Mirror Mirror: Snowdrop and its Reflection of Misogyny

    The short story “Snowdrop” published by the Grimm Brothers has continued to have cultural relevance due to Disney’s retelling of the story with the movie “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” However, many people forget, or are unaware of the damaging misogynistic undertones that are at play throughout the story. 

    The most obvious of these is the objectification of women throughout the story. There are  two prominent female characters in the story, the Queen and Snowdrop, and the entirety of both of those characters' worth stems from their beauty and appearance. The Queen’s sense of self worth is shattered when a mirror tells her a seven year old is prettier than her. This news is so devastating that she makes numerous attempts to kill said seven year old. The choice to make the Queen not only evil, but obsessed with her appearance and willing to do anything to preserve that appearance is blatantly misogynistic by portraying a woman in a position of power to be cruel, heartless, and self absorbed. The text demonizes women in power, while creating a shallow depiction of women and their values. There’s no depth to the Queen, no character development, nor any sense that there is anything else important to her other than her beauty. This creates a degrading depiction of women, that they only value their external beauty, but are cold and heartless internally. 

    While the Queen depicts a demonizing version of women, the title character Snowdrop creates an equally damaging idealization of women. Snowdrop is a seven year old girl that is widely believed to be the most beautiful woman in the land. There is clearly something wrong with that sentence. A seven year old is not a woman, but is a child, and a seven year old should not be sexualized at all, let alone to the point that she is being compared to grown women and considered the most beautiful of them all. There’s an overt and accepted sexualization of a child that goes completely unquestioned and unchallenged throughout the story. As the Queen’s value was only given to her through her beauty, Snowdrop’s value is given based on not only her beauty, but her domestic abilities. When she is with the dwarfs she is immediately ordered to cook and keep the house clean. And she does so without hesitation or any begrudging attitude. The story pushes the degrading narrative of what the idealized woman should be; young, innocent, submissive, and domestically capable, all while lacking depth and personality. The character is not even given a personality, she just exists to be looked at and to be helpful around the house. The lack of depth in the prominent women characters demonstrates the lack of value that is given to women’s intellectual abilities or general personality, and are instead objectified and shrunken down to a beautiful face that is either cold hearted internally or domestically capable. Two opposite sides of the same objectifying spectrum. 

    Snowdrop then becomes a literal object when she dies, as her body is placed in a glass coffin and put on top of a mountain, only to be found by a prince who, instead of wondering why there’s a dead child in a glass box on top of a mountain, decides to take the coffin home because he feels it would make for a beautiful living room decoration, as if she were an artifact or a Jackson Pollock painting hanging over a fireplace. Even after death any respect that would be given to Snowdrop is completely overlooked because of her appearance. The prince is shocked when Snowdrop comes back to life, and asks her to marry him, to which Snowdrop agrees, because what other option does she have? She is in the middle of the woods being carried in a glass coffin, her options are nonexistent. This places an emphasis on marriage for women, and pushes the idea that a woman’s goal should be to get married instead of creating a life for themselves. Snowdrop is not only never given any options or choices, but by having this seven year old get married shows that her entire life is marriage. Marriage was an unavoidable sentence given to her from birth. She is belittled and objectified the entire story, but still is granted a “happy” ending because she gets married. This creates a fantasized vision of marriage for women, that you are no more than your beauty and one day a prince is going to sweep you off your feet and live happily ever after. When in reality, that prince may treat you horribly. It’s creating a fantasy of what marriage is in order to further restrict women to believe that marriage is not only the only option, but an inevitable, predetermined outcome of existence.