tale ignores the fact that the dwarves take the place of robbers or human miners found in older renditions of the story. Some of the older narratives assure us that the robbers “loved the girl as they would a sister,” while others are mute on the subject, or else intriguingly ambiguous.
    Soon, the queen learns that Snow White still lives. She determines to kill her young rival herself. Here the queen stands revealed as a full-fledged witch, sorceress, or alchemist, creating potions in a “secret, lonely room where no one ever came.” Disguised as an old peddler woman, she sells the girl poisoned bodice laces, then combs her hair with a poisoned comb. After each of her visits, the dwarfs return home to find their young housekeeper dead. “Why couldn’t she heed our warnings?” asked “The Seventh Dwarf” in a poem by Gwen Strauss (from Trail of Stones). “Time and again we told her to stay inside the house, to do her tasks away from the door. We urged her daily, but she was a flitting butterfly … . She was driven by something.” In imagery old as Adam and Eve, the disguised queen comes one last time to tempt Snow White with a crisp, red apple. “Do you think I did not know her … ?” writes Delia Sherman, explaining the princess’s point of view in her heartbreaking poem “From Snow White to the Prince” (published in The Armless Maiden ). “Of course I took her poisoned gifts. I wanted to feel her hands coming out of my hair, to let her lace me up, to take an apple from her hand, a smile from her lips, as when I was a child.” In Sherman’s poem, Snow White is every abused child who ever longed for a parent’s love. “Don’t curse me, Mother,” echoes Olga Broumas in her poem “Snow White” (in Beginning with O ). “ … No salve, no ointment in a doctor’s tube, no brew in a witch’s kettle, no lover’s mouth, no friend or god could heal me if your heart turned in anathema, grew stone against me.”
    In other versions of the story, taking on local coloration as it travels around the world, the princess is slain through poisoned
flowers, cake, wine, pomegranate seeds, a golden ring, a corset, shoes, coins, or the ink of a letter. The dwarfs (robbers, miners, or monks) can revive her once, and even twice; but with the third act of poisoning, she seems indisputably dead. Her body (too beautiful to bury, and strangely incorruptible) is then carefully, almost fetishistically displayed in a clear glass casket—or else on a woodland bier, or a four-poster bed, or a shrine surrounded by candles. (In other variants, she is thrown into the sea, abandoned on a doorstep or windowsill, sent to the fairies, stolen by gypsies, even carried on a reindeer’s antlers.) There are various ways Snow White’s spell of death/sleep is broken, but generally not with a kiss. (That seems to be a modern addition.) The poisoned item must be removed, usually by pure accident. In the chaste