Variations on Snow White

Of the four readings of the Snow White tale, three are narratives reflecting traditional cultural views and one is a poem presenting the modern feminist view.  The traditional tale of The Young Slave (1634) reflects a theological cultural context as Lilla, the unmarried sister of an Italian baron, becomes pregnant by something akin to Immaculate Conception.  Unfortunately, a fairy inadvertently curses her daughter Lisa and she dies at seven years of age.  Although Lilla supernaturally preserves Lisa’s body in seven caskets of crystal, she dies of grief a year later and entrusts the key to the room holding Lisa’s casket to her brother for safekeeping.  It is the baron’s wife, “impelled by jealousy, consumed by curiosity” who ironically frees Lisa from death and then makes her a slave.  When the Baron overhears Lisa revealing her true identity to a doll he has given her, and hears her threat to kill herself, the Baron knocks down the door and rescues her from suicide, an irreparable sin in Catholicism.  He then orders a great banquet to welcome her home (reminiscent of the biblical parable of the prodigal son) and as his guests listen to her story they weep at the cruelty of his wife and rejoice when the Baron drives her out of the household.

There is vivid cultural imagery and symbolism threaded throughout the second traditional version, Snow White (1812) by the Grimm Brothers.  In the initial scene, a queen sits looking out from an ebony-framed window at the snow and wishes for a child “as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the window frame.”  The cultural meaning of color in this scene is thought-provoking; white for purity, red for blood or danger, and black for mourning or death.  The queen gives birth to Snow White shortly after the wish scene and then she dies, her daughter then governed by a beautiful, vain stepmother who turns “green with envy” (which the Disney version uses to great effect) when Snow White’s beauty exceeds her own, according to the Magic Mirror. Snow White finds refuge when she happens upon the home of her surrogate family, the seven dwarfs, but because she fails to heed their warning not to let anyone in the house while they’re away, she falls prey to the devices of her stepmother disguised as an old peddler woman.  As in The Slave Girl version, Snow White’s body does not decay in death and this allows the possibility for the love of the dwarfs and a prince to free her from death.  Again, the stepmother/queen is publicly humiliated but in Grimms’ version, she also dies a grotesque, painful death as a result of her cruel vanity.

The longest of the traditional tales, Lasair Gheug, the King of Ireland’s Daughter (1891) introduces a cultural stock villain of Scottish lore, the eachrais urlair, an evil old woman who, together with stepmother/queen, plots to kill the king’s daughter out of greed.  There are many twists and turns in the story, but in the end, Lasair Gheug devises a way to reveal how the eachrais urlair and stepmother/queen have framed her and she publicly exposes her stepmother as a “monster” who is then “burnt in fire,” a type of hellish punishment similar to the Grimm Brothers’ red-hot iron shoes.  These traditional narratives fulfill Aristotle’s definition of an effective narrative, discussed by Culler on pages 84-85 of Literary Theory, by providing “an end relating back to the beginning … an end that indicates what has happed to the desire that led to the events the story narrates.”

In contrast, Anne Sexton’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a modern feminist critique, parodies the cultural contexts of the traditional versions.  As Barry points out in his chapter on feminist criticism, feminists seek to expose the “mechanisms of patriarchy” in the cultural representations of women in literature and call into question those symbols they believe associated with authority, fathers, and repression.  Sexton views Snow White as a “lovely number,” a virginal china doll, and likens her whiteness to “a bonefish,” something stiff and dead.  In her poem she paints the proud stepmother/queen as a victim of a patriarchal society’s demand for the prize of physical beauty; a demand that transforms her into a ghoul “lapping her slim white fingers” as she chews what she believes is Snow White’s heart “like a cube steak.”  In other modern cultural references that disrupt the reader’s traditional images of the tale, she substitutes an Ace Bandage for the Grimms’ corset laces and red-hot roller skates for their red-hot iron shoes.  The feminist moral to Sexton’s tale appears to be that both Snow White and her stepmother are captive to the patriarchal voice of the mirror, a cultural script in which feminist critics Susan Gilbert and Susan Gubar view “women (as) enmeshed in a discourse connecting beauty, death, and femininity,” on page 77 of Classic Fairy Tales.