Snow White

Im sorry guys, but im trashing this odd fairytale too...  Everyone knows the Snow White story, it is proberly one of the most reyound fairytales so I won't bother with the plot and such but heres the break down of what characters and certain things mean...

The queen orders a woodsman to take Snow White into the forest and kill her. He is further instructed to bring back her heart and lungs as proof that the deed is done. The woodsman, one of the very few adult males ever to appear in a Grimms Brothers’ fairy tale, is a compassionate soul. He lets the girl go and kills a wild pig instead, bringing back its heart and lungs to the bloodthirsty queen. If memory serves, the queen cooks and eats these organs. There is a strong resonance here concerning the fierce tension that often develops between aging mothers and their beautiful teenage daughters.


The Handsome Prince is a special case because he is a virtual non-entity except when he is wielding his sword, kissing the damsel to awaken her (both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty), and finally standing up at the altar to say “I do.” At first glance, it might seem that the lovely girl is the prince’s prize, in the case of the handsome prince in Sleeping Beauty who hacks his way through the dark wood raised by the evil witch around the castle in order to release Sleeping Beauty from the witch’s dreadful sleeping spell. He gets through. He kisses Sleeping Beauty awake. He wins her hand in marriage. The truth is, however, that the prince is actually the prize, to be given to the most worthy girl: he is her reward for being beautiful, pure and well-behaved. (In Sleeping Beauty’s case being virtuous is rather easy: all she had to do is lie there in a warm, well-protected, palace bedroom.)

It would seem that the prince is the brass (gold, in this case) ring, awarded to good young women who have lived a morally correct girlhood. He brings social status, a socially sanctioned sex life, and money. All the other princesses will just die of envy. This way of thinking still prevails. All over the world, girls and young women are in a frenzy to get married. In point of fact, if at least some of these hyper-educated females were to take a good look at statistics concerning marriage in the first decade of the twenty-first century, they might choose to avoid marriage altogether. But such statistics are no match for genetics, mythology and eons of feminine training.

so to wrap up this fairytale covers the tensions between mother and daughters, and how women are veiwed as prizes for men.