ABSTRACT
Our fascination with the fairy tale “Snow White,” originally written down in 1810, changed and edited by the Brothers Grimm over a period of forty-seven years, has very little to do with the trials and tribulations of the virginal protagonist Snow White, but much more to do with the passionate queen, her stepmother, and the queen’s struggles with her omniscient and authoritative magic mirror. Despite its seemingly happy end, this tale is tragic: the beautiful queen has a major flaw in her character that leads to her downfall, namely her vanity. This is not to say that the character of Snow White is negligible in the story, but she is not the driving force. She is too pathetically good, too much the domestic, to be of major interest in the story. As is well known, the animators of the Disney film preferred to draw the evil queen because she was more real and complex as a woman, more erotic, and driven to desperate acts by her magic mirror. In fact, the tale should have been given the title “Cracking the Magic Mirror,” for the mirror has a powerful hold on the queen and, to a certain extent, on Snow White. The queen’s actions are determined by the mirror’s representations of her as exemplifying beauty and evil, or associating evil and vanity with beauty, and these mirror representations are taken as the truth by the queen. Had she perhaps doubted and cracked the mirror, cracked the meaning of the mirror, she might still be alive today. As it is, she is still dancing herself to death in red-hot shoes in some printed version of the tale.
