I bought a copy of the Grosset &
Dunlap Grimms' Fairy Tales last week. It's definitely my
favorite book in all the world. I've owned copies of it before but
have given them away to various people who I thought would love it
as much as I do.
So last night, as the winter is coming
on and the days are getting shorter and the nights colder, I opened
up this treasury and read Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
before going to bed. It was all new to me once again despite my
having read it so many times over the course of my life.
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| Thomas Kinkade, Snow White Discovers the Cottage |
This time I was more aware than ever
that she represents the pure heart, the pure-in-heart, perhaps from
having written about it recently, as well as more experience since I
last read this story.
The seven small protectors, who work in
a gold mine, try to protect her from her stepmother, the widower
King's second, vain, wife. This woman's mirror has been telling her
that she is the most beautiful woman in the world until one day it
tells her that, no, Snow White is actually more beautiful, “a
thousand times more fair.” Oh, geez. Now's there's hell to pay. The
old baggage tells the huntsman to take Snow White into the woods and
kill her. That doesn't work out. So she tries three deceptive ploys
in the disguise of an old woman offering good things – tightened
laces, a poison comb, and the poisoned half of an apple. Lots of
other exciting stuff happens and at the end the wicked stepmother
goes to the wedding feast and “was beside herself with
disappointment and anger” that Snow White was a thousand times more
fair, and then gets served her just deserts: “For they had
ready red-hot iron shoes, in which she had to dance until she fell
down dead.”
The Grimms don't fool around. They tell
it.
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