Snow White Unveiled

MMM--pretty snow. I want a baby in those colours.

I have recently read the original Grimm's version of Snow White to my daughter as a bedtime story.

It is a great story—good enough to have kept me and her nine-year-old brother enraptured as well as our three-year-old girl. And she herself does not get enraptured by being read to all that easily.

In recent decades, there has been a strong push from feminists to get rid of all the old fairy tales. True, they can be violent. But they are not as violent as the cartoons; yet there is no similar campaign against the cartoons. The real problem is that the fairy tales pretty consistently go against feminist teachings. In fairy tales, the father is always good-natured, but relatively powerless. The mother has all the power; and she is often evil.

The soul awakens into the dream.

Not exactly what feminists want kids to be taught. Nevertheless, I submit that this motif is consistent in fairy tales because it is the consistent perception of real children themselves. If it did not ring true in some sense, after all, the fairy tales would not be able to enthral as they do, and would not have survived in this form over all the years.

From a child's perspective, I submit, the mother really does have all the power. The father is usually away at work; the mother has full control of the kids. If a father is bad, he is still more or less powerless,because he is rarely or never alone with the children. If a mother is bad, she has free rein, and the father may not even know what is going on. Moreover, we know from current stats that mothers are more likely than fathers to abuse.

Fairy tales convey important messages. Notably, they teach kids that they cannot trust their own parents to love them. This is a valuable lesson for children to learn, but obviously not one it is of advantage to parents to teach them—particularly parents who do not, in fact, love them. By the way, all those stories about wicked stepmothers? It turns out that, in the original, these were not stepmothers; they were the children's natural mothers. The Grimms were Victorians, after all—they were the first to bowdlerize the raw folk tales they heard.

In the Grimms' original story of Snow White, she is seven years old; and there is no indication that much time passed by the end of the story. The story ends, therefore, with her as a child bride. There would have been nothing wrong with this in her day, probably a dream come true for any little girl to think of growing up so quickly, but of course no longer politically correct in recent decades.

But all this is comparatively trivial to the true mission of Snow White. The true story of Snow White is the journey of every individual soul.

Who is Snow White? She is actually carefully defined for us as she is introduced, but in the form of a riddle.

ONCE upon a time in the middle of winter, when the flakes of snow were falling like feathers from the sky, a queen sat at a window sewing, and the frame of the window was made of black ebony. And whilst she was sewing and looking out of the window at the snow, she pricked her finger with the needle, and three drops of blood fell upon the snow. And the red looked pretty upon the white snow, and she thought to herself, "Would that I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the window-frame."

So, who or what is Snow White? Well, what is black and white and red all over?

The white is expressly the white of midwinter snow. Combine this with the black window frame—that is, darkness at the window. Darkness, as much as snow, is a part of winter; winter, darkness, and night all go together as times of dormancy or suspension of the physical-sensory-natural world. And red is blood—blood falling, a hint at least of death, the separation of the soul from the physical body and the physical senses. All three are really expressions of the one principle, of a shutting off or down of the senses, of the body or the sensory world.

No wonder the queen fears her—so do we all. The Queen's fear of Snow White is the fear of her own death.

From the passage, we also immediately know something about the queen—and recall that, in the original, this queen is the same wicked queen who seeks to kill Snow White. She is easily and profoundly swayed by appearances: the mere prettiness of the red blood against the white of the snow makes her want to have a child with the same characteristics. Not a terribly worthy or respectful thought.

So the queen and Snow White are opposites: Snow White is the place in which the senses are absent, and the queen is all senses, all the time. That is also why she is queen—because she is completely invested in our shared social life. And hence, theoretically, being all senses, the queen is and must be the most beautiful thing there is—the most appealing to the senses.

And yet, she discovers in her mirror a dark paradox. It seems that there is a greater beauty, incipient, potential, hidden in the depths of night/winter/death. There is something non-sensory that is, in the end, more beautiful than this whole sensible world.

This, surely, is the beauty of the soul, and of the world perceived directly by the soul: of that kingdom that is “not of this world.”

Snow White, then, is the human soul, facing all the dangers that the sensory and social world contains.

It is because Snow White is the soul that she is so devilishly hard to kill. In the end, it seems it is categorically not possible for her to really die. The queen, seeking to kill her, only drives her deep into the dark forest. This classic destination of all fairy tales is the same “green world” Northrop Frye found in Shakespeare's comedies and romances—a place apart from society in which troubles are miraculously healed. Frye was wrong, though, to equate this with the world of “nature.” It is just the opposite; it is the world of “supernature.” Nature would be no place for the soul, Snow White, to sojourn, let alone to heal. No, the dark wood is primarily the world of darkness, and of no other people—hence the world of night, hence the world of sleep, hence the world of dreams. That's why magical things like gingerbread houses and caves of diamonds are to be found there. It is here, in the world of dreams, of the imagination, that the soul finds refuge within any 24-hour period, just as Snow White does in the forest.

It is also a good place for abused children to find refuge, and here the story offers useful advice: in the land of dreams, of stories, and of the imagination. That is your escape.

In the dream world, Snow White finds shelter with seven little men. In the first instance, they are dwarfs, which is to say, creatures of the imagination, of dreams, never seen in the waking world. Like her, they are outcasts from the social world—unknown and unseen, or if seen, seeming to this world small and ugly.

Such friendly, comic old helper figures, when seen in dreams, are, quite simply, angels, who can guide and advise us. The abused child can rely on them for help, when he or she cannot rely on any of the adults around them. They are seven, no doubt, from reliance on an old and universal folk concept, that the seven (visible) planets of the ecliptic are living spirits moving through the heavens, that represent the upper limit of the world of time, just before, rising heavenward, you reach the firmament of eternity. They mine diamonds—stars--in the mountains of dawn, returning home to Snow White every night, as the stars and planets do in the daily cycle. All lovely dream-associations. More importantly, like angels, the seven give Snow White good advice, essentially moral advice. They warn her not to talk to any strangers, not to let anyone in, not to buy any frivolities, to avoid the snares of passing witches. They model to her and teach her of the importance of responsible work and self-sufficiency. All good lessons, too, for the listening young soul.

The contents of mind emerge from sense experience.

The magic mirror is, let us say, the conscious mind—the mind which mirrors all that we see, as the moon in the night mirrors the light of the sun. Our conscious mind tells us, as it tells the queen, that there truly is something greater than we are in this universe; something behind the sensed, and beyond the seen. This always comes as a humbling shock; like a death. Original sin makes us all want to see ourselves as gods, masters of good and evil. The evil queen, like many, does not take it well.

Logically enough, the wicked queen tries to kill the soul, or rather paralyse it, with sensory temptations. First, in the Grimm version, the wicked queen tempts Snow White with a fancy dress with stays, supposed to make her figure more attractive. Clothes—outward appearances; what matters in the physical, not the spiritual, world. But putting it on cuts off Snow White's breath—“breath” being the word (in Latin) from which the word “spirit” is derived. Good advice for the young soul.

Perhaps a bit tighter than good health would suggest.

Then the wicked queen tempts Snow White with a poisoned comb, supposed to make her hair more beautiful. More of the same—earthly vanity, vanity of the senses. The comb accordingly poisons her head. Finally, this not being enough, the wicked queen reproduces Eve's apple itself. “Whoever ate a piece of it must surely die”-- the words of Genesis, here quoted from Andrew Lang's English translation of the German tale. A temptation, in the first instance, to the sense of taste; but the image of the reddening apple also carries its associations with the returning sun, the source of all light, and therefore a symbol, in appropriate context, as here, for all the senses. It cannot hurt the wicked queen, because she is all senses; but it is death to Snow White.

Or simulated death, pending the coming of the handsome prince.

And who is the handsome prince?

The original tall, dark, and handsome stranger.

You've already guessed, haven't you? Contrary to much neo-pagan wishful thinking, the old fairy tales are actually resolutely Christian.

Interestingly, first, he is not, in the original (as Lang translates it), actually a “prince.” the word seems to be avoided. Instead, he is, repeatedly, “a king's son.” This might amount to the same thing in practice, but it is odd that this awkwardness not only appears, but has been preserved, and not “corrected” through the years of oral transmission. But “king's son” seems intended by its slight awkwardness, oddly preserved through the oral generations, to suggest a reference to the most famous of all “king's sons,” Jesus the Christ—often referred to as “son,” rarely as “prince.”

Disney changed the ending in having the sleeping girl awakened by a kiss. Romantic touch, but not as apt allegorically. It is not romantic love that saves us. In the Grimm version, Snow White is awakened when one of the King's son's retainers trips on a tree stump, and the coffin is jolted. A bit of apple that was lodged in her throat pops out, and she revives.

To a Catholic, that bit about tripping must evoke echoes of the Way of the Cross, an oft-repeated devotion, in which Jesus stumbles three times on his trip through the streets of Jerusalem to Calvary. The more so since it is a tree root that trips the manservant: the tree, in turn, would be the cross, often referred to quasi-metaphorically as a tree, a tree reversing in its import the fatal tree of Eden, source of evil apples. As she awakes, and asks where she is, the King's son answers “You are with me,” as if his own identity should be, to her, self-evident.

And so the two really did, and really do, and really will, live “happily ever after”; for there really is a “happily ever after,” more real than anything outside of fairy tales. We will be joined to God forever in heaven.

Happily ever after. Really. Deal with it.

The wicked, worldly queen? Importantly, she is invited to heaven too—it is not God who excludes. But in the original, arriving at the feast full of envy, she is clad in shoes of red-hot iron, and dances until she dies. A fairly traditional vision, surely, of hell—but also I think suggestively self-imposed. She was, as we say, “burning with envy,” and dancing in eternal vain hope to draw attention away from the blessed soul and to herself.