Okay, so everyone knows the story of Snow White is probably the stupidest fairy tale there is. In the first place, Snow White does almost nothing in the story. The entire plot is acted out by the people around her; she is just the catalyst for their actions. In the second place, she's way too young to get married; in the third place, the prince just happens upon her dead in a coffin and decides that she's the one he wants to marry (their seconds-long meeting at the beginning of the Disney movie is not part of the original story). In the fourth place, it's pretty ridiculous that a woman would be so jealous of her seven-year-old stepdaughter's beauty that she would have her killed and eat her heart. This whole situation is pretty bad news all around.
However, I have never before read an adaptation of the story that made me so acutely aware of just how awful the story is. The picture book that holds this high honor is the adaptation illustrated by Quentin Greban.
Page one: several lines about a good queen who sat by her window, pricking her finger and wishing she had a child with "skin white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as this ebony embroidery frame," which is a pretty weird wish in the first place, but whatever, okay, good queen. Wish granted. Then the queen dies, and there's this one sentence: "After a year had passed, the king took another wife." Remember this for later.
So the queen does her "mirror mirror" business. "Every day she stood before it and asked, 'Looking glass upon the wall, who is fairest of us all?" And then one day it's not her, so she sends Snow White to be killed.
In this adaptation, no mention is made of Snow White's age, although you can tell she's quite young. I didn't think about it consciously, but probably assumed she was supposed to be around fourteen, which is her age in the Disney movie. She wanders through the forest, she comes across the little house, and she goes inside, where everything is "small but very neat and clean." She's starving but doesn't want to finish anyone's food, so she eats a little from each plate. She's exhausted but none of the beds fit right, so she tries them all until she gets to the last one and falls asleep; then the dwarfs come home, and we have a Goldilocks moment. But when they find Snow White asleep in the last bed, she's so beautiful that they're too full of joy to wake her.
In the morning, the dwarfs hear her story and tell her that if she'll keep house for them, she can live with them. So, my question is: Why do these dwarfs need Snow White to keep house for them in exchange for their not turning her out to be killed by her stepmother? Remember how "very neat and clean" everything was when she got there? They're obviously doing fine on their own. At this point I have to give it to Disney for, if not changing that dumb plot point, at least making the dwarfs filthy eccentrics so it makes sense.
So the dwarfs tell Snow White that she must never let anyone into the house while they're gone all day. Since this adaptation doesn't specify her age, I was picturing marriageable Snow White, and it occurred to me that this is actually pretty obnoxious and/or creepy of the dwarfs, who are essentially imprisoning Snow White in their house. If she's seven years old, that makes perfect sense. But in the version where she just gets married at the end—well, come on, people. You have to make a choice here. Either she's old enough to get married and open the door if she wants to, or she's young enough to be hidden in the house and not get married. (And also not be left alone all day to cook and clean for seven grown men... But whatever.)
Anyway: The queen finds out she's alive. She brings the corset and the poisoned comb. Snow White keeps stupidly accepting gifts from strange women in forests, dying, and being saved by the dwarfs. Then the queen brings the apple, and Snow White dies for real. Now here is one of my favorite pages. Just look at it yourself, and see if you can figure out what's been bothering me.
Yes. That is, in fact, a hand mirror. And it has been a hand mirror the entire time, ever since the mirror is first depicted. Even as the queen is saying, "Looking glass upon the wall," she is holding the mirror in her hand. Come on, Quentin. Seriously? That one is all on you.
The dwarfs put Snow White in a glass coffin. (Why?) She's still so beautiful that they can't bear to put her in the ground. (Ugh.) So they put the coffin in the woods and take turns keeping watch. And do you know what they've written on the coffin? "This is Snow White, Daughter of a King." If you'll remember the beginning of my post, I pointed out that several lines are devoted to the queen, the one who wished for a very-specifically-designed daughter, gave birth to her, and then died. The king gets one sentence, and it is for the sole purpose of introducing the new queen, who drives the rest of the story. So why, I ask you—why did that epitaph not read "This is Snow White, Daughter of a Queen"?
One day, a prince rides up and sees Snow White. He tries to buy her from the dwarfs. When they refuse, saying they couldn't part with her for any amount of gold, he asks them to instead part with her out of kindness, because after two seconds of looking at her, he loves her "more than anything in this world and cannot live without looking upon her." They cave, and when the prince's servants trip while carrying the coffin away, the piece of apple is thrown from Snow White's lips, and she wakes up. "Where am I?" she asks. Then this happens:
So, to sum up...
Snow White: Where am I?
Total Stranger: You are near me. Isn't that great? I mean, you've actually never seen me before in your life, so maybe you don't know that you're supposed to be comforted by this information. But it's good news, I promise. What's happened is that you died, and I fell in love with you by riding past your absurdly impractical coffin and seeing how hot you were, and the dwarfs were totally cool giving you up to a guy they've never met because I told them I couldn't live without having your dead body around to look at all the time. So now we're going to get married. Sound good?
Snow White:
And the next line is, "Their wedding was held with great splendor." All right, well, great. Who needs a consenting bride anyway? Then they invite the wicked queen to the wedding, give her a pair of red-hot iron shoes, and make her dance until she dies. And they all live happily ever after. Good riddance, I say, to this book and the whole stupid story.
I read a second adaptation after this, one by Charles Santore, that I just want to mention briefly. Story-wise, it's the same, with one or two small improvements (like that Snow White actually does consent to the marriage, and the mirror on the wall is actually on the wall). But there's one plot point that I just couldn't ignore.
I mentioned earlier that in the Greban adaptation, Snow White's age isn't specifically mentioned, and she's obviously the same age at the end of the book that she was at the beginning. In the Santore adaptation, however, Snow White is seven years old when she dies, and lies in the coffin for many years. In one way this is reassuring, as the Snow White who gets married is obviously no longer a small child. ---> But I find the inclusion of this plot point, whether it's from the original story or has been added later (I don't know), highly suspect. Because guys—not only is she wearing the same (thin white) dress that fit her when she was seven... She hit puberty in that coffin. That is just absurd. Not that there's any part of this entire fairy tale that is not absurd... But please. There are limits.
