From ‘Snow White’ to ‘Snow Night’: Subverting the Grimmest of Them All
by Nicola Scholes
ince its first appearance as “Sneewitchen”
(“Snowdrop”—read it here—ed.) in the Grimm Brothers’ 1812 collection Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales), the story of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” has proven to be one of the most popular, loved, commercially lucrative and potent of them all. It dates back as far as 1634 in Giambattista Basile’s Lo Cunto de li Cunti (The Story of Stories). In this tale, known also as “The Young Slave,” a beautiful girl named Lisa is preserved in a glass coffin after having been poisoned by a comb [1]. “Richilde” (circa 1782-87) by Johann Karl Musäus gives its title to the jealous stepmother rather than to the object of her jealousy, her beautiful stepdaughter Blanca. Richilde consults her magic mirror to confirm her beauty, while court dwarfs help Blanca in her plight [2].
The Grimm Brothers collected and recycled these folk tales from both written sources and the oral storytelling tradition of working people. Often, the fairy tales were originally “old wives’ tales” told by women. However, by the time the Grimms got a hold of them, the tales had already been imbued with the values of the bourgeoisie, a practice to which they contributed and continued by their own extensive modifications and bowdlerizations [3]. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, as the collection is now known in the English-speaking world, has been translated into more than 160 languages, a publishing feat rivaling that of the Christian Bible [4]. The US animated motion picture Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 was the first feature-length animation of its kind. Being such a huge commercial success, it initiated the mass-media “Disnification” of the Grimm Brothers’ tales. According to Marina Warner, Walt Disney’s fairy tale adaptations
“have done more than any other creation to naturalize female-maternal-malignancy in the imaginations of children worldwide [5].”
It is this kind of feminist criticism of fairy tales that has spurred the counter-creation of feminist fairy tales. Barbara Walker’s “Snow Night” is a prime example. This essay offers readings of the Grimm Brothers’ “Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs” (as translated by Vladimír Vařecha) [6] and Walker’s reversion “Snow Night” [7] to show how the latter subverts the pervasive ideology of patriarchy in the former.
Many who have studied the fairy tale have criticized the genre’s sexism, racism and politicism. Critics during the nineteen sixties and seventies objected to the perceived promotion of capitalist values within the tales. One of these critics, Jack Zipes, argues that the tales are dangerous in the way that they “prescribe choice” [8]; that is, in terms of an individual’s choices in life, only a certain range of options are depicted as available so that one’s choice must be made within the acceptable range. (The “range” itself, of course, represents the presiding views of the conservative middle and upper classes whose interests are vested in maintaining the status quo).
Others have expressed concern over the brutality of the tales – the instances of and allusions to rape, incest, murder and cannibalism. In fact (dubious though these recurring themes are, regardless of audience), early versions were never intended for children, or at least, not exclusively so. Acknowledging this, Marina Warner states that she chose to begin her book From the Beast to the Blonde “with the collection which inaugurated the fairy tale as a literary form for children: Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé, [Histories, or Tales of Past Times] or Contes de ma Mère l’Oye, [Mother Goose Tales] of 1697 [9].” Acceptance of the oral folk or fairy tale as a literary form was conditional on its ability to teach acceptable (i.e. bourgeois) manners and behaviors. Since social conditioning ideally occurs during childhood, it was thought that to target the tales to a young and impressionable audience would be highly instrumental [10].
