When we first encounter this “new” wife, she is framed in a magic looking glass, just as her predecessor—that is, her earlier self—had been framed in a window. To be caught and trapped in a mirror rather than a window, however, is to be driven inward, obsessively studying self-images as if seeking a viable self. The first Queen seems still to have had prospects; not yet fallen into sexuality, she looked outward, if only upon the snow. The second Queen is doomed to the inward search that psychoanalysts like Bruno Bettelheim censoriously define as “narcissism,”3 but which * * * is necessitated by a state from which all outward prospects have been removed.
That outward prospects have been removed—or lost or dissolved away—is suggested not only by the Queen’s mirror obsession but by the absence of the King from the story as it is related in the Grimm version. The Queen’s husband and Snow White’s father (for whose attentions, according to Bettelheim, the two women are battling in a feminized Oedipal struggle) never actually appears in this story at all, a fact that emphasizes the almost stifling intensity with which the tale concentrates on the conflict in the mirror between mother and daughter, woman and woman, self and self. At the same time, though, there is clearly at least one way in which the King is present. 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. He it is who decides, first, that his consort is “the fairest of all,” and then, as she becomes maddened, rebellious, witchlike, that she must be replaced by his angelically innocent and dutiful daughter, a girl who is therefore defined as “more beautiful still” than the Queen. To the extent, then, that the King, and only the King, constituted the first Queen’s prospects, he need no longer appear in the story because, having assimilated the meaning of her own sexuality (and having, thus, become the second Queen) the woman has internalized the King’s rules: his voice resides now in her own mirror, her own mind.
But if Snow White is “really” the daughter of the second as well as of the first Queen (i.e., if the two Queens are identical), why does the Queen hate her so much? The traditional explanation—that the mother is as threatened by her daughter’s “budding sexuality” as the daughter is by the mother’s “possession” of the father—is helpful but does not seem entirely adequate, considering the depth and ferocity of the Queen’s rage. It is true, of course, that in the patriarchal Kingdom of the text these women inhabit the Queen’s life can be literally imperiled by her daughter’s beauty, and true (as we shall see throughout this study) that, given the female vulnerability such perils imply, female bonding is extraordinarily difficult in patriarchy: women almost inevitably turn against women because the voice of the looking glass sets them against each other. But, beyond all this, it seems as if there is a sense in which the intense desperation with which the Queen enacts her rituals of self-absorption causes (or is caused by) her hatred of Snow White. Innocent, passive, and self-lessly free of the mirror madness that consumes the Queen, Snow White represents the ideal of renunciation that the Queen has already renounced at the beginning of the story. Thus Snow White is destined to replace the Queen because the Queen hates her, rather than vice versa. The Queen’s hatred of Snow White, in other words, exists before the looking glass has provided an obvious reason for hatred.
For the Queen, as we come to see more clearly in the course of the story, is a plotter, a plot-maker, a schemer, a witch, an artist, an impersonator, a woman of almost infinite creative energy, witty, wily, and self-absorbed as all artists traditionally are. On the other hand, in her absolute chastity, her frozen innocence, her sweet nullity, Snow White represents precisely the ideal of “contemplative purity” we have already discussed, an ideal that could quite literally kill the Queen. An angel in the house of myth, Snow White is not only a child but (as female angels always are) childlike, docile, submissive, the heroine of a life that has no story. But the Queen, adult and demonic, plainly wants a life of “significant action,” by definition an “unfeminine” life of stories and storytelling. And therefore, to the extent that Snow White, as her daughter, is a part of herself, she wants to kill the Snow White in herself, the angel who would keep deeds and dramas out of her own house.
The first death plot the Queen invents is a naively straightforward murder story: she commands one of her huntsmen to kill Snow White. But, as Bruno Bettelheim has shown, the huntsman is really a surrogate for the King, a parental—or, more specifically, patriarchal—figure “who dominates, controls, and subdues wild ferocious beasts” and who thus “represents the subjugation of the animal, asocial, violent tendencies in man.”4 In a sense, then, the Queen has foolishly asked her patriarchal master to act for her in doing the subversive deed she wants to do in part to retain power over him and in part to steal his power from him. Obviously, he will not do this. As patriarchy’s angelic daughter, Snow White is, after all, his child, and he must save her, not kill her. Hence he kills a wild boar in her stead, and brings its lung and liver to the Queen as proof that he has murdered the child. Thinking that she is devouring her ice-pure enemy, therefore, the Queen consumes, instead, the wild boar’s organs; that is, symbolically speaking, she devours her own beastly rage, and becomes (of course) even more enraged.
When she learns that her first plot has failed, then, the Queen’s storytelling becomes angrier as well as more inventive, more sophisticated, more subversive. Significantly, each of the three “tales” she tells—that is, each of the three plots she invents—depends on a poisonous or parodic use of a distinctively female device as a murder weapon, and in each case she reinforces the sardonic commentary on “femininity” that such weaponry makes by impersonating a “wise” woman, a “good” mother, or, as Ellen Moers would put it, an “educating heroine.”5 As a “kind” old pedlar woman, she offers to lace Snow White “properly” for once—then suffocates her with a very Victorian set of tight laces. As another wise old expert in female beauty, she promises to comb Snow White’s hair “properly,” then assaults her with a poisonous comb. Finally, as a wholesome farmer’s wife, she gives Snow White a “very poisonous apple,” which she has made in “a quite secret, lonely room, where no one ever came.” The girl finally falls, killed, so it seems, by the female arts of cosmetology and cookery. Paradoxically, however, even though the Queen has been using such feminine wiles as the sirens’ comb and Eve’s apple subversively, to destroy angelic Snow White so that she (the Queen) can assert and aggrandize herself, these arts have had on her daughter an opposite effect from those she intended. Strengthening the chaste maiden in her passivity, they have made her into precisely the eternally beautiful, inanimate objet d’art patriarchal aesthetics want a girl to be. From the point of view of the mad, self-assertive Queen, conventional female arts kill. But from the point of view of the docile and selfless princess, such arts, even while they kill, confer the only measure of power available to a woman in a patriarchal culture.
Certainly when the kindly huntsman-father saved her life by abandoning her in the forest at the edge of his kingdom, Snow White discovered her own powerlessness. Though she had been allowed to live because she was a “good” girl, she had to find her own devious way of resisting the onslaughts of the maddened Queen, both inside and outside her self. In this connection, the seven dwarves probably represent her own dwarfed powers, her stunted selfhood, for, as Bettelheim points out, they can do little to help save the girl from the Queen. At the same time, however, her life with them is an important part of her education in submissive femininity, for in serving them she learns essential lessons of service, of selflessness, of domesticity. Finally, that at this point Snow White is a housekeeping angel in a tiny house conveys the story’s attitude toward “woman’s world and woman’s work”: the realm of domesticity is a miniaturized kingdom in which the best of women is not only like a dwarf but like a dwarf’s servant.
Does the irony and bitterness consequent upon such a perception lead to Snow White’s few small acts of disobedience? Or would
Snow White ultimately have rebelled anyway, precisely because she is the Queen’s true daughter? The story does not, of course, answer such questions, but it does seem to imply them, since its turning point comes from Snow White’s significant willingness to be tempted by the Queen’s “gifts,” despite the dwarves’ admonitions. Indeed, the only hint of self-interest that Snow White displays throughout the whole story comes in her “narcissistic” desire for the stay-laces, the comb, and the apple that the disguised murderess offers. As Bettelheim remarks, this “suggests how close the stepmother’s temptations are to Snow White’s inner desires.”6 Indeed, it suggests that, as we have already noted, the Queen and Snow White are in some sense one: while the Queen struggles to free herself from the passive Snow White in herself, Snow White must struggle to repress the assertive Queen in herself. That both women eat from the same deadly apple in the third temptation episode merely clarifies and dramatizes this point. The Queen’s lonely art has enabled her to contrive a two-faced fruit—one white and one red “cheek”—that represents her ambiguous relationship to this angelic girl who is both her daughter and her enemy, her self and her opposite. Her intention is that the girl will die of the apple’s poisoned red half—red with her sexual energy, her assertive desire for deeds of blood and triumph—while she herself will be unharmed by the passivity of the white half.
But though at first this seems to have happened, the apple’s effect is, finally, of course, quite different. After the Queen’s artfulness has killed Snow White into art, the girl becomes if anything even more dangerous to her “step” mother’s autonomy than she was before, because even more opposed to it in both mind and body. For, dead and self-less in her glass coffin, she is an object, to be displayed and desired, patriarchy’s marble “opus,” the decorative and decorous Galatea7 with whom every ruler would like to grace his parlor. Thus, when the Prince first sees Snow White in her coffin, he begs the dwarves to give “it” to him as a gift, “for I cannot live without seeing Snow White. I will honor and prize her as my dearest possession.” An “it,” a possession, Snow White has become an idealized image of herself, and as such she has definitively proven herself to be patriarchy’s ideal woman, the perfect candidate for Queen. At this point, therefore, she regurgitates the poison apple (whose madness had stuck in her throat) and rises from her coffin. The fairest in the land, she will marry the most powerful in the land; bidden to their wedding, the egotistically assertive, plotting Queen will become a former Queen, dancing herself to death in red-hot iron shoes.
What does the future hold for Snow White, however? When her Prince becomes a King and she becomes a Queen, what will her life be like? Trained to domesticity by her dwarf instructors, will she sit in the window, gazing out on the wild forest of her past, and sigh, and sew, and prick her finger, and conceive a child white as snow, red as blood, black as ebony wood? Surely, fairest of them all, Snow White has exchanged one glass coffin for another, delivered from the prison where the Queen put her only to be imprisoned in the looking glass from which the King’s voice speaks daily. There is, after all, no female model for her in this tale except the “good” (dead) mother and her living avatar the “bad” mother. And if Snow White escaped her first glass coffin by her goodness, her passivity and docility, her only escape from her second glass coffin, the imprisoning mirror, must evidently be through “badness,” through plots and stories, duplicitous schemes, wild dreams, fierce fictions, mad impersonations. The cycle of her fate seems inexorable. Renouncing “contemplative purity,” she must now embark on that life of “significant action” which, for a woman, is defined as a witch’s life because it is so monstrous, so unnatural.* * * She will become a murderess bent on the self-slaughter implicit in her murderous attempts against the life of her own child. Finally, in fiery shoes that parody the costumes of femininity as surely as the comb and stays she herself contrived, she will do a silent terrible death-dance out of the story, the looking glass, the transparent coffin of her own image. Her only deed, this death will imply, can be a deed of death, her only action the pernicious action of self-destruction.
In this connection, it seems especially significant that the Queen’s dance of death is a silent one. In “The Juniper Tree” [245–52], a version of “Little Snow White” in which a boy’s mother tries to kill him (for different reasons, of course), the dead boy is transformed not into a silent art object but into a furious golden bird who sings a song of vengeance against his murderess and finally crushes her to death with a millstone. The male child’s progress toward adulthood is a growth toward both self-assertion and self-articulation, “The Juniper Tree” implies, a development of the powers of speech. But the girl child must learn the arts of silence either as herself a silent image invented and defined by the magic looking glass of the male-authored text, or as a silent dancer of her own woes, a dancer who enacts rather than articulates.
* * *
† From Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979), pp. 36–43. Copyright © 1979. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.
1. Adam’s first wife, before Eve was created.
2. “Little Snow White.” All references are to the text as given in The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales (New York: Random House, 1972).
3. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976), pp. 202–03.
4. Bettelheim, p. 205.
5. See Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 211–42.
6. Bettelheim, p. 211.
7. An ivory statue carved by Pygmalion and brought to life by Aphrodite in response to the sculptor’s longing for his creation [editor’s note].
KAREN E. ROWE
From To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale†
I begin not, as one might expect, with a conte de fées or a Märchen1 but instead with a story, which provides us with a more ancient paradigm for understanding the female voice in folklore and fairy tale. But to speak about voice in a tale so singularly about the voiceless is immediately to recognize that to tell a tale for women may be a way of breaking enforced silences. I refer to Ovid’s account in the Metamorphoses of Philomela and Procne, which in Western tradition can serve as a type for the narrative power of the female, capable of weaving in tapestry the brutal story of rape that leads to the enactment of a terrible revenge.2 Since the image of Philomela as weaver and nightingale becomes the quintessential type of the woman as tale-teller, it is best to review the story, noticing Ovid’s preoccupation with the varieties of utterance and silence and the analogy that can be drawn between the story of Philomela and the art of creating a tale itself. Based upon this paradigm we can begin to explore the lineage of women as tale-tellers in a history that stretches from Philomela and Scheherazade to the raconteurs of French veillées3 and salons, to English peasants, governesses, and novelists, and to the German Spinnerinnen4 and the Brothers Grimm. It is a complex history, which I can only highlight in this essay.
To return to Ovid. With “flame bursting out of his breast,” Tereus, as Ovid recounts, in his “unbridled passion” is granted a perverse eloquence (p. 144). Although he disguises them as the pleadings of a “most devoted husband,” the “crime-contriver” Tereus speaks only false reassurances of protection, honor, and kinship (p. 144). The voyage to Thrace accomplished, Tereus violently seizes Philomela and
told her then
What he was going to do, and straightway did it,
Raped her, a virgin, all alone, and calling
For her father, for her sister, but most often
For the great gods. In vain. (p. 146)
Trembling “as a frightened lamb which a gray wolf has mangled,” she vows to “proclaim” the vile ravishment, to “go where people are / Tell everybody,” and “if there is any god in Heave
n, [He] will hear me” (pp. 146, 147). Fearing already the potency of Philomela’s voice, the cruel king Tereus
seized her tongue
With pincers, though it cried against the outrage,
Babbled and made a sound something like Father,
Till the sword cut it off. The mangled root
Quivered, the severed tongue along the ground
Lay quivering, making a little murmur,
Jerking and twitching …
… [and] even then, Tereus
Took her, and took her again, the injured body
Still giving satisfaction to his lust. (p. 147)
What Tereus has injured, we might keep in mind, is not only the organ of speech, but the orifice of sexuality itself—and when the ravaged Philomela speaks later through another medium, it is on behalf of a body and spirit doubly mutilated. Philomela, who supposedly lacks the “power of speech / To help her tell her wrongs,” discovers that
grief has taught her
Sharpness of wit, and cunning comes in trouble.
She had a loom to work with, and with purple
On a white background, wove her story in,
Her story in and out, and when it was finished,
Gave it to one old woman, with signs and gestures
To take it to the queen, so it was taken,
Unrolled and understood. (p. 148)
Remember too this old woman, whose servant status belies her importance as a conveyor of the tale. Having comprehended her sister’s woven story, Procne enacts a dreadful punishment. She slaughters, stews, and skewers her beloved son Itys as a fitting banquet for the lustful defiler of flesh, Tereus, doomed to feast greedily “on the flesh of his own flesh” (p. 150). As we know, the gods intervene to thwart a further cycle of vengeance by transforming Tereus into a bird of prey (the hoopoe or a hawk), Philomela into the onomatopoetic image of the quivering tongue as a twittering swallow, and Procne into the nightingale. The Romans (with greater sense of poetic justice) transposed the names, making Philomela into the nightingale who sings eternally the melancholy tale of betrayal, rape, and maternal sorrow. As such, she comes down to us as the archetypal tale-teller, one who not only weaves the revelatory tapestry but also sings the song which Ovid appropriates as his myth.5
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