In case it has been a while, let me refresh your memory. As the tale begins, a Queen sits sewing in an ebony-framed, snowy window, wishing for a child. She pricks her finger and three drops of blood fall on the snow, inspiring her to wish for a child with ebony hair, blood-red lips, and skin as white as snow. Sure enough, a short time later she gives birth to such a child, dying in the process. The little girl grows up, getting more "beautiful" every day. (I really have to wonder at who would think that a person matching this description would be beautiful--extreme pale skin and dark red lips remind me more of the dead, or maybe a vampire, than a pretty little girl.)
Anyway, the King remarries, and Snow-white's stepmother not only has unsurpassed beauty, but is obsessed with making sure things stay that way. When Snow-white turns seven years old (yes, that's right, that would be seven years old) the Queen's enchanted mirror declared that the little girl is now more beautiful than the Queen, prompting her into a murderous rage. Hauled off into the forest to her death, Snow-white is released by a kind-hearted huntsman and eventually finds and breaks into a cottage of dwarfs, where she helps herself to their food and sleeps in their beds before being discovered. Although alarmed at the intruder, the little men are so charmed by her great beauty that they agree to let her live with them in exchange for domestic servitude. Things seem to go okay for a while, until the Queen realizes that she's been tricked and that Snow-white is still alive (and still more beautiful than she). She disguises herself as a peddler and convinces Snow-white to let her lace her into some pretty stays (or corset--not sure why a seven-year-old would need a corset, but there you go) which suffocate the little girl and she loses consciousness. She is revived by her housemates, only to fall victim the the Queen's next temptation, a poisoned comb. Fortunatley, the comb is removed and Snow-white recovers in time for her to be duped once again, this time into biting a poisoned apple. Unable to figure out what's wrong with her, the dwarfs decide to encase her in a glass coffin which they display on a hill, under guard. It is at this point that the Prince wanders by and is instantly taken with the sight of a dead child in her glass case. He finagles the dwarfs into giving him Snow-white and, loading her into a wagon, heads out for home. The bumpy wagon ride dislodges the bit of apple apparently causing Snow-white's death-state, and she revives, surrounded by strange men, in an unfamiliar place. The Prince, noticing that she is now awake, proposes marriage to her (!), which she accepts.
Yeah.
So if bargaining for a dead child wasn't weird enough, now this creepy Prince character is going to marry a little girl?
Even more bizarre is the thought that it is stories like these upon which modern ideas of beauty and romance are based. Fairy tales frequently have one or more pretty blatant morals that supposedly teach children maxims that keep them safe: don't break into bear's houses, don't walk alone in forests inhabited by wolves, that sort of thing. But the story of Little Snow-white is so focused on white aristocratic beauty, including the dangers and rewards of desiring it, possessing it, etc., that it is tough to tell if other morals are present.
I think this story is great stuff for use in researching standards of white female beauty, particularly in the nineteenth century when this particular version of the story was widely circulated. While I am still working out the particulars, I see many interconnections between the fantasy of fairy tale and the "reality" of the illusory white ideal. Even today, don't white women still compete for status through physical beauty? How else can we explain the multi-million-dollar industries that traffic in polishing, "fixing" and re-shaping female bodies, all in a quest to gain recognition as the "fairest of all."
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