Sarah Bonner-University of Manchester
‘Snow White: Repetition and Resistance in the Visual Arts’ –
Stream Repetition and Embodiment

Snow White is one of the most popular and enduring fairy tales focusing on the maturation process of an adolescent girl into a woman. It speaks of survival and of wish fulfilment. It communicates to the individual, as it does to the collective unconscious of the popular masses. Through repetition Snow White has become an archetypal fairy tale based on the persecuted female heroine. I will examine the predominant themes in Snow White through the nineteenth century Grimm brothers and 1937 Disney versions, and more recent translations by visual artists in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Through a comparison of the recent artworks with the literary tradition and subsequent Disney interpretations I argue that the very nature of repetition that ensures the survival of the genre, also works to subvert it. I will examine the fairy tale in the visual arts to illustrate how repetition reveals the potential for change through radical representations of cultural attitudes, in particular toward gender and race.  Primarily I will examine how Snow White conveys specifically gendered and explicitly racial codes that, in the guise of entertainment, operate as part of an ideological apparatus imposing social control through representation that insidiously informs society of putative behavioural and cultural attitudes. In recent visual fairy tale interpretations, through what could be termed transgressive repetition, the production of meaning in Snow White is resisted and subverted upsetting the taken-for-granted tropes and exposing repressive codes of social order. I will conclude by looking to recent films that have made radical claims against these normative codes in terms of gender and race found in the traditional fairy tale.

            It has been accepted (through decades of psychoanalytical, socio-historical, and feminist theory[1]) that fairy tales impact on audiences. Within the popular fairy tales there are patterns of behaviour that dictate that active and adventurous boys are rewarded with fortune and a wife, and that beautiful and passive girls will be rewarded with a rich husband. As Marcia Lieberman (1972) stated about children’s relation to fairy tales[2]:
Children are socialised or culturally conditioned by movies, television programs, and the stories they read or hear […] they also learn behavioural and associational patterns, value systems, and how to predict consequences of specific acts or circumstances. Among other things, these tales present a picture of sexual roles, behaviour, and psychology, and a way of predicting the outcome or fate according to sex. (Zipes, 1993 pp.186-7)

These early feminist observations on the capacity of fairy tales to maintain dominant ideological concerns has lead to further research that examines the constitution of gender as dictated by the genre. There is no doubt as to the pervasive and persuasive power of the fairy tale in society; I argue that the very repetition of the tales (facilitated through VCR and DVD technologies) endows the genre with a more insidious power today than was anticipated in the 1970s. As fairy tales are produced in book format or through (predominantly) Disney film treatments generally adhering to the Grimm Brother’s template, the behavioural codes (specifically of gender, race, class and heterosexuality) of the passive female victim, eventually rewarded for her beauty, will continue to saturate Euro-American audiences, informing children, and adults alike, of potential fates achievable through specific social conduct.

The notion of repetition works as a paradox in this case. The endurance of the traditional fairy tale (as delivered by Charles Perrault and the Grimms) relies on the continuous pattern of repeat. In contrast, the repetition of certain social codes threatens to stall advances in individual identity development and non-prejudicial social development. Endurance is weighted against an arrested development.

Judith Butler, citing Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that womanhood is not a biological fact, instead a cultural application, comments that gender is not a stable identity and, in fact, shifts over time and within historical conditions.[3] Butler examines the notion of performing an identity, which repeated, over and over, becomes the accepted constitution of that given identity, in this case female. Thus the identity is instituted and takes on the appearance of substance, whereas it is, in fact, a self-perpetuating constructed identity: “a performative accomplishment”. Butler continues her argument to propose the potential of change through repetition:
If the ground of gender identity is the stylised repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style. (Jones, 2003 p.392)
Butler identifies the potential, through repetition, to change the grounds of constituted gendered identity, which, I argue, occurred in the adoption of the fairy tale by the visual arts in the late twentieth century.

To apply Butler’s theory of performative acts and gender constitution to the repetitive nature of fairy tales reveals the scope of the genre for both maintaining codes of social conduct, but also the capacity for change. However, whilst the Disney Corporation (refining the traditional fairy tale via a strictly defined formula) dominates fairy tale production, from films to merchandising, the potential for change is more challenging. Disney has developed a sophisticated understanding of the power of performing a role. Thus not only are children able to watch Disney fairy tale versions at the cinema (invoking at an early age Laura Mulvey’s concept of identification with the leading roles according to gender[4]), but they are also able to buy the DVD and watch repeatedly their favourite parts within the home. Add to this Disney merchandising whereby little girls can purchase the dress that Snow White wears (or Cinderella goes to the ball in, even Princess Jasmine’s slippers) and suddenly young girls are able to perform the fairy tale roles as seen on TV. These roles, with the aid of props, are then internalised: girls grow up to understand that beauty and composure are sufficient attributes to succeed in life (by succeed I mean gain a rich husband). Butler’s performative act here constitutes a constructed identity that is based on a constructed fantasy in the hands of Disney. In today’s increasingly equal economic and political climate women are expected to be independent. Through improved media and communication technologies the tacit adherence to repressive social codes as found in the traditional tales seems counter-developmental. In fact, these types of fairy tales are maintaining a constructed fantasy that is legitimated as normative. In short, girls are being sent mixed messages that are arbitrary and unrealistic and can invoke deep-seated anxiety in terms of individual worth.

The Brothers Grimm & Disney
The fairy tale Little Snow White included in the Grimm’s nineteenth century literary collection tells of the relationship between two females defined in character by age and beauty: Snow White and her stepmother. This relationship tells a broader tale of maturation, jealousy and conflict; Snow White, as a narrative,is representative of the sexual maturation of a young girl into womanhood.  While it is not explicit, the stepmother, although beautiful represents the precarious position of impending de-sexualisation following the menopause. In Snow White the Grimm brothers offer a tale of wish fulfilment, maturation, and jealousy combining all three to create a fairy tale thriller.

The popular version of the tale stems from the Grimm’s text. In the 1937 Disney animated film version Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,[5] the ending differs significantly from the Grimm’s tale. There is no barter for Snow White’s body between the dwarfs and the prince, and a kiss is enough to revive the girl rather than the more realistic jostle of the coffin to knock the piece of apple from her throat. Snow White is rendered less and less independent and animate with the closing scenes. Disney actively ascribed to stereotyping patriarchal gender codes through the heterosexual romance between Snow White and the prince. While rendering the tale more pleasant and palatable Disney reinforces gender and age stereotypes (of the young, beautiful and passive female; the old, ugly woman; and the heroic rescue by the prince) but loses the depth and message of the traditional tale. Disney emphasises the aspect of romance in contrast to the Grimms’ focus on the conflict between the two females. Snow White’s banality infiltrates the very fabric of the Disney version and the tale becomes a meaningful (exerting a normative social order) exercise of patriarchal heterosexual romance. The prince is the active agent in this tale and saves Snow White literally and metaphorically. The patriarchal code is played out; the women are saved from each other and ultimately from themselves: the step-mother represents what Snow White will become in maturity unless there is a man to control her.

Repetition and Resistance
In Paula Rego’s artwork Snow White Swallows the Poisoned Apple (1995) Snow White is dressed in a costume made familiar through Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, yet her extreme posturing, tense and contorted, as she falls from the couch, does not match the common accounts relating to the final (albeit simulated) death of the heroine. Imaged upside down and clutching her throat and skirt, Snow White confounds our usual knowledge of her as passive, pretty and pure. This image draws from the fourth attempt made on Snow White’s life by her stepmother: the gift of the poisoned apple that induces death. For the Grimms’, Snow White merely falls to the floor in a death-like state. Rego offers the more likely truth and Snow White is depicted somewhere between her death throes, and according to Ruth Rosengarten, “the strangulating ecstasy of orgasm.”[6] (1997 p.117)

In her death like state Disney’s Snow White is the archetype of passive (all she has to do is play dead and her prince will come and find her), in contrast Rego’s Snow White actively fights for her life and is altogether more human. Rego depicts one of the most violent scenes, and drawing from the original tale the notion of sexual maturation an injection of auto-eroticism is introduced here. It is impossible to tell whether violence is being done to Snow White, or whether she is experiencing a pleasure akin to pain, thus illustrating the transition from girlhood to womanhood. As viewers our position is clear, we are comfortably familiar with Snow White, yet we are forced into voyeurism with this work. It is clear that Snow White does not lack agency, it is also clear that she has vitality. Rego has overturned the traditional interpretations of the tale to activate alternative readings. As Butler proposes, Rego has used repetition (the deployment of the fairy tale) subversively to re-engage audience imagination, to wake them, and not Snow White, from a somnambulist acceptance of fairy tale gendered roles.

Snow White sets down very specific conventions of gender behaviour (the beautiful, pure and passive); the fairy tale also associates these feminine attributes to the white, western, heterosexual female. We do not need to be reminded of the original queen’s triadic wish for a daughter with skin as white as snow, hair as black as ebony, and lips as red as blood. As well as reducing Snow White to passive invisibility her name also betokens a specific racial type – the inference being that anything other than white would be impure and undesirable. There is no allowance for Snow White to be any other race than Caucasian; variation from this dominant is precluded by the values imposed by the character’s name. This convention of the white female in fairy tales has endured despite significant changes, since the 1960s, in cultural attitude towards inclusion and acknowledgement of racial difference.

This preclusion of racial variety was challenged by feminist artists working in the 1980s. Carrie Mae Weems has consistently addressed gender and racial stereotyping as methods of oppression in her work since the mid-1980s. In her Ain’t Jokin series she interrogates prejudice based on skin colour, in Mirror Mirror (1987-88) she takes issue from an African-American stance using the fairy tale Snow White to highlight embedded cultural stereotyping and prejudice.
Mirror Mirror combines photograph and text and parodies the scene where the queen consults her magic mirror. A black woman is depicted holding a frame as if it were a mirror, yet turns away from it. Within the frame, although not confined by it, we can see another woman of indeterminate race dressed in white and holding a wand with a glittered star up to the surface of the mirror. The photograph is closely cropped making the piece claustrophobic and intensifying the aggressively sardonic response of the mirror. The caption that accompanies the piece is:
Looking into the mirror, the black woman asked, ‘Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the finest of them all?’ The mirror says, ‘Snow White, you black bitch, and don’t you forget it!!!’

Engagement with this piece challenges every viewer invoking “dilemmas of identification for both black and white women who encounter the work, inviting each to question the notions of beauty in which they situate themselves.”[7] (Reckett & Phelan, 2001) Weems has taken the common understanding of Snow White to expose the inherent prejudices within it against the black woman via her absence. Not only is the black woman too old to be the finest, she is also the wrong colour. The physical impossibility of the black woman to become Snow White is underlined in this piece. An extension of this impossibility, through the use of the mirror, is the revoking, for black women, beauty and the rights of social ascendancy that go with it (according to fairy tales).

Weems invokes Butler’s notion of using repetition to break the relentless white versions of particularly Snow White and the fairy tale more broadly. The jolt that Weems gives the viewer reveals the brutal inequities of the genre and the blatant level of racism practiced in the repeating of tales with white protagonists. If the protagonist of the fairy tale is always described and depicted as white, what relation do black audiences have to the tales, and more specifically the relation of black women to protagonists such as Snow White?

In bell hook’s essay The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators she discusses the estrangement black women experience when watching Hollywood films.[8] Twice discriminated against for being female and black, audiences have, according to hooks, no relation to the heroines depicted on the movie screen. What has developed as a response has been the development of an oppositional gaze acting in resistance to the predominant casting of white women in the leading female role. From this position of resistance a critical interrogation is initiated on the complex levels and techniques of stereotyping and dehumanising of non-whites that takes place in dominant western film. The perpetuation of the white ideal has served to exclude the black spectator, I would argue no more so than in Euro-American fairy tale films (where the non-white characters have been reduced to animals).

Weems visually represents the cultivation of a black critical resistance that developed in the late 1980s and 1990s. In Mirror Mirror Weems uses the frame held by the black woman as a mark of difference and of separation. The caption is used to reinforce the futile aspiration to inclusion or equality. As the black woman looks away it is an ambiguous gesture. Does she turn away from rejection, or is her act one of resistance? Does her stance recall that of the black slaves not allowed to look at their white master, or is it a gaze of absentia, illustrating the lack of relevance and connection black women have with popular western fairy tales?

Stuart Hall discusses the difference between reflection and representation proposing that representation “implies the active work of selecting and presenting, of structuring and shaping: not merely the transmitting of an already-existing meaning, but the more active labour of making things mean.”[9] (Gurevitch et al, 1982 p.64) Thus the representation of fairy tales visually must inevitably (consciously or unconsciously) be aligned to a specific agenda. In Weem’s work the casting of the black woman looking into the mirror exposes the seemingly normative casting of a white woman and interrupts the taken-for-grantedness of fairy tales. By consciously changing normative casting Weems undermines the operation of fairy tales of maintaining a repression of race and instead reveals that very prejudice of selection in representation. Stalling the favoured representation of fairy tale heroines as white Weems succeeds in proposing a new mode of identity formation in this radical political gesture. In terms of the blatant lack of black female protagonists hooks cites Stuart Hall’s understanding that “identity is constituted ‘not outside but within representation’”[10] (Jones, 2003 p.104). Thus pressing home the message that abiding images of white female heroines negatively impact upon the social education of black women. The repressed black woman is taught that she has no place in mainstream culture and subsequently questions her value in mainstream society. Both Weems and hooks press the imperative need to critically challenge the fairy tale, as just one vehicle of ideological standards, to bring the genre in line with current social standards of gender and race, or alternatively to expose it for being the site of significant and insidious prejudice.

In recent years there have been moves to address questions of race and gender in film. A Disney live action musical production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella was released in 1997[11]. The film, a third remake of a 1957 version starring Julie Andrews, casts the pop star Brandy Norwood in the title role with a support cast of Whitney Houston (the fairy godmother) and Whoopi Goldberg (the prince’s mother). The film is positively mixed race, even the prince, Paolo Montalban is Philipino. This is a seemingly positive move by Disney to accommodate racial inclusion at the end of the twentieth century. However, more cynically, the enterprise can be seen as a process of transference, from white to black, with no adjustment to the tale nor the gendered implications of it; mere lip service in response to the 1990’s climate of racial equality.

On the other hand, in 2001 Shrek[12] was released by DreamWorks and uses the traditional format of the genre and various repeated tropes from fairy tales in parody of Disney fairy tale presentations. Shrek,and the sequel Shrek 2,[13]have challenged both gender and racial representation in fairy tales. Gender is interrogated in a light-hearted manner by inverting (to an extent) the lead roles: Shrek is shy and enjoys the quiet life; Princess Fiona, in contrast, is a feisty kung fu fighting heroine. Shrek is forced to take on the active adventure to save the princess; and Fiona plays, albeit impatiently, at being the princess waiting to be rescued. Gender roles are initially inverted only to become more equal as the film continues.

Shrek’s handling of race is more complex. Shrek is cast an ogre rather than a prince, and Fiona, beautiful princess by day, turns into an ogre at night. Fiona’s struggle to come to terms with who she is underpins the racial challenge made by the film. Again beauty is represented by the white female and ugliness by the green ogre (read here any non-white). Shrek goes beyond appearances conveying the message that beauty lies within when Fiona’s romantic involvement with Shrek results in her permanent ogre status. This is a radical challenge, yet difference embraced by Shrek and Fiona isn’t radical enough in terms of race. For Fiona to be an ogre was undesirable and hidden away at night. Shrek is also an outcast; the pair end up together, implicitly suggesting racial segregation rather than integration. In addition it must be noted that Shrek and Fiona are voiced by Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz, two of Hollywood’s most successful white actors, using Scottish and all-American accents respectively. Shrek’s sidekick Donkey is voiced by Eddie Murphy, again the African-American dehumanised and represented by an animal. Is the message of racial equality really that convincing?
The Shrek films fly in the face of traditional fairy tales and are hilarious entertainment whilst also conveying more contemporaneous interpretations of gender and race. The former is inverted and the latter, if not reconciled, then certainly not absent. Both Rego and Weems harness the potential for change via repetition, taking the fairy tale and subverting it. By making the familiar unfamiliar the artists interrupt the normative understanding of the tale questioning the embedded meanings and values and asserting an alternative reading. Rego activates Snow White’s agency reinforcing female autonomy; Weems renders visible the invisible black woman by exposing fairy tale prejudice. Hall’s assertion of identity being based in representation and Butler’s performative theory of repetitive acts as constituting gender highlight the essential need to critically assess the role of the visual fairy tale at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Repetition ensures the endurance of tales (and their embedded values) whilst it also offers opportunity and potential for change. This is where the notion of repeat is most important.