![]() 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). What is the moral of ‘Snow White’? Should we even attempt an analysis of the story in this respect? ![]() 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. With a foreshadowing image of an apple in the decorative filigree, this impressive design by Jim Shore features gorgeous and enchanting details.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. Questioning the Magic Mirror, Snow White's stepmother, the Evil Queen, folds her arms in disgust when she is not named the fairest one of all.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |