My children were shocked by a terrible act of censorship they discovered when we moved from Germany to the United States. In a local library, they unearthed a copy of Disney’s version of Cinderella.
The liberties taken in this version of the story were a shock to the tender literary conscience. My wife and I had taught our children German by reading them the Grimm brothers’ stories. They knew them backward and forward.
Where did all these good-natured rodents come from? Why did the stepsisters not cut off toes and heels to fit into the slipper? And what on earth is “a fairy godmother”?
It is not just the changes to the particulars of the story that upset our children; their outrage was not, at bottom, an objection to literary license taken. They felt that the changes were more fundamental. Their real object was to the cruelty softened, brutality soft-pedaled, stakes lowered.
Saccharine subplots entertained but ultimately distracted from the moral thrust and aesthetic of the fairy tale. The religious and spiritual all but disappear and are replaced by wishful thinking and something more mechanical called “magic.”
It is often forgotten that, to this day, those claiming a German background represent the largest ancestral footprint in America. Generations of children, including Walt Disney himself, were raised on the German fairy tale. So what explains the departure from the spirit of the original?
At some point, our culture became deeply uncomfortable with the darkness in the human heart that true beauty can inspire and must work to overcome.
Perhaps no story in Western culture captures the paradox of beauty better than Snow White. In fairness, the Disney version does not entirely miss the mark, but it does not hold a candle to the original.
Snow White is an answer to the prayers of her mother. She longs for a beautiful child as white as snow, as red as blood, and with hair as dark as ebony of the window frame in which she sits, as she imagines—or one could say conjures—the beauty of her hoped-for daughter. She is granted her wish, but her beautiful child comes at a price: the birth of her daughter spells her own death.
Beauty, we learn from the beginning, is linked to death and the sacrificial.
Snow White’s new mother is a proud and arrogant woman, but she is also the most beautiful woman in the world, as her magic mirror, that can tell no lie, confirms for her vanity daily. Truth and beauty, as yet, pose no threat to the queen.
At some point in her childhood, Snow White’s beauty not only surpasses that of her stepmother, but leaves it far behind; she is “a thousand times” more beautiful than the queen, possessing the kind of beauty like the “clear day,” the queen’s mirror declares, pulling no punches.
The jealousy of the queen grows “like a weed in her heart,” offering no rest day or night. Consider the strangeness of this for a moment: the most beautiful person in world becomes a form of torment to another, her nearest rival.
The transition from envy to bloody thoughts and their execution is swift and visceral. Not only does she arrange Snow White’s murder, but the queen desires to consume her vital organs.
When this plot fails, she takes matters into her hands and makes three further attempts on Snow White’s life. First, she strangles her with a beautiful lace, then conjures a poisonous comb and runs it through her hair, playing on Snow White’s longing for a maternal figure in her life; finally, drawing on her knowledge of black magic, the queen finally cooks up the famous poisonous apple, of an irresistible charm to any who lay eyes on it.
By the end, the queen is so bound and determined that she does not care if the price for taking Snow White’s life is her own. Each time she stands over what she believes to be a dead body, she is comforted by the idea that Snow White, the very “paragon of beauty,” is gone from the world. It is as if she believes her death means that the kind of beauty she possessed no longer exists, having disappeared from the here and now.
Although beauty may appear the same to everyone, it also seems to draw out something in us independent from itself, even unlike itself—not something beautiful but something ugly.
Perhaps it would be better to err on the side of caution, then. Perhaps we might be better off without beauty in the world, if it can elicit such ugliness and violence. Beauty is not worth the risk. The price is too high, the danger too great.
But Snow White’s death does not kill off her beauty.
In death, Snow White somehow becomes more beautiful, if the measure of beauty is what it draws out of those in its orbit. Her body impervious to decay, the dwarves cannot stand the idea of burying her in the darkness of the ground. More vigilant than they were when she was alive, one of their number always stands guard at her glass coffin, until the son of a king falls in love with her and begs them to let him take her into his own care. Moving her causes the bite of apple to become dislodged and she wakes up.
“Where am I?” she asks. “You are with me,” he answers.
The kind of love that, even in the face of death, will not leave the beloved’s side is the only kind worthy of a living beauty.
Beauty does not rest in the appearances, although it may begin there for us. When beauty reveals herself, she demands a response. Snow White teaches that beauty goes to the very heart of our freedom.
With beauty, the full spectrum of human emotions is at play. Beauty may inspire ugliness and murderous jealousy; but in those who are faithful—in those who learn to love Snow White as she deserves—beauty leads to mercy, friendship, courage, romance, marriage, and even justice.
Justice, too, you say? Yes, justice, too.
The aging queen cannot resist seeing a princess, apparently more beautiful than she, on the cusp of marriage. The beauty she attempted to wipe from the face of the world calls her back again, this time to her doom, a hellish death that completes the jealousy that consumed her in life.
Beauty, Snow White shows, ultimately transcends our responses to it. It will not be ruled by our attitudes to it. Beauty judges us. Beauty chooses us. Not we it. Evil and death cannot kill beauty; beauty, rightly seen, saves us from both. Beauty cannot be bought at a price, but it may cost everything you have. And it will be worth it.
These are terrifying, forbidden thoughts for our culture.
Yet such stories make up the imagination of the Western heart. When at our best, we tell stories about beauty, death, judgment, and redemption. We do not shy away from the darkness, for the darkness only makes the light shine out all the brighter, as every child raised on fairy tales knows.
