Snow White: Evil Witches

hello i'm really thrilled that you could uh come to my lecture um today and this is part of a series i'm doing at the gresham college on evil women and it's kind of a continuation of the six body parts talks that i gave last year which you can find on the gresham website but this particular lecture obviously it's part of the gresham college but i'm really thrilled to say it's also part of the being human festival it's a festival of the humanities hello and welcome to my next lecture on the series that i'm doing on

evil women and today i want to talk about the evil rich of snow white well each generation of course invents their own kinds of evil and evil women have incited our imaginations ever since eve plucked that first apple but i think one of my favorite evil women is the evil queen in the story of snow white she is the archetypical aging woman she's postmenopausal she's demonized as the ugly hag the malicious crone and of course the depraved witch she is evil she is obscene and she is threatening because of her familiarities with the dark arts

her skills in making poisonous potions and of course her possession of a magic mirror she was so sexual and aware like eve she has tasted of the tree of knowledge now her story first roused the imaginations of the brothers grim in 1812 and 1819 and that second version stripped the story of its rivaled connotations while retaining and even in some cases augmenting the story's real sadism famously though snow white and the seven dwarfs was then set to song by disney in 1937 a film that is often hailed as the seminal version interestingly you know this

word seminal um itself of course comes from semen so in other words is by its nature encoded male now it's exportation by disney has helped the company generate over 48 billion a year through its movies theme parks and memorabilia such as collectible cards coloring inbox books princess gowns and tiaras um dolls peaked hats and mirrors snow white and the evil queen appear in literature music dance theater the fine arts television comics it's all over the internet it remains a powerful way to castigate powerful women as during hillary clinton's bid for the white house when she

was regularly dubbed the witch now this link between powerful women and evil witchery has made the story popular amongst feminist storytellers keen to show the way the story shapes the way children and adults think about gender and sexuality class and race it has even inspired a way of dying snow white's story was loved by alan turing the inventor if you like of modern computing as well as the mathematician who broke the german enigma code during the second world war he was reputedly re-fond of reciting two lines from the 1937 film the lines he loved were

dip the apple in the brew let the sleeping death seep through when he was prosecuted for homosexuality and forced to agree to chemical castration turing did just that he committed suicide by biting into an apple laced with cyanide thus allowing sleeping death to seep through now we are all familiar with the snow white the dwarfs the evil queen created by the grimm brothers and by disney so today i want to take another route and i want us to listen to the way the poet anne sexton one of the greatest poets in my view of the

20th century the way she evoked the evil queen in her 1971 poem simply entitled snow white and the seven dwarfs here's what she wrote once there was a lovely virgin called snow white say she was thirteen her stepmother a beauty in her own right though eaten of course by age would hear of no beauty surpassing her own beauty is a simple passion but who my friends in the end you dance with the fire dancing iron shoes the stepmother had a mirror to which she referred something like a weather forecast a mirror that proclaimed the one

beauty of the land she would ask looking glass upon the wall who is the fairest of us all and the mirror would reply you are the fairest of us all pride pumped in her like poison suddenly one day the mirror replied queen you are full fed is true but snow white is fairer than you now the queen saw brown spots on her hand and four whiskers over her lip so she condemned snow white to be hacked to death so this is evil is there anything more evil than killing your own child four times the stepmother

attempts to kill snow white the first time she orders a huntsman to take snow white to the woods and kill her when the huntsman stunned by snow white's beauty takes pity and lets her escape the evil queen decides to do the dirty deed herself she attempts to suffocate her with a stay lace made of silk lace woven of many colors then she brushes her hair with a bewitched and enchanted comb then she gives her a poisonous apple to eat she nearly succeeds with the apple the same one that eve bit into which led to the

banishment of humanity from the garden of eden and that was um the lecture i gave last time in the series you can always watch it on the gresham website but what's interesting about these ways that the evil queen attempts to kill snow white is that they are unmistakably feminine modes of committing evil murder in the guise of false acts of nurturance and mother care the evil queen also wants to devour snow white's tender flesh is there anything more evil than cannibalism she orders the huntsman not only to murder snow white but to remove her lungs

and her liver and deliver them to her after his act of disobedience in freeing snow white and surely the queen's powers are waning when even a servant flouts her will he presents the queen with the lungs and liver of a wild boar instead believing them to be the organs of the virgin princess the queen has them boiled in brine before gobbling them up it is a particularly dark form of witchcraft as i argue in my book what it means to be human ingesting the body parts of a human or non-human animal is a form of

magic a kind of sympathetic sorcery that transfers the characteristics of the devoured body into the living body sigmund freud made this observation with regards to the primal father who was feared and envied by other men in the act of devouring him the brothers accomplished their identification with him and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength in this way cannibalism is a means of ingesting the desirable qualities or desirable characteristics of the other in the case of the evil queen snow white's youth and her beauty you are what you eat literally but should

we accept the demonization of the evil queen or do the different versions of snow white tell us more about other people's fears about the witching powers of aging women do they warn us about the valorisation of youth beauty domesticity it is of central importance that although the evil queen is one of the two central characters in the story she is not named in the title what does her erasure signify but first how is the violence in snow white been interpreted well the most popular versions draw on psychoanalytical insights in the interpretation of dreams sigmund freud

suggested that fairy tales typically involve psychological processes whereby the child falls in love with one parent while hating the other bruno bettelheim uh developed this interpretation in his book the uses of enchantment for better line fairy tales such as snow white enable children enabled readers to come to terms with forbidden fantasies and desires that cannot be openly acknowledged for him the key character is not the evil queen but snow white herself who is insanely jealous of the beauty and the power of her stepmother the edible conflict between mother and daughter cannot be brought into consciousness

without threatening the child so she projects her own feelings onto this parent the reality which is i am jealous of all the advantages and prerogatives of mother is therefore projected into a wishful thought mother is jealous of me the feeling of inferiority is defensively turned into a feeling of superiority but lamb explains this in another passage he writes the typical fairy tale splitting of the mother into good usually dead mother and an evil stepmother serves the child well it is not only a means of preserving an internal ghoul good mother when the real mother is

not all good but it also permits anger at this bad step mother without endangering the good will of the true mother who is viewed as a different person bethlehem harnesses this reading of snow white to his therapeutic agenda the magic of snow white is that it enables the child to work through her feelings of rage and impotence this can be accomplished without the distress that conscious anxiety would have caused bethlehem argument has been deservedly influential but should we accept it at its worst it is founded on misogynous assumptions about female narcissism and vanity it is

built on a problematic freudian obsessions with female lack women compensating for the lack of a phallus by becoming preoccupied with physical beauty but the most trenchant criticism of him has come from marina warner in a fantastic and a classic book called from the beast to the blonde great title isn't it from the beast to the blonde on fairy tales and their tellers well in her words his argument and its tremendous diffusion and widespread acceptance have effaced from memory the historical reasons for women's cruelty within the home and have made such behavior seem natural even intrinsic

to the mother-child relationship it has even helped to ratify the expectation of strife as healthy and the resulting hatred as therapeutic so in other words warner is disturbed by the way he accepts and promotes harmful stereotypes about women she's alarmed by the therapeutic implications of his theory accusing him of holding girls mothers stepmothers responsible for the gendered discrimination that they are subjected to but i think there's another problem with his account he assumes that um stories such as snow white were addressed to children in other words it was a way for girls to unconsciously relieve

their aggression against their mothers and in so doing resolve their tensions but that's not quite right you see the fairy tales collected and composed by the brothers grimm were actually stories for adults not children despite the fact that the brothers grimm published their collections under the title nursery and household stories they were intended to be read by adults as well as intended to be a way of preserving folklore the transformation of the tales into children's stories came later so instead of the child needing to work through her destructive longings perhaps our attention should be focused

on homicidal mothers this is where our evil queen returns to the center stage although the queen is unacknowledged in the uh story's title whether this is snow white or snow white and the seven dwarfs the story is about the anxieties of mothers infants they are the flesh of their flesh they literally consume their mother's bodies in a cannibalistic sucking of umbilical blood and breast milk they figuratively consume the mother's time labor love life yet they inevitably eventually snub maternal sacrifices as mothers age so too do their children they walk away is it any wonder that

at each step the mother might feel murderous turning yellow and green with envy like the evil queen looking upon an increasingly independent and beautiful snow white she felt her heart heaved in her breast she hated the girl so much her jealousy grew higher and higher in her heart like a weed she so she had no peace day or night this is motherhood as monstrous a refusal to surrender to the younger surrender power to the younger generation and as a consequence be rendered invisible the tale then is not so much about providing children with a way

of safely fantasizing about hating their mothers but about mothers safely dreaming about slaughtering their children it gets more complicated though after all the evil queen is not simply a mother she's a step mother now this is interesting i think that was not always the case the evil queen was originally snow white's birth mother the brothers the brothers grim only made her a stepmother in their revised 1819 version perhaps because they wanted to avoid insulting their own beloved mother or because they may have thought a less aggressive it was a less aggressive script for their more

middle class readers to handle in either case the demonization of stepmothers has become a folklore staple appearing for example in cinderella pencil and gretel the six swans the juniper tree to name just a few these tales were originally composed and narrated by folk who were all too aware that being female was to be born into a society where economic options were radically restricted and the one source of power being able to bear children was fraught with dangers a frighteningly large proportion of women died in or shortly after childbirth as did snow white's mother in the

period when snow white was being recited around fireplaces and at bed sides between one-fifth then some historians say as high as 80 percent of widowers remarried within a year of their spouse's death stepmothers therefore were a common presence in homes given the few options open to girls and women to make their own living independently these stepmothers were forced to compete for the affection and economic resources held by and unequitably distributed by the pata familias maybe we should ask whether the malevolent acts committed by step mothers were responses to oppressive treatment as opposed to women being

the cause of evil in these contexts a stepmother might have very good reasons to want to be rid of the offspring of the women who proceeded of the men who preceded her in her husband's bed historically step children had a high death rate now infetticide was not necessary when neglect could have the same outcome there was even the option of relegating unwanted infants and stepchildren to so-called baby farms which were notorious for high death rates indeed in my next lecture we're going to be looking at uh the life of amelia dyer responsible for the deaths

of around 400 infants and children who had been dumped in her baby farm she was actually the most prolific mass murderer in victorian britain so join me on the 14th of january for that the casual neglect of step children by stepmothers has been explained in more recent years decades by some evolutionary psychologists they claim that step parents are less likely to squander resources on children who are not genetically related to them this means that step parents are more likely to neglect abuse or even kill their step children now i have to put a warning over

this we have to be really careful about this argument it's not been found um empirically in our many historical contexts but also this research showing that child neglect and infanticide are most likely when quote circumstances reduce a mother's chance of successful investment in other words the problem of stepmothers may not be their inherent evilness but their reduced options and precarious access to resources in either case the evil queen is portrayed in snow white as acting according to type but what snow white suggests is that there's not such a great chasm between the good mother who

dies shortly after snow white's birth and the evil stepmother as mentioned earlier the original version of grimm's tale refers only to snow white's mother the stepmother is added in 1819 snow white's birth mother wishes for a daughter as white as snow red as black blood black as ebony and her wish is granted in the 1819 version a stepmother is substituted for the birth mother and seeing how beautiful her stepdaughter has become her heart turned over in her bosom the murderous fantasies begin on the final occasion of murder when the evil stepmother hands snow white the

poisonous apple she repeats the words of the good mother with a terrible laugh we read the evil queen cries out white is snow red as blood black as ebony the dwarfs won't revive you this time it's a bitter echo of the magical maternal dreams of her former self who desired the child with all her heart the status of stepmother with its radically disempowering potential is augmented with or by damaging troops about aging at the heart of snow white is the valorization of a specific type of youthful beauty appearance matters unfortunately for her the evil queen

has internalized this distortion time and again she asks mirror mirror on the wall who is the fairest one of all with the passing of time the brutal truth is eventually revealed to her my queen you are the fairest one here but snow white is a thousand times more fair than you this causes envy and pride to sprout like weeds in her heart day and night she never had a moment's peace according to this telling beauty is manifest on the skin's surface both the queen and snow white are there to be looked at the mirror passes

judgment on the queen snow white is encased in a glass coffin to be stared at by the prince this is their shared fate the fate of being a woman this superficiality that's on the surface has another harmful effect there's no coincidence that the lead character in snow white is pale with skin as white as snow and cheeks as red is blood her hair as black as black as ebony simply offsets the whiteness of her skin olivia who contends in his discussion of filmic versions of fairy tales like snow white he writes whiteness is universalized through

the privileged representation of middle class social relations values and linguistic practices such as in the films american english to be fully human then these stories are telling us is to be white even disney films like the lion king 1994 in tarzan 1999 which is set in africa contain no black humans instead blackness is associated with witches wickedness the underworld the abyss the 1937 version of the evil queen has her dressed entirely in black living in a black castle surrounded with a black raven black rats black bats snow white inhabits a white world and is eventually

carried away to her rightful station in life by a white prince riding a white stallion galloping towards a white castle from the opening credits of the 1986 disney version of snow white she's joined by five white doves symbols of gentleness and goodness in contrast the first image of the evil queen has her adorned in dark clothes and a black headpiece in the evil queen's incarnation as a witch she is draped entirely in black and as she mixes her poison is watched by a black raven readers the message is clear white is good black is evil

as jessica baker keane and walter grant point out in a wonderful article called disney's post question mark racial gays these films serve as racial pedagogies they both reinforce structure and institutional racism and maintain stat status quo ideologies the result for children of color is that they are denied positive role models instead their identities are either lapooned by negative stereotypes or rendered invisible altogether for readers of snow white this beauty is not only physical it is also moral snow white is not alone in equating girlish beauty with helplessness and ugliness with women's agency female evil is

post-menopausal it she is of no use anymore to the fully human which is male evil resides in an aged bad tempered and active body while snow white skulks in the cabin of the seven dwarfs doing housework and passively waiting to be found by her evil stepmother the evil one is ruining the land she dons disguises she hatches monstrous plans which she then sets out to achieve her manipulate powers are masculine but the evaluation of agency is different for the two sexes when men take charge they are praised the prince for example is portrayed in a

positive light when he does everything possible to possess snow white even after her supposed death when women actively pursue their desires they are evil the evil queen then will have to be punished as we know when the queen attends the wedding of snow white to her prince she is given iron slippers that had already been heated up over a fire of coals they were brought in with tongs and set right in front of her she had to put on the red hot iron shoes and dance in them until she dropped to the ground dead like

the witches at the stake most of whom were menopausal or aged women there is a particularly hot hell reserved for women who pursue their cravings in these stories female passivity is the ideal the good woman is compliant and dependent she's also stupid after all why would snow white repeatedly open the door to danger she is seduced by stays a comb and an apple prompting the questions the question well what is her life worth whose valuable assets are her youth she's 14 years old in the tale and beauty her bow vine domesticity is also highly prized

the seven dwarfs need not have been anxious about whether snow white will take care of our house cook make the beds wash snow sew and knit and we'll keep everything neat and clean because in her dim witted way snow white is happy to do these chores it's all such good fun her presence in the home of the dwarfs is after all simply an apprenticeship heterosexuality is assumed it also solve every women's problems including those of snow white as long ago as 1953 simon de voir you could always find something consumed work what she wrote that

she contended that quote everything still encourages the young girl to expect fortune and happiness from some prince charming rather than to attempt by herself their difficult and uncertain conquest the reward for girl women like snow white is marriage but as we know snow white will also age and most likely turn into the evil witch herself that is unless she dies as do all good mothers this brings me to my final theme what if snow white and the evil queen are in fact the same person women are faced with two options they can be virginal sweet

and submissive imprisoned in a child-like state dependent upon the prince or they could be powerful women active and creative but derided is witch-like masculine and evil in the book the mad woman in the attic feminist critic sandra gilbert and susan gopal contended that snow white is an angel in the house of myth not only a child but as female angels always are childlike docile submissive by contrast the queen is a plotter a plot maker schemer a witch an artist an impersonator a woman of infant create creative energy witty wily and self-absorbed as all artists traditionally

are is it any wonder that the adult and demonic queen should want to kill the snow white in herself the angel who would keep deeds and dramas out of her own house in this scenario where stepmother and step-daughter are complementary aspects of the same person it is worth asking well who is evil clearly no one is truly good but evil evil resides in the monstrous mirror with its shimmering misogyny it is the mirror that causes all of the harms the mirror refuses to tell the queen that she is gorgeous as well as powerful it can

only register this superficial beauty it is the absent yet all-encompassing father who is incapable of recognizing the beauty that is inherent in aging mirror is the tool of patriarchy setting women against each other does it have to be this way fairy tales like all stories do not merely report or reflect um cultural anxieties but also create them this is why subversion is so sweet witches are increasingly embracing their own powers now admittedly most are less rebellious um in the television uh program uh bewitched broadcast between 1964 and 1972 which samantha stevens is a cutie pie

housewife who uses her powers in positive ways her most radical um action is to gently mock her husband the girl power of sabrina the teenage witch 1996 2003 and charmed 1998 to 2006 are also really kind of a swedish kind these witches live in traditional homes and are careful not to exert too much anxiety and agency in other words they propagate the message that evil queens well can be powerful but only if they maintain a facade facade of acting in traditional gendered ways more astute i think is the witch in the hit musical of 2003

wicked in it she struggles to be accepted in a world that reviles her difference that is her green skin it's a musical about empowerment female friendship inclusivity and inner goodness as the highest form of highest form of beauty which is exactly why young girls and teenage girls have loved um the musical but these stories all of these stories i think are reminders that witchery is socially constructed the evil witch as witch as well as stepmother has been embraced by feminists keen to repudiate traditional forms of femininity and to emphasize female agency outside of the marriage

and home model now my personal favorite is this woman here joanna freud her one of her performance pieces is called the amorous stepmother freud declares that she aims to save the stepmother from her cultural fate from her status as a cliched victim of her own monster beauty she's quick to insist that this does not mean that she will vindicate the stepmother by remaking her from a martyr into a saint for the stepmother must remain a provocative figure as are all arched archetypes and individuals steeped steeped in erotic allure however she does seek to release the

stepmother from the archetype scandalous and perverse essence freud's performance then positions the older woman and the stepmother as seductive the word seduce is from the latin meaning to lead astray which is exactly what aging women do for freud the archetype of the aging woman the stepmother is drawn from the 1937 film snow white and the seven dwarfs where the monstrous beauty of the evil queen is evidenced in her severe features and falsely arced eyebrows she is a stark contrast to snow white's creamy do-eyed passivity for freud the queen is the true star she is possessed

of a acute intelligence that is burdened by aesthetic erotic fire in an older woman being erotic is not undignified it is the ultimate in seductiveness it is the villainous mirror that not only destroys the powerful queen but denies her the pleasures of intergenerational female closeness it denies her the erotic possibilities embedded in friendships with daughters stepdaughters and their allies in short it is the evil queen as witch and stepmother who should be celebrated she is imperfect cool creative she is aging but in her wisdom refuses to be erased as the brother brothers grim and their

successors have done in their wrongly titled snow white snow white in the seven dwarfs the queen's ancestors are the feminists who have inverted misogynist tales spawned from old memories of witch hunts these witches don't tempt young eaves to with poisoned apples indeed they are more likely to seek to fatten them up with tofu they also shun mirrors preferring to trust their female companions to tell them that they are truly beautiful like the evil queen snow white however they are still feared by male society reviled for their alleged unattractiveness and scorned for heretical beliefs and they

are deeply flawed this is why there is no happy ending ann sexton tells us what to expect her poem ends with these lines and thus snow white became the prince's bride the wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast and when she arrived there were red hot iron shoes in the manner of red hot roller skates clamped upon her feet first your toes will smoke then and then your heels will turn black and you will fry upward like a frog she was told and so she danced until she was dead and there we have it

no happily ever after because women are not free the evil one is not evil just a thwarted soul who believed in the evil words spewed forth by the prattling gambling mirror and the good snow white is not so good after all she is a beautiful passive dumb bunny anne sexton who was easily tricked by the creative queen before foolishly giving up her life to domestic drudgery worse she doesn't spare a thought for the older woman dancing and burning shoes at her wedding she rashly ignores the inevitable she too will grow old as anne as sean

sexton concluded her poem and so the wicked queen danced until she was dead meanwhile snow white held court rolling her china blue doll arm eyes open and shut and sometimes referring to her mirror as women do snow white will become the evil queen the end you