Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies

2. The Framing of "Snow White": Narrative and Gender (Re)Production

THE FRAMING OF "SNOW WHITE" NARRATIVE AND GENDER (RE)PRODUCTION 2 TH E FA IRY TALE'S MAGIC depends on our suspension of disbelief : we do not expect the tale's events to be realistic. Even more, though, magic is invoked through the tale'smatter-of-fact, artfully simple narrative that relies on dialogue and single strokes of color to produce a feeling of familiarity aitd wonder at the same time. Wolves, eagles, ants, even the fish talk, and we understand. Flowers and jewels fall from the heroine's lips. A queen gives birth to a pig or to a bush of rosemary; a dead girl reviveswhen her poisoned shoes are removed. The magic is riot that such things happen in fairy tales, but that they are immediately recognizable as "true" in Bettelheim's terms, or in some abstract wayas part of our own experience—"a general explanation of life" as Calvino put it (Italian Folktales xvm). Not the actual events, but the wonder itself is recogni/ed in the images, in their symbolic resonance, in their logic. Like a magic mirror, the fairy tale reflects and conforms to the waythings "truly" are, the wayour lives are "truly"lived. As with all mirrors, though, refraction and the shaping presence of a frame mediate the fairy tale's reflection. As it images our potential for transformation, the fairy tale refracts what we wish or fear to become. Human—and thus changeable—ideas, desires, and practices frame the tale's images. Further, if we see more of the mirror rather than its images, questions rather than answers emerge. Who is holding the mirror and whose desires does it represent and contain? Or, more pointedly, how is the fairy tale's magic produced narratively? In this chapter, I will show how several mirroring or mimetic strategies—externali/ation, nature metaphors, the invisible external narrator, mirrors themselves—sustain the fairy tale's wonder The Framing of "Snow White" 29 by unobtrusively easing us into recogni/ing correspondences between the natural world and the psycho-social human world. As my reading of "Snow White" will emphasize, this mirroring, or highly-distilled mimesis, is no value-free or essential distillation of human destiny, but a "special effect" of ideological expectations and unspoken norms—a naturalizing technology that works hard at, among other things, re-producing "Woman" as the mirror image of masculine desire. Within the fairy tale's narrative frame, Snow White is the crystallized image of the "natural" woman. Examining the construction of such a frame can at the very least contribute to unmaking the power of that crystal. All popular fairy tales do not of course inscribe such static beauties . I choose "Snow White" as my example because, even among the "innocent persecuted heroine" fairy tales, it is a particularly "fixed" and mimetic narrative. Byanalyzing the mirroring strategy in "Snow White" as it re-produces the passively beautiful female character with very limited options, I seek to magnify norms at work in the fairy tale, the narrative frame which measures the voices, gazes, and actions of all the genre's female heroines. Best known nowadays in its Disney movie version and the Grimms' nineteenth-century printed text, the immensely popular "Snow White" (AT709) has hundreds of oral versions, collected primarily in Europe, but also in Asia Minor, Africa, and the Americas (Jones 14).' When preparing their Kinder- und Hausmdrchen, the Brothers Grimm themselves collected several German versions , and the tale they selected for publication has in turn influenced the oral tradition. As one would expect, "Snow White" versions vary greatly in details or allomotifs. The (step)mother attacks Snow White in a variety of ways; the girl finds refuge with robbers, assassins, giants, fairies, instead of with dwarves. The narrative structure and thematic interpretation have however been comparatively homogeneous, fixing "Snow White" more firmly than most fairy tales in our imaginations.2 Giambattista Basile published an early literary retelling, "La schiavetta" or "The Young Slave" (Second Day, Eighth Tale), in Lo Cunlo de li Cunti or The Pentamewn in 1634—36. Lilla, the baron's 30 Chapter 2 young sister, swallows a rose petal to win a bet and finds herself pregnant; the fairies help her conceal her condition, and then bestow gifts on baby Lisa. On her way to bless the child, one of the fairies trips and curses her instead, declaring that when lisa turns seven her mother will leave...