How Snow White Films Define Beauty and Power

the essay behind the video essay

“‘Take Snow-White out into the woods. I never want to see her again. Kill her, and as proof that she is dead bring her lungs and her liver back to me.’ … The cook had to boil them with salt, and the wicked woman ate them, supposing that she had eaten Snow White's lungs and liver.” Can I get that recipe?

The tale of “Snow White”, made popular by the Brothers Grimm’s collection of tales published in 1812, was one of the first fairy tales to be adapted, first for the stage and then for early cinema, Betty Boop even had her turn as the raven-haired beauty, but it is Disney’s 1937 animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that brought the tale to the forefront of cinema and pop culture.

The tale of “Snow White” is one of beauty and power. Every time the tale is told again on screen, it seems to focus more and more on Snow White’s stepmother, the evil queen. While the tale, being a fairy tale, doesn’t provide much character motivation, the films give the stepmother a backstory and a reason behind her wicked ways. In a flashback scene in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), a young Ravena has a spell put on her by her mother “By fairest blood, it is done” before her family is killed in an attack on their village. “Avenge us,” her mother cries. They give her magic and power, which are inextricably connected with her beauty. They give Snow White power by aging her up from the original tale’s age of just seven years old, and often turning her into a leader and a fighter.

In watching these Snow White movies, I saw how the male filmmakers defined beauty, created power, and tried to give Snow White some agency.

The Fairest of Them All

Who’s the fairest of them all? Whomever the director casts as his leading ladies. A written or oral tale can just write “she was the most beautiful woman in all the land” without further description, but in a film, you have to show, in every little detail, exactly what the most beautiful woman in all the land looks like. All but one of the films I’ll be referencing here were directed by men, which means men were defining beauty, which is a key element of the story. It’s the stepmother’s main character motivation; to be and stay beautiful. More beautiful than Snow White.

By now we’re all familiar with the term “the male gaze.” I’m not going to dissect each of these films to point out where that gaze seems to be particularly “male gaze”, but I do want to talk about something adjacent to the gaze, which is this idea of defining beauty.

So, what is beautiful in these filmmakers’ eyes? Snow White’s beautiful stepmother is white, an average age of 44, often fair-haired, thin, not visibly physically disabled or ill, with unblemished skin, and no signs of “aging” like grey hairs or wrinkles. Snow White is younger at an average age of 18; light-skinned, brunette or black hair (the one physical trait specified in the tale), thin, unblemished, no visible physical disabilities or illnesses, and, you know, pretty. The Grimm’s tale says that Snow White was born “white as snow, red as blood, and hair as black as ebony”. It actually did not specify that her skin was white as snow or her lips or cheeks were red as blood. And they often give her brown, not ebony hair. But she’s got to be white! Not white as snow, because that would actually be terrifying, but caucasian, at least. I’d personally love to reinterpret the tale for the screen using an actress with looks that could be interpreted from the text. “Red as blood” could be a port-wine stain birthmark. “White as snow” could be albinism or vitiligo. Considering the one thing for sure is that her hair is as black as the wood of an ebony tree, making her a black or brown girl makes more sense. But somehow the white skin is the characteristic that all filmmakers felt they needed to stick to the most? But then, she is the “fairest” of them all.

fair
/fer/
adjective
2. (of hair or complexion) light; blond.
“a pretty girl with long fair hair"

Now that we’ve decided what’s beautiful; what is ugly? An aspect not in the tale is the idea that the stepmother’s beauty is tied to her mirror and her magic. I’ll address the use of magic and why it’s been added to film adaptations so consistently later on, but my point here is that often in the films the stepmother is so desperate to stay beautiful, that she’s already been taking drastic measures, like using magic, to keep her beauty, as she’s gotten older. And there it is- keeping beauty. Women have beauty in their youth and try to hold onto it as they age out of it. Snow White was only seven years old when she became more beautiful than her mother. (And mother became stepmother as the Grimm’s revised their tales for subsequent editions.) If this isn’t a story about youth and beauty and the power it holds, I don’t know what it’s about. In most films, as the evil queen’s power fades, because Snow White is becoming more powerful, her beauty starts to fade as well. And what’s the first subtle visualization of the loss of her beauty? It’s not acne, it’s not her waist size- it’s wrinkles. In Mirror Mirror (2012), the queen objects to the mirror’s accusation of wrinkles by saying “They’re not wrinkles. Just crinkles.” And most of the evil stepmothers meet their final end by getting older and older until they are a shrivelled up mummy and turn to dust or fall apart. Showing us that old is the opposite of beautiful.

When we talk about “ugly”, unfortunately, we have to talk about the dwarfs. Whether it’s said directly in the film- “Banish all the uglies” one of the dwarf bandits repeats the queen’s orders in Mirror Mirror (2012) -or not, it is the place of the dwarfs in the story to be, if not specifically “ugly” on the outside then outsiders of some sort. They are bandits, outcasts, outlaws, and under-appreciated workers. If they’re not dwarves, then they are physically disfigured in some way. They play the role of teaching us that it’s not what’s on the outside that counts; it’s what’s on the inside. The dwarfs have inner beauty, but not outer beauty. The stepmother has outer beauty but no inner beauty. Snow White, of course, has both. “Do a person’s outsides have anything to do with them being kind or considerate or careful towards others? No.” says Snow White in Snow White: The Fairest of them All (2001). And that may also be the moral of the story; be kind to the uggos. Don’t trust anyone who is too vain. People who care about what they look like, only care about that and don’t care about other people at all. People who are kind will be loved even if they’re ugly. Or dwarves.

The filmmakers may be the ones really deciding what’s beautiful or ugly on-screen, but within the films’ worlds, the authority of beauty is the stepmother’s magic mirror. It is a third party who is telling her who’s the fairest of them all; she’s not coming up with this herself. The modern interpretation could be that the mirror, often depicted with a man’s voice and face, represents the patriarchal misogynist society that gives women these beauty standards and pits them against each other to think there can only be one woman on top. (Drink every time I blame The Patriarchy.) In Sydney White, a modern interpretation of the tale, instead of a magic mirror, it’s the school’s “Hot or Not” ranking that tells Rachel Witchburn that she’s the prettiest girl in school and tells her when Sydney takes the number one spot from her. It is literally her peers deciding who’s the prettiest.

But no matter how the films portray the authority or definition of beauty within their worlds, it is predominantly men filmmakers who have written and directed these films, and are therefore responsible for showing the audience young, thin, white women as the top two most beautiful women in all the land. They tell us that youth is beauty and old is ugly. The moral I take from the film adaptations of Snow White is about the values of inner beauty and outer beauty, and that the fight for beauty is really the fight for power.

Magic & Mirrors

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most powerful of them all? Knowing nothing about the mother, or stepmother, from the tale other than her desire to be the fairest in the land, filmmakers have had to create much of her character themselves. And the direction the character has gone in, since Disney, is that of a power-hungry, gold-digging black widow who cares too much about her looks. As Ravena says in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) as she murders the king, “When a woman stays young and beautiful forever, the world is hers. First, I will take your life, my Lord. And then I’ll take your throne.”

I can’t help but think, as a woman, that women interpreting the character of Snow White’s stepmother would have different ideas about how this woman ended up so bent on being the most beautiful that she would kill her own daughter (or stepdaughter). Women have felt the societal pressure of the patriarchy (Drink!) to look a certain way, to be a certain way, to value our looks and what men think of us over our intelligence, personality, and ambitions. In college-set Sydney White (2007), Rachel Witchburn criticizes the appearance her sorority’s pledges one by one using a magnifying glass, saying comments like “Your pores are enormous.” We have personal experience seeing in ourselves and others what horrible cocktail of outside pressures creates a vain woman. It seems most of the men writing these Snow White movies are not interested in exploring all the influences that could lead to the stepmother being so vain it’s turned into insanity. Instead, they have created a motivation that men are taught to value and understand; the desire for power.

In several Snow White films, the stepmother character pursues Snow White’s handsome prince, as a way of gaining more money and power for her and her kingdom, and sometimes just out of jealousy of Snow White.

And, as I’ve explored; beauty is power. Like deciding who is beautiful, or not, these male filmmakers decide what is worth killing for; the crown, the kingdom, the money, the control, the power. That’s what the stepmother wants in these films. Most of them make Snow White’s father a king and the stepmother is on the hunt for a rich and powerful husband before they even meet. No specific motivation; just an evil gold-digging bitch from the start.

And here’s where magic comes in; magic is also a form of power. And this power she already has when she shows up. The magic, tied to the mirror, is already giving her the power of beauty, which is a kind of magic that helps her ensnare a man. For some reason, she can never get her hands on some magic that can just give her the kingdom, it just keeps her beautiful, maybe it can put a spell on the king so he will marry her, maybe it helps her kill him so she can take over. The magic never seems to work on pure, innocent Snow White, though. And therein lies the conflict of the story.

There actually wasn’t any magic in the tale. Well, a talking mirror sounds pretty magical. And that whole not-dead-but-not-alive thing that happens to Snow White definitely isn’t natural. But the mother was not a witch. She didn’t need magic to trick a seven-year-old girl. She just put on a disguise, tied the laces too tight, and poisoned a comb and an apple. The addition of magic to the stepmother’s tricks (well, the movies usually skip straight to the apple) is connected to Snow White’s age. It’s one thing to write about a little girl being tricked, but when the films make Snow White a teenager, she would seem pretty stupid for falling for the disguise and taking things from a stranger. But for most films, Snow White is compelled to eat the apple by magic. She’s not dumb or naive; she’s under a spell!

Snow White is so pure of heart, and protected by her new friends the dwarves, that the stepmother has to rally the troops to get to her. She needs the help of the magic mirror. The stepmother is powerful and often harnesses magic on her own, but she’s really got nothing without the mirror. But her folly is in her perception that she is in charge of the mirror and its power. She thinks she’s controlling its magic, but really, it has a hold over her. Generally, she doesn’t use the power of the mirror to make her attacks on Snow White, but she relies on the mirror to tell her that Snow White is still alive and where she is, often even literally showing her a live feed of Snow White that very moment. And so, it all falls apart when the mirror falls apart. Or the mirror falls apart when it all falls apart. When the mirror, and the magic, are broken, so is the stepmother.

It’s up to the filmmakers to create a rich backstory and motivation for the evil-stepmother-queen-witch, and I think I have a pretty strong case in saying that creating a character whose main motivation is to gain power is something more likely to come from a man’s mind than a woman’s. And I can’t help but think that the male writers may have felt they needed to give the stepmother magical power because they don’t believe women can be powerful enough on their own.

But they take a different approach to giving Snow White power, by turning her into a warrior…

Snow White: Warrior Princess

Snow White was a helpless little seven-year-old girl in the tale, so among many things a filmmaker has to add to the story to create enough material for a feature-length film, Snow White has been aged up to a teenager; still young and beautiful but capable of a lot more than a child. To create a more compelling story, Snow White has to be given more agency than her original passive role in the tale. Her age is one way, but the big trend that I’ve seen in recent films is to turn Snow White into a warrior.

Again, I can’t ignore the fact that these films were written by men, and that they have chosen to give their female lead characteristics that are valued, in real life and in films, by men, in men. Leadership, physical strength, fighting for someone you love, combat skills. And, sure, they might have the best intentions with this; they might be just over-correcting. They want to subvert the damsel in distress trope so they go hard in the opposite direction, and end up turning their female lead into the male hero, the knight in shining armour. But it looks to me like a big male blind spot, throwing male ideals onto a woman, rather than considering other ways to portray an autonomous, powerful young woman.

In Sydney White (2007), Sydney works at her father’s construction company, just one of the guys, before going off to college and first impresses the prince character by catching and throwing back a football.

But, backing up a bit, the first way we see Snow White in films portrayed as an independent young woman, is her romantic attraction to a young man. For what better way to show that one is an adult, with needs and desires and something to fight for, than to give them romantic feelings for someone? What’s a fairy tale without the romantic happily ever after? In the tale, the prince comes along after Snow White is in the glass coffin, not-dead-not-alive, and thinks she’s so pretty he wants to keep her for himself. (Pedophile much?) He does not, however, cure her with true love’s kiss. The 1987 film Snow White actually takes the most from the tale and it shows the tale’s “cure” which is that while the prince’s men are carrying the coffin away, one trips and bumps the coffin, which bumps the piece of poison apple out of her throat. And more recent films create even more in-depth romantic relationships for Snow White; the college-set adaptation, Sydney White, pretty much all revolves around her growing relationship with the cute frat boy. Lily Collins meets Armie Hammer in the forest before either of them knows who the other really is in Mirror Mirror. In Snow White: A Tale of Terror, she actually has a cute prince, but then falls for a hot guy with a scar, one of the seven “disfigured” bandits she hangs out with. Snow White and the Huntsman somehow managed to avoid much of a romantic plot line, yet still had a man kiss her to break the spell. So, being in a romantic relationship, even just having a crush, shows that if Snow White is old or mature enough for that, then she’s mature enough to learn to fight and hatch a plot to overthrow the queen.

So, she’s met her handsome prince true love, she’s been run into the forest by someone trying to kill her under orders of her stepmother, she’s made friends with some outcasts, so now it’s time to fight! She’s a grown woman with womanly feelings for a man, and an understanding of how the world works outside her fancy castle. She’s smart enough to see that her stepmother is behind everything bad that’s ever happened, so, naturally, she wants to fight back. And what better way to fight back than to literally, physically, fight. Right?

Snow White and the Huntsman is the most obvious example of this plot. She essentially declares war on the queen, leads an army, fights, and murders her stepmother herself. But the film has this amazing b-plot of Snow White being like a magical queen of the forest, but it’s mostly unexplored, much to my disappointment, and it’s actually kind of used as an example of how a peaceful approach won’t work; violence is the answer. Instead, Snow White is turned into a military leader like she is taught to fight and steal in Mirror Mirror and A Tale of Terror. Snow White often learns, not just self-confidence, but leadership, not just strategy to disempower the stepmother, but combat training to kill her. She does what any male hero of a story does; training montage, suit up, kick some ass.

I mean, it’s not all bad. No one wants to see another woman as a victim on screen, right? So, turn her into a warrior, a tough survivor, and channel all her emotions into physical combat. As if losing her father, never knowing her mother, being assaulted, being betrayed by a guardian, and being poisoned, didn’t cause a lot of mental and physical trauma. She’s not a victim, she fights for what is right, and that makes up for everything that happened to her! And she has a prince! So, she can live happily ever after with no worries. (“I believe in love,” sings recently married Snow White at the end of Mirror Mirror.) Imagine how compelling fairy tale adaptions would be if they really showed and dealt with the characters’ traumas. Fairy tales are full of crazy-ass shit! There’s plenty of fodder for a psychological drama full of emotional resonance. Alas, instead we get sword fights and weddings in place of healing and recovery.

So, men have tried to modernize the tale by taking the damsel in distress and making her kick butt instead but it still reeks of the patriarchal agenda (Drink!). They give her agency by giving her attributes that men see as keys to success and self-empowerment; physical strength, combat skills, leadership, fighting for the one you love (romantically), and fighting to take power over something. These are not everyone’s values. And while I don’t dislike the idea of Snow White’s motivation being to right the wrongs that the Queen has inflicted on the kingdom and take back the throne for the sake of her family legacy… Is violence the only way to do that?

Ever After

So, I’ve explored about eight feature films based on the fairy tale Snow White, of which all but one were written by and directed by men. And what I’ve seen in all of them is male ideals being put into this story of women’s lives. As I’ve said, a screenwriter would have to add plenty to the story of Snow White to have a feature-length script, but with all these adaptations and room for interpretation and imagination, most use the same tropes. Snow White was always a tale of power; beauty as power in the world, and goodness as power over evil, but instead of expanding the tale into a story of the complex relationship between a mother and daughter, these male writers and directors used common tropes of male-centric films and disguised them with a female lead. They create a stepmother that requires magical power to get anything done and turn an abused young woman into a warrior. These films use beauty, magic, and combat to create a story of two women fighting for a single position of power.

“You have no right to rule the way you do. And technically, I’m the rightful leader of this kingdom,” says Snow White in Mirror Mirror. “Probably not the best thing you could have said just then,” replies her stepmother, as her magical necklace glimmers.

Well, the moral of this story is to be conscious of who is creating the ideals in the films you’re watching; the beauty, the character traits, the happy ending, and what, possibly damaging, values are they upholding. And, just because a woman is the lead of a movie, doesn’t mean her character should be held up as any sort of ideal for women.

And they all lived oppressively ever after under The Patriarchy (Drink!).

The End.