In Defence of Snow White

“I’m awfully sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. But you don’t know what I’ve been through – and all because I was afraid. I’m so ashamed of the fuss I made.”

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

 

‘Snow White and the Three Dwarfs’ somehow doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

It’s no secret that I’m a big Disney fan. Disney’s animated classics constituted an indisputable majority of the films I saw as a young child; of the video cassettes that lined the shelves of my childhood home, almost all the commercially-produced (rather than home-recorded) ones were Disney films. One of my earliest favourites was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. That film made an enormous impression on me: I found Snow White’s escape through the woods genuinely frightening,¹ was fascinated by the mystery of the magic mirror, and could have watched the scene where Snow White and the dwarves play music and dance over and over again.² I especially liked the deleted scene featured at the end of the VHS version, an extra song all about soup.³

Obviously I’m not quite the same person I was when I could fit into the pale blue dress I liked to wear when I was pretending to be Snow White, and I can’t deny that there has been some shift in the elements I value when watching a film – but it seems to me that Snow White gets a disproportionately rough deal as regards popular perception of her these days. I have had several conversations in which friends, even fellow Disney fans, have expressed severe dislike of her. Most of the criticisms can be whittled down to two main points: first, her voice is annoying; and second, she’s such a … well … such a typical Disney princess, you know? She’s just this sort of useless milksop who falls for the first guy she meets and then does nothing but sit around waiting for him to rescue her. She’s an outdated stereotype and a terrible role model for young girls.

Against the first charge I can offer little defence: if you find Adriana Caselotti’s vocal performance irritating, I suppose that’s that. The second, however, is another story. Such disdain for Snow White as little more than an insult to the whole female sex strikes me as very unfair. I make no pretence that the values apparently upheld by Disney’s portrayal of the character are totally unimpeachable, but neither are those opposing values according to whose standards she is so readily condemned. In other words, the fact that we in the modern west are so revolted by Snow White tells us far more about us than it does about her.

Let’s take a look at Snow White’s story.⁴ She’s a fourteen-year-old orphan whose only legal guardian (her stepmother), far from offering her any support in her bereavement, has stripped her of her status, her dignity, and her material comforts, and reduced her to little more than a slave, all out of jealousy over her appearance. Is it really any wonder that she should desperately want to be loved by someone? Is it really any wonder that any teenage girl should dream of a relationship with the perfect guy for her? But, on top of that, in Snow White’s case in particular, a marriage surely represented not only the possibility of the love and attention and security of which she had been so utterly deprived, but also her best chance of extricating herself from the oppressive power of her stepmother. You have to remember she lived in the 1500s.⁵ So, she sings her wishing song:

I’m wishing for the one I love to find me today.

I’m hoping and I’m dreaming of the nice things he’ll say.

Note she doesn’t make any reference to this guy being rich or handsome or even a prince; she just wants him to say nice things to her. But of course, when the guy in question fortuitously shows up and sets about wooing his princess, Snow White’s stepmother – either jealous or, more likely in my opinion, sensitive that a married Snow White with a royal husband’s backing and the possibility of heirs posed a far greater threat to her power (since she had, after all, all but usurped the throne that was rightfully the property of Snow White’s bloodkin) – orders her huntsman to murder the young princess. He of course gets cold feet at the fatal moment and urges Snow White to flee into the forest.

Again, it’s no wonder that Snow White should be so scared. She’s completely alone in a distinctly creepy place that she’s never seen before, and has just been informed that the ruler of the realm wants her dead. So she runs, and eventually collapses. Upon waking, she finds herself surrounded by a motley assortment of woodland creatures and, instead of either taking her anger out on them or simply sitting there moping about her plight, she actually apologises for startling them (as per my opening quotation), before setting about cheering herself up the only way she knows how, by singing. Perhaps she has had everything else taken away from her, but she can still sing.

After that, things take an extremely practical turn, with Snow White wondering what she might do about shelter. Her new animal friends are kind enough to escort her to a nearby cottage. When it emerges that said cottage is in a state of some disarray, Snow White readily makes use of her experience as a scullery maid to tidy things up, and then, once the dwarfs whose cottage it is return home, manages to secure herself a job as their housekeeper. Far from sitting about doing nothing, Snow White makes good use of the limited skills she’s had the opportunity to learn to improve both her situation and the dwarfs’ (and even teaches them the importance of basic personal hygiene).

While the Evil Queen is busily plotting Snow White’s demise (again), the princess herself sings the following famous lines:

Someday my prince will come.

Someday we’ll meet again.

And away to his castle we’ll go

To be happy forever, I know.

It’s one of the most objectionable points in the film to those who find Snow White’s voice annoying as much to those who find the character herself a useless milksop. But frankly, after the prince declared his undying love for her earlier on, it’s no surprise that she should expect him to come looking for her. We later find out that he was indeed doing just that all along. In the meantime, staying put in a place where she’s safe and happy hardly seems the worst decision in the world.

Indeed, the stupidest thing Snow White does in the film is definitely when she ignores the dwarfs’ warning to beware of strangers and lets her stepmother, in a very good disguise as a poor old lady, trick her into eating a poisoned apple. It’s worth noting that Snow White has good reason for suspecting that the ‘wishing apple’, as it is pitched to her, really might have magical wish-granting properties: the wishing well at which she sang earlier granted her wish to meet her true love, after all. Magic is part and parcel of the world of the film, just like unrealistically intelligent woodland creatures, and, arguably, love at first sight. If we are prepared to suspend our disbelief of this last principle to the extent of acknowledging Snow White and the prince’s relationship as genuine love, then none of her wishing to meet him again seems particularly excessive or unusual.

Most crucially, however, long before Snow White takes the apple, the film has already well established that it is not trying to present its protagonist as the brightest or savviest princess ever. What has been made clear about Snow White is that she has great compassion for others – and so of course she pities this poor old lady being viciously attacked by birds (who are, in turn, only trying to protect Snow White); of course she gives her the benefit of the doubt. Snow White’s naivety is a manifestation of her will to see the good in other people. Despite all she’s been through, at every turn, she is freely, relentlessly kind.

But of course, we don’t care about that. Snow White isn’t nearly clever enough, independent enough, adventurous enough, for our tastes. Her gracious endurance of the ills that befall her strikes us as a wonderful impression of a doormat. Her making use of the skills she has for the benefit of others as well as herself is no more than a failure to challenge traditional gender roles. Her willingness to assume the best of other people is just hopeless foolhardiness. And above all, her naïve, idealistic romanticism is absolutely disgusting to us; heaven forbid that a young woman should have any desire to marry a man who loves her!

I’m well aware that it would be a very bad idea for every film’s heroine to be like Snow White – but surely the same is true of any character. I’m also well aware that there are interpretations of Snow White’s story that could have detrimental effects on young girls who look up to their favourite Disney princesses as role models, the idea of marrying a prince being the solution to all life’s problems being of greatest concern – but again, anyone’s story can be similarly misrepresented. The most important thing has to be to have variety among film characters, so that there is represented as wide a range as possible both of virtues and of flaws. I worry that when we disdain Snow White and characters like her, we spurn that variety in favour of foregrounding particular virtues our society holds dear – like cleverness and independence and adventurousness. Kindness drifts down the list. And we forget that Snow White is more than a useless milksop: not only is she remarkably compassionate, but also joyful, hardworking, and actually rather plucky in a ‘with-a-smile-and-a-song’ sort of way. Surely there are worse qualities a supposed role model could display?

None of this, of course, was in the mind of my younger self as I sat watching and re-watching Snow White’s beautifully-animated adventures; I just liked the film. And I still like it. Perhaps if you were to give it half a chance, O Understandably But Nevertheless Unreasonably Cynical Reader, you might quite like it too.

(Unless you really can’t stand Snow White’s voice, of course. Then I’m afraid there’s no hope.)

Footnotes

¹ It’s a stunning bit of animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2zrs7Irzuw.

² The second-funnest song in a musical film ever to feature yodelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lR2SFDnHM_E.

³ The animation is still uncoloured, but I think that just made the whole thing more fascinating to my younger self: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr-OEaocgOU.

⁴ I was at this point very greatly helped by the synopsis of the film at Filmsite: http://www.filmsite.org/snow.html.

⁵ According to this rather lovely timeline: http://geektyrant.com/news/disney-movie-chronology-chart.