Now the shepherd had a friend named Jitu, and when Jitu saw what a prize his friend had won, he decided that he could not do better than to marry a dog. His relatives did not object, and a bride was chosen. The wedding celebrations began, but when they were putting vermilion on the bride’s forehead, she began to growl. Still, they dragged her to the bridegroom’s home and anointed her with oil and turmeric. But when the bride’s party set off for home, the dog broke loose and started running back to them. Everyone shouted at Jitu, telling him to run after his bride and bring her back. But she growled at him and then bit him so that he had to give up. Everyone laughed so hard at him that he was too ashamed to say a word. Two or three days later he hanged himself.
* * *
† Cecil Henry Bompas, Folklore of the Santhal Parganas (London: David Nutt, 1909), pp. 255–56, with some minor stylistic emendations by the editor of this volume. Santhal Pargana belongs to one of five administrative units in eastern India.
INTRODUCTION: Snow White
Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) has become our cultural story about an innocent heroine, her evil stepmother, and a romantic rescue from household drudgery and maternal persecution. The film so dominates the fairy-tale landscape that it is easy to forget the many versions of it that animated storytelling in times past and still circulate in our own day. Parental cruelty and romantic love know no geographical or chronological boundaries, and the tale—both its deep structure and its standard tropes—flashes out at us in ways both predictable and unexpected. Cannibalism and necrophilia, child abandonment and sexual rivalry, beauty and monstrosity: these are the constants in the kaleidoscopic variations of Snow White stories.
Disney’s story about Snow White is very different from the one we find in the canonical literary version recorded in the early nineteenth century. The Brothers Grimm called their story “Little Snow White,” perhaps to emphasize the vulnerability of a young girl persecuted by her jealous stepmother. Their heroine is precociously stunning: “When she was seven years old she was as beautiful as the light of day, even more beautiful than the queen herself.” Her beauty inspires huntsman, dwarfs, and prince alike to protect her from a less fair queen. Although the early versions of the Grimms’ “Little Snow White” pit a biological mother against her daughter, later iterations of the tale feature a stepmother, reminding us that mortality rates for child-bearing women were exceptionally high in earlier eras and that their children were socially vulnerable and not necessarily protected by a father’s second wife.
When asked why he did not stay closer to the Grimms’ script, Walt Disney responded, “It’s just that people now don’t want fairy stories the way they were written. They were too rough. In the end, they’ll probably remember the story the way we film it anyway.” There is indeed much “rough” stuff in earlier cultural inflections of the tale, though one could argue that Disney, rather than lightening up the story, preserved much of the blood and gore. It may be that the Wicked Witch’s plunge from a cliff in a lightning storm is less protracted than the Grimms’ tableau of a woman dancing to her death in red-hot iron shoes, but the ending to the animated film feels more terrifying in its fierce pacing, with dwarfs in hot pursuit and a frenzied scramble up a cliff.
The story of Snow White varies tremendously from culture to culture in its details. Disney’s princess ingests a poisoned apple, but her European counterparts fall victim to toxic combs, contaminated cakes, and, in one case, a suffocating braid. Disney’s queen, who demands Snow White’s heart from the huntsman who takes the girl into the woods, actually seems restrained by comparison with the Grimms’ evil queen, who orders the huntsman to return with the girl’s lungs and liver (she plans to eat both after boiling them in salt water). In Spain, the queen is even more bloodthirsty, asking for a bottle of blood, with the girl’s toe used as a cork. In Italy, the cruel queen instructs the huntsman to return with the girl’s intestines and her blood-soaked shirt. Disney’s film has fetishized the coffin made of glass, but in other versions of the story it is made of gold, silver, or lead or is jewel-encrusted. While it is often displayed on a mountaintop, it can also be set adrift on a river, placed under a tree, hung from the rafters, or locked in a room gleaming with candlelight.
Nearly every critic attempting to understand the deeper meaning of “Snow White” identifies a stable core that turns on some kind of rivalry between mother and daughter. Steven Swann Jones, modifying and refining the structure of the story as outlined in the international index of tale types, breaks the story down into a sequence of nine events: birth, jealousy, expulsion, adoption, renewed jealousy, death, exhibition, resuscitation, and resolution. “The most plausible explanation for the form that the overall plot structure of ‘Snow White’ assumes,” he declares, “is that it is a reflection of a young woman’s development.”1 Jones captures the defining features of the tale, but more important the sequence he identifies reveals how the story’s narrative structure is sustained by binary opposites (birth/death, expulsion/adoption, jealousy/affection). The powerful staging of mother/daughter conflicts is driven by matters primal and primary—giving birth yet also suffocating, nurturing but also withholding, caring but also competing.
Psychologists have described these conflicts as Oedipal, with mother and daughter in competition for the love and affection of an absent father. Bruno Bettelheim bases his reading of the story on the Grimms’ “Snow White,” which features a “good” biological mother who dies in childbirth and an “evil” queen who persecutes her seven-year-old stepdaughter. He argues that the splitting of the maternal function has a strong emotional appeal for children. The young, emotionally and economically dependent on their parents, have a deep need to preserve a positive image of mother, one uncontaminated by the natural feelings of anger and hostility that arise as differences develop between mother and child. The wicked stepmother of fairy tales “permits anger at this bad ‘stepmother’ without endangering the goodwill of the true mother, who is viewed as a different person.”2
The struggle between Snow White and the wicked queen so dominates the psychological landscape of this fairy tale that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have proposed renaming it “Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother.” These two critics, for whom the Grimms’ tale enacts “the essential but equivocal relationship between the angel-woman and the monster-woman” of Western patriarchy, emphasize not just a generational divide but also a moral, ethical, cognitive, and aesthetic standoff.
The central action of the tale—indeed its only real action—arises from the relationship between these two women, the one fair, young, pale, the other just as fair, but older, fiercer; the one a daughter, the other a mother; the one sweet, ignorant, passive, the other both artful and active; the one a sort of angel, the other an undeniable witch.3
For both Bettelheim and Gilbert and Gubar, the absent father occupies a central, if invisible, position in the domestic drama. And in fact many versions of the story show (step)mother and daughter competing for the attention of a charismatic male figure—sometimes a husband/father, but occasionally also a husband/uncle. Gilbert and Gubar find the father acoustically present if physically absent: “His, surely, is the voice of the looking glass, the patriarchal voice of judgment that rules the queen’s—and every woman’s self-evaluation.”4 The absence of the father is framed as an emphatic repression that reveals only the degree to which he occupies center stage.
In “The Young Slave” (see here) from Giambattista Basile’s 1634 collection of tales published under the title The Pentamerone, the persecution of the heroine is explicitly motivated by an aunt’s unwarranted sexual jealousy. Lisa, a Neapolitan Snow White, falls into a coma and is preserved for many years in a casket of crystal. When she awakens, she finds herself the target of frenzied envy, for her aunt believes that she has been the clandestine mistress of her husband. In the end, Lisa’s uncle, who has been a model of marital fidelity, reveals a distinct preference for his niece when he dri
ves his cruel wife out of the house. Basile’s tale, one of the earliest recorded versions of “Snow White,” suggests that the complex psychosexual motivations shaping the plots of fairy tales underwent a process of repression once the social venue for the stories shifted from the household and the communal hearth to the nursery.
Where Bettelheim sees a generational conflict between mother and daughter, Gilbert and Gubar see an intrapsychic drama played out between two possible developmental trajectories, one passive, docile, and compliant with patriarchal norms, the other nomadic, creative, and socially subversive. The two feminist critics invest the figure of the wicked queen with narrative energy so powerful that she becomes the story’s most admirable character. For them, she is a “plotter, a plot-maker, a schemer, a witch, an artist, and impersonator, a woman of almost infinite creative energy, witty, wily, and self-absorbed as all artists traditionally are.”5 And it is the queen who foreshadows the destiny of Snow White, predicting just what will happen to the innocent, persecuted heroine as she rides off to a “happily ever after” and ascends the throne. Then she will exchange her glass coffin for an equally imprisoning looking glass, which will reflect back to her every aspect of the aging process.
Gilbert and Gubar surely took an interpretive cue from Anne Sexton’s poetic transformation of the Grimms’ “Snow White,” in which an aging queen (“brown spots on her hand / and four whiskers over her lip”) is pitted against a thirteen-year-old “lovely virgin.” “Beauty is a simple passion,” Sexton declares, “but, oh my friends, in the end / you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes” (see here). The scene that stages the queen’s death juxtaposes a mobile queen, dancing to death with “her tongue flicking in and out / like a gas jet,” with a frozen Snow White “rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut / and sometimes referring to her mirror / as women do” (see here). Sexton’s inert Snow White is destined one day to become her mother, galvanized into action and turned into an agent of persecution by the divisive gaze in the mirror.
The mirror and the glass coffin are important as both aesthetic artifacts and psychological symbols. The looking glass can be a trope for vanity and narcissism, and for the wicked queen it is also the voice of judgment. On the one hand the mirror reflects back an image of beauty and integrity, but it is also a reminder of self-division and temporality—the image that looks back at us is subject to change. It is ephemeral and marked by mortality. Beauty may appear to mask death but its image (both in the mirror and on the face of Snow White in her coffin) also has a sinister side, reminding us that everything is subject to decay and must die.6
Disney Studios has given us the culturally dominant version of “Snow White,” turning her into one of the most familiar fairy-tale characters of all time. The Grimms’ “Snow White” may not have fared particularly well in Anglo-American cultures, but its cinematic reincarnation as a feature-length animated film created a new portal for fairy tales. Suddenly fairy tales were turned into cartoon versions of themselves, designed to entertain children, but they were also transformed by the new medium into powerfully present, nearly palpable cultural narratives.
Advertisements for “Snow White” may picture the heroine and the prince, but the seven dwarfs and the wicked queen dominate the film visually and verbally. Snow White and the Prince, despite the use of primary colors, are bleached-out figures, as flat and colorless as their names. The seven dwarfs, by contrast, enliven the film with their antics, just as the wicked queen provides surges of emotional energy with her cruel charms. In her underground lair, surrounded by skulls and ravens, she works with dusty tomes and a chemistry set to concoct deadly recipes.
Disney Studios erased the Grimms’ prelude, an episode that describes the death of Snow White’s biological mother in childbirth. The only maternal figure is the stepmother in her double incarnation as beautiful, proud, and evil queen and as ugly, sinister, and wicked witch. Notes taken at story conferences reveal that the queen was planned as “a mixture of Lady Macbeth and the Big, Bad Wolf,” fiercely treacherous and unforgiving.7 Disney himself, who referred to the transformation of the queen into an old hag as a “Jekyll and Hyde thing,” seemed unaware that there is no Jekyll component to the figure’s personality, only two Hydes.8 Instead of the splitting of the mother image into a good mother who dies in childbirth and an evil queen who persecutes her stepchild, the maternal figure appears bent on destruction in every way.
The Disney version of “Snow White” relentlessly polarizes the notion of the feminine to produce a murderously jealous and forbiddingly cold woman on the one hand and an innocently sweet girl accomplished in the art of good housekeeping on the other. Beginning with the Grimms, it is through a combination of labor and good looks that Snow White earns a prince for herself. Here is how the Grimms describe the housekeeping contract extended to Snow White by the dwarfs: “If you will keep house for us, cook, make the beds, wash, sew, knit, and keep everything neat and tidy, then you can stay with us, and we’ll give you everything you need” (see here). But the dwarfs in the Grimms’ tale are hardly in need of a housekeeper, for they appear to be models of tidiness. Everything in their cottage is “indescribably dainty and spotless” (see here); the table has a white cloth with tiny plates, cups, knives, forks, and spoons, and the beds are covered with sheets “as white as snow” (see here). Compare this description of the dwarfs’ cottage with the following one taken from a book based on Disney’s version of “Snow White”:
Skipping across a little bridge to the house, Snow White peeked in through one windowpane. There seemed to be no one at home, but the sink was piled high with cups and saucers and plates, which looked as though they had never been washed. Dirty little shirts and wrinkled little trousers hung over chairs, and everything was blanketed with dust.
“Maybe the children who live here have no mother,” said Snow White, “and need someone to take care of them. Let’s clean their house and surprise them.”
So in she went, followed by her forest friends. Snow White found an old broom in the corner and swept the floor, while the little animals all did their best to help.
Then Snow White washed all the crumpled little clothes, and set a kettle of delicious soup to bubbling on the hearth.9
In one post-Disney American variant of the story after another, Snow White makes it her mission to clean up after the dwarfs (“seven little boys”)10 and is represented as serving an apprenticeship in home economics (“Snow White for her part was becoming an excellent housekeeper and cook.”)11 The Disney version, made at the height of the Great Depression, has everyone whistling and singing while they work, all the while embracing the work ethic with no grumbling at all. Household drudgery becomes frolicking good fun, less work than play, since it requires no real effort, is carried out with the help of wonderfully nimble, adorable woodland creatures, and achieves dazzling results. And the dwarfs cheerfully extol the joys of spending their days underground in a diamond mine: “To dig dig dig dig dig dig dig is what we really like to do.”
“We just try to make a good picture,” Walt Disney once observed in connection with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. “And then the professors come along and tell us what we do.”12 The professors for sure, but also filmmakers who have recognized that the evil queen plays a commanding role, a source of cinematic fascination that contrasts with a figure so dull that she needs a supporting cast of seven to enliven her scenes. With a voice in which “the accents of Betty Boop are far too prominent”13 and with a figure that has been described as a “pasty, sepulchral, sewing-pattern design scissored out of context,”14 the Snow White character lacks the narrative charge and élan so potently present in the representation of the stepmother. Ultimately it is the stepmother’s disruptive, disturbing, and divisive presence that invests the story with a degree of fascination that has facilitated its widespread circulation and that has allowed it to take hold in our culture.
In the cinematic afterlife of “Snow White,” we find that productions ran
ging from Michael Cohn’s Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997) and Tarsem Singh’s Mirror Mirror (2012) to Rupert Sanders’s Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and ABC’s Once Upon a Time (2011–) continue to tell a story about generational conflict and parental cruelty, yet they also poignantly capture adult anxieties about aging and loss. Disney’s brilliant compression of the aging process into a brief sequence shows us the queen drinking a magic potion. Suddenly her hair turns white, her hands become gnarled with age (“Look, my hands!”), her voice turns into a throaty cackle (“My voice!”), and finally she emerges from under her dark cloak as a hunchbacked crone. The horror of the queen’s transformation from a beautiful woman into an abject old hag is still potent, especially in the film industry, where roles become scarce for actresses once they turn thirty.
Sanders’s Snow White and the Huntsman captures deepening anxiety about aging and generational sexual rivalry in clever, self-reflexive ways, with Charlize Theron as a beautiful cougar (and established Hollywood star) threatened by a younger, sylph-like Kristin Stewart. In the world of the film, beauty is the locus of female power and is thereby fleeting in its effects (men are “enchanted” by women but “use” them until they eventually “tire” of them). Beauty becomes a source of both fascination and horror. Early on, we learn the wicked queen’s backstory: she was abandoned by her first husband for a younger woman. This is meant to explain why she is so desperate to suck the life force out of local virgins, to dine on the vital organs of birds, and to reap the cosmetic effects of baths in mysterious white fluids.
The queen’s quest for lasting youth is part of the story’s larger exploration (in the tradition of many great myths) of how humans relate to the natural world—whether we are of it or have mastered and moved beyond it. Efforts to remain forever young violate the natural order of generational succession and imperil life itself. The woods have always been terrifying, but never more so than in this new version of the tale, in which a despoiled Mother Nature mirrors and magnifies the wicked queen’s frenzied assaults on humans. Snow White and the Huntsman holds a mirror up to our own vanity, narcissism, and recklessness, emphatically reminding us, as Theron proclaims shortly before her downfall, that every world gets the wicked queen it deserves.
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