ABSTRACT
Long live, indeed, in deed. I have found that this tale, besides being the formative tale of my upbringing (Doll, 1995), also played a role, mostly unconsciously, in the lives of my colleagues, who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s as I did, willing ourselves into psychological burial. We were, most of us, motherless children. Our mothers were either dead or absent, either physically or mentally. We were the daughters of the patriarchy, doing its bidding. And, lo and behold!, the bidding of the patriarchy for its Snow White daughters was to obey and to “die” so as never to become real women. We were to die to our erotic natures, our deeper selves, so as to live as a perfected image. We were to remain on show, so that “they” might “look.” We were the good girls-not in fiction, as seen in the previous chapter-but in real life. Our real life goodness was a Grimm tale, indeed.
