Snow White: A Mirror to the Past?
In my third year of studying English and politics at university, I decided that my final project - the dreaded ‘diss’ - would explore fairytales. Now, on the surface, this sounds silly, and, yes, I did get a few funny looks when I told people. I would argue that fairytales and their many, many adaptations, provide a mirror to the past.
The pitting of two women against one another is a tale as old as time, apparently. But the symbolism, and the characters themselves, change with context. In 1812, the relationship seems black and white, but fast forward 200 years, and we have an armour-clad Snow White, and an Evil Queen with a backstory in Rupert Sanders’ Snow White and the Huntsman.
Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) examines Victorian literature with a feminist lens. They argue that a the core of Little Snow White is the polarisation of the ‘angel-woman’ and the ‘monster-woman’ - Snow White and the Evil Queen. It is true that this binary is present in each adaptation, but with the medium of film, there are more ways to present it, and make it more complex. Gilbert and Gubar’s scholarship, surprisingly, defends the Queen. They claim that she is a victim of the patriarchy. How? The mirror.
In the original tale we never meet the King, but we can expect that there is one. It can be interpreted that the mirror is actually the voice of the King, reflecting standards of beauty upon the Queen. She then internalises this; as Gilbert and Gubar say “to be caught and trapped in a mirror…is to be driven inward”. The Queen then projects her frustrations at societal expectations onto the one person who seemingly meets them all, Snow White. It can be read that Snow is the younger version of the Evil Queen, before her naivety was shattered. It can also be read that the Evil Queen is punishing Snow for being the very thing she cannot live up to. This entire narrative is driven by the mirror. As Maria Tartar states, “the voice in the mirror…places a premium on beauty”, making it the voice of expectation, to be internalised.
When we finally do have a male presence other than the prince, we have seven of them: the dwarfs of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As Gilbert and Gubar note, the dwarfs’ cottage is a miniature, patriarchal, kingdom. I second this by asserting that the dwarfs’ cottage is a microcosm of 1930s America. Snow, ever the angel-woman, tells them that she will sew, cook, and clean in exchange for a place to stay. As Gilbert and Gubar note, Snow White is “patriarchy’s angelic daughter”; clad in a dress of primary colours, she is the epitome of innocence.
Through this all, what else is common…the apple. Do we even have time to dissect this? The apple can symbolise temptation, sexuality, and knowledge. Once bitten, once the ‘innocence’ has been destroyed, Snow is no longer the ‘angel-woman’. Luckily, there’s a Prince who can remedy this and bring her back to submission, but that’s a sidetrack for another day.
By tracing a thread from the original Little Snow White, to Disney’s adaptation, through to Rupert Sanders’ 2012 version Snow White and the Huntsman, we can see an attitude shift. In Sanders’ adaptation, the Queen has a backstory: she is a survivor of sexual violence, and kills the King herself. We are opened up to a more complex binary than ever before - the stakes are higher, we are forced to sympathise with the ‘evil’ Queen. Snow White herself is a warrior, which contrasts the angel-woman she was supposed to embody. The film ends with a glimmer of understanding from Snow to the Queen, and a glimmer of hope for the audience.