Woman Hating Read Free Page B

fair, 'tis true, But Snow-white fairer is than you. ” 4 Snow-white was 7 years old.
    The queen became “yellow and green with envy, and from that hour her heart turned against Snow-white, and she hated her. And envy and pride like ill weeds grew in her heart higher every day, until she had no peace.... ” 5
    Now, we all know what nations will do to achieve peace, and the queen was no less resourceful (she would have made an excellent head of state). She ordered a huntsman to take Snow-white to the forest, kill her, and bring back her heart. The huntsman, an uninspired good guy, could not kill the sweet young thing, so he turned her loose in the forest, killed a boar, and took its heart back to the queen. The heart was “salted and cooked, and the wicked woman ate it up, thinking that there was an end of Snow-white. ” 6
    Snow-white found her way to the home of the 7 dwarfs, who told her that she could stay with them “if you will keep our house for us, and cook, and wash, and make the beds, and sew and knit, and keep everything tidy and clean. ” 7 They simply adored her.
    The queen, who can now be called with conviction thewickedqueen, found out from her mirror that Snow-white was still alive and fairer than she. She tried several times to kill Snow-white, who fell into numerous deep sleeps but never quite died. Finally the wicked queen made a poisoned apple and induced the ever vigilant Snow-white to bite into it. Snow-white did die, or became more dead than usual, because the wicked queen’s mirror then verified that she was the fairest in the land.
    The dwarfs, who loved Snow-white, could not bear to bury her under the ground, so they enclosed her in a glass coffin and put the coffin on a mountaintop. The heroic prince was just passing that way, immediately fell in love with Snow-white-under-glass, and bought her (it? ) from the dwarfs who loved her (it? ). As servants carried the coffin along behind the prince’s horse, the piece of poisoned apple that Snow-white had swallowed “flew out of her throat. ” 8 She soon revived fully, that is to say, not much. The prince placed her squarely in the “it” category, and marriage in its proper perspective too, when he proposed wedded bliss —“I would rather have you than anything in the world. ” 9 The wicked queen was invited to the wedding, which she attended because her mirror told her that the bride was fairer than she. At the wedding “they had ready red-hot iron shoes, in which she had to dance until she fell down dead. ” 10
    Cinderella’s mother-situation was the same. Her biological mother was good, pious, passive, and soon dead. Her stepmother was greedy, ambitious, and ruthless. Her ambition dictated that her own daughters make good marriages. Cinderella meanwhile was forced to do heavy domestic work, and when her work was done, her stepmother would throw lentils into the ashes of the stove and make Cinderella separate the lentils from the ashes. The stepmother’s malice toward Cinderella was not free-floating and irrational. On the contrary, her own social validation was contingent on the marriages she made for her own daughters. Cinderella was a real threat to her. Like Snow-white’s stepmother, for whom beauty was power and to be the most beautiful was to be the most powerful, Cinderella’s stepmother knew how the social structure operated, and she was determined to succeed on its terms.
    Cinderella’s stepmother was presumably motivated by maternal love for her own biological offspring. Maternal love is known to be transcendent, holy, noble, and unselfish. It is coincidentally also a fundament of human (male-dominated) civilization and it is the real basis of human (male-dominated) sexuality:
[When the prince began to search for the woman whose foot would fit the golden slipper] the two sisters were very glad, because they had pretty feet. The eldest went to her room to try on the shoe, and her mother stood by. But she could not get her