![]() Perhaps the moral value of a tale such as ‘Snow White’ is to be found as much in the fate of the wicked queen as it is in the younger heroine. Vanity, too – that magic mirror a clear symbol of the wicked stepmother’s (literal) self-regard – will lead to unhappiness, because you will be destined always to compare yourself with others. There is evil in the world, but there is also good death is a part of life, but so is marriage and love being beautiful isn’t the picnic it may appear to less attractive people envy and jealousy ultimately eat away at the person who feels them, and are therefore self-destructive. Perhaps such interpretations are pointless, because fairy tales were not devised primarily to teach children clear morals but to fuel their imaginations and introduce them to the way stories work structurally and emotionally, bringing to light universal human truths through narrative and character. What is the moral of ‘Snow White’? Should we even attempt an analysis of the story in this respect? Like the tale of ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’, it may partly be to teach children that the world is big and bad, and that they shouldn’t trust blindly in what strangers tell them (as evinced by the innocent Snow White’s readiness to believe what the wicked stepmother tells her) from another angle, it is about finding peace and happiness even in humbler surroundings (being the daughter of a queen, Snow White is a princess who actually finds she is happy living among miners in their cottage, though she does leave this world behind when she re-attains her exalted social status through marrying the prince). The Disney film then came up with the names with which we forever associate the seven dwarfs (spelt ‘dwarfs’ rather than ‘dwarves’, by the way: Tolkien was largely responsible for the latter spelling, though he argued that strictly speaking the plural of ‘dwarf’ should probably be dwerrows). ![]() That happened in a 1912 Broadway play, which called the dwarfs Blick, Flick, Glick, Snick, Plick, Whick, and Quee. In the Grimms’ version, and indeed all nineteenth-century retellings of the Snow White story, the seven dwarfs don’t have names.īut nor was the 1937 Disney film the first version to give them individual names. The story of ‘Snow White’ was first made popular in printed literature by the Brothers Grimm in the early nineteenth century: the tale of ‘Schneewittchen’ appears in their volumes of classic fairy tales. But enough of this digression into fantasy literature. This can be seen in the countless fantasy trilogies produced in the wake of The Lord of the Rings: the first volume establishes the quest or danger at hand, the second sees that danger doubled, and the third volume sees good triumph over evil (or law triumph over chaos in Michael Moorcock’s trilogies of the 1960s and 1970s). Like the significance of the number in the Goldilocks tale, the wicked stepmother’s three attempts to kill her rival may be seen as an example of the ‘just right’ balance in classic narratives: the first establishes a plot point, the second is a result of the thwarting of the first attempt and so redoubles the efforts, and the third ends with success. How should we analyse the story of Snow White? Like many other classic fairy tales, such as Rumpelstiltskin and the story of Goldilocks, the tale is haunted by the number three: there are three drops of blood that drip from the first queen’s hand, there are three queens (Snow White’s mother, her wicked stepmother, and finally Snow White herself), the wicked stepmother has to come up with three plans to murder the girl at the dwarfs’ cottage, and the dwarfs mourn Snow White’s death for three days before burying her. In the morning she wakes and tells them her story, and they agree to let her stay with them, and look after the cottage while they go out to work. Much like the situation the three bears come back to in the ‘Goldilocks’ story, the occupants of the cottage – seven dwarfs – then return from a hard day mining for gold in the nearby caves, and spot that an intruder’s been nibbling at their food.īut unlike the three bears, who are angry upon discovering a juvenile delinquent in their home, the seven dwarfs are so impressed by Snow White’s beauty that they are overjoyed to see her and leave her to sleep. She has a bit out of each of the food and drink set out at the dinner table, before trying each of the beds, until she finds one that’s comfortable, and falls asleep. Instead, what she finds are seven places laid out for dinner, seven beds: seven of everything. Snow White wanders, lost and forlorn, through the forest until she comes to a cottage, which she enters in the hope of finding shelter.
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