Notes on Snow White

There are three paradigms on naming in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
1) Descriptive Naming based on Mannerisms and Personality – The Dwarfs (the country) àsome of these even being so abstract as to be “Doc”
2) Descriptive Naming based on Titles – The Queen and The Hunter (the court and castle), The Slave in the Magic Mirror
3) Descriptive Naming based on physical appearance – Snow White

The used to call me Snow White: women’s strategic use of humor by Regina Barreca

Penguin Books
New York, New York, USA
Copyright 1991

0 14 01.6835 4 (pbk.)

-No overt discussion of Snow White throughout the text.
-Cover also features three images of the Mona Lisa: 1st, the classic, 2nd, grinning closed mouth, 3rd laughing with mouth open
-“The image of the Good Girl was a product developed in a conspiracy among parents, the media, and advertising, with support from the church, educational and economic institutions, and the government in general.” – page 4. “Good Girls didn’t make trouble for anybody. They did what they were told, whether that was keeping their rooms clean, watching TV while they baby-sat on Saturday nights, or buying all the current Cover Girl merchandise… Good girls were taught to believe that everything would continue to be just fine, and that someone else was out there taking care of things.” – page 4
-(from page 14): Quote of Elayne Boosner: “Reagan was against sex education in the schools because he thought there was a connection between promiscuity and sex education--that kids did it because they learned about it. No way. I had four years of algebra and I never do math. These guys say they’re against abortion because birth is a miracle. Popcorn is a miracle, too, if you don’t know how it’s done.”
-Page 40, Barreca discusses Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic. Their discussion of: “the literary convention that forces the good heroine to keep the bad woman locked away” & Jane Eyre.
-178: “Fay Weldon quotes this old joke: “Question: How many radical feminists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: That’s not funny!”

page 23: “Joanna Russ writes in her article ‘What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write’ about the ways in which, wh en the sex of the protagonists is changed, the plots no longer work, thus proving that the so-called universal plot depends heavily on the sex of the main character. In the supposedly universal plots we’ve all read in ‘great’ literature (that is, literature by men), changing the sex of the main character changes the paradigm so completely it becomes comic. Russ’s examples include the following: “1. Two strong women battle for supremacy in the early West. 2. A young girl in Minnesota finds her womahood by killing a bear. 3. A phosphorescently doomed poetess sponges off her husband and drinks herself to death, thus alienating the community of Philistines and businesswomen who would have continued to give her lecture dates. 4. A young man who unwisely puts his success in business before his personal fulfillment loses his masculinity and ends up as a neurotic, lonely eunuch.”

Russ, Joanna. How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.

Page 181 – “The mind is much more powerful than the prick – The mind doesn’t go down in two minutes.” Quote of Robin Tyler

Not in bibliography

Page 179: Barreca quotes Kate Clinton: “Men have used humor against women for so long—we know implicitly who is the butt of their jokes—that we do not trust humor. Masculine humor is deflective. It allos a denial of responsibility, the oh-I-was-just-kidding disclaimer. It is escapist, something to gloss over and get through the hard times, without ever having to do any of the hard work of change. Masculine humor is essentially not about change.”

Not in bibliography


Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire

Copyright 2003
HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022
ISBN 0-06-039384-X

“I am a girl who did no wrong
I am a woman who slept with my father the Pope
I am a rock whose hands have appetites
I am a hunter who cannot kill
I am a mercenary with the French disease
I am a girl who lived among stones
I am a woman who poisoned my enemies
I am a rock and my brothers are rocks
I am a cleric who trafficked in curses
I am a gooseboy or am I a goose
I am a girl who did little wrong
I am a a gooseboy or am I a boy
I am a farmer who stole something sacred
I am a monster who let the child go
I am a dog with an unlikely past
I am a hunter who followed the coffin
I am a girl who did something wrong
I am the other side of snow

I am a mirror a mirror am I

Mirror mirror on the wall
Who is the fairest one of all”

[last two lines in larger font]
[appears before page 1]

Moulding The Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, University of Toulouse-Le Mirail, France

Copyright 2007
Published by Ashgate Publishing Company, Burlington, VT USA
978-0-7546-6034-7

“Wilkie Collins’s Modern Snow White
Aresenic Consumption and Ghastly Complexions in The Law and the Lady (1875)”

-No overt reference to Snow White in that article?
-Final chapter
-“Like Bluebeard’s wives, Collins’s female characters experience male cruelty and strive to transform themselves to please men—even when the remedies are lethal. While the novel’s main secret lies in a dead woman’s toilet case among her comsetics, the deciphering of the enigma involves decoding the signs of femininity as so many incriminating clues paving the way for truth.” – page 159
-“


Feminist Fairy Tales by Barbara G. Walker
Copyright 1996
HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY
ISBN 0-06-251320-6

-“Snow Night” – page 19

Page 19: “The wicked stepmother is ubiquitous in European fairy tales, whereas any father figure is usually given a good character. Snow White’s stepmother seems to have been vilified because (a) she resented being less beautiful than Snow White, and (b) she practiced witchcraft.
“One might suspect that female beauty was really a larger issue for men than for women, because male sexual response depends to a considerable degree on visual cues. Placing each “fair lady” (or anything else) somewhere on an arbitrary hierarchical scale seems to be a male idea. Women may recognize a thousand different types of beauty without having to make them compete.
“As for witchcraft, the last bastion of female spiritual power fell when the church declare its all-out war on witches, the name they gave to rural midwives, healers, herbalists, counselors, and village wisewomen, inheritors of the unraveling cloak of the pre-Christian priestess. A queen who was also a witch would have been a formidable figure, adding political influence to spiritual mana. Snow White’s stepmother therefore seems to me a porjection of male jealousies. As re-envisioned in this story, she may seem more true to life.”


Page 21: “Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess with skin white as snow and hair black as night, so she was called Snow Night.” (21)

“Her mother died when she was a baby, and her father remarried. Snow Night’s setpmother was a noted sorceress, and also famous for her beauty, of a more mature type than that of the young princess”

-Lord Hunter wants to improve his rank by marrying a royal princess.
-Snow Night escapes the Hunter by kicking him in the crotch

Page 22
“One evening he [the Lord Hunter] found the queen alone in here anteroom, consulting her magic mirror, wh ich always told the truth. He sat quietly while she asked the mirror several questions. Then, as she was turning away, he said, ‘I wonder if Your Majesty has ever asked the mirror who is the fairest lady in the land?’
“The queen smiled. ‘I know the answer it would give, huntsman. Snow Night is the fairest.’
“’Doesn’t that anger you?’
“’No, why should it?’
“’Surely Your Majesty’s great beauty has always been fairest in the land. Wouldn’t that make the princess a usurper and an upstart?’
….

Page 23
“’But don’t stepmothers always hate their stepdaughters?’
“That must be one of the ridiculous traditions about women invented by men.

Page 23
The Huntsman: “According to an old story, the royal stepmother sends another to act for her, such as her faithful huntsman. He is the one charged with killing the stepdaughter and bringing back her heart in a jeweled casket.”

Page 23
“The dwarves’ eyes sparkled like the gems, which dwarves love above everything else.”

Page 25
“As for Lord Hunter, his reason quite gone, he lived confined for the rest of his life as the dwarves’ prisoner. In later years eh sometimes passed the weary hours by writing stories. It is said that he wrote an entirely different version of the story you have just heard.”

--No magic occurs in the story, since the mirror is never actually asked a question
--The dwarves have a Queen of their own, with whom the Queen has diplomatic relations with
--Snow White does not live with nor care for the dwarves (never “learns what it means to become a woman”)
--Prince Charming does not kiss Snow White as she is never left unconscious
--



Moulding the female body in Victorian fairy tales and sensation novels by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
Copyright 2007
Ashgate Publishing Company, Burlington VT
ISBN 978-0-7546-6034-7

“Consumer Culture in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels”

“’Pretty things to sell, very cheap, very cheap… stay-laces of all colours’. – ‘Little Snow White’, the Brothers Grimm”

Page 5: “As Snow White’s wicked stepmother’s irresitible offer illustrates, what we generally learn as children through fairy tales is that all princesses are beautiful and may even try to improve their beauty. In fact, their beauty is their wealth—quite literally, since being beautiful enables them to win a prince and a fortune. Hence, what fairy tales foreground is the idea that femininity is closely linked to aestheticization, and that beauty is a feminine virtue which needs to be cultivated. Whether it be Psyche enticed by Proserpine’s beauty cream or Snow White lured by the wicked Queen’s gaudy stay-laces, these female characters all exemplify how much their own fate depends on their physical appearance, on their power to construct a self which matches male expectations.”

Page 95-96: “The deceptive nature of glass if ofeten visible when mirrors are used to purvey reflections on feminine representation. In Gubar and Gilbert’s feminist interpretation of Snow White, the magic looking-glass is a cultural weapon that enforces patriarchal sentences on women and locks them up in ‘crystal prisons.’ The Queen’s obsession with her own reflection suggests less the woman’s self-absorption and narcissism than it discloses the King’s appraising gaze. As Gubar and Gilbert posit, ‘His, surely, is the voice of the looking-glass, the patriarchal voice of judgment that rules the Queen’s—and every woman’s—self evaluation.’ Yet, by producing two-dimensional images, the looking-glass also provides a significant means to investigate the relationship between femininity and/as (chimerical) representation.”

Talairach-Vielmas then compares to George MacDonald’s ‘The Woman in the Mirror’ about a woman “unable to choose her setting and unable to phrase her depair, the melancholy female reflection epitomizes objectification and subservience to the male order”

“Female Aestheticism and Criminalit in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale”

Wilkie Collins’s Armadale… Page 147: “… Armadale seems to expose the Victorian underworld of feminine construction, using the fairy tale Snow White and the figure of the narcissitic Queen to offer its readers an insight into the looking-glass of femininity.”

“As in the fairy tale, the mirror becomes the site which encapsulates treacherous female nature, inspiring Gwilt with new plots and reflecting woman as an actress staging the scenes of her life” (154).

155: “Ironically, the Queen’s anxiety over her own loss of physical attractiveness is displaced onto Snow White, her mirror image, with the murder plot reflecting Snow White’s ‘training’ in femininity before marriage. The very plots the Queen invents—especially the poisoned comb, the suffocating set of tight laces, and the poisoned apple cooked ina secret kitchen—all turn out to be feminine weapons in the aresenal of female cosmetics. Thus, the wicked actress, like a Madame Rachel who adds arsenic to her lotions, in fact merely reenacts the controlled male scripts she wanted to wipe off the surface of the glass: Snow White is crystallized by the glass coffin, murdered by her own aestheticization.”

155: “In Armadale, however, Gwilt does not seek to murder Snow White (that is, another version of herself). Unlike the Queen, she projects the sadistic voice of the mirror onto the two male protagonists and plots to kill the two Armadales. … Here, Gwilt intends to undermine the patriarchal ideology expressed by the voice in the mirror”


Politically correct bedtime stories by James Finn Garner.
Copyright 1994
Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, NY
ISBN: 0-02-542730

Page 43: Once there was a young princess who was not at all unpleasant to look at and had a temperament that many found to be more pleasant than most other people’s. Her nickname was Snow White, indicative of the discriminatory notions of associating pleasant or attractive qualities of light, and unpleasant or unattractive qualities with darkness.

44: The queen’s prized possession was a magic mirror that would answer truthfully any question asked it. Now, years of social conditioning in a male hierarchical dictatorship had left the queen very insecure about her own self-worth. Physical beauty was the one standard she cared about now, and she defined herself solely in regard to her personal apperance. So every morning the queen would ask her mirror:

‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who’s the fairest one of all?’

…

45 (response):
‘Alas, if worth be based on beauty,
Snow White has surpassed you, cutie.’

45: “But his [the woodsperson] connections to the earth and seasons had made him a kind soul, and he couldn’t bear to harm the girl. He told Snow White of the oppressive and unsisterly order of the queen and told her to run as deeply as she could into the forest”

---In this version, the dwarfs have a strong bond of brotherhood; 46: “She’ll disrupt our strong bond of brotherhood and create competition among us for her affections. I say we throw her int the river in a sack full of rocks.”

48: “Just like a woman,” grumbled one of the men under his breath, “get a man to do her dirty work.”

“’We are known as the Seven Towering Giants,” said the leader… “We are towering in spirit and so are giants among the men of the forest… To make ends meet, we also conduct retreats for men who need to get in touch with their primitive masculine identities”

“So what does that involve,” asked Snow White, “aside from drinking milk straight from the carton?” 48

50: “Meanwhile, back at the castle, the queen rejoiced at the thought that her rival in beauty had been eliminated. She puttered around her boudoir reading Glamour and Elle, and indulger herself with three whole pieces of chocolate without purging.”

Buying the apple: 51: “In protest against agribusiness conglomerates, she had a personal rule against buying food from middlepersons. But her heart went out to the economically marginalized woman, so she said yes.”

52: “ When Snow White handed over the money for the apple, you would have expected the queen to be gleeful that her plan for revenge was working. Instead, as she looked at Snow White’s fine complexion and slim, taut body, she felt alternating waves of envy and self-revulsion.”

à “You’re so young and beautiful,” sobbed the disguised queen, “and I’m horrible to look at and getting worse.”

“You shouldn’t say that. After all, beauty comes from inside a person.”

“I’ve been telling myself that for years,” said the queen, “and I still don’t believe it. How do you stay in such perfect shape?”

“Well, I meditate, work out in step aerobics three hours a day, and eat only half-portions of anything placed in front of me. Would you like me to show you?”

à53, “Oh yes, yes, please,” said the queen. So they started out with 30 minutes of simple hatha yoga meditation, then worked out on the step for another hour. As they relaxed afterward, Snow White cut her apple in half and gave a piece to the queen. Without thinking, the queen bit into it, and both of them fell into a deep sleep.”

54: “’You know,’ said the prince, ‘this might sound a little sick, but I trust you guys. I find that younger one attractive. Extremely attractive. Would you fellows mind… um.. waiting outside while I…?’”

leader of the dwarfs:…”Does Snow White make you feel like a man again?”

in regard to ‘having’ the Queen, the Prince says: “I don’t want to sound classist, but she’s not high enough caliber for me.”

End (56):

The Queen says: “From now on, I am going to dedicate my life to healing the rift between womyn to accept their natural body images and become whole again.”


Mirror Mirror, Copyrigh 2003 by Gregory Maguire; HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

ISBN 0-06-039384-X

Motefiore, the estate where the primary action takes place, is on top of a steep hill, looking down at the rest of the world.

5: “Like any child, she [Bianca/Snow White] looked out and across rather than in. She was more familiar with the vistas, the promising valleys with their hidden hamlets, the scope of the future arranged int erms of hills nad light.”

52: “The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective. Even a bowed mirror works primarily by engaging the eys, and she who centers herlsef in its surface is unlikely to notice anyone in the background who lacks a certain status, distinction. Or heigh. Like a dwarf, for instance. Or a young child.”

53: “This is a lovely looking glass,” I [Lucrezia/Wicked Stepmother] said to Don Vicente. “It’s only as lovely as what it reflects,” he answered, though his courtliness was studied and heavy.

54: He [Don Vicente/absent father] didn’t look at me. He looked in the mirror instead. “Who is the fairest of all?” he whispered. Did he mean to compare the pair of us, the Lucrezia who stood in the mirror and the Lucrezia who stood before it? A mirrored image has no cologne to seduce; is purer for that. While I had dabbed mself with attar of Persian roses.

[cont] “My sister,” said Cesare at the door, in admiration. “Will you never learn to govern your clothing?”

110: [Lucrezia says]: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who among us is fairest of all?”

[cont] Bianca straightened up and listened, as if the mirror might answer. If it did, it was in a pitch too cerebral or too hushed for Bianca to hear. In any event, Cesare either mocked his sister or echoed the mirror’s answer when he said, “Well, it’s not you, sister. It’s that little mouse child, the daughter of our agent de Nevada. Doesn’t that just make your Borgia blood boil. What’ll you doa bout that?”

“…I’ll be damned if I see you casting glances at a child young enough to be your daughter.”

[..cont] “You’re jealous because she’s lovelier than you,” he said. “You always were a jealous type. I still adore you, Crezia. Come here. Come to Cesare.”

124: “Do as I say. Bring me her heart carved from her chest.” @ Ranuccio

The dwarfs: 140: “The human mind—we have come to observe—tricks out distinctions in principles of opposition. A man more foul will ikely be less benign. A woman with a greedy belly may also be mean with her widow’s migte. The way a man slakes his thirst and a woman slakes her thirst are not identical, for they thirst for different things.”

“Perhaps that is why humans rely on the mirror, to get beyond the simple me-you, handsome-hideous, menacing-merciful. In a miror, humans see that the other one is also them: the two are the same, one one. TH emenace accompanies the mercy. The transcendent cohabits with the corrupt. What stirring lives humans have managed to live, knowing this of themselves. And so we had made a mirror, and in our foolishness lost it, and the one who set out to reclaim it had never returned. Back into our unexamined selves we slunk, until she arrived at our door.”

142: Bianca meant white.

143: The dwarf names: Blindeye, Gimpy, Tasteless, Bitter, Deaf-to-the-World, Heartless, MuteMuteMute.

Events (182-183): Lucrezia eats a slice of the apple; the “stone dog” eats a slice and then gives the rest to the dwarfs

185: “She [Lucrezia] had dismissed him [Vicente], and now faced the mirror. “I must see to my hair,” she spoke, almost to herself, in the way of certain women. She scooped up the single fruit on its silvery bough and held it alongside her face. It was such a feminine gesture, it brought back to him Maria Ines, and his child, Bianca, who would never become a waomn.”

188: In title chapter, “Mirror mirror,” Lucrezia asks the question again. This time it shows Bianca.

In the next chapter, “The return of the prodigal” (191), Bianca sees back at Lucrezia as Lucrezia sees her… she sees Lucrezia through a “circle of mist”

194: “ ‘I’ll make you a meal,’ she said. ‘Why not? I need things, though, things to cook with.’ She realized that though she’d eaten,---occasionally—the sight of that apple in Lucrezia Borgia’s lap had made her hungry as hell. Hungry not to eat, but to feed someone else.

Suddenly she became happy.”

197: She feeds the dwarfs the apple.

200: The dwarfs made the mirror.

219+: Lucrezia does not poison the comb and tempt Snow White with it; she assaults Snow White with the comb.

228: “She didn’t know if it was herself she was seeing. The reflection was imprecise, varnished with mist; but there was a woman’s face therein, and as its lips moved, so Bianca moved hers, as if under a spell. ‘Mirror, mirror,” she said, ‘What is to become of us?’”

228: dwarfs have vague similarities to the dwarfs from “Politically correct bedtime stories.”

236: “The mirror, maddening one minute, was helpful the next. Lucrezia began to realize that it alerted her when the dwarves were ready to leave. They would begin to appear in garb more clearly like human garments. They constructed a clumsy box with wheels and shafts, and practiced hauling it about. They were on a campaign of some sort. What were they up to? No mind, never mind; enough that they were gone.”

247: “They were seven or eight or nine small men, bleeding obstinately toward some kind of humanity, stuck in a process of change that they could no longer vary. They might have used their mirror as an escape hatch, to ask it the single correct question, the only question a mirror ever cares about: not who did I used to be, nor who am I now, but who am I to become?—for the secret act of light that fires a mirror is this: A mirror’s image is always forward of the truth by an instant or so. While a question is formulating—Who is the fairest of us all, say, or How many crow’s feet can I pretend not to have today? or Is this the face of a murderer?—the mirror always knows the answer before the question is asked.

253: “I made to give him a semblance of privacy, and turned to fuss over the heating water. But there was the mirror in which I would glimpse his handsome form, because mirrors don’t lie about men, only women.”


275: Ranuccio, the hunter, occompanies Bianca/Snow White back to Montefiore (her home), implying that she is her prince? (he also kisses her to wake her)