In both “Schneewittchen” and Disney’s Snow White, the queen and Snow White are constrained neatly within the virgin/whore dichotomy, that ubiquitous trope found time and again in popular and religious culture and even the American legal system (Fourie 324, Christ 90, Kaye 147). In this over-simplistic view of femininity, female characters are either entirely moral (virgin) or entirely immoral (whore). Neither Snow White nor the queen is restrained to these roles in “Snow, Glass, Apples.” Gaiman rejects Snow White, the virginal heroine and replaces her with a vampiric child villainess. The queen, on the other hand, provides an image of companionate marriage. She is strength without dominance, power without the repression of the feminine.
It’s important to note that fairy tales generally do not engage in complex character development. The female characters tend to either be helpless princesses and village girls in need of rescue or witches and wicked stepmothers. Their male counterparts are not exactly multifaceted either. Male protagonists tend to be unnamed and are “defined by their parentage (Miller’s son), their station in life (the prince), by their relationship to their siblings (the youngest brother), by their level of intelligence (the simpleton), or by physical deformities (Thumbling)” (Tatar, Hard Facts 85). Fairy-tale heroes may be clever or stupid but they inevitably succeed by demonstrating compassion and humility (Tatar, Hard Facts 89). Fairy-tale heroines must also be humble, but where the heroes demonstrate this through an act of kindness (usually to an animal) the heroines “undergo a process of humiliation and defeat that ends with a rapid rise in social status through marriage but that also signals a loss of pride and abdication of power” (Tatar, Hard Facts 94). Even if a fairy-tale heroine is “as good as she is beautiful,” she must prove herself through a demeaning ordeal that often involves domestic labor (Tatar, Hard Facts 87). Only upon the completion of these tasks is she rescued and given the reward that awaits all good virgins: marriage.
The whore, on the other hand, is “full of artful tricks strung like beads by the hundred on every hair of her head: fraud is her mother, lying her nurse, flattery her tutor, dissimulation her councilor & deceit her companion, so that she twists and turns man to her whim” (Basile, qtd in Tatar, Off with Their Heads 112). Gaiman’s princess is the duplicitous woman that Basile describes in such florid detail. What Basile misses and Gaiman makes evident is that for a woman to be viewed as the ideal, she must engage in this duplicity and deceit.
There are moments in “Snow, Glass, Apples” when the princess does appear to be the archetypal whore. While in the forest, the twelve-year-old princess approaches the fire of a monk who is traveling through the woods. The monk beckons to her and throws a penny her way. She catches it and he “pull[s] at the rope around his waist,” until his robe falls open (Gaiman 332). In the guise of a prostitute, she sinks “her teeth deep into his breast” to feed on him and “a thin blackish liquid began to dribble from between her legs” (Gaiman 332).
Though the princess accepts money from the monk in the forest in exchange for a sexual act, her role as prostitute is as false as her physical appearance of innocence. In a phallocentric economy, the whore exists to be desired and to create desire, but without desire of her own. The princess reveals what patriarchy fears: female desire exists and is not phallocentric; it exceeds male desire. The princess plays at the role of prostitute to entrap the monk, just as she played at the role of the innocent child to overcome the queen in her bedchamber. She steals the monk’s life, his strength, for her own survival. She engages in sexual acts for her own end, neither for male pleasure nor for procreation. As she drinks the monk’s blood, the patriarchal anxieties of the “the dark continent of woman’s sexuality” drip from her abyss (Freud 212).
Gaiman deconstructs the virgin/whore dichotomy through this revelation that the virgin is a whore. The princess exposes that patriarchy does not valorize physical or moral purity, but cold, lifeless chastity. In order to be the “fairest one of all,” one is necessarily dehumanized. The ideal woman is nothing more than a pale, submissive body unblemished by desire of its own—a body that ensures the primacy of male potency through an absence of vitality. Whether deified or demonized, the “fairest one of all” is dehumanized. She reveals the consequences of idealizing a kind of virginity based not on purity or chastity of the mind, but instead upon the absence of passion in women. She is a body devoid of substance, the cold, female body that exists only by virtue of complete reliance upon the male. Though the princess is not passive, she and queen are the active drivers of the plot, her vitality is necessarily parasitic. Without the patriarchal phallus—that is, without the power she siphons from her father’s body—she would fall “prey” to the Queen (not once, but twice). However, because the princess embodies the ideal virgin of patriarchy, she attracts the quintessential patriarchal male and with him is finally able to overthrow the Queen.
The queen inhabits one of the most pervasive prostitute roles in fairy tales: the stepmother. As a bastardization of the role of mother, the stepmother is always already wicked. Snow White’s stepmother is “a beautiful lady, but proud and domineering” (Grimm 244). The Queen’s sins are authoritarianism and self-confidence—both traditionally masculine traits. Importantly, these “flaws” are identified in contrast to her physical appearance. The Queen is “a beautiful lady” the text states, but this attribute is then qualified with “but...” While fairy-tale village girls are often humble by nature, the Queen displays the “[a]rrogance, haughtiness, and pride ... runs in the blood of most royal fairy-tale women, and motivates a plot that relentlessly degrades women and declares them to be social misfits until they have positioned themselves as wives in subordinate roles to husbands” (Tatar, Off with Their Heads 105). Physical appearance and demeanor are not enough to decide the fate of a woman in a fairy tale. If she is able to be humbled and will submit to her husband by the end of the tale, she will get her happy ending.
Gaiman’s queen, however, is damned because she will never be meek. Her death and the ceremony that surrounds it is an exercise in humiliation to punish her for refusing to defer in life. She was not a weakened widow, but instead a wise ruler, both fair and just. Yet, in the end it does not matter how “fair” she is. Justness, wisdom, compassion, and even beauty are not enough to compensate for the grievous sin of female self-sufficiency. While it is her behavior, dangerously close to masculine, that incurs censure, it is her envy of Snow White’s beauty that drives her to evil actions in both Snow White and “Schneewittchen.” In Gaiman’s retelling, the idealization of Snow White’s appearance is a lie fabricated by the young princess as a cover story for the more sinister tension between the two female characters. It is not the attention or approval of the absent husband/father that the queen and princess struggle for, but the power and authority reserved for the paterfamilias and king. The two women are fighting for the right to authority because fairy-tale women have no hope of self-rule unless they are able to rule others.
While Gaiman reveals the limits of patriarchy in the character of the princess, it is the stepmother who offers a view of another structure entirely. The queen, like her stepdaughter, had been a fairy-tale princess, although more in the tradition of Cinderella than Snow White. She was a village girl born to humble origins who, through enchantments, was able to change her status. Though her life followed the upward trajectory of her fairy tale sisters, she was not humbled through humiliation like Cinderella or stolen as a baby like Rapunzel.
The queen was once poor, but beautiful, and skilled in the art of scrying. She had seen the king in her visions for years before he rode through her town, lifted her onto his “high horse,” and took her virginity (his “king’s right”), then ushered the young beauty to his castle and married her (Gaiman 325). She was her own fairy godmother and her own savior. In Gaiman’s telling, she may have been proud, and that inevitably is her downfall, but she had plenty of reasons to be pleased with her accomplishments. The queen advances in the phallocentric economy by enac
ting expected feminine roles, such as that of the virginal village girl and the dutiful wife. Yet, she goes beyond these roles and maintains her independence. She keeps her own chambers after wedding the king, and it is clear that she considered sex with her husband not a conjugal duty but an act of giving and receiving pleasure. Additionally, she insists that she is as entitled to sexual satisfaction as her partner.
Gaiman’s queen is the closest example there is of a woman living honestly in the tale. She is not ashamed of her passion; she has a body and it feels; she has a brain and she uses it. She wields power wisely and truly improves the lives of her subjects, even though to do so requires that she come face to face with what she fears most, the only person (or thing) who could ever make her submit: the princess. Yet, in order to have the freedom to live authentically, the queen had to resort to self-serving, willful deceit earlier in her life. She manipulated the king by casting a “glamour” over herself to gain his attention, and as she offered herself to him hopefully, she let him believe it was his idea in the first place. Real women, like Gaiman’s queen, will always fall short of the virgin ideal; therefore, if the binary is valid, every actual woman who masquerades as such is a whore.
Another way Gaiman complicates the “Snow White” tale is by staging the princess, not her stepmother, as an outsider. She is “of a different blood” than her biological mother whose “hair the color of dark wood” and “nut-brown” eyes evoke earthy associations (Gaiman 326). The king, when healthy, is the embodiment of late August with “his beard so red, his hair so gold, his eyes the blue of a summer sky, [and] his skin tanned the gentle brown of ripe wheat” (Gaiman 326). It is during the fall that one prepares to endure the coming winter for “autumn is the time of drying, of preserving, of rendering the goose fat” (Gaiman 326). The king, as the patriarch of the fatherland, embodies both the preparation for and the survival of the frozen season. His warmth and vigor stand in stark contrast to the deathly pallor of his daughter. The princess is the fairest of them all, not because of her beauty, but because of her physical appearance of frailty. She is small, pale, and coldly without passion. Unlike her stepmother, she needs a prince or a king, someone off of whom she can live parasitically. She is the physical embodiment of the patriarchal fantasy of woman: a sexualized girl that simply cannot survive without a man’s self-centric potency. The princess’ pale skin, when set against the backdrop of her father’s visage and her mother’s warm complexion, is not beautiful but an indication of unnaturalness.
The convention of staging natural versus unnatural is ingrained within the fairy-tale genre. Traditionally, the stepmother (in opposition to the biological or “natural” mother) occupies the space of the unnatural intruder that invades the domestic sphere of the fairy-tale heroine. This intrusion then results in the expulsion of the heroine from the home, where she finds herself, more often than not, lost in the woods. It is in the forest that the heroine’s naturalness becomes apparent. As Tatar points out, “the ‘natural’ children of fairy tales literally become children of nature, aided by nature and protected by it from the highly unnatural villains of their homelife” (Tatar, Hard Facts 80).
When the Grimms’ Snow White is abandoned alone in the forest, she is safer than she ever was at home. Though “[w]ild beasts hovered around her at all times, [...] they did her no harm” (Grimm and Grimm 245). Surrounded by predators, Snow White remains untouched. When the day is over and she could go no further, “she discovered a little cottage” seemingly just waiting for her in the midst of the forest (Grimm and Grimm 245). Disney takes further pains to align Snow White with nature. After the queen’s huntsman tells Snow White to run for her life, the heroine runs aimlessly through a dark forest where she sees danger at every turn. The trees threaten her with glowering eyes and gaping mouths; branches become long fingers clawing at her clothes; logs transform into terrifying alligators waiting to snap. Eventually, Snow White is surrounded by menacing eyes, and she collapses into a sobbing heap. Lost, alone, likely scraped and bruised, Snow White is saved immediately upon becoming the ideal prey. The terrifying creatures she has been running from are revealed to be gentle rabbits, squirrels, deer, and songbirds. After admonishing herself for being so “silly,” Disney’s Snow White confides in the forest creatures that she is homeless and they lead her to the cottage of the seven dwarfs.
Disney is equally blunt in showing the unnaturalness of the evil queen. This is most obvious in Disney’s portrayal of the queen’s death. Rather than having Snow White exact revenge on the queen at her wedding feast (as is the case in the Grimms’ version), Disney’s queen falls to her death off the side of a mountain. After being chased up the mountain by the dwarfs, the queen is poised to dislodge a boulder and kill her pursuers. At that moment, nature rises against the evil queen. Lightning strikes the precipice on which she stands and down she falls. Through this refiguring of the plot, Disney preserves Snow White’s innocence, displays the dwarfs’ loyalty to Snow White without forcing them to sully their hands with murder, and solidifies a direct relationship between evilness and unnaturalness.
Gaiman utilizes this dichotomy of natural versus unnatural and its correspondence with good and evil while simultaneously turning the conventional wisdom about fairy-tale good and evil on its head. The reader of fairy tales is always encouraged to align with what is natural. Nature remains aligned with good, but instead of being represented by purity and innocence, Gaiman links naturalness to fecundity and fertility. What is hailed as natural in “Snow, Glass, Apples” is the affirmation of life. It is sterility, stagnation, and frigidity that are unnatural. The princess’ pale external features, lacking in warmth and vivacity, are ghoulish and macabre in Gaiman’s context. The reader is reminded that though there are certainly many real women and girls with light complexions; only the dead are “white as snow.” While it is true that Disney and the Grimm brothers do not necessarily present a child with skin that is literally as white as snow, Gaiman’s decision to literalize this metaphor is in keeping with fairy-tale convention.
Fairy tales present a world where ideas not only matter, “ideas become matter” (Tatar, Hard Facts 80). Tatar has identified two distinct spheres of action within fairy tales; one of which makes literal what is merely figurative in the other. The first sphere, more closely tied with reality, is the domestic space where fairy tales generally begin. The castle or cottage where the fairy-tale protagonist lives tends to be mundane and recognizable by the reader. Within this sphere, there is family conflict. In the case of Snow White, the discord is a result of the queen’s jealousy of her stepdaughter. When the protagonist leaves this sphere and enters the unknown, often a forest or strange land, “the hero escapes the tiresome clichés of reality by entering a world where the figurative or metaphorical dimension of language takes on literal meaning” (Tatar, Hard Facts 80). Gaiman’s entire tale can be read as a literalization of the metaphors within Snow White. In this way, “Snow, Glass, Apples” serves to question the more conventional retellings of “Snow White.” A tale that remains unquestioned and unaltered is unnatural because it, like Gaiman’s young princes, is lifeless. As demonstrated with the princess’ monstrousness, the “literalizations of metaphors can at times translate into grotesque effects” (Tatar, Hard Facts 80). Skin that is literally as white as snow is cold with death. The princess’ lips are not red as blood, but red with the blood of her victims.
Where her father’s features evoke the autumn harvest, the young princess personifies winter. As if to prevent mistaking romanticism for truth, Gaiman reminds the reader that “[w]inter is the time of hunger, of snow, and of death” (Gaiman 326). Throughout “Snow, Glass, Apples” the reader is never quite able to escape the chill evoked by the title. The queen sees “frozen moments,” scrys into “cold glass,” and though the story spans a decade, nearly all the events happen in the winter with each one a bit more harsh and unforgiving than the last (Gaiman 325). The snow in Gaiman’s retelling becomes a symbol of disguising and
forgetting. After the queen’s huntsman removes the princess’ heart, “the snow fell, covering the footprints of [the] huntsmen, covering her tiny body in the forest where it lay” (Gaiman 329). A mound of dirt may be indistinguishable from a corpse when covered with snow. Additionally, the queen’s side of the story is hidden by “lies and half-truths [that] fall like snow” (Gaiman 328). Her tale, like “a landscape, unrecognizable after a snowfall,” becomes lost beneath the stories of Snow White (Gaiman 328). In this wintry tale, the only sign of thaw to be found is the king’s visage, and the young princess brings the winter to her father’s healthy autumn features.
On his deathbed, the king is reduced to “a shadow of the man” he once was (Gaiman 327). Though the queen is also “frozen ... owned and dominated” by the child, the princess only feeds from the queen once—leaving a scar that looked “ancient” within a day (Gaiman 326). The king’s body, however, becomes “covered with a multitude of ancient scars” that were not present when he first remarried (Gaiman 327). His daughter drains him of all vivacity until “his bones showed, blue and white, beneath the skin ... his hands were cold as stone, his eyes milky blue, his hair and beard faded and lusterless and limp” (Gaiman 327–28). The princess murders her father by slowly sapping his strength. Even more terrifying, where the traditional versions of “Snow White,” “leave the oedipal entanglements to our imagination,” Gaiman’s iteration reveals the princess’s oedipal desires to be both literal and figurative (Bettelheim 201). The princess instigates carnal relations with her father, and it is clear that her sexual desire is tied directly to a yearning for the power of the patriarchal phallus, the “signifier that is destined to designate meaning” (Lacan 579). All of the king’s potency, both literally and metaphorically, is contained and concentrated in his genitalia. The scars on “her father’s thighs, and on his ballock-pouch, and on his male member, when he died” reveal that the princess has seized the patriarchal phallus with her teeth (Gaiman 328).
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