On Snow White

The traditional academic approach to fairy tales (Marchen) is to see them as undigested bits of paganism or expressions of Freudian passions suppressed by Christianity.

This is silly; the people who have told them have been Christians for many generations. It is a classist assumption that the average person is too stupid to realize a conflict with their own religion. And it is even worse to assume, as Freudians and Jungians do, that the average person is actually unconscious.

On seeing Disney’s Snow White—actually for the first time, though of course I already knew the story—nothing could be more obvious than the specifically Christian overtones of the tale. It is surely perverse to overlook the similarity between the apple Snow White eats, against the warnings of the dwarfs, and the apple Eve eats in Eden. In both cases, the effect is the same, too. “On that day, you will surely die.” A spiritual sleep, a spiritual death, until awakened by love.

Snow White is recognizable as the human soul, always feminine (Greek Psyche), and her story is the epic of human salvation. We begin innocent, Snow White, but eventually we all eat the apple. Original sin.

The Wicked Queen is Lucifer. Like Lucifer, she is beautiful—the most beautiful of the angels—and like Lucifer her chief sin is pride. In the Muslim conception, Satan falls when he refuses God’s command to bow before man—envy of humanity is implied here. And note that, as here, in many Medieval and Renaissance depictions, the serpent in the garden is female. She is female again in Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. She is our step-parent and our ruler—Satan is “the Lord of this World.”

The Handsome Prince who awakens her with his love is, of course, the Christ; and he takes her in the end to live happily ever after in his father’s house, which has many mansions.

Some day our prince will come—indeed.

The seven dwarves? They are the saints, the believing church, the faithful, who intercede for and protect the soul pending the second coming of the Christ. They know where the true gold is, buried deep in this world. They are small of stature in this world, because that is how true Christians are supposed to be—the “little ones” of the Beatitudes, the anawin. In the world, but not of it.

It is indeed also possible to find nature references in the story. This pleases those who want to see it all as a pagan survival, because paganism is supposed to be about nature worship. Paganism is in fact not at all about nature worship; but never mind. One can see Snow White as the earth itself, barren in a deathlike sleep over the winter. The Handsome Prince is the vegetation God, like Adonis or Dionysus, who disappears each fall and reappears each spring.

The seven dwarfs could be interpreted as the seven stars of the Big Dipper, who remain loyally in the sky, overlooking the prostrate earth, throughout the fallow period, while many other stars fall below the horizon. They represent faithfulness, because they are always in the sky, and because they always point to the north pole, the centre of the sky’s motion, the centre of all things. One can even see them as miners, digging the other stars up from the earth, where they disappear for part of the year, like diamonds from a mine.

Continuing the celestial imagery, the bright red apple is the sun, which, devoured by darkness, causes winter to come. The Queen’s magic mirror that sees all upon the earth is perhaps the moon, which sees in dark places with reflected light. And the Wicked Queen, possessing both these things, as if one in either hand, is time, which is measured by the sun and moon, and which gives birth to and devours all things—like a mother who is also homicidal.

But note that this explanation works rather less well than the Christian one. For example, it makes the claim that Snow White lives “happily ever after” literally false. It makes no sense that the earth should retire, as Snow White does, to the house of the seven stars/dwarfs—i.e., the sky--for the winter: it doesn’t. Nor does the Big Dipper point to the earth; can Snow White represent both the changing earth and the permanent North Star? While digging diamonds sounds like a reference to the stars in the night sky, this is Disney’s addition: in the Grimm story, they dig gold. And so on.

It is necessary, therefore, I think, to see the Christian signification as the primary one, and these interesting allusions to nature as secondary.

Why are they there? It is possible that there is an earlier pagan story underlying the story we know, which has been altered to make it Christian. But there is, I think, a more plausible alternative explanation. I would argue that all art, and certainly all mythoi, seek to uncover the logos, which is to say, the basic structure or order or plan underlying all things. Think of Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, which I take to be his grand image of art. To the extent that it does so, makes sense of a variety of diverse elements of human experience, can demonstrate the same pattern underlying disparate things, it works as art. And it also works as cosmology, mythos, making sense of human experience and showing God through his plan of creation.

So, while the story’s main intent is to show the basic pattern of human life—which is, after all, of greater intrinsic importance to any of us than the mere cycles of nature—it succeeds better as art if it can also make this a coherent and compelling narrative, plus an accurate description of the cycles of nature, plus an accurate description of the organization of human society, plus a completely logical process, plus referring in correct detail to the movements of the night sky that represent time, and so on and on.

It is therefore a measure of the success of Snow White as art and mythos that it works so well at once as a story, as a schema of human salvation, and as a description of the cycles of nature and of the sky.

But there is nothing pagan about that. The logos itself is an essential Christian concept.

It is also, incidentally, what science is all about—that other quintessentially Christian activity.

I only wish more recent Disney products had some tiny fraction of the artistic depth of Snow White. But genius is genius, and it is rare.