The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman

by Burke, Jessica

  Crucial to this reworking is a shift in the narrative voice. Like most fairy tales, “Snow White” is classically represented in the third person with narrative favoring Snow White herself as the (passive) protagonist. However, Gaiman’s version shifts the narrative to the first person, in the perspective of a heretofore unknown version of the Queen.6 Without altering most of the key portions of the plot, Gaiman presents an unsettling new version by showing the Queen’s motivations and justifications of her actions in the face of the vampiric evil that is the young Princess.7

  The way that Gaiman has shifted some of the central signifiers in the plot is crucially linked to his choice of narrator: this is the Queen’sstory. The Queen makes several mentions of the lies that the Princess and Prince have told of her, implicating the traditional tale and making the original a competing narrative to the Queen’s own version. Mathilda Slabbert argues that the Queen is an unreliable narrator. She notes that the Queen’s presentation of her story is complicated by her capability for violence, power struggles, and sexual manipulation.8 In addition to this, the Queen’s belated acknowledgement of the glamour she has used on the King in their courtship adds to the sense of distrust by the reader. Despite these qualifiers, however, it is worth exploring the way the Queen’s construction of her own narrative functions in its competition with the original story. For example, speaking of the idea that the Queen was given an animal’s heart when she ordered that the Princess’s heart be brought to her, she says:

  …they say I was fooled. And some say (but it is her lie, not mine) that I was given the heart, and that I ate it. Lies and half-truths fall like snow, covering the things that I remember, the things I saw. A landscape, unrecognizable after a snowfall; that is what she has made my life.9

  This image of snow as the narratively obliterating influence of the Princess’s competing tale indicates the way the Queen plays upon key icons from the original tale to subvert the meaning of the original.

  Gaiman uses the familiarity of the fairy tale elements of the Snow White story in order to firmly establish some of the altered meanings of the key touchstones of the story. As the title indicates with “Snow, Glass, Apples,” the story picks up on several iconic elements from the tale. This tale is originally iconized by the girl’s coloring and its associations with particular items. The Princess’s skin is white as snow and, as the Queen echoes the original, “Her eyes were as black as coal, black as her hair; her lips were redder than blood.”10 In the original, Snow White’s name and descriptors function as a guiding principle in the story, originally indicating her exceptional beauty, and thus goodness, and leading to the Queen’s jealous machinations. In such a way, Gaiman has pricked out the key elements of the story that have been generously discussed critically— the snow of her mother’s wish and the tone of the girl’s skin, the glass of the Queen’s magic mirror and the girl’s coffin, and the apples of the Witch Queen’s curse and Snow White’s false death—and pivots these same elements into new meaning. In this crucial way, Gaiman keeps the story fully recognizable structurally and iconically but twists its meaning through the new perspective of the Queen’s version. The Princess is now an evil creature whose “snow white” skin is indicative of her unnatural life and cold flesh and her “lips as red as blood” exhibit her vampiric nature.

  In particular, Gaiman makes extensive use of snow and apple imagery throughout the story in order to present the Queen’s narrative as one that posits the Princess as a deadly force of wintry deprivation and the Queen as a conscientious ruler who utilizes a counteracting force for preparation and provision.

  The Queen speaks of such provision, saying: Autumn is a time of drying, of preserving, a time of picking apples, of rendering the goose fat. Winter is the time of hunger, of snow, and of death; and it is the time of the midwinter feast, when we rub the goose fat into the skin of a whole pig, stuffed with that autumn’s apples; then we roast it or spit it, and we prepare to feast upon the crackling.11

  These images of autumnal preparation and wintertime hunger, “when fresh food is a dream of warmth and sunlight,”12 are repeatedly evoked in the story to reinforce the Princess’s role as a deathly influence and to show the Queen in her, ultimately ineffective, efforts to ward off this influence.

  Snow becomes the ultimate setting for the influence that the Princess has on the world around her. Contrasted with the Queen’s golden description of her royal courtship and her connection with the Spring Fair in her earlier years, her time at the castle and under the influence of the Princess is marked by a passing of the years that always falls heavily on wintertime — emblematized by falling snow. The pervasive imagery of a snowy winter is the context for the Queen’s first vampiric encounter with the girl, for the false peace after the girl’s heart is hung, for the Queen’s bewitching of the apples, and for her being prepared for execution. In Snow White’s iconic name and in the cold skin that indicates her unfeeling existence, we see the embodiment of a singularly focused seasonality that can only mean deprivation and hunger for the people of the Queen’s kingdom.

  As is indicated by the Queen’s discussion of apples as involved in autumn’s preparations for winter, the apple is deeply associated with the Queen’s role in storing and preparing against hunger. Apple imagery is also used throughout to develop the meaning of the relationship between the Queen and the Princess as complements in a relationship of provision and deprivation as signified by the unnatural gluttony of vampirism. The poisoned apple known from the original story already carries with it the conflicted coding of sustenance and death but Gaiman’s tale adds to this with the context of the Princess’s vampirism. The Queen infusing the apple with her own blood to achieve the spell of poisoning and as a draw for the Princess’s vampirism changes the iconically red fruit’s codification. The connection between the Queen’s offer of an apple and the exchange of blood with the vampiric Princess is one that Gaiman develops earlier in the story that is not present in prior versions. When the six-year-old Princess comes to the Queen insisting she is hungry, the Queen offers one of the apples drying from her bedroom ceiling. As the girl eats the apple, a momentary display of physical affection from the Queen allows the girl to bite the Queen’s hand and the girl sucks the Queen’s blood in a scene of terrifying mesmerism. Beyond the two instances of apple consumption being conflated with vampirism, the image is further reinforced as the Queen has hung the Princess’s heart, “from the roof beam, with the apples and ham and the dried sausages.”13 By linking apples as provisions and the Princess’s taking of others’ lives through blood, Gaiman taints the former beauty of the crimson shade of the fruit and makes it an icon for the danger all are in when near the Princess.

  The image of a heart hanging amongst drying apples and hams also highlights the final way that the Queen employs these concurrent images in her power struggle between autumnal plenty and wintertime deprivation. This is done through the image of the “whole pig, stuffed with that autumn’s apples.”14 The connection between apples and the pig for the midwinter feast becomes the final use of apple imagery as the Queen is led to her death, which is drawn from an English variant to the story’s end in which the Queen is “roasted alive in the king’s brick-kiln (sic).”15Using this conclusion and adding in the imagery of the Queen as a greased roast pig, already associated as being stuffed with apples, serves as a final flourish to the way that imagery of winter, apples, and the Princess’s vampiric urges in the story function. With the cannibalistic undertones to the Queen’s roasting (whether there is an implicit actual feast to follow or not) her being prepared as a roast pig ironically highlights the Queen’s ultimate failure to provide for her people against the influence of the wintry Snow White. These uses of snow and apple imagery support the larger theme that Gaiman develops in regard to a seasonality in the story that seems deeply connected with what the Queen represents as her benign witchery and her failure to counteract Snow White’s barren influence.

  The cannibalistic impl
ications of this final scene are also highlighted by the Queen as she says that “They have told the people bad things about me; a little truth to add savor to the dish, but mixed with many lies.”16 This image of a dish savored with lies, brings together the Queen’s representation of the Princess as a perverse consumer with the importance of controlling the narrative. As the Queen faces her death in the kiln, it is revealed that her story has been told as the heat builds around her and that such a story will be lost when she dies. She says, “They will have my body, but my soul and my story are my own, and will die with me.”17The Queen’s thoughts upon her death rework the way that the Princess has affected how she will be perceived and indicate the importance of considering the way their two narratives compete with each other.

  As she looks out from the kiln, the first and only mention of the Queen looking at her own reflection is when she sees it in the passive eyes of the Princess as the girl watches the Queen roast to death. The Queen says, “She looked at me though; and for a moment I saw myself reflected in her eyes.”18Slabbert offers the idea that this reflective moment indicates the women’s mutual potential for horrific violent action against each other19but it also seems to implicate the way narration functions as we have competing versions of the story. Like Slabbert’s idea of mutual violence, the reflection of the Queen in Snow White can also mean mutual negative portrayal: as the Queen has here represented her version of the story, the Princess will go on to represent the Queen as a vindictive witch, continuing to tell “bad things” about her in what will become the classic version of the tale. This recognition of the alternate version of the events as represented through the original tale we are all familiar with is reinforced by the Queen’s use of familiar language in her final words. She says, “I think of her hair black as coal, her lips, redder than blood, her skin, snow-white.”20This final line is the one and only time that the iconic name of the Princess is used in the story. By finishing the Queen’s story with the familiar refrain and completing the flourish with the acknowledgement of Snow White’s name, this ending has the effect of realigning the story the reader has become absorbed in with the original version of the fairy tale in a jarring manner. Re-emphasizing the icons that have been modified in the Queen’s narrative in this final line serves to remind the reader of how much their viewpoint has been altered in the course of the story.

  The pivotal pressure that Gaiman applies to this familiar fairy tale is one that yields a disturbing yet enjoyable result. The tale is still strangely familiar yet wholly refreshing. Gaiman says of his desire in this retelling that, “In Smoke and Mirrors there are definitely stories where I just wanted to try to essentially do a magic trick—it’s ‘Snow White,’ but I’m going to show it to you in a mirror so you’ve never seen it like this before. And you’ll never be able to think of it in the same way ever again.”21

  Gaiman accomplishes this goal through showing a Queen that constructs a deeply problematic narrative. There is room for doubt in her version, yet at the same time the purpose of her version is to instill doubt regarding the original tale. Thus how we ultimately judge the Queen’s narrative is of less importance than that her story has been allowed to escape from the kiln at all. Through exposure to the competing narrative of the Queen’s experience, the touchstones of the famous fairy tale are constantly available for re-evaluation and doubt. And it is that ongoing doubt in the face of the original tale, that act of unsettling what the reader believed they knew and the tainting of a previously singular narrative, that is one of the main achievements of Gaiman’s version.

  “The White Road” In the poem “The White Road,”22 Gaiman draws upon the English tale of Mister Fox and related stories and condenses them into a scene of tale-telling that unsteadies our expectations and reevaluates the way narrative functions in constructing reality. The tale of Mister Fox fits within a broader category of murderous husband tales, such as The Robber Bridegroom and Bluebeard,23where a young heroine is endangered by a fiancé or new husband who has secretly murdered her predecessors or women very much like her. In “The White Road,” Gaiman takes up these themes of secrecy, sexuality and violence, but amplifies the story’s signification as a told tale and uses the context of narration to dramatically alter our understanding of what these tales mean. By placing the entirety of the poem within a storytelling setting and changing crucial details from the original tale, Gaiman presents a story that is chilling like its source material, but in a wholly new manner.

  The central Mister Fox tale that Gaiman uses in his poem typically involves storytelling as crucial to its resolution. The girl engaged to Mister Fox travels to her fiancé’s home, witnesses the terrors of his secret homicidal life, returns to her home and, at a storytelling event with all gathered, recounts her experience as though it were a dream and only at the end reveals that this “dream” truly happened. This is usually accomplished by revealing the finger or hand of a woman whose murder she secretly witnessed and recounted in the dream and those in attendance summarily kill Mister Fox based on the evidentiary hand. Gaiman’s tale includes the girl’s recounting of her “dream” in a richly embellished version, but he omits the first half of the original tale as there is no narration of the girl’s “actual” experiences at Mister Fox’s home until she tells of them herself. In Gaiman’s version, the story begins in media res with the common refrain of the man asking his beloved to visit him at his house. The narrator, Mister Fox, begins the poem by saying, “…I wish that you would visit me one day, / in my house. / There are such sights I would show you.”24We are already at the storytelling event where, in the original tale, the tale-telling contest will end with the girl’s reveal, which condemns the murderous Mister Fox. This focus in Gaiman’s poem upon narration rather than direct action is incredibly important to the way the poem functions.

  In the original, the retelling of the events of the girl’s experience as its own story within the larger tale is crucial to its resolution; the reader or listener of the original will hear the same story twice in a row but to very different effect—i.e., first with suspense and unknown terror, then with foreknowledge and anticipation of the conclusion of justice. By omitting the duplicate nature of the original, Gaiman makes this version solely about the telling of the story without the anchor of unbiased narration to validate the girl’s tale for the reader. As the storytelling event nestled within the larger structure is crucial to the resolution of the larger tale, Gaiman uses the potential of narration as an act to dictate the direction his encompassing tale takes.

  It is important to note that there is nothing that contradicts Mister Fox’s guilt until the very end of the poem. By using the reveal of what should be a human hand but is only a fox’s paw at the conclusion of the fiancée’s tale as the pivotal point of proof over narrative, Gaiman creates a moment in which the proof of the maiden’s tale and the proof of the tale that we are reading are one and the same—yet they do not reach the same conclusion. By saving this form of evidence until the end of the story, allowing the reader to carry the prejudice of previous knowledge of the tale type as Mister Fox’s seeming guilt builds through the several Fox tales the women tell, the reveal of his seeming innocence for the reader serves to reinforce the way that narrative creates its own form of truth and that reshifting to a new truth can be shocking or, as within the story, impossible. Despite the unclear and unacknowledged nature of the beloved’s evidence, her control of the narrative within his larger narration means that, as Gaiman puts it, “His story is effectively over”25 without him being able to affect it.

  Gaiman takes the opportunity in this storytelling context to add to the central tale by pulling together several variants of the Mister Fox tale type and other thematically related stories to create a new meaning for the core tale.26 Grouped by their relationship to fox motifs and plots of sexual knowledge and danger, together these tales play with ideas of guilt, concealment, and conclusory judgment but are ambiguous in terms of conclusions regarding these ideas.
As the pale woman tells the first tale in the poem, a variant of the Mister Fox tale, it lacks its typically conclusive ending. The girl betrayed by her scholar lover avoids her murder but runs mad and there is no mention of the justice she usually receives in this variant. Conversely, the beloved of Mister Fox presents a richly narrated version of the Mister Fox tale that ends in a contradictory manner: the paw she throws down sows doubt about the justness of her accusation and her lover’s death. As the poem moves through the reversals in these stories, determination of guilt and acknowledgment of victimization become problematic concepts. It becomes increasingly unclear who is the fox and who is the victim, who the hunter and who the hunted.

  Like “Snow, Glass, Apples,” this poem shifts narration from the third person to the first by the former villain of the piece in a manner that drastically changes our relationship to the story. However, where “Snow, Glass, Apples” empowers the reader with a new perspective on the story the shift here to Mister Fox’s narration serves to occlude the purpose of the narrative. Rather than being shown a new perspective on the story, we are given an obscured version.

  The commandeering of the narrative voice in this story is crucial. After the pale woman’s tale is applauded, Mister Fox attempts to tell his own story about trickster foxes in a version that seems poised to switch the gendered power dynamic and trickery of the pale woman’s tale by shifting to a different narrative tradition. He begins, “I read that in the Orient foxes follow priests and scholars, in disguise as women, houses, mountains, gods, processions, always discovered by their tails,”27 but as his story is about to gain momentum he is interrupted by his beloved’s father who asks the girl to tell her story. The power of the narrative is displaced from poem’s narrator and all are focused upon the girl’s story. Gaiman’s fantastically rendered version of her tale is riveting for both his reader and her audience. Though Mister Fox is our window into her narration, he contributes little to how we are meant to interpret the tale. Instead there is a great deal of focus on the responses occurring around him, registering the threat through the building focus that the girl’s narrative creates. As he says, “All eyes were on me then, not her, though hers was the story.”28 Her captivation of the audience directs their gaze and he is incapable of altering the focus of her narration.