Reading "Snow White": The Mother's Story

Author(s): Shuli Barzilai

Source: Signs , Spring, 1990, Vol. 15, No. 3, The Ideology of Mothering: Disruption and
Reproduction of Patriarchy (Spring, 1990), pp. 515-534
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

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 READING "SNOW WHITE":
THE MOTHER'S STORY

SHULI BARZILAI

It is no news, yet still interesting to consider, that myths an

tales are complex reflectors of the conscious and unconsc
concerns of their readers. A case in point is the story of Snow
In the familiar version collated and edited by Jakob and W
Grimm, a young girl flees from the murderous intentions
wicked stepmother, finds shelter with the seven dwarfs, und
three trials or temptations, succumbs to the poison apple,
rescued from her death-sleep by a charming prince. Two
readings of this version, one psychoanalytic and the other fem
suggest that because "Snow White" is part of a literary as wel
folkloric tradition, it may be studied as a cultural artifact and
valid in itself.'
As part of a people's oral tradition, a folktale is a continually
recreated narrative. Even when written and codified, the tale still

Special thanks to Gannit Ankori and Zephyra Porat for their many valuable
suggestions and encouragement.
From the standpoint of anthropological and folkloristic research, an analysis
based on only one variant and, moreover, on a reading of two readings of that variant
might be seen to exemplify what Steven Jones calls the "pitfalls of Snow White
scholarship." Hundreds of versions of the story are cited by Antti Aarne and Stith
Thompson. I have chosen to focus on the Grimms' version mainly because of its
familiarity to most readers, but also because it is representative of the basic structure
and themes that inform the tale (see Steven Jones, "The Pitfalls of Snow White
Scholarship," Journal of American Folklore 92 [January-March 1979]: 69-73; and
Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and
Bibliography [Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961], esp. 245-46).
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1990, vol. 15, no. 3]
? 1990 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/90/1503-0400$01.00

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Barzilai / SNOW WHITE

reflects the conflicts and concerns of earlier generations of tale-

tellers. An analysis of numerous versions will yield interesting and
valuable information about a variety of individual, national, and
cultural characteristics. However, as the typologies identified by
several folklore studies indicate, certain episodes associated with
the tale type of "Snow White" remain constant. Though details or
motifs might vary considerably, general patterns such as jealousy
and expulsion are invariant.2 This constancy suggests that the fairy
tale draws on a communality of human experience that is not
contingent upon the time and place of the telling. Whether we
examine one version of "Snow White" or one hundred versions, we
will always find the persecutor-be it a cruel stepmother, treacher-
ous sister, or jealous mother-who resents and engages in hostili-
ties against a young girl.3 Even details of a particular version can
exemplify the patterns underlying various oral and written ver-
sions. Such is the case with the version of "Snow White" collected
in the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmirchen.4 A study of the psycho-
analytic and feminist contributions to an understanding of this
version is, then, a useful introduction to a third possible reading
that will present what happens in "Snow White" from the mother's
perspective.

The father's law: A psychoanalytic reading

Retold from the vantage of Freudian theory, the story of Snow

White is about "being in love with the one parent and hating the
other."5 This retelling applies, of course, not only to "Snow White,"
or Oedipus Rex, or Hamlet but to countless other legends and lives
as well, for it identifies the core or nuclear complex which is the
source, in Freudian terms, of all intrafamilial conflict and deviant
(i.e., neurotic) behavior. Thus Bruno Bettelheim proposes that the

2 For a discussion of the narrative patterns found in "Snow White" and a survey
of other typological descriptions of the tale, see Steven Swann Jones, "The
Structure of 'Snow White,'" in Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and
Paradigm, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1986), 165-86.
3 Aarne and Thompson, 245.
4 As N. J. Girardot writes, "an examination of available handbooks" suggests that
the Grimms' version, "at least with regard to the specific tale of Snow White, can be
taken as generally representative" (see "Response to Jones: 'Scholarship Is Never
Just the Sum of All Its Variants, "Journal of American Folklore 92 [January-March
1979]: 73-76, esp. 75).
5 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24
vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953-74), 4:260.
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 Spring 1990/ SIGNS

inimical relations between the two female protagonists in "Snow

White" are generated by rivalry over the male, a father figure. "The
story deals essentially," says Bettelheim, "with the oedipal conflicts
between mother and daughter."6
Yet, in "Snow White" the oedipal rivalry is not evident in the
narrative itself, and the object of contention-the father-is virtu-
ally absent from the story. Bettelheim's reading addresses this
objection by invoking the psychoanalytic claim that the analyst is
precisely equipped to reveal something concealed, to distinguish
the latent desire from its manifest expression in a dream, or a story.
"Fairy stories teach by indirection," Bettelheim contends. "In the
well-known story of Snow White, the jealous older female is not her
mother but her stepmother, and the person for whose love the two
are in competition is not mentioned. So the oedipal problems-
source of the story's conflict-are left to our imagination."7
The Freudian imagination, by contrast, leaves little to our own.
Following the principles outlined in The Interpretation of Dreams,
Bettelheim proceeds to unravel the story's tissue of disguises,
distortions, and subterfuges. Indirections are turned into signposts:
Bettelheim's reading provides a name (the Oedipal Father) for the
source of conflict in "Snow White" and also specifies why the issue
of beauty is central to the story. Because competition over the father
is not an acceptable form of contestation for a queen or a king's
daughter, it undergoes repression and reemerges through displace-
ment onto beauty. Bettelheim writes: "Much as the child wants the
father to love her more than her mother, she cannot accept that this
may create jealousy of her in her mother. ... When this jealousy-
as is true for the queen in 'Snow White'-cannot be overlooked,
then some other reason must be found to explain it, as in the story
it is ascribed to the child's beauty."8 The wish to be "fairest of them

6 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of

Fairy Tales (New York: Vintage, 1977), 202.
7 Ibid., 201.
8 Ibid., 203. On the question of "who's jealous of whom?" Bettelheim offers two
different explanations. At times, he treats the queen's jealousy as a projection of
Snow White's feelings: "I am jealous of all the advantages and prerogatives of
Mother" turns into the wishful thought: "Mother is jealous of me" (204); and
"Lasting hatred and jealousy of the mother ... are projected onto the evil queen"
(206). At other times, however, he considers the queen's rage and jealousy solely in
terms of her rivalry with Snow White: "The stepmother begins to feel threatened by
Snow White and becomes jealous" (202); and "this is not the first story of a mother's
jealousy of her daughter's budding sexuality" (207). It is only toward the close of the
"Snow White" chapter that Bettelheim briefly addresses the discrepancy his
analysis generates: "Snow White and the queen's relations are symbolic of some
severe difficulties which may occur between mother and daughter. But they are also
projections onto separate figures of tendencies which are incompatible within one
person" (210-11).

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Barzilai / SNOW WHITE

all" attributed here to the queen (though later Bettelheim assigns it

to Snow White as well) is yet another one of the story's subterfuges.
In addition to the alteration of mother to stepmother and the
tell-tale absence of the father, beauty itself is a cover-up for the
sexually motivated competition between two women. Nor is it an
entirely gratuitous transposition on the part of a mother and
daughter. The woman endowed with the greater portion of beauty
has a better chance of seducing the king.
Bettelheim's revision of "Snow White" reflects the culture of
patriarchy in two ways. First, through his tale of repression and
displacement, Bettelheim finds a key to the story: the paternal
phallus. As he says, "We are told nothing about [Snow White's]
relation to her father, although it is reasonable to assume that it is
competition for him which sets (step)mother against daughter."9 Yet
this same observation may also suggest an opposite conclusion. It
would seem equally reasonable to assume that the relation has little
or no significance for Snow White's story; but according to the
psychoanalytic rules that order Bettelheim's discussion, denial is
an admission, and absence a presence. There is nothing more
incriminating than the patient's protest: "That lady in my dream
was not my mother!" Further, a Freudian approach precludes the
possibility of a conflictual relationship between women in which
the male is only peripheral. "A year later the king took a second
wife."'0 There is no further mention of the king in the story.
Nevertheless, Bettelheim puts the father at stage center and keeps
him there.
Second, a Freudian approach refuses the possibility that women
value beauty, give and receive pleasure through beauty, for reasons
unrelated to a paternal presence. The physical vanity of women,
Sigmund Freud asserts in "Femininity," has its source in penis
envy: "They are bound to value their charms more highly as a late
compensation for their original sexual inferiority."" Therefore Bet-
telheim maintains that the queen, "who is fixated to a primitive
narcissism," orders the huntsman to return with Snow White's
lungs and liver; for the queen wants above all "to incorporate Snow
White's attractiveness, as symbolized by her internal organs."'2 In

9 Ibid., 203.
10 Jakob Ludwig Karl Grimm and Wilhelm Karl Grimm, Grimms' Tales for Young
and Old: The Complete Stories, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Doubleday,
1977), 184-91, esp. 184. All citations to "Snow White" refer to this version. The
Doubleday edition is based on the Winkler-Verlag (Munich) edition of Kinder- und
Hausmarchen, first published in 1819.
" Sigmund Freud, "Femininity," in Strachey, ed. and trans., 22:132.
12 Bettelheim, 206-7.

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 Spring 1990 / SIGNS

other words, by means of beauty the queen tries to compensate for

the defectiveness of her genital organs or deflect attention from her
female wound. Snow White, according to Bettelheim, is likewise
preoccupied. The development of her narcissistic investments,
presumably a displacement or distortion of an underlying penis
envy, is reflected in the magic mirror: "As the small girl thinks her
mother is the most beautiful person in the world, this is what the
mirror initially tells the queen. But as the older girl thinks she is
much more beautiful than her mother, this is what the mirror says
later."'3 As Bettelheim tells it, feminine preoccupation with physi-
cal appearance becomes the focus of the story; the vanity attributed
by Freud to women as a compensation for their originary lack is
once more underscored. The central interest of these women's lives
reduces to the question of whether they look good or not.

The father's law: A feminist reading

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar offer us an innovative, alter-

native reading of "Snow White." As a starting point, Gilbert and
Gubar concede the psychoanalytic premise that "myths and fairy
tales often both state and enforce culture's sentences with greater
accuracy than more sophisticated literary texts."'4 Yet the deliber-
ately ambiguous use of the word "sentence," in conjunction with
"enforce," already points to the direction that their interpretation of
the cultural consensus will take. Citing extensively from male
literary sources, Gilbert and Gubar argue that "for every glowing
portrait of submissive women enshrined in domesticity, there exists
an equally important negative image that embodies the sacrilegious
fiendishness of what William Blake called the 'Female Will' ";
moreover, "the monster may not only be concealed behind the
angel, she may actually turn out to reside within (or in the lower
half of) the angel."'5 Thus the conflict in "Snow White" arises
between two oppositional images or arche(stereo)types imposed
upon women by Western patriarchal society: the angel and the
monster. Snow White epitomizes an image of femininity-
"patriarchy's angelic daughter"-that the rebellious queen actively
rejects.16

13 Ibid., 207.
14 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1979), 36.
15 Ibid., 28-29.
16 Ibid., 39.

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Barzilai / SNOW WHITE

In this view, Snow White and the queen become representa-

tions in an intrapsychic drama; that is, rather than two people in a
nuclear family with its inevitable oedipal problems, for Gilbert and
Gubar the female protagonists are dissociated parts of one psyche
In terms of the Jungian symbology suggested by their analysis,
Snow White and the queen constitute a house divided agains
itself:17 "Shadow fights shadow, image destroys image in the crysta
prison, as if the 'fiend' . . . should plot to destroy the 'angel' who is
another one of her selves.... The Queen, adult and demonic,
plainly wants a life of 'significant action.' . . . She wants to kill the
Snow White in herself, the angel who would keep deeds and
dramas out of her own house."'8
In thus describing the angel and the monster of "Snow White,"
Gilbert and Gubar reverse traditional valuations of these images of
women. Their "demonic" means dynamic; "fiend," a vital female
force: "For the Queen ... is a plotter, a plot-maker, a schemer, a
witch, an artist, an impersonator, a woman of infinite creative
energy, witty, wily, and self-absorbed as all artists traditionally are."
In contrast to the queen, Snow White is an "angel in the house of
myth ... not only a child but (as female angels always are)
childlike, docile, submissive."'9 The competition between Snow
White and the queen turns into a struggle for survival between two
halves of a single personality: passivity and tractability as opposed
to inventive and subversive activism. Were the best woman to win,
clearly victory would-that is to say, should-belong to the queen.
Yet Gilbert and Gubar go beyond reversing our conventional
assessment of Snow White and her wicked stepmother. In their
revisionist reading, the story of the angel-monster woman holds out
no hope of a happy ending. Such a divided house cannot stand.
Thus the queen dances herself "to death in red-hot iron shoes,"
while Snow White merely exchanges "one glass coffin for another."
Although she is "delivered from the prison where the Queen put
her," Snow White ends up "imprisoned in the looking glass from

17 In Freudian dream symbology, a house is typically a symbol of the body: "The

human body as a whole is pictured by the dream-imagination as a house and the
separate organs of the body by portions of a house" (Freud, The Interpretation of
Dreams [n. 5 above], 258-59). By contrast, for Carl Jung houses and parts of houses
are frequent symbols of the psyche. See, e.g., Jung's analysis of a dream he reported
to Freud: "I dreamed that I was in 'my home.' . .. The dream is in fact a short
summary of my life, more specifically of the development of my mind" (see Carl G.
Jung and M.-L. von Franz, eds., Man and His Symbols [1964; reprint, London:
Picador, 1978], 42-43; see also 175-76).
18 Gilbert and Gubar, 36-37, 39.
19 Ibid., 38-39.

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 Spring 1990/SIGNS

which the King's voice speaks daily."2 There is no living happily

ever after with the prince. Domesticity as the fulfillment of every-
woman's wish is a male myth of happiness. The lesson of Snow
White is that the achievement of psychic integration, of balanced
selfhood within the patriarchy is difficult, perhaps even impossible,
for a woman.
Despite their evident differences, there are certain similarities
between these two responses to "Snow White." For Bettelheim, the
king is absent precisely because he is too completely present,
because direct oedipal confrontation would be too painful. For
Gilbert and Gubar, the king is absent or "need no longer appear" in
the story because "the woman has internalized the King's rules: his
voice now resides in her own mirror, her own mind."21 It is not the
daughter as Bettelheim contends: "The magic mirror seems to
speak with the voice of a daughter."22 Instead, according to Gilbert
and Gubar, it is the father who speaks: "His, surely, is the voice of
the looking glass, the patriarchal voice of judgment that rules the
Queen's-and every woman's-self-evaluation."23 It is noteworthy,
however, that in either case the king's presence looms large in spite
of his virtual absence in the story. In Gilbert and Gubar's account,
as in Bettelheim's, the conflictual relationships in "Snow White"
are determined by male rule and male influence. Gilbert and Gubar
observe that, compounding the angel-monster dichotomy within
every woman, discord and division between women are all too
frequent: "Female bonding is extraordinarily difficult in patriarchy:
women almost inevitably turn against women because the voice in
the looking glass sets them against each other."24 Although their
emphasis is on the "sentence" of the collective rather than the
personal father, Gilbert and Gubar's argument is not so far removed
from the psychoanalytic insistence that oedipal rivalry is the source
of contention between Snow White and her (step)mother.
Creative and compelling as either (or both) of these readings
are, the issue for literary criticism is: How well do they account for

20 Ibid., 42.
21 Ibid., 38.
22 Bettelheim (n. 6 above), 207. Bettelheim notes that the mirror might also
express the fears of the queen: "A mother may be dismayed when looking into the
mirror; she compares herself to her daughter and thinks to herself: 'My daughter is
more beautiful than I am.' " However, because of the wording "she is a thousand
times more beautiful," Bettelheim finds the mirror's voice "much more akin to an
adolescent's exaggeration," and therefore attributes it to "the voice of a daughter
rather than that of a mother" (207).
23 Gilbert and Gubar (n. 14 above), 38.
2 Ibid.

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Barzilai / SNOW WHITE

what actually happens in "Snow White"? Whereas Bettelheim mus

put something into the text in order to have it fit his psychoanalytic
model, namely, the father as object-choice, Gilbert and Gubar leave
something out. For their feminist poetics, the specificity of the
familial relationship, the fact that the queen and Snow White ar
(step)mother and daughter, is largely irrelevant. They could just as
well be neighbors, housemates, cousins, or no kin at all. Any tw
similarly contrasting women would serve the same interpretiv
function. In both instances, the critics arrive at a description, claim
to find a meaning; however, these readings require ignoring basi
elements of the text in order to sustain their arguments.
Bettelheim's and Gilbert and Gubar's revisions of "Snow
White" thus are not only indicative of their specific theoretica
commitments but suggest a paradigm of the projective processe
that govern reader-text relations as well. In addition to the mirror
within the fictional world of Snow White, the text itself becomes a
mirror; or, as the narrator of Jacob's Room says, "Nobody sees
anyone as he is.... They see a whole-they see all sorts of
things-they see themselves."25 Yet while these readings offer
partial (in both senses of the word) psychoanalytic and feminist
interpretations, they are not "wrong," nor is there a "right"-a one
and only-approach to the text. It is a critical commonplace that
folktales and literary fairy tales consist of multivalent symbols and
communicate on many levels. The oedipal and the angel-monster
theories may have relevance for different readers at different times.
Hence the considerable explanatory powers of these competing
theories. As Norman Holland has observed: "The unity we find in
literary texts is impregnated with the identity that finds that unity";
and "all of us, as we read, use the literary work to symbolize and
finally replicate ourselves."2 The reading I now propose is not
excluded from this observation. It is as convinced and convicted (or,
rather, as reflected) by its interpretive commitment as those read-
ings that have come before.

What the mother wants

The story of Snow White, then, is not just another variant of th

myth of King Oedipus, nor a tale of any two women (psychi
fragments) in conflict. Rather it is also a story about mothers an
5 Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room (1922; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 28
26 Norman Holland, "Unity Identity Text Self," in Reader-Response Criticism:
From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 1980), 118-33, esp. 123-24.

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 Spring 1990 / SIGNS

daughters. This is another source of its enduring appeal. It in-

scribes the difficulties inherent in the closest of female bonds. It
portrays relations gone radically wrong, or what happens when
mothers and daughters cannot work out the problems created by
the special, intense bond between them.
"Snow White" is the daughter's story. Her perspective orients
the narrative from beginning to end. As Bettelheim has noted:
"Since the hearer identifies with Snow White, he sees all events
through her eyes, and not through those of the queen."27 The text is
full of indications of Snow White's perspectival dominance. There
is first and foremost the jealousy of the queen, repeatedly and
graphically expressed: "The queen gasped, and turned yellow and
green with envy."28 An angry or hostile response is never explicitly
attributed to Snow White. Whatever negative feelings she might
have toward the queen are indirectly conveyed through the narra-
tive structure (see, e.g., the episodes in which her persecutor's
plans are repeatedly foiled) and language. The queen is character-
ized throughout in unremittingly negative terms: she is most often
deemed "wicked," but she is also proud, overbearing, and envious.
"Envy and pride [grow] like weeds in her heart" while at her
behest the huntsman prepares to pierce Snow White's "innocent
heart."29
Such one-sidedness of characterization typifies the fairy tale and
indicates its governing perspective, but complete disregard of the
variety of traits to be found in real human beings is, as Freud has
observed, a typical feature of daydreams and phantasies as well. All
of the characters are defined in relation to the hero, either as
helpers or as enemies and rivals."3 "Snow White" has this and other
features in common with daydreams; both personal and cultural
phantasies are elaborated in the daughter's story. Thus the descrip-
tion of Snow White's remarkable coffin, like the characterization of
her (step)mother, also bears the unmistakable signature of her
daydreaming consciousness: "'We can't lower her into the black
earth,' [the dwarfs] said, and they had a coffin made out of glass, so
that she could be seen from all sides, and they put her into it and
wrote her name in gold letters on the coffin, adding that she was a
king's daughter."31 We may easily recognize here what Freud calls
"His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-dream and of

27 Bettelheim, 203.
28 Grimm and Grimm (n. 10 above), 185.
29 Ibid.

30 Sigmund Freud, "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming," in Strachey, ed. and

trans. (n. 5 above), 9:150.
31 Grimm and Grimm, 189-90.

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Barzilai / SNOW WHITE

every story." Similarly, the pattern of Snow White's close escape

from the strange deaths plotted by the queen corresponds to th
Freudian scenario of the adventures that befall this invulnerable
("Nothing can happen to me!") hero: "If, at the end of one chapter
of my story, I leave the hero unconscious and bleeding from severe
wounds, I am sure to find him at the beginning of the next being
carefully nursed and on the way to recovery."32
That Snow White is the story's dreamer is born out by the fact
that all the male figures come under the spell of her incomparable
beauty. Thus, "because of her beauty the huntsman took pity on her
and said: 'All right, you poor child. Run away.' " Later, " 'Heavens
above!' [the dwarfs] cried. 'Heavens above! What a beautiful child!'
They were so delighted they didn't wake her but let her go on
sleeping in the little bed." The dwarfs obligingly provide a halfway
or transitional home, a place for Snow White to stop on the journey
from her father's house to the assumption of her husband's. In the
dwarfs' cottage, "everything was tiny, but wonderfully neat and
clean": a manageable and nonthreatening doll-like world (with
little cups and little plates) for a young princess to play
housekeeping.33 The daughter's daydream resonates with the patri-
archal culture that has shaped her individuality. Then one day
Snow White's erotic and ambitious wishes are fulfilled: a prince
comes along and falls in love with her at first sight.34 The queen's
plans are foiled again: "The jolt shook the poisoned core, which
Snow White had bitten off, out of her throat, and soon she opened
her eyes . . . and was alive again. 'Oh!' she cried. 'Where am I?'
'With me!' the prince answered joyfully."35 Then in a final flourish

32 Freud, "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming," 9:150, 150, 149.

33 Grimm and Grimm, 185, 186, 185.
34 Compare Freud: "The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes,
and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish. ... In young women the
erotic wishes predominate almost exclusively, for their ambition is as a rule
absorbed by erotic trends. In young men egoistic and ambitious wishes come to
the fore clearly enough alongside of erotic ones" ("Creative Writers and
Day-dreaming," 9:146-47).
35 Grimm and Grimm, 190. In Donald Barthelme's imaginative revision of the
tale, the prince also gallantly saves Snow White-but with a difference: "Jane gave
Snow White a vodka Gibson on the rocks. 'Drink this,' she said. 'It will make you feel
better.' 'I don't feel bad physically,'.Snow White said. 'Emotionally is another story
of course.' 'Go on,' Jane said. 'Go on drink it.' .. 'This drink is vaguely exciting, like
a film by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson,' Paul said. 'It is a good thing I have taken it away
from you, Snow White. It is too exciting for you. If you had drunk it, something bad
would probably have happened to your stomach. But because I am a man, and
because men have strong stomachs for the business of life, and the pleasure of life
too, nothing will happen to me....' 'Look how he has fallen to the ground Jane!'
Snow White observed. 'And look at all that green foam coming out of his face! And
look at those convulsions he is having! Why it resembles nothing else but a death

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 Spring 1990/SIGNS

of wish-fulfillment, the (step)mother drops down dead at the

wedding.
The narrative focus of "Snow White" would seem consistently
to occlude the queen's experience. Whatever she sees and feels is
filtered through an external, and implicitly hostile, perspective. Yet,
the various plots the queen contrives against Snow White could be
an expression of her unconscious wishes; the narrated events could
be symbolizations (or symptoms) of her repressed desires. This is
not an entirely wild or willful supposition; folkloric studies provide
corroborating grounds for such a reading. As Ruth Bottigheimer
observes, German Mirchen are "assumed to have originated in or to
have passed through ... the Spinnstube, for it was there that
women gathered in the evening and told tales to keep themselves
and their company awake as they spun. And it was from informants
privy to this oral tradition that Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm gathered
many of their folk tales."3 Karen Rowe also cautions: "To have the
antiquarian Grimm brothers regarded as the fathers of modern
folklore is perhaps to forget the maternal lineage, the 'mothers' who
in the French veillees and English nurseries, in court salons and the
German Spinnstube . . . passed on their wisdom."37
This emphasis on the mother as principle narrative agent is not
intended to rule out the daughter. Rather, it suggests that the same
dream/text may be attributed to or seen as woven by two different
dreamers. A single dream component may be read from the per-
spective of either the mother or the daughter. The textual attribu-
tion, the perspective we choose to follow, necessarily alters our
reading of the action, but the two perspectives coexist rather than
supplant one another. Moreover, since every mother is also a
daughter, different phases of her development may be represented
simultaneously in the dream.
One character trait remains constant throughout the mother's
story. Her artistry does not belatedly emerge with her transforma-
tion into a "wicked witch." In the opening scene the "good" queen
is already an artist, inventing, designing, creating her child: "If
only I had a child as white as snow and as red as blood and as black
as the wood of my window frame." Being mad or bad is not, as
Gilbert and Gubar contend, a necessary correlative of female

agony, the whole scene! I wonder if there was something wrong with that drink after
all? Jane? Jane?' " (see Donald Barthelme, Snow White [1967; reprint, New York:
Athenaeum, 1978], 174-75).
36 Ruth B. Bottigheimer, "Tale Spinners: Submerged Voices in Grimms' Fairy
Tales," New German Critique 27 (Fall 1982): 141-50, esp. 143.
37 Karen E. Rowe, "To Spin a Yam: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale,"
in Bottigheimer, ed. (n. 2 above), 53-74, esp. 68.

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Barzilai / SNOW WHITE

creativity in this story. "A little while later," we are told (this is
surely in dream time), "she gave birth to a daughter."3 The child
initially fulfills her maternal expectations. She answers exactly-as
white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony-to the
queen's wishful description. What the beginning of "Snow White"
represents is the imaginative or creative aspect of motherhood, the
child as mother's work of art. If there is nothing overtly deviant or
disturbing in this story as yet, it is not only because mothering (i.e.,
nurturing and socializing as well as bearing a child) is commonly
women's labor, but also because women's creative impulses have
few alternative outlets in the patriarchy. Mothers thus tend to
regard their children as objets d'art, and with a complicity born of
convenience, men encourage them to do so.
That the wicked queen is an artist has already been suggested
by Gilbert and Gubar. That she is a surrogate for the real mother has
been posited by Bettelheim, who brackets the references to her
foster function: (step)mother. I would further suggest that the
monster-mother develops out of the Madonna-mother, that the two
queens may be seen as temporally successive aspects of the mother
as artist.39 Thus, after Snow White takes a bite out of the apple and
falls down dead, the woman who once wished for this child laughs
"a terrible laugh" and says: "White as snow, red as blood, black as
ebony. The dwarfs won't revive you this time."40 The second queen
bitterly mocks the wishes of her former self. This radical division
between self and self is represented in the fairy tale by the
presence of a good mother and a bad mother; that is, the doubling
of mothers need not invariably be read as an expression of the
child's ambivalence, manifested by the splitting of the parental
imago into two opposing characters. It may also be read as a
symbolization, a casting out onto the external world, of the alter-
ations that occur within a woman as a result of her own experiences
in the maternal role.
Viewed thus, the initial "death" of the queen-"when [Snow
White] was born, the queen died"-signals her first transformation
or rebirth into motherhood. Significantly, her second transformation
into "wicked witch" occurs when Snow White reaches the age of
3 Grimm and Grimm (n. 10 above), 184.
39 This relationship between mother and stepmother is reinforced by the many
variants of"Snow White" in which the child's persecutor is her actual mother. Only
with the nineteenth-century German reworking and editing of the tale was the
mother definitively recast as a stepmother (see Jones, "The Structure of 'Snow
White' " [n. 2 above], 168-70). Kurt Ranke points out that the Grimms' substitution
of stepmother for mother served "to make the villainess an outsider in the family
circle" (see Kurt Ranke, ed., Folktales of Germany, trans. Lotte Baumann [London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966], xviii).
40 Grimm and Grimm, 189.

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seven and is presumably no longer as dependent or docile as she

once was. One bright morning, for example, Snow White might
have woken up and said: I want to dress all by myself. Then she
might not have stood still while her mother tried to comb her hair.
She might even have stamped her little foot and said: I don't want
pigtails anymore! Or: Can't you do anything right? Be that as it may,
at this juncture the queen's dream of maternity turns bad: "But as
Snow White grew, she became more and more beautiful, and by the
time she was seven years old she was ... more beautiful than the
queen herself." It is only then that the queen undergoes a change
of heart ("her heart turned over in her bosom"), and she begins to
rage against her growing (step)daughter.4l
The king need not be imported into the argument in order to
understand this. Corresponding to separation anxiety in children, to
the fear of being cut off from parental love and protection, there is
a comparable anxiety in adults: a fear of being cut off from the
child's proximity and dependence, a fear of freedom from the
thousand and one tasks that structure the life of a mother.42 How-
ever, the rewards for overcoming separation anxiety in the child are
increased independence, a sense of selfhood and progress. For the
adult the implications are radically different: a passage from ascen-
dancy to decline, from omnipotence or, at least, control to a
dwindling of authority. This process is inseparable from aging.
Hence, beauty is at issue. Following Freud, Bettelheim says that
the overevaluation of beauty is "an impulse inhibited in its aim," a
displacement of the desire for the father.43 Gilbert and Gubar argue
41 Ibid., 185.
2 Separation anxiety can occur, of course, in male and female parents but is more
likely to be found in the culturally designated primary parent or caretaker, i.e., the
mother. For an illuminating analysis of maternal separation anxiety, see Erna
Furman, "Mothers Have to Be There to Be Left," Psychoanalytic Study of the Child
37 (1982): 15-28. In discussing the trauma of weaning, Furman observes: "It is often
the first time when a mother is called upon to be there to be left. Since she is then
still so utterly close with her baby ..., she is especially likely to experience his
turning away from her and reaching out for more advanced and independent
satisfactions as a narcissistically hurtful rejection, abandonment or attack" (20). The
infant's subsequent conflicted and stressful behavior is largely a reaction to "his
mother's upset at his leaving of her," rather than to "the loss of his earlier state and
satisfactions" (20). On the consequences of women's monopoly of child rearing and
the ambivalent responses it promotes, see esp. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction
of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1978); Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid
and the Minotaur (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); and Jane Flax, "Mother-
Daughter Relationships: Psychodynamics, Politics, and Philosophy," in The Future
of Difference, ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1987), 20-40.
3 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in Strachey, ed. and trans.
(n. 5 above), 21:30. See Bettelheim, 203.

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Barzilai / SNOW WHITE

that beauty is an imposition of the patriarchy that dictates the terms

of conflict and inhibits female bonding. Man, in either case, is the
measure of all things. Yet the mother's story suggests that, quite
apart from the oedipal complex or patriarchal constraints, beauty
may have an intrinsic aesthetic value for women. Further, the issue
of beauty is inseparable in "Snow White" from the generationa
conflict, from youth and ascent as opposed to aging and descent
Ann Sexton, in her Transformations, renders with precision the
core of this conflict: "Once there was a lovely virgin / called Snow
White. / Say she was thirteen. / Her stepmother, / a beauty in her
own right, / though eaten, of course, by age, / would hear of no
beauty surpassing her own." In Sexton's poem, the issue of aging is
directly linked to the queen's change of attitude toward her
(step)daughter. There is no reference at all to the father: "Suddenly
one day the mirror replied, / Queen, you are full fair, 'tis true, / but
Snow White is fairer than you. /. .. now the queen saw brown spots
on her hand / and four whiskers over her lip / so she condemne
Snow White to be hacked to death." Then immediately after:
"Bring me her heart, she said to the hunter."44 Eating Snow White
(and I will return to this later) is one way of not letting go.
If the wished for child had been a boy instead of a girl, this story
of separation would probably have required an entirely different de
velopment. Nancy Chodorow speaks of mothers' differential treatmen
and experiencing of their sons and daughters. Drawing on clinical an
cultural evidence, Chodorow points out that ego boundaries (a sense
of personal psychological division) between mothers and daughters are
less easily formed, less clearly defined than those between mothers
and sons. Mothers normally identify more or have "a greater sense o
sameness" with daughters than sons.

Because they are the same gender as their daughters and

have been girls, mothers of daughters tend not to experience
these infant daughters as separate from them in the same way
as do mothers of infant sons. In both cases, a mother is likely
to experience a sense of oneness and continuity with her
infant. However, this sense is stronger, and lasts longer,
vis-a-vis daughters. Primary identification and symbiosis
with daughters tend to be stronger and cathexis of daughters
is more likely to retain and emphasize narcissistic elements,
that is, to be based on experiencing a daughter as an
extension or double of a mother herself.45

44 Ann Sexton, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," in her Transformation
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 3-9.
45 Chodorow, 122, 109.

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 Spring 1990 / SIGNS

The conflict in "Snow White" thus reflects an exaggerated form

of an otherwise normal relationship in everyday life. This is not to
say that all mother-daughter relations display this type of conflict.
Since a mother regards herself and is regarded by others as
responsible for the growth of her child, she typically takes pride in
"the production of a young adult acceptable to her group"; yet,
since pain as well as pleasure may be part of the maternal
experience of a child's growing autonomy, "mothers engage in
practices other than and often conflicting with mothering."46 It is the
queen's radical attempt to perpetuate primary intimacy and iden-
tification with her (step)daughter that marks the specific pathology
of her story.
Jacques Lacan's analysis of the mirror phase or stage (Le stade
du miroir) suggests that the magic mirror is central to the queen's
experience of identification with-as well as alienation from-her
daughter. According to Lacan, this phase takes place between the
ages of six to eighteen months, when the child first perceives "the
total form of the body," that is, its complete reflection in a mirror,
instead of the incomplete or fragmented image previously seen
without a mirror.47 The child's specular experience of its bodily
unity inaugurates the formation of the "moi," or what is to become
the ego. The mirror phase is thus a turning point, a "coming-into-
being (le devenir)," which, says Lacan, "manufactures for the
subject ... the succession of phantasies that extends from a
fragmented body-image (une image morcelee du corps) to a form of
its totality."48 Although the ego is a construct of successive imagi-
nary identifications, and hence for Lacan a "mirage," the mirror
phase is vital for the maturation of the subject.
The queen's confrontations with her magic mirror set and keep
the plot of "Snow White" in motion. However, these confrontations
dramatize a reversal or regressive form of the mirror phase. The
queen who once upon a time saw a whole in the mirror-ratified by
the assurance, "You are the fairest in the land"-no longer sees that
image. She repeatedly turns to the mirror in an attempt to recapture

4 Sara Ruddick, "Maternal Thinking," Feminist Studies 6 (Summer 1980):

342-67, esp. 348-49.
47 Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as
Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," in his Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1-7, esp. 2. In addition to J. Laplanche and J.-B.
Pontalis's discussion of the mirror phase in The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth, 1983), I have found Malcolm Bowie,
"Jacques Lacan," in Structuralism and Since: From Levi-Strauss to Derrida, ed.
John Sturrock (Oxford: University Press, 1979), 116-153; and Jane Gallop, "Where
to Begin?" in her Reading Lacan (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University
Press, 1985), 74-92, particularly helpful.
4 Lacan, 4.

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Barzilai / SNOW WHITE

the sense of totality, albeit of an imaginary order, which the birth of

her daughter had extended and enriched. Suddenly, the daughter's
otherness is asserted. The mirror refuses to sustain any illusion of
identification with the daughter; in its truth function, the specular
image shows the mother that her daughter is discordant with her
own identity. The mother loses control over the beauty, the creation
that seemed an extension of herself. Something is taken from her, a
vital part of her is cut off. Symbolically, what she perceives in the
mirror is a body-in-pieces.49 The mirror reflects disintegration
without possibility of regeneration. All the king's horses and all the
king's men cannot put this queen together again.
The voice in the mirror thus belongs to neither the king nor the
queen's daughter. The voice she hears is her own. To put it in
another way, the mirror images the mother's wound. This is not that
general "genital deficiency" Freud finds in all women; rather, this
is the wound inflicted by the mother's experience of separation.
The child of her own making finds completion without her. For the
mirror not only says that Snow White is "a thousand times more
fair"; it also repeatedly reminds the queen that Snow White "has
gone to stay / With the seven dwarfs far, far away."5 This distancing
is a symbol of maternal loss. It signals the disruption of a dream of
exclusive and everlasting attachment.
Hence the desperate queen attempts to regain control over her
"far, far away" daughter. First, she orders the hunter to kill Snow
White and return with her lungs and liver: "The cook was ordered
to salt and stew them, and the godless woman ate them, thinking
she was eating Snow White's lungs and liver."51 This shares, but
reverses, one of Freud's strangest and most powerful insights. In
Totem and Taboo Freud speculates that the sons of the patriarchal
horde assumed the father's authority by murdering him and con-
suming him, literally: "The violent primal father had doubtless
been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of
brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their
identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of
his strength."52 By contrast, in "Snow White" the consumer is the all
too powerful and jealous mother.
49 According to Laplanche and Pontalis, in Lacanian theory the mirror phase is
also seen as retroactively responsible for "the emergence of the phantasy of the
body-in-pieces ... where anxiety about fragmentation can at times be seen to arise
as a consequence of loss of narcissistic identification" (Laplanche and Pontalis,
251-52).
50 Grimm and Grimm (n. 10 above), 187-88.
51 Ibid., 185.
52 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the
Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, in Strachey, ed. and trans. (n. 5 above),
13:1-161, esp. 142.

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 Spring 1990/ SIGNS

On the daughter's part, this reversal may be constituted by

projection. Her wish to incorporate the authority of the parent, who
presents a formidable obstacle to her demand for independence
and power, is projected onto that parent. The unnatural mother is
therefore seen as desiring to eat rather than to feed her child.53 On
the queen's part, this same episode is the expression of an entirely
different wish. It represents a preemptive strike: she wants to eat
(leave) me; I will eat (make her leave me) first. Conversely, the
attempt to incorporate or consume Snow White may also represent
a refusal to relinquish the daughter. Julia Kristeva speaks of and
from the mother's position in "Stabat Mater": "What connection is
there between myself, or even more unassumingly between my
body and this internal graft and fold, which, once the umbilical cord
has been severed, is an inaccessible other? ... No identity holds
up. A mother's identity is maintained only through the well-known
closure of consciousness within the indolence of habit, when a
woman protects herself from the borderline that severs her body
and expatriates it from her child."54 In "Snow White," however, the
mother denies the fact of expatriation. Too much was perhaps
invested in her artistic vision of a child "as white as snow, as red as
blood, and as black as ebony." It is the queen's wish to take the
daughter back into herself, to recreate the condition in which her
creation was the very flesh of her own flesh. There was no clash of
wills in those edenic days when mother and daughter were still an
intermingled and undifferentiated unit.
When the queen fails to eat Snow White, she tries to alter the
course of their relationship three more times with laces, a comb,

53 Interestingly, whereas in Totem and Taboo Freud envisions this conflict only in
terms of fathers and sons, the fairy tale-with greater insight perhaps-attributes
totemism to mothers and daughters as well. See Kenneth Burke's discussion of
totemism as an instance of Freud's overemphasis on patriarchal patterns: "I submit
that this emphasis will conceal from us, to a large degree, what is going on in art....
Totemism, as Freud himself reminds us, was a magical device whereby the members
of a group were identified with one another by the sharing of the same substance. ...
And it is to the mother that the basic informative experiences of eating are related."
For these reasons Burke suggests that there is "a tendency for rebirth rituals to be
completed by symbolizations of matricide," and therefore "the phenomena of
identity revealed in totemism might require the introduction of matricidal ingredi-
ents also" (Kenneth Burke, "Freud-and the Analysis of Poetry," in his The
Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3d ed. [Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1973], 258-92, esp. 273-74). A harrowing
dramatization of this argument is to be found in the "rebirth" of a group of
schoolboys as savage hunters and their slaughter of a nursing sow in William
Golding's Lord of the Flies (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), 146-51.
4 Julia Kristeva, "Stabat Mater," trans. Leon S. Roudiez, in The Kristeva Reader:
Julia Kristeva, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 160-86,
esp. 178-79.

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Barzilai / SNOW WHITE

and an apple. Her continuing obsession with issues of intimacy

and separation is evident in the repetitive nature of her plots. Fo
Bettelheim, whose emphasis is on the child's experience of
sexuality, the similarity of these episodes consists in "the readi-
ness with which Snow White repeatedly permits herself to be
tempted by the stepmother." This readiness symbolizes the
adolescent girl's "unconscious wish to be sexually attractive"; her
deathlike sleep after eating the apple is evidence that "she
became overwhelmed by the conflict between her sexual desires
and her anxiety about them."55 Gilbert and Gubar stress the
creativity and ingenuity of the queen's schemes, pointing out tha
each of her plots "depends on a poisonous or parodic use of a
distinctively female device as a murder weapon. . . . The girl
finally falls, killed, so it seems, by the female arts of cosmetology
and cookery."56 Though these readings recognize the importance of
recurrent aspects of the plot, they do not take into account that the
queen invariably chooses to "get at" Snow White by doing what a
mother does for a very young child: dressing, combing, and
feeding. The immediate outcome in every instance is to render
Snow White helpless and passive, as if an unsatisfying reality
could be corrected by returning to the time when Snow White was
still, literally, a baby.
What the queen wants, therefore, is not so much to destroy Snow
White (which is borne out by the fact that the daughter does not die)
but, rather, to set back the clock and then stop it. For the other
aspect of keeping Snow White in a state of infantile passivity is
keeping herself perpetually young. To eat or to infantalize Snow
White is thus not merely to hold onto her. It is to recapture youth
and vitality. It is to distance the death that lurks behind the mirror
The phantasy underlying the mother's story is twofold: the desire,
always unappeasable in reality, to remain one with the child of her
body; and the painful and equally impossible desire to ward off age
and aging, to remain forever "fairest in the land."
The failure of the queen's plots does not defeat or transform her,
however. (Only her relationship with Snow White brings about
transformations in the queen, as her death at the wedding show
once more.) She continues to try. Her last plot is the most inge-
nious, desperate, and regressive one of all. The queen offers Snow
White the object of their first relationship: her breast. As Linda
Nochlin points out, "apples and breasts have been associated from
the time of Theocritus' pastoral verse down to Zola's eroticized

55 Bettelheim (n. 6 above), 211-12.

6 Gilbert and Gubar (n. 14 above), 39-40.

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 Spring 1990/ SIGNS

paean to fruit in Le Ventre de Paris."57 In attempting to explain the

universality of the breast-apple metaphor, Nochlin argues that it
derives from "man's erotic association of inviting fruit and a
succulent, inviting area of the female body." I suggest that the
association is not confined to male tropes or, as Nochlin puts it, "the
apple-female sexuality syndrome."8 In the following account Mar-
guerit Sechehaye describes a twenty-one year old psychotic patient
who can only eat green vegetables and unripe apples, still attached
to the tree, which she must pick for herself:

I persist in trying to understand the symbolism of the apples.

To the remark that I gave her as many apples as she wanted,
Renee cries: "Yes, but those are store apples, apples for big
people, but I want apples from Mummy, like that," pointing
to my breasts. "Those apples there, Mummy gives them only
when one is hungry."
I understand at last what must be done! Since the apples
represent maternal milk, I must give them to her like a mother
feeding her baby.... To verify my hypothesis I carry it out at
once. Taking an apple, and cutting it in two, I offer Renee a
piece, saying, "It is time to drink the good milk from Mum-
my's apples, Mummy is going to give it to you." Renee then
leans up against my shoulder, presses the apple upon my
breast, and very solemnly, with intense happiness, eats it.59

For the very young child, the mother's breast is, normatively, a
good object, representing comfort, connection, and security; for the
oedipal child and adolescent, the breast represents a bad object,
symbol of transgression and loss ("forbidden fruit"). The apple in
"Snow White" conjoins these two trends; that is, it has its good side
and its bad. In the fairy tale: "Snow White longed for the lovely
apple, and when she saw the peasant woman [i.e., the queen]
taking a bite out of it she couldn't resist."60 The scene has a certain
resemblance to the analytic situation in Sechehaye's account: the
queen offers her apple to Snow White, but, in contradistinction to
the analyst, she shares it with her as well. Partaking of the apple

57 Linda Nochlin, "Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art," in

Woman as Sex Object, ed. Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin (New York: News-
week, 1972), 9-15, esp. 11.
58Ibid., 11.
59 Marguerit A. Sechehaye, Symbolic Realization: A New Method of Psychother-
apy Applied to a Case of Schizophrenia, trans. Barbro Wiirsten and Helmut Wiirsten
(New York: International Universities, 1951), 50-51.
60 Grimm and Grimm (n. 10 above), 189.

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Barzilai / SNOW WHITE

together symbolizes a reciprocal regression to the oral stage when

the child is most completely dependent and the mother mos
needed in every way. This is, therefore, "a very poisonous apple"
for the developing child.61 The queen extends to her daughter th
possibility of a return to infancy or early childhood, and Snow
White is unable to resist the temptation. For together with the
desire to break away from the mother, Snow White experiences
yearning for the carefree days of childhood, for a symbiotic and
nonconflictual relationship with her mother.
"Snow White," then, is the story of two women, a mother and a
daughter: a mother who cannot grow up and a daughter who must.
Hate rather than love becomes the keynote of their story. The
conclusion of this tale, like the narrative in its entirety, could b
read as the product of two perspectives. From the mother's per-
spective, the wish she held most dear has turned into a tale of loss
and fragmentation. There is no resolution in sight for the relation-
ship, only hostility and conflict. In the end, the queen dies of grief.
From the daughter's perspective, the old nurturing gestures-be i
grooming or feeding-are threatening. Mother always smothers, a
when "[she] pulled the lace so tight that Snow White's breath was
cut off and she fell down as though dead."62 Snow White would like
therefore, nothing better than to get this interfering older woman,
this deadly dragon-mother, out of her life. The conflict is finall
resolved, and the daughter's wish fulfilled. In the end, the queen
dies of spite.
Yet once more from the mother's perspective: Snow White is
going to be ever so sorry when the babies start coming, and the king
goes out hunting, and no woman really close and caring is around
to help her.
At this point I return you to the opening statement.

Department of English
Hebrew University of Jerusalem

61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., 187.

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