Mirror, Mirror: Framing the Story of Snow White
Keywords:
Little Snow White, mirror, fairy tale, feminism, Emma Donoghue, Theodora GossAbstract
The Queen’s mirror is an essential part of the classic tale “Little Snow White.” It is the driving force behind Queen’s actions and thus behind the whole plot of the story. In feminist criticism, the mirror is often interpreted as a tool of patriarchy that is meant to pit the female characters against one another. Many authors of modern fairy tale rewritings have thusly adjusted the position of the mirror in the story to show the influence it has on female characters. This paper will discuss two such rewritings, namely “The Tale of the Apple” by Emma Donoghue and “Snow White Learns Witchcraft” by Theodora Goss, focusing on how these two authors change the position of the mirror and what effect this has on the female characters. Despite the differences in the approaches of these two authors, the results of the altered role of the mirror share striking resemblances with regard to the messages their stories convey about female characters in a patriarchal story.
References
Bacchilega, Cristina. “Cracking the Mirror Three Re-Visions of ‘Snow White.’” Boundary 2 15, no. 3 (1988): 1–25. Accessed March 21, 2021. <https://doi.org/10.2307/303243>.
Barzilai, Shuli. “Reading ‘Snow White’: The Mother’s Story.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 3 (1990): 515–534. Accessed April 18, 2021. <https://doi.org/10.1086/494608>.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Fairy Tales: A New History. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009.
Donoghue, Emma. “The Tale of the Apple.” In Kissing the Witch Old Tales in New Skins, by Emma Donoghue, 43–58. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
Dworkin, Andrea. Woman Hating. New York: Plume, 1974.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2. ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
Girardot, N. J. “Initiation and Meaning in the Tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The Journal of American Folklore 90, no. 357 (1977): 274–300. Accessed May 14, 2021. <https://doi.org/10.2307/539520>.
Goss, Theodora. “Snow White Learns Witchcraft.” In Snow White Learns Witchcraft: Stories and Poems, by Theodora Goss, 13–15. [United States]: Mythic Delirium Books, 2019.
Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. “Little Snow White.” In The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition, translated by Jack Zipes, 170–178. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.
Joosen, Vanessa. “Disenchanting the Fairy Tale: Retellings of ‘Snow White’ between Magic and Realism.” Marvels & Tales 21, no. 2 (2007): 228–239. Accessed October 20, 2020. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/41388836>.
Kawan, Christine Shojaei. “A Brief Literary History Of Snow White.” Fabula 49, nos. 3–4 (2008): 325–342. Accessed October 31, 2020. <https://doi.org/10.1515/fabl.2008.023>.
Lieberman, Marcia R. “‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale.” College English 34, no. 3 (December 1972): 383–395. Accessed October 16, 2020. <https://doi.org/10.2307/375142>.
Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Warner, Marina. Once upon a Time: a Short History of Fairy Tale. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
