The Falsehood of Fairy Tales
I want to talk about Snow White, but not like that. Not like we have, not like the angry old woman who lost her youth and vitality and so she spent her remaining bitter days plotting a beautiful young woman’s demise.
I want to talk about that older woman who lost her youth and vitality but only by the measurement of the patriarchy. Because she’s no longer controllable. She’s no longer manageable. She’s suffered through the years of disappointments and gaslighting and betrayals, and I know it’s not spelled this way but it should be, the mother load curving her spine, toughening her hands, pulling her jowls to meet her shoulders as they drive into her ears while she gets through day after day after day.
She’s never been more vital. She knows the home’s secrets, where things can be found, the keeper of all the family lore. All plans move through her and her extensive knowledge, all problems brought to her feet, organized and sorted by importance to be resolved.
Did she once have skin as smooth as an unfurled flower? Hair as thick and shiny as a dream? Body as full of hope and promise as only a young woman, not in her prime, see that is another word we get all wrong, for a prime number is one that cannot be divided by anything but itself, by 1, and that’s it, that is it, every man who casts aside the evil older woman for Snow White thinks they are The One, and so they say that the young woman who doesn’t know of his grabbing hands, his false promises, his betrayals, that she is in her prime.
But she is so easily divided. She is divided by the baby he puts in her, divided by the backbreaking job of running a house, splintered into pieces by his ultimate neglect as he once again seeks out a new Snow White, a new prime for his singular division until she becomes that older woman, wiser, slightly bent and unbroken, steel in her eyes where once danced fancies.
And perhaps the stories were wrong. Snow White was kept locked away by seven men to cook and clean and care for them, who said she mustn’t ever tell where she has been hidden, that the danger was outside where the air was free. What if the comb wasn’t poisoned but instead paved a way for two women, one seasoned and one so very lost and alone, for them to talk as they braided one another’s hair? The apple an offering because Snow White was so very very thin to meet certain male expectations, and weren’t most doctors in that time a man? An apple a day…
And when the beautiful perfect Prime of a girl was rendered unconscious, immobile, she was put on display for all to ogle, for strange men to kiss her into wakefulnesss. Could our older witch be so frustrated that she tried, she did everything to let Snow White see the truth? We age, we lose our desirability and are labeled witches. Our attempts to speak to truth become evil, it is we who destroy the hope and promise of a young woman in her Prime, the stories say.
I want to talk about how the stories got it all wrong. Because what if, what if there was no mirror but the reflection of disdain in her husband’s eyes? What if there was no jealousy but the cool understanding that she had been discarded? What if her attempts to reach Snow White were nothing more than the warnings of one who realized she never needed the Prince or King or any of them, she had been through the fire, and the storytellers got her dancing in flame-hot iron shoes wrong, because it wasn’t her ending but a metaphor for her whole damn life up to that point.
What if it was all a lie? Well, then you’d have to ask yourself, “Why would they lie?” Why, indeed.
And that’s what I want to talk about.
(And the comments are open…)
So good!
I love this so much.