Fairy tales are good to think with. Compact yet also capacious, with roots in myth, they were engineered to accommodate changes in cultural values and conflicts. “Snow White” is no exception. Rupert Sanders’s film “Snow White and the Huntsman” the latest version of the tale, takes us into a wilderness of environmental depredations and dynastic conflict. Charlize Theron’s fair-haired wicked queen presides over subjects with ravaged faces in landscapes that resemble toxic oil spills; in her shape-shifting magic, she reconstitutes herself at one point from what looks like a flock of crows caught in an oil slick. Her rule has no doubt created the viscous black horrors that Snow White encounters in the denuded woods to which she flees. The film’s raven-haired heroine, by contrast, soothes savage beasts with her compassionate face and, as a digitally miniaturized Bob Hoskins, playing one of the seven dwarfs, proclaims: “she will heal the land.” But she’s no passive, guiltless damsel. Her exquisite beauty, combined with charismatic leadership, enables her to defeat the evil queen and redeem the desolate landscape of the kingdom.
This Snow White is very different from the one we find in the canonical literary version recorded in the early nineteenth century. The Brothers Grimm called their story “Little Snow White,” to emphasize the innocence and vulnerability of a young girl persecuted by her jealous stepmother. Their heroine is precociously stunning—“When she was seven years old she was as beautiful as the light of day, even more beautiful than the queen herself”—and her beauty inspires huntsman, dwarfs, and prince alike to protect her from a less fair, wicked queen. The early tale is also a reflection on children’s fears about the cruelty of stepmothers, at a time when mortality rates for child-bearing women were exceptionally high. The concept of the “blended” family was foreign to the Grimms’ era, and it remains so in new inflections of the tale. Snow White delivers a timely message about survival even when the odds are not in your favor, as they surely are not for the heroine of “Snow White and the Huntsman,” who must now stand up to both a perverse stepmother and a hostile Mother Nature.
A 1912 Broadway musical first gave the story the title by which we know it today: “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The miniature miners of the Grimms’ tale now had whimsical names and personalities—an antidote to the tale’s dark themes. The Disney version (from 1937), too, draws much of its charm from the allegorical vigor of Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy and Dopey, and, in addition, gives Snow White a new mission. The Grimms’ girl was something of an intruder, a Goldilocks figure who discovers an enviably “neat and clean” cottage, along with seven little beds—one “just right”—covered with white sheets. Disney’s heroine, by contrast, is given a Depression-era work ethic and cleans up a house that appears to be occupied by what she disapprovingly refers to as “seven untidy little children.” Whistling while she works, she is a kindred spirit to the dwarfs, who descend into the mines to carry out their subterranean work “from early morn ’til night,” yet cheerfully intone: “we don’t know / what we dig ’em for.” Something of a “dumb bunny,” as the Anne Sexton calls her in a poem from “Transformations,” Snow White falls victim three times to the camouflaged wicked queen.
Grimm purists regard the Disney version as a sentimental confection, but Disney animators preserved the fairy tale’s powerful engagement with a child’s fears about parental persecution and abandonment, while also capturing adult anxieties about aging and loss. After drinking the magic cocktail she has brewed, the queen’s hair turns white, her hands become gnarled with age (“Look, my hands!”), her voice turns into a throaty cackle (“My voice!”), and finally she emerges from under her dark cloak as a hunchbacked crone. The horror of the queen’s transformation from a beautiful woman into an abject old hag is still potent.
Anne Sexton may well have had Disney’s transformation scene in mind when her wicked queen condemns Snow White to be “hacked” to death after she herself discovers “brown spots on her hand” and “four whiskers over her lip.” Sexton’s emphasis on the stepmother prefigured the nineteen-seventies protests against the Disneyfication of fairy tales, with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar leading the charge in their preface to “The Madwoman in the Attic,” a landmark work of feminist criticism. They proposed calling the story “Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother,” arguing that the queen—inventive, active, and mobile—was far more enthralling than her insipid stepdaughter.
With “Snow White and the Huntsman,” the tale has been reconceived to appeal to an audience partial to high-decibel special effects, monsters and vampires, triangulated teen romance, epic battle scenes, and young warrior women who, like Katniss Everdeen in “The Hunger Games” or Merida in Pixar’s “Brave,” have appropriated not only the wicked queen’s inventive energy but also the huntsman’s proficiency with weapons. The film preserves the central motifs of the Snow White plot: mother-daughter rivalry, magic mirror, compassionate huntsman, seven dwarfs, poisoned apple, and redemptive kiss—with all but the last steroid-enhanced through high-tech cinematic magic. Like all fairy-tale adaptations, it also operates like a magnet, picking up relevant bits and pieces of the culture that is recycling the tale.
Kristen Stewart’s Snow White is nothing like the charmingly goofy princess of Disney’s live-action “Enchanted” or the spunky yet vulnerable Snow White in ABC’s series “Once Upon a Time.” More like a serious cousin to the spirited and radiantly youthful Snow White of Tarsem Singh’s campy recent film, “Mirror Mirror,” she is ready for action. This Snow White becomes a “pure and innocent” warrior princess, an angelic savior who channels Joan of Arc and Tolkien’s Aragorn, as well as the four Pevensie siblings from C. S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia,” to save the kingdom of her late father (stabbed to death by the queen on their wedding night). Everyone is armed, and swords, scimitars, axes, snares, and shields feature as prominently in this film as they do in the Middle Earth of “The Hobbit.” Romance is edged out by the racing energy of horses speeding through dramatic landscapes and by expertly choreographed combat scenes. This is a Snow White designed to appeal to viewers of all ages, and to men and women alike.
“Snow White and the Huntsman” captures deepening anxiety about aging and generational sexual rivalry in clever, self-reflexive ways, with Charlize Theron as a beautiful cougar (and established Hollywood star) threatened by a younger, sylph-like Kristin Stewart. In the world of the film, beauty is the locus of female power, and is thereby fleeting in its effects (men are “enchanted” by women but “use” them until they eventually “tire” of them); it is the source of both fascination and horror. Early on, we learn the wicked queen’s backstory: she was abandoned by her first husband for a younger woman. This is meant to explain why she is so desperate to suck the life force out of local virgins, to dine on the vital organs of birds, and to reap the cosmetic effects of baths in mysterious white fluids.
The queen’s quest for lasting youth is part of the story’s larger exploration (in the tradition of many great myths) of how humans relate to the natural world—whether we are of it or have mastered and moved beyond it. Efforts to remain forever young violate the natural order of generational succession and imperil life itself. The woods have always been terrifying, but never more so than in this new version of the tale, in which a despoiled Mother Nature mirrors and magnifies the wicked queen’s frenzied assaults on humans. “Snow White and the Huntsman” holds a mirror up to our own vanity, narcissism, and recklessness, emphatically reminding us, as Charlize Theron proclaims shortly before her downfall, that every world gets the wicked queen it deserves.
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