“The Dwarfs, when they came in the evening, found Snowdrop lying on the ground" (*source*, *alternate source). From* *Grimm's Fairy Tales - Illustrated by Arthur Rackham* *(1909).*

To read the original Snow White as published by the Brothers Grimm in 1819, click here.

This post is dedicated to my daughter and to Sinead O’Connor.

Beauty: A Blessing or a Curse?

Once upon a time in the middle of winter, when snowflakes the size of feathers were falling from the sky, a queen was sitting and sewing by a window with an ebony frame. While she was sewing, she looked out at the snow and pricked her finger. Three drops of blood fell onto the snow. The red looked so beautiful against the white snow that she thought:

“If only I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the window frame.”

Not long after that, she gave birth to a little girl who was white as snow, red as blood, and black as ebony, and she was called Snow White. The queen died shortly after the child was born.

The odds were stacked against Snow White.

Her mother, the Queen, dies shortly after her birth, leaving the infant princess motherless. Her father, the King, is so absent from the tale that he’s only mentioned to introduce us to the evil stepmother, whom he marries a year later. We don’t know whether it is from grief, fear or immaturity that he cannot see beyond the new queen’s beauty to her less desirable traits which ultimately lead her to try to murder his own daughter several times.

Snow White’s story seems set up to be a tragic one. But, like many fairy tales, Snow White’s story ends with a “happily ever after.”

Or does it?

This tale is centered entirely around Snow White’s beauty and how it affects her life. Born as a wish come true for her mother who wanted a baby with a very specific kind of beauty, Snow White’s looks seem at first to be a supernatural blessing.

Note that her mother does not wish for a child with wisdom, compassion, humor, or health; she lists only requirements for the baby’s outward appearance. From the beginning, Snow White’s very existence and identity is predicated on her looks. That is to say, she is a person deemed desirable because of her perceived beauty.

This same beauty instills rage and envy in the “replacement” for the maternal force in her life. Here, by no fault of her own, Snow White’s beauty is a curse. The evil stepmother brings her own issues around vanity to move the tale through its cycles of terror and rescue. But each time her seething hatred for Snow White’s beauty is on the brink of obliterating the child, that self-same beauty saves her.

First, the wicked queen goes for the inside job, ordering the huntsman not only to kill Snow White, but to bring back her lungs and liver as proof that the deed is done. But:

Snow White was so beautiful that the huntsman took pity on her and said, “Just run off, you poor child.”

An illustration from page 7 of *Mjallhvít (Snow White)* an 1852 icelandic translation of the Grimm-version fairytale.

Abandoned to the appetites of wild animals in the forest, Snow White luckily finds the cottage of the seven dwarfs. When they return from work, their alarm is raised about an intruder in their home. We can imagine that were they to find such a person still lurking about, they would fight to expel them. But when they find Snow White sleeping in one of their beds,

“My goodness, my goodness!” they all exclaimed. “What a beautiful child!” The dwarfs were so delighted to see her that they decided not to wake her up, and they let her keep sleeping in the bed.

Despite the dwarfs’ three warnings to the child now living in their home, Snow White each time falls for the evil queen’s disguises and is struck down. Twice she is revived by the dwarfs’ care, but the third time it is not until the prince is so awestruck by her beauty that her life is saved – by accident (more on that below).

It is not her wits or her kindness or anything to do with her behavior that she is cursed or saved; it is by her inert beauty.

Beauty in the Eye of the Male and Female Gaze

It’s worth exploring who the beauty-beholders are in this fairy tale. “Snow White” has often been interpreted as a warning against patriarchal ideals of beauty imposed upon women and the havoc it can wreak on females both old and young. After all, the men in this story are motivated by it: The huntsman lets Snow White go because of her beauty. The prince wishes to keep her because of it. We can imagine the evil stepmother’s beauty had something to do with the king’s choice to marry her.

The dwarfs, too, allow Snow White to stay the night in their cottage because of her beauty, but it should be noted that they do not let her continue to live there because of it.

The dwarfs told her: “If you will keep house for us, cook, make the beds, wash, sew, knit and keep everything neat and tidy, you can stay with us, and we’ll give you everything you need.”

Quite unlike the Disney cartoon version which has become the most iconic and even canonical telling of this tale, where the dwarfs are slobs living in filth, the original Grimm story’s dwarfs are seven men living at the outskirts of society who are very good housekeepers indeed:

When night fell, she discovered a little cottage and went inside to rest. Everything in the house was tiny and indescribably dainty and spotless. THere was a little table, with seven little plates on a white cloth, each with its own little spoon. And then there were seven little knives and forks, and seven cups. Against the wall were seven little beds in a row, each made up with sheets as white as snow.

Not too shabby for guys slugging away in the dusty old mines all day.

Yes, domestic skills can be interpreted as qualities deemed as “beautiful” and desirable for women to have by traditional patriarchal values. But the dwarfs are the only men in the story who see beyond Snow White’s appearance for some other value she could have, one that would contribute to the household organism, something would give her a sense of achievement. And after all, as she is just a child when she comes to them, such tasks seem appropriate to building her confidence as a member of a family.

The “Snow White” fairy tale also looks at how other women are complicit in upholding patriarchal beauty standards.

“Mirror, tell me who is the most beautiful in the world?” Illustration by Zofia Plewińska-Smidowiczowa, pre 1944.

The evil stepmother, after all, has likely had her own beauty routine work to her advantage, netting herself a king as a husband. But it’s her relationship with her magic mirror that holds the key:

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,

Who’s the fairest one of all?”

The mirror would always answer,

“You, O Queen, are the fairest of all.”

Then she was happy, for she knew that the mirror always spoke the truth.

Two things stand out about this passage. One is, the evil stepmother is looking at her own reflection, technically, when she looks in the mirror. What she sees is how she has created herself to be beautiful, by her standards – which we can reliably presume are standards driven by the need to satisfy the male gaze, so internalized into the female psyche that she may as well be talking to herself.

When the mirror answers and “she was happy, for she knew that the mirror always spoke the truth,” this presupposes that that there is in fact some absolute truth about what the standard of beauty should be, that there is in fact a pinnacle. This is supported today by such phenomena as beauty pageants and popular magazines with their annual cover stories declaring the “most beautiful” man or woman in the world.

This leads us to examine why women continuing to cling to and force younger generations to conform to such standards is so damaging for society in general.

The Comb, the Staylaces and the Apple

What is fascinating about the evil stepmother is that she clearly has so much more than beauty going for her. She has cunning, intelligence, and understanding of the occult arts. This is power. She could use that knowledge of magic for good, but she does not. Instead, she uses it to create instruments of death to bring down Snow White.

Two of these are tools of beauty: the staylaces and the comb. Both are meant to help cultivate a certain kind of appearance, and literally to keep things in place: the comb will order the hair into a desired pattern, and the staylaces will restructure the flesh to give a certain shape.

That she brings each of these items to entice Snow White into “buying into” normative (patriarchal) standards of beauty may be interpreted as an older generation of women introducing toxic lookism to a younger one. Snow White indeed falls for both – and is felled, temporarily, by both. While we have no real markers of time in this fairy tale, save that she survives her trip to the woods with the huntsman at age 7, we do know that by this age most little girls have been exposed to and are influenced by externally imposed beauty standards. They are told what their hair should look like, what they should wear, what an ideal body shape will be when they get older, and how to ornament themselves to enhance their appearance.

What are we to make of the apple, the most deadly of all the tools used by the evil stepmother to tempt Snow White?

Franz Jüttner (1865–1925): Illustration from *Sneewittchen,* Scholz' Künstler-Bilderbücher, Mainz 1905.

Unlike the staylaces and the comb, the apple is not some item to be worn. Its ordinariness makes it less suspect; it breaks the pattern Snow White and the dwarfs may have come to expect. However, it’s a much greater magical work of art than the first two, precisely because it is so mundane. Nature makes apples, not humans. But this apple is not a natural creation:

The queen went into a remote, hidden chamber in which no one ever set foot and made an apple full of poison. On the outside, it looked beautiful – white with red cheeks – and if you saw it, you craved it. But if you took the tiniest bite, you would die.

“White with red cheeks” – this reminds us of the description of Snow White herself; what makes her beautiful is also what makes the apple beautiful. The fruit is another kind of mirror. Now she, like those who find her irresistible despite knowing nothing about her, partakes of that illogical attraction. The apple drives home the point that beauty is skin deep, and what is underneath and inside could be very different indeed.

The apple can certainly stand for the value based on appearance at the cost of knowing the substance beneath. These days, it can be understood through swipeable dating culture, slick product packaging, and even outsize promises of transformation offered by the plastic surgery, makeup and beauty supplements industry. If it looks good, it must be good. If it looks good, it is desirable.

Snow White buys in. She literally internalizes the idea of the apple’s goodness based solely on its appearance. Furthermore, she does so in communion with the queen who knows it is poisonous and gives her the toxic half. Like Eve tempted by the snake in the Garden of Eden, Snow White now has knowledge of desire driven by a lie, and the result is a kind of death.

Snow White Characters as Parts of Self and Intergenerational Trauma

Snow White may be the titular character of this fairy tale, but it becomes more interesting if we place the evil stepmother at the center. It is she, after all, who drives the plot.

By her marriage to the king, she steps into a role where she should be the maternal force for Snow White. As a woman of beauty and power, she could impart to Snow White a healthy understanding of self-esteem, grooming, and self-care, as well as significant occult knowledge which could be used for good.

But she doesn’t. All of those gifts and talents are twisted and weaponized into vehicles of envy and wrath toward a truly innocent little girl whose only crime is being born “white as snow, red as blood, and black as ebony.”

We don’t get to know what made the stepmother so evil, but we can be curious enough to guess without inventing narratives that are too remote from the original story.

Perhaps she doesn’t think she’ll ever get over being the king’s “second” choice (that is, chronologically, after his first wife). As Snow White is a walking, talking reminder of his previous love, she fears she will fall to third place in his attention.

Perhaps her obsession with beauty has to do with a fear of aging and being superseded by the younger, prettier stepdaughter.

Perhaps she looks at Snow White and is reminded of her younger self and is not comfortable with accepting that “her best days are behind her.”

Another way of looking at their relationship is as parts of the queen herself:

The queen's persona is the beautiful, regal mask she presents to the outer world. Here is a powerful woman worthy of being queen, worthy of being chosen by the most powerful man in the land. She cultivates her appearance and cares that, especially in her royal role, she should also outrank others in beauty, the keys to which she has unlimited access because of her privilege.

Snow White can be seen as a part of the evil stepmother too: she is the inner child, whose trauma is at the heart of the queen’s malevolent actions. She is born with her own unique beauty and talents, but has been stretched, manipulated and bent into an unnatural mold of beauty imposed by the outside. She needs basic guidance about how to care for and honor herself in a healthy way, but all she receives is more rules about how to measure up to someone else’s standard. The longer the inner child’s needs to be truly seen and valued go neglected or shunted off to artifice, the less worthy she feels.

Franz Jüttner (1865–1925): Illustration from *Schneewittchen,* Scholz' Künstler-Bilderbücher, Mainz 1910

And the less worthy the stepmother’s inner child feels, the more the shadow part of the personality is activated. The shadow is part of the queen who disguises herself to commit murder. It is she who goes to her secret room to mix poisonous potions to kill off the vulnerable inner child who only asks to be cared for and seen for her own inherent worth. To look at the neediness of the child, to hear her cries, is too much to bear; better to shut her up forever. Why can’t she just accept those unnatural standards the same way every other woman has had to learn to put up with them since time immemorial?

Why do some women wear high heels that wreck their feet and knees — their literal ability to move?

Why do some women, diet and work out to exhaustion, or burn their scalps with treatments to change the color or texture of their hair?

Why do some mothers tell their daughters to lose that extra 10 pounds, wear a less shocking shade of lipstick, or ‘stop dressing like a tomboy’?

Why do some women stuff down and hide their significant talents and intelligence in order to let a man take center stage?

Why do some women exalt their talents and intelligence to impress a man in authority?

Why do some of the most accomplished and confident women shrink when a Marilyn-Monroe-type bombshell enters the room?

Deep down, the evil stepmother knows.

Happily Ever After?

Essentially, it is the dwarfs who play the role of the parents Snow White never had. They meet her basic needs of survival with food and shelter. They acknowledge her beauty, but they go beyond that, recognizing that she can build self-esteem and worthiness by giving her tasks to complete for the good of the family. They warn her to keep her safe, and they save her life twice.

What they don’t have, however, is a real plan about how Snow White will grow up and move out into a life of her own. All they can do is work their day job and respond to one crisis after another — which sometimes really is how actual day-to-day parenting can feel.

When the prince comes and asks to take Snow White in her coffin, it’s almost as if he is asking the dwarfs for her hand in marriage. But why does he want her, presumably a corpse in a glass coffin? Because she is beautiful. That is all. Beautiful things that are essentially useless, practically speaking, are put on display. The best we can hope is that the prince sees Snow White in her coffin as a kind of art (necrophilic as it may be) that inspires him with a sense of true and ultimate beauty (a la the Platonic form of same), but still, like the mummified remains of ancient Egyptians in displayed to the indifferent and gawking masses in museums, a human body deserves more respect. Again, Snow White is reduced only to her looks, even in death.

*Schneewittchen;* Darstellung von Alexander Zick (1845 - 1907)

Because they love her, the dwarfs hesitate to let her go, but they relent. Luckily for Snow White, this decision leads to the stumble that dislodges the bit of poisonous apple from her throat, reviving her. It is not “love’s first kiss,” as in the alternate versions of this and other tales involving comatose princesses, that awakens her, but clumsiness.

“Good heavens, where am I?” she cried out. The prince was thrilled and said: “You will stay with me,” and he told her what had happened. “I love you more than anything else on earth,” he said. “Come with me to my father’s castle. You shall be my bride.” Snow White had tender feelings for him, and she departed with him.

Here we have a couple where one party loves a stranger he has met just moments ago “more than anything else on earth” and the other party develops “tender feelings” for a stranger she has just met moments ago. On these not quite mutual feelings they decide to marry, and the girl who fled the courtly life with its dangerous personalities and expectations to the sanctuary of the woods goes right back to the kind of life where she started, with a man she barely knows, who loves her only because she is beautiful.

As for the evil stepmother, at the royal wedding, her beauty too gets put on display: not as art, but as a gruesome spectacle where red-hot iron slippers are placed upon her feet and she dances herself to death in front of the partygoers. In the end her vanity is punished, while Snow White is left in peace to rule as “the fairest of them all.”

God forbid she finds the magic mirror.

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Next up: Medicinal plants and lore inspired by “Snow White” : herbs for reviving consciousness and moving anger.