![]() ![]() ![]() She dies soon afterwards and is buried in a glass coffin. When the comb fails to kill her, she visits again as a farmer's wife and gives Snow White a poisoned apple. When that fails, she returns as a different old woman and tricks Snow White into using a poisoned comb. The Queen intentionally laces the corset too tight in an attempt to asphyxiate the girl. She visits the dwarfs' house and sells Snow White laces for a corset. She uses witchcraft to take the disguise of an old peddler woman, because she intends to kill the girl herself. While questioning her magic mirror, the Queen discovers that Snow White has survived. The Queen then eats what she believes is Snow White's organs. However, the huntsman takes pity on Snow White and instead, brings the Queen the lungs and liver of a boar. She asks him to bring back the girl's lungs and liver as proof that she is dead. However, being “the good one” does not prevent suffering in her regressed childlike state, Snow White is vulnerable she fails the test of each of the three temptations offered by the queen, and becomes immured in a glass coffin.After deciding to rid of Snow White, the Queen orders her huntsman to take the princess into the forest and kill her. Psychologically speaking, the unacknowledged dark forces within her have been projected onto her stepmother. While the queen is “all bad,” Snow White is too good, too pure, too innocent, and thus unable to discern the evil in her midst. In “Snow White” we have the positive and negative aspects of the feminine self. In psychological terms, the denial of what is most troubling in us is a primitive defense mechanism that strives to keep us ignorant of what we are unwilling to face. Jung called our shadow, those despised parts of self we project onto others. We fear her ravenous desire for power, her one-sided narcissism and obsessive nature as we fear our own hunger for power and rage, the split-off and dissociated qualities in ourselves C. The wicked mother figure presents a paradox: if we are to survive childhood, we need our mothers to nurture us, but the evil mother wishes to devour our being. That she is a mother and cruel engenders in us a peculiar dread. Putnam's Sons/Public DomainĪs a universal figure, the witch or stepmother or evil-doing woman reappears in fairy tales across time and continents. Source: European Folk and Fairy Tales published by G.P. In fact, in a 2014 UK survey, one-third of the 2,000 adults polled voted the Evil Queen in “Snow White” to be “the scariest fairy tale character of all time.” ![]() She is the hag on a broomstick, mad Bertha locked in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre she is Cruella De Vil. Her power to bewitch and the inexhaustible amount of energy she expends to carry out her nasty wishes is the stuff of nightmares. Unlike her male counterparts, the monsters and Bluebeards who inhabit other tales and engage in bloody combat and wizardry, the witch/stepmother’s weapons of choice are more devious- gossip, poison, and directing others to do her dirty work. The wicked stepmother contains all that we fear and loathe in the feminine, a female devil whose diabolical nature and brutality frighten us. Rarely do we meet a kindly stepmother, for like all fairy tale figures, the stepmother is an archetypal symbol not an illustration of a real individual whose feelings, emotions, and thoughts we are privy to. In fairy tale language, the stepmother embodies traits we associate with evil: rage, envy, jealousy, greed, self-absorption, cunning cleverness, and uncanny powers. Source: Fairy Tales published by Ward Lock & Co./Public Domain The tales suggest ways to recognize and discern good from evil and provide solutions to life-threatening challenges. This frequent motif reflects our experiences with destructive forces symbolized by giants, trolls, witches and monsters. But despite their ancient origins, fairy tales remain relevant to our postmodern selves and depict the dramas of the human soul, one of which is the confrontation with evil. The collected fairy tales we know today are a distillation of many iterations, the product of countless imaginations told by many tellers. Birds spoke to humans, the wind was a spirit, and giants trod the earth. Most fairy tales originate as oral stories repeated over generations and reflect older strata of cultural development when humans lived closer to nature and the membrane between the real and the imagined was more porous. It became “Little Snow-White” in English translations based on the Grimms’ final 1857 version of the tale. Vanity and envy are the twin engines that drive the story of “ Sneewittchen,” the title used by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm when they recorded the folktale in 1812. Source: Household Stories from the Collection of the Brothers Grimm published by Macmillan & Co./Public Domain ![]()
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