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Feminist criticism and the fairy

tale
Vanessa Joosen
a
Universiteit Antwerpen, Departement Germaanse , A
1.20 Universiteitsplein 1, 2610, Wilrijk, België E-mail:
Published online: 16 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Vanessa Joosen (2004) Feminist criticism and the fairy
tale , New Review of Children's Literature and Librarianship, 10:1, 5-14, DOI:
10.1080/1361454042000294069

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 FEMINIST CRITICISM AND THE
FAIRY TALE
The emancipation of ‘Snow White’ in
fairy-tale criticism and fairy-tale
retellings

Vanessa Joosen
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In the large corpus of fairy-tale scholarship since the 1960s, feminist criticism has
contributed substantially to analysing, interpreting and evaluating the Grimm tales. At
the same time, fairy tales have been rewritten countless times with an explicit or
implicit feminist agenda. A comparison between ‘Snow White’ adaptations and
emancipatory criticism shows that fairy-tale criticism and fairy-tale retellings have
often addressed similar issues. Garrison Keillor’s ‘My Stepmother, Myself’, for instance,
shares with Andrea Dworkin a distrust of the prince’s fascination with Snow White
(both accuse him of necrophilism), and with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar shares a
defence of the stepmother as a victim of patriarchy. In retellings like Keillor’s, a double
intertextual dialogue can be reconstructed. On the one hand, there is the explicit
intertextual link with and a critique of the Grimm tale of ‘Snow White’. Due to the fact
that Keillor expresses issues raised by Dworkin and Gilbert and Gubar, the reader can
establish a second, implicit intertextual link between Keillor’s text and feminist fairy-tale
criticism. However, Keillor’s feminist agenda is ambivalent. Although his retelling
definitely raises readers’ awareness about problematic issues in the Grimm tale, it can
also be read as a critical parody of overtly polemical or self-reflexive feminism.

Introduction
In the large corpus of fairy-tale scholarship since the late 1960s, feminist
criticism has contributed substantially to analysing, interpreting and evaluating
the Grimm tales. In recent ‘Snow White’ criticism, most texts are either written
from an explicitly feminist perspective or they implicitly take a number of feminist
assumptions for granted. The same trend can be noted in ‘Snow White’ retellings.
In the past three decades, fairy tales have been parodied and rewritten in
countless adaptations, usually with an explicit or implicit feminist agenda.
My research at the University Antwerp is concerned with the interaction
between fairy-tale retellings and fairy-tale criticism (see also Joosen 2004). A
comparison of adaptations and criticism has shown that tales retold from a
feminist perspective often display the same issues and stages that feminist
criticism has dealt with during the past 30 years. These are, among others:
. a critique of female role models and stereotypes imposed by patriarchy;
. a rediscovery of fairy-tales written by female authors;
New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2004
ISSN 1361-4541 print/1740-7885 online/04/010005
/10
# 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1361454042000294069
 6 VANESSA JOOSEN

. a rediscovery of fairy tales that feature empowered female characters;

. a promotion of female bonding;
. a critique of the Grimm Brothers’ sexist editing strategies;
. influences from Marxism and psychoanalysis on thinking about gender; and
. influences from lesbian and queer studies. (See also Haase 2000.)

In this article I will focus mainly on emancipatory feminism and how it is reflected
in one particular retelling */Garrison Keillor’s 1991 short story ‘My Stepmother,
Myself ’ */with a few digressions to other authors, such as Jane Yolen and Emma
Donoghue.
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‘Dead or as Close to it as Possible’: Andrea Dworkin

The emancipation movement is the earliest and most widely known
manifestation of feminism. As a paradigm of literary criticism, emancipatory
feminism or so-called Anglo-American feminism has mainly sought to expose
sexist ideology in literature, both on the level of the content and the production
of literature (see also Barry 1995). In this context, the fairy tale has sometimes
been praised for its portrayal of positive female characters (e.g. Gretel in ‘Hansel
and Gretel’), but more often it has been attacked for its stereotypical treatment of
women as passive victims.
In 1974, the American feminist Andrea Dworkin published one of the most
aggressive fairy-tale critiques. The title of her book, Woman Hating , leaves little to
the imagination with regard to its polemical agenda, and the same is true for her
introduction: ‘This book is an action, a political action where revolution is the
goal. It has no other purpose. [. . .] The commitment to ending male dominance
[. . .] is the fundamental revolutionary commitment’ (Dworkin 1974, 17).
In her chapter on fairy tales, Dworkin focuses on Snow White and Sleeping
Beauty as the embodiments of passive beauty: ‘For a woman to be good, she
must be dead, or as close to it as possible’ (1974, 42). Dworkin reads the tales as
mimetic reflections of reality, with little consideration for the fairy tale’s literary
qualities (metaphors, symbols, etc.) or the sociohistorical context in which they
originated. In spite of this aggressive tone (something for which the emancipa-
tion movement has often been reproached) and the limited scope of her
argument,1 Dworkin’s ideas on the representation of women as passive victims
have been reflected frequently in fairy-tale criticism and retellings since the
1970s. This becomes clear if we compare her argument on ‘Snow White’ with
Garrison Keillor’s short story ‘My Stepmother, Myself’, which was first published in
the early 1980s.
Keillor’s ‘My Stepmother, myself’ consists of three short sequels to popular
fairy tales. It contains interviews with Snow White, Gretel and Cinderella, three
female characters who are granted a forum to give their account of what ‘really’
happened in the Grimm stories. Snow White testifies on her marriage to the
prince, who turned out to be not so charming. Andrea Dworkin could have
 FEMINIST CRITICISM AND THE FAIRY TALE 7

predicted this tragic outcome, since she was one of the first critics to accuse the
prince of necrophilism (1974, 33):
For a woman to be good, she must be dead, or as close to it as possible. [. . .]
Snow-white was already dead when the heroic prince fell in love with her.
(Dworkin 1974, 42)

One can point out that in fact [the prince] is not very bright. [. . .] His recurring
love of corpses does not indicate a dynamic intelligence either. (Dworkin 1974,
43
/44)

In Keillor’s sequel, Snow White rephrases in her own words the necrophilic lusts
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of her husband:
Now I can see how sick our marriage was. He was always begging me to lie still
and close my eyes and hold my breath. He could only relate to me as a dead
person. He couldn’t accept me as a living woman with needs and desires of my
own. It is terribly hard for a woman to come to terms with the fact that her
husband is a necrophiliac, because, of course, when it all starts, you aren’t
aware of what’s going on */you’re dead. (Keillor 1991, 182)

Both Dworkin’s critical analysis and Keillor’s fictional retelling expose as

pathological an aspect of the prince that was accepted as natural in the Grimm
version: namely, the fact that he falls in love with a woman who is believed to be
dead.2
Dworkin and Keillor use two different methods for addressing this issue.
Dworkin points out the inconsistency in the tale: what is so desirable about a
man who falls in love with a dead person?3 Keillor takes this critique of the prince
as a starting point and imagines what happens when a necrophiliac gets married.
This gives a funny twist to the ‘happily ever after’ ending of the Grimm tale: the
only happy ending for the prince in Keillor’s story would have been if Snow White
had never woken up. However, Keillor does not tell this story from the point of
view of the prince, but instead gives Snow White a voice as the I-narrator of the
tale. By repeating the analysis of critics such as Dworkin, Snow White functions as
a mouthpiece for emancipatory feminism. This is not wholly unproblematic, as I
will argue later in this article.

The Madwoman in the Mirror: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

There is a second parallel between Dworkin’s analysis of ‘Snow White’ and
Keillor’s ‘My Stepmother, Myself’: the defence of the stepmother. Dworkin
addresses this idea briefly in her introduction, but for a more substantially
developed feminist analysis of the stepmother, I will turn to Sandra M. Gilbert and
Susan Gubar’s discussion of ‘Snow White’, which was first published in their
feminist milestone, The Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert and Gubar 1979). Their
reading of ‘Snow White’ is much more complex and refined than Dworkin’s.
 8 VANESSA JOOSEN

Gilbert and Gubar not only focus on the effect that patriarchy had on the content
of the tale, they also analyse the narrative structures and metaphors through
which this patriarchal attitude can be perceived.
To Gilbert and Gubar, the ‘central action of the tale’ is the conflict between
Snow White as the stereotypical angel-woman and her stepmother, who is
portrayed as a monster-woman. A healthy relationship between the two is not
possible, because their lives are dominated by men: ‘female bonding is
extraordinarily difficult in patriarchy’ (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 38). In Gilbert
and Gubar’s interpretation, the voice of the patriarch is represented by the magic
mirror: ‘the voice of the looking glass [is] the patriarchal voice of judgement that
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rules the Queen’s */and every woman’s */self-evaluation’ (1979, 38). By compar-
ing women in terms of beauty, the mirror encourages rivalry and destroys
friendships.
In Keillor’s ‘My Stepmother, Myself’, Gilbert and Gubar’s interpretation is
almost literally rephrased by Snow White herself:
In trying to come to terms with myself, I’ve had to come to terms with my
stepmother and her envy of my beauty, which made our relationship so
destructive. She was a victim of the male attitude that prizes youth over
maturity when it comes to women. Men can’t dominate the mature woman, so
they equate youth with beauty. In fact she was beautiful, but the mirror (which
of course, reflected that male attitude) presented her with a poor self-image
and turned her against me. (Keillor 1991, 182)

Both in Keillor’s text and in Gilbert and Gubar’s text, the mirror is identified
explicitly with the voice of a patriarch. This is interpreted twice as a way for men
to encourage rivalry between women, and this rivalry is a strategy to control or
put aside mature women (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 38).
It should be noted here that Keillor is not the only author to identify the
voice in the mirror as the King’s or patriarch’s. In retellings where the mirror is left
out, we see that the patriarch himself reassumes its voice. Jane Yolen’s (2000)
‘Snow in Summer’ is a good example of this. In this retelling, it is Snow’s father
who calls attention to his daughter’s beauty:
Papa said, as if surprised by it, ‘Why, Rosemarie . . .’ which was my Stepmama’s
Christian name,
‘Why, Rosemarie, do look at what a beauty that child has become’.
And for the first time my Stepmama looked */really looked */at me.
I do not think she liked what she saw. (Yolen 2000, 92)

Emma Donoghue (1997) is even more explicit in linking the King and the magic
mirror in ‘The Tale of the Apple’. In the first lines of the following fragment,
Donoghue shows that a hesitant friendship is developing between Snow White
and her stepmother, two young women who do not differ much in age in this
retelling. This fragile bond is, however, soon disrupted by a casual remark that
Snow White’s father makes:
 FEMINIST CRITICISM AND THE FAIRY TALE 9

Once when he came to [my stepmother’s] room at night he found us both

there, cross-legged on her bed under a sea of velvets and laces, trying how
each earring looked against the other’s ear. He put his head back and laughed
to see us. Two such fair ladies, he remarked, have never been seen in one bed.
But which of you is the fairest of them all? We looked at each other, she and I,
and chimed in the chorus of his laughter. Am I imagining in retrospect that our
voices rang a little out of tune? [. . .]
He let out another guffaw. Tell me, he asked, how am I to judge between two
such beauties? I looked at my stepmother, and she stared back at me, and our
eyes were like mirrors set opposite each other, making a corridor of reflections,
infinitely hollow. (Donoghue 1997, 47
/48; emphasis added)
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In both Yolen’s and Donoghue’s texts, it is the father’s voice that stimulates the
rivalry between Snow White and her stepmother, as the mirror did in the Grimm
tale. This is in line with Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis of ‘Snow White’, because they
read the mirror as a symbol of the patriarch’s voice in the first place. By replacing
that symbol with the male person it represents, Donoghue and Yolen too raise a
feminist critique to the Grimm tale of ‘Snow White’, albeit in a less explicit way
than Keillor.
According to Gilbert and Gubar’s interpretation, Snow White will not be
able to escape her stepmother’s fate once she has grown up and become a
mature woman (and a mother) herself. ‘What does the future hold for Snow White’ ,
Gilbert and Gubar ask themselves, ‘[w]hen her Prince becomes King and she
becomes a Queen, what will her life be like?’ (1979, 42). As patriarchy only favours
young and innocent women (since they are powerless and easier to control), it is
most likely that Snow White will be vilified too once she has traded her role as
princess to a role as queen. A similar point is made by Polly Peterson (2000), in
her poem ‘The Prince to Snow White’:
You are beautiful, sublime,
yet not so lovely
as our daughter will be:
your mother’s daughter’s child */
her immortality.4

The prince functions here as a mouthpiece of patriarchy: he tells his wife that
there will be a time when she will be compared with her own daughter’s beauty,
and that this comparison will always turn out to be unfavourable for the older
woman. ‘[H]er immortality’ refers then not to the stepmother as a specific person,
but to the role that every (step)mother plays in patriarchy: that of the older
woman who feels threatened when she is about to be replaced. It is the pattern
(identified by Gilbert and Gubar) that becomes immortal in the fairy tale (and as
emancipatory feminists would argue, in every patriarchal society); namely, that
mature women are put aside in favour of younger ones.As Gilbert and Gubar see
 10 VANESSA JOOSEN

patriarchy incorporated in the magic mirror, they predict that this looking glass
will eventually turn against Snow White when she is a mature woman:
Snow White has exchanged one glass coffin for another, delivered from the
prison where the Queen put her only to be imprisoned in the looking glass
from which the King’s voice speaks daily. (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 42)

The fact that the magic mirror with all its terrible consequences for a young wife
will be passed on to the next generation has also been thematised in several
‘Snow White’ retellings. In the Grimm tale, it is not revealed what happens to the
magic mirror after the stepmother dies: the mirror speaks one last time before the
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queen goes to Snow White’s wedding and is then not mentioned again. Like
Gilbert and Gubar, several retellings fill in this gap and end with an image of
Snow White looking in this mirror for the first time. Already in Anne Sexton’s
(1971) Transformations , the poem on ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ ends
with a reference to this mirror:
Meanwhile Snow White held court,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut
and sometimes referring to her mirror
as women do. (Sexton 1971, 153)

At the end of Wim Hofman’s Zwart als inkt (Black as ink), the mirror is offered as a
wedding present to Snow White:
On the last day (bride and groom
were just about to leave) a woman came to visit.
She had come from far, she said, and knew the bride well.
As a gift, she brought a pack, an embroidered
cloth with birds and flowers and fish
and wrapped in it was a wonderful mirror,
big as a gate, framed in golden curls.) [. . .]

After the party, Snow White had the mirror

hung up on her bedroom wall.
She wanted to have a look at herself.
And when she had, the mirror said:
‘Well done, beautiful.’ (my translation; Hofman 1998, 179)

Although these two retellings do not provide the reader with a sequel to the tale
as Keillor and Peterson do, the reappearance of the mirror at the end too
corresponds to Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis. Sexton and Hofman leave open what
will be the consequence of this poisoned gift, but readers who make the
connection with the beginning of the story, where the mirror makes its first
appearance, may come to the same conclusion as Gilbert and Gubar. Patricia
Carlin makes an even stronger suggestion to link Snow White’s end to her
stepmother’s, as Gilbert and Gubar did:
 FEMINIST CRITICISM AND THE FAIRY TALE 11

The stepmother dies

in the burning shoes. Her dancing
days are over. The girl acquires

a castle, a kingdom, a mirror,

and a new daughter. [. . .]

The face in the mirror changes.

It’s time for an ending.
Upstairs they are heating the iron shoes. (Carlin 2003, 47)

In Carlin’s poem (like in those of Hofman and Sexton), Snow White receives the
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mirror after her stepmother has died. After that, her life becomes the double of
the evil queen’s: she too gets a daughter and after that the mirror turns against
her. The final line, in which Snow White’s ending is announced, is the most
obvious link with her stepmother’s painful death, one that Gilbert and Gubar
make in their critical analysis as well: ‘in fiery shoes [Snow White] will do a terrible
death-dance out of the story, the looking glass, the transparent coffin of her own
image’ (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 42).

A Double Intertextuality
In the previous two sections, I have argued that fairy-tale criticism and fairy-
tale retellings often share an interest in expressing the same issues. Both in Keillor
and Dworkin, the prince is accused of necrophilism. In Keillor, Donoghue, as well
as in Gilbert and Gubar, the evil stepmother is defended as a victim of patriarchy
in her own right. In Hofman, Carlin, and Sexton, the mirror returns to ‘Snow
White’, as it also does in Gilbert and Gubar’s interpretation.
If we keep these similarities in mind, a double intertextual link can be
established. I shall use Keillor’s ‘My Stepmother, Myself’ as an example. On the
one hand, there is in this retelling the explicit intertextual link with and a critique
of the Grimm tale of ‘Snow White’. However, due to the fact that Keillor expresses
issues raised by Dworkin and Gilbert and Gubar, the reader can establish a
second, implicit intertextual link between Keillor’s text and feminist fairy-tale
criticism. I will not argue that Keillor has read or based his retelling on Dworkin or
Gilbert and Gubar, because that could only be speculative and would probably
not even be relevant. However, by comparing ideas from emancipatory criticism
with their reflection in the retellings, the fairy-tale debate can be broadened. The
nuances that can be added from these two different textual genres (fictive and
non-fictive) with their specific characteristics can only enrich the dialogue on the
Grimm tales.
Keillor’s text once again proves to be a good example to illustrate this
point. Dworkin and Gilbert and Gubar leave little ambivalence in their discussion
of ‘Snow White’ and do not question their feminist perspective. In Keillor, we
do find some ambivalence with regard to the emancipation movement. One
 12 VANESSA JOOSEN

the one hand, Keillor uses the ideas of necrophilism and of the victimised
stepmother as a starting point, thus putting himself on the same line as Dworkin
and Gilbert and Gubar. On the other hand, his retelling can also be read as a
parody of emancipatory feminism. This movement has often been reproached
both by men and women for its radical critique. Dworkin’s own aggressive tone
has become in the mean time at least as stereotypical as Snow White’s passive
innocence. Pointing out that fairy-tale princesses are passive is one thing, but
offering an alternative is another, and feminists tend to disagree on what a
woman can and should be.
Keillor’s retelling, then, can be read as a critique of the emancipation
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movement. Both his and Dworkin’s text share the same polemical and often
bitter tone: as a narrator, Snow White after her divorce sometimes resembles
Dworkin, the enraged feminist. Additionally, the confessional discourse that she
uses is also reminiscent of therapeutic group talks or talk shows that mark this era
of emancipatory feminism:
I can see now that there were other factors, and that I didn’t give her much
reinforcement [. . .]
And that is what I believed right up to the day I walked out on him. I felt like I
owed my life to Jeff [. . .]
As I look back on it, I can see that that was a very poor basis for a relationship
[. . .]
Now I can see how sick our marriage was [. . .]
In trying to come to terms with myself, I’ve had to come to terms with my
stepmother. (Keillor 1991, 181
/82; emphasis in original)

The title of Keillor’s short story (‘My Stepmother, Myself’) seems to be a clear
intertextual reference to Nancy Friday’s feminist classic My Mother, My Self (1979).
Snow White’s reflection on her stepmother can indeed be read as a parody of
Friday’s analysis of her relationship with her mother. Friday too uses quotes like
the fragments listed earlier, either describing her own experience or referring to
conversations that she had with other women:
I have always thought my emotional highs and lows were with men. It was men
who peopled my days and nights. Today I know it is not that I don’t need
women, it is that I need them too much and my need of them precedes my
need of men. (Friday 1979, 199
/200)

I married when I was a sophomore in college. I wanted a family, I expected to

be a traditional wife, like my mother. The stereotype didn’t work out that way.
The man I married never found a career */he was just like my father. I followed
my mother’s model and did everything so this man could be successful. I got a
part-time job, I went to graduate school, I wanted to be as strong as my mother
in helping my father. Eventually I couldn’t take it. I left him. (citation from Friday
1979, 261)
 FEMINIST CRITICISM AND THE FAIRY TALE 13

This retrospective self-analysis (‘I have always thought that’, ‘Today I know’, etc.)
is parodied in ‘My Stepmother, Myself’: by putting Nancy Friday’s words in the
mouth of a fairy-tale character, a funny contrast between discourses is produced
that ridicules Friday’s confessive tone.
Garrison Keillor’s retelling incorporates ideas that have been expressed in
literary criticism into his fairy-tale retelling. ‘My Stepmother, Myself’ can thus be
said to be a feminist fairy tale. However, there is a certain ambivalence to its
feminist agenda. Even though his retelling definitely raises an awareness about
certain problematic gender issues in the Grimm tale, his story can also be read as
a critique of overtly polemical or self-reflexive feminism. In this way, Keillor */like
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Donoghue, Yolen, Hofman, Peterson, Carlin and so many other rewriters of fairy
tales */has incorporated the critical debate on fairy tales into his writing; and in
doing so, he has become an enriching part to the debate himself.

Notes
1. Dworkin only focuses on a limited number of tales, and like many feminist fairy-
tale critiques of the 1970s, it seems to address the Disney adaptations rather
than the Grimm texts. See also Jack Zipes’ critique of Dworkin in Don’t Bet on
the Prince : ‘Her contribution to feminist criticism about the complex reception
of fairy tales remains limited because she stereotypes the tales in much the
same way as she perceives the fairy tales to be conveyors of stereotypes for
children’ (1986, 5).
2. The 1857 Grimm text, it reads (translated by Margaret Hunt): ‘And now Snow-white
lay a long, long time in the coffin, and she did not change, but looked as if she
were asleep; for she was as white as snow, as red as blood, and her hair was as
black as ebony. It happened, however, that a king’s son came into the forest,
and went to the dwarfs’ house to spend the night. He saw the coffin on the
mountain, and the beautiful Snow-white within it, and read what was written
upon it in golden letters. Then he said to the dwarfs, ‘‘Let me have the coffin, I
will give you whatever you want for it.’’ But the dwarfs answered, ‘‘We will not
part with it for all the gold in the world.’’ Then he said, ‘‘Let me have it as a gift,
for I cannot live without seeing Snow-white. I will honour and prize her as my
dearest possession.’’ As he spoke in this way the good dwarfs took pity upon
him, and gave him the coffin’ (http://www.fln.vcu.edu/grimm/schneeeng.html).
3. Note that Walt Disney also corrects this awkwardness. In Disney’s Snow White and
the Seven Dwarves , the prince already meets Snow White (in the famous ‘Some
day my prince will come’ scene) when she is living with her stepmother, so that
he falls in love with her when she is still alive. The same is true for the prince in
Sleeping Beauty . In the Grimm version, this man too could also be accused of
necrophilism; whereas in the Disney film, Sleeping Beauty and her prince
already meet before she is asleep.
4. See http://www.endicott-studio.com/cofp2sw.html
 14 VANESSA JOOSEN

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Vanessa Joosen, Universiteit Antwerpen, Departement Germaanse, A 1.20

Universiteitsplein 1, 2610 Wilrijk, België. E-mail: vanessa.joosen@ua.ac.be