Cinematic Identities... SNOW WHITE
| The producers of knowledge are a collective of weird male figures, bunch of sympathetic old boys, sexually depraved, but good humored – a cultural and especially film stereotype of the American academic before Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf. The dwarfs' house is a typical disorderly fraternity house on campus before the coming of the pioneer woman – Snow White: the ideological desire of "order" in the academia is quite clear. Through the pioneer woman's intervention, the dwelling is restored in its alpine (Bavarian? Tyrolian? Swiss?) kitsch glory, with the corresponding yodeling acoustic identification. The surrounding is set. Enter Snow White, which had to be reconstructed according to the ideological intervention. She has to undergo a rite de passage through death in order to re-appear as a New world's heroine. Her terrifying travel through the underworld is not real in the cartoon world (everything is a product of her fear), but the consequences are: Snow White symbolically awakes in America, after her life has been threatened in a European-looking castle. The new location is illustrated by the animals that start surrounding her, among them raccoons14, chipmunks and blue jays, which cannot be seen in Europe. But this clear distinction of the animal order had to rely on a certain narrative, familiar in many cultures: therefore, rites de passage taken from myths of Dionyssos, Artemis and Persephone are mixed. We might suspect that all this was done only to introduce cute fluffy cartoon animals – but they inevitably bear some unplanned, or carefully deliberate meanings. Animals surrounding and helping Snow White, while she demonstrates her love for them (including the motherly attitude and a presumed capacity of reproduction) give a perfect picture of a pompe of Artemis, or Dionyssos. Snow White as potnia theron (Gr. "mistress of animals") does not wear bow and arrows as Artemis surrounded by animals on Greek vases, to denote her power over life, reproduction and death: Snow White is a docile object of the patriarchal rule; she has just underwent symbolic death, which makes her half human – half goddess. Her ambivalent position allows her to play both roles of a mother and of a work supervisor/educator regulating dwarfs' behavior, although she is a virgin. This "advertising" of patriarchal feminine qualities before spectators that do not have any ambition nor social competence to take part in the mating procedures clearly indicates the ritual aspect of Snow White's behavior, a performative urge to do things related to a cult. Dionyssos' pompe comes immediately in mind not only in the scene in which Snow White is dragged by animals toward her new home, or is sleeping there with them, but also in the scene in which the dwarfs, just like the Ancient Pygmies, fight with the animals – and Dionyssos is certainly a good mythological parallel of surviving the death. The case for Persephone is blurred by the imperative absence of a mother, or any other relation with older women and mature womanhood: Snow White must be totally cut off and constructed as an exclusive male product. Thus comes the American, resurrected Snow White, who is willing to distribute her pioneer woman's and mother's qualities and authority and to pass the exam before the sexually irrelevant academic dwarfs, in order to later offer her services in the right patriarchal setting. Snow White - Artemis executes her virgin/mother-to-be/goddess' power on dwarves through possession of their names, purifying, disciplining, partial de-sexualization, introducing civic rules, regulative practices. To get to the right patriarchal setting, she has to die again, breaking all remaining links with her gender group, and then to awake by the intervention of the only legitimate owner of her fertility and work capacities. Since she has been kissed by the prince charming, Snow White does not walk any more, she is carried around by her new master, the Prince, as a true object of his desire and his control over her. They reach his castle, which blends with the Sun in the final scene of the cartoon. The male Sun god takes over the story. "Lifting up" is a usual procedure of censoring the rape: verbally, it is censored since Antiquity and in the most of the European languages by the use of the meaning rape-kidnapping, and by the visual presentation of lifting up instead of putting down, which is the real action of rape15.
The evil stepmother is a good example of reading of a masked, hidden and perverted ideological reconstruction. She appears as a quotation of Hollywood vamps: almost everything of the body is covered, and the seductress works mostly with her words, combined with body artistry and the signs of power supporting the rhetoric. When she moves into her downstairs academic domain, the queen works as a devoted scientist: experiment, verification, choice of literature, checking the sources, double-checking the footnotes... Her transformation into an old hag is a horrifying perspective of uselessness and danger of the female climax – women should preferably die before. But she is so evil that she does not, and continues in performing a grotesquely perverted relation with a girl, who dose not want any of women's knowledge nor any truth about women's life. Since Snow White refuses to be Eve, the apple must kill her. A lynching party is the only social solution for a witch. There is little or nothing here to be related to Ancient myths or rituals; in order to profile Snow White as a goddess, the stepmother has to be constructed as a negation of every possible use of myths and rituals, according to the censorship process already done in the fairy tale, through which Snow White had to be separated from the collective of women. She is deprived of the status of Demeter, or Artemis' mother, or many female Dionyssos' followers and helpers. The figure of the goddess of nature and the ruler of animals is used to present the pioneering, new, innocent but powerful new world, in the contrast with the old, corrupted Europe. |
The figure of the evil queen is an expected patriarchal closure, which should also bee seen in the context of the Hollywood production of the 20-30': after two decades of mostly European vamps and independent heroines, often rich but socially aware, silly but persistent in the quest of women's rights, witty and chattering, invented to sooth the problems of the male population during the great economic crisis – thus figures of an emerging anti-capitalist set of mind, there comes the Disney's political backlash: a ignorant virgin offering her services, completely cut off from the society of women, denying their knowledge and experience, and ready to loose her mobility and serve the master of the house, after she proved she can control children and sexuality in the episode with the dwarves. But this virgin is endowed with the great symbolic meaning of the American patriotism. There are even more convincing uses of rituals and images which situate the cartoon in the space of Ancient references, like in the case of the virginal taboo. In the opening of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Walt Disney, Snow White appears as a virgin in rags (according to Barthes, holes and cuts in garments are sexier than a nude body), but powerful enough to instigate prince's (any male's) fear of virginal gaze. Therefore, the first exchanged gazes by Snow White and the Prince must be filtered through a neutralizing mirror – a well's water surface. The acoustic identification (the echo) is followed by the visual one. The practice is analogue with the ritual practices around Medusa (the evil eye): on Greek vases, Perseus and Athena watch the head of Medusa on a water surface, and thus reinforce their own alliance, or he is looking at the Medusa's severed head reflected on the shield, while Athena is looking directly at the head. As Jean-Pierre Vernant and Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux put it – in the eye of the mirror . The use of a standard fairy-tale virginal blushing goes into a dark taboo, because it is there, just slightly covered, and then exposed by the strong visual rendering of the cartoon. This is crucial for the reading of the Snow White: it should be read within the same interpretation framework set up by the French anthropological school for the Greek vases and other visual material. The mirror plays an important part in the cartoon plot, from the mask in the mirror, to the diamonds and mineral surfaces (dwarves' mine), to the purifying water for the dwarfs and soap bubbles. In Disney's Cinderella, the girl is working (washing staircase), she is singing, and bubbles echo her singing visually (multiplying her figure) and acoustically (as a quire). In fact, mirror in a cartoon shows many more visual capacities and ways of interpretation than any mirror in the film. We can speculate on who in Disney's large team was familiar with Ancient Greek mythology, or how Ancient myths are built in the mass-culture narratives on a global scale, both in colonizing and in colonized cultures. It should suffice to underline that this type of investigation, as attractive as it may be, is of no bearing to the need to reflect critically on non-said and non-seen, hidden or masked narratives of the patriarchal construct of the feminine. The global acceptance of the cartoon Snow White and the Seven Dwarves clouds its historical and contextual role in the American and American-influenced popular cultures, which is a patriarchal comeback with a revenge, a clear attempt to diminish the ruling figure of a new, independent woman. Ancient cults and rituals are used to denote the universal (polytheistic) cultural space beneath the narratives of great religions, to give it qualities that form a new feminine model, and to distance this new feminine model from women's history – even the stereotypical one. The new feminine model also evokes American patriotism and colonialism, which are inevitable in making the final conservative patriarchal gender figure. Thus Disney's Snow White presents a perfect example of possible uses of Ancient cult and ritual narratives, but also a perfect object of manipulation of narratives and images in a cultural practice, showing many common anthropological features similar to the Ancient manipulation with narratives and images on Greek vases.
Svetlana Slapšak |
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14Raccoons were introduced in Europe and Asia mostly in the second half of the 20th ct, in the USSR in the late thirties.
15 See Deacy, Susan, Pierce, Karen, eds., Rape in Antiquity: Sexual Violence in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Duckworth Publishers, 2002.
16 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise, Dans l'oeil du miroir, Odile Jacob, Paris, 1996; Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise, "Andromède et la naissance du corail", in Georgoudi, Stella, Vernant, Jean-Pierre eds., Mythes grecs au figuré de l'antiquité au baroque, Gallimard, Paris, 1996 .
