In Defense of Maligned Fairy Tale Characters

Fairytale characters get a bad rap. The heroes and heroines are looked at as weak, sexist, fetish-minded, duplicitous, and superficial. The current trend is to glorify the villains in these stories because, as the saying goes, the villains are the most interesting characters. Interesting, maybe, but I think people give short shrift to fairy tale characters. I’m going to take three popular and maligned fairy tale characters and present them in a light perhaps originally intended by their authors to show there’s more on their minds than hoping “one day my prince will come.”

Snow White

Poor Snow White. The modern world overlooks and harshly criticizes her. Disney hardly promotes her except when hawking merchandise and hides her behind the banner of “the first fairy tale princess.” One of the latest depictions of her in the television show Once Upon a Time makes her out to be a Robin Hood type character in its early episodes. In other words, she’s a badass survivor.

Snow White's woodsGoing back to Grimm, Snow White has one unique quality. She’s beautiful. It’s because she’s lovely that the huntsman takes pity on her. One of the seven dwarfs asks “What beautiful child is this?” and then they set her to work on the house in exchange for her lodgings. Of course, her stepmother hates her for being fairer than she.

Not a ringing endorsement of feminism.

But then again, she’s not supposed to be. We aren’t all assertive or bold or badass. Some of us, men and women, are shy, reserved, and introverted. This is how I picture Snow White. More importantly, Snow White as a symbol I think belongs to the Bible verse “And the meek shall inherit the Earth.” Meek does not equal weak. The older definition of meek is “gentle, kind” and this is what the Bible verse meant. It applies to Snow White as well. Her beauty alone stays the Huntsman’s hand, but after he decides to help her, my version says “…and it was as if a stone had been rolled away from his heart.” This is why he kills the boar and presents its heart to the queen. Snow White represents the downtrodden, the ones on the edges of society that rely on the help of others because she’s going through a bad time in her life. She’s the homeless woman on the corner, she’s the cancer patient who doesn’t know how to pay the bills, she’s the single mother living in her car. She didn’t put herself in this situation and she doesn’t plan to milk it or stay there. She’s temporarily reliant on others until she can land on her own two feet. In this way, the prince doesn’t “save” her, he’s a symbol of her re-integration into society.

Cinderella’s Prince

We’ve all heard the accusations. Cinderella’s unnamed prince is deviant, idiotic, and disturbed. What sort of a prince can’t recognize the girl he swooned over and danced with three nights in a row, and relies on a shoe to “find” her anyway? Again, on the surface, this seems to be the case, but don’t discount this character yet. Let’s look at the story behind the story. Cinderella, like Snow White, represents a marginalized person. In Grimm, her own father looks the other way at her mistreatment, and it takes her dead mother (not a fairy godmother) to provide her glamorous clothing.

Cinderella asking her mother to go to the festival.
Cinderella asking her mother to go to the festival.

She is a symbol of all of us who are treated like a number, who are discounted, who are overlooked. But suddenly, she’s in the spotlight. This is what we call a Cinderella story, right? And what does the prince symbolize? He represents us as a society in a different way. He’s the other side: the adoring fans of a famous person, a person of power sincerely listening to another person’s story of hardship, the patient parent forgiving a wayward child. He’s the benevolent power figure. Because of a paternalistic society when it was written, power is male and downtrodden is female, but as symbols, gender doesn’t matter. An empathetic female senator listens to a male farmer who has lost his land represent Cinderella’s prince and Cinderella just as much. The final symbol is the slipper. The slipper is not a token of deviant sex–modern society’s newest take on the story. It’s far deeper and significant. The slipper represents the restoration of the dignity of the human person. When the prince places the slipper on Cinderella’s foot, it signifies society saying to the human person “you matter…you are heard…you count.” The prince is anyone who believes their family and friends are important and make a difference, and Cinderella is no less than the story of the value of the human race.

Glinda

Am I talking about L. Frank Baum’s Glinda, the Good Witch of the South from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or Billy Burke’s iconic representation “bubble” Glinda from the 1939 movie version of The Wizard of Oz, or Gregory Maguire’s Galinda of Wicked? They are really three different representations. We all think of Burke or perhaps Galinda, but we tend to forget Baum’s original Glinda. For those who haven’t read the book for a while, Glinda does not greet Dorothy at the beginning, and she’s from the south, not the north. She’s not a bubble character.  She’s closer to an empress of the south, surrounded by female soldiers. She’s wise and powerful, an interesting counterpart to the humbug wizard, and she provides the solution to Dorothy to get home (like the movie). When the book was written circa 1900 and women couldn’t vote, Baum wrote about a woman leader. To demonstrate how radical of an idea it was for this time in history, it’s over a hundred years later and the United States still doesn’t have a woman president.

GlindaIn the book, the reader gets the sense that Glinda is far more powerful than the Wicked Witch of the West. She’s not a crusader, running around Oz righting all wrongs. Rather, she’s a person who knows her power and doesn’t abuse it. This makes me respect her even more. Where was she when Dorothy was trapped in the witch’s domain? Why doesn’t she stomp out the witch before Dorothy arrives? Most of us know that, just because you have power, doesn’t mean you always use it. We instinctively understand the saying “choose your battles.” There’s a reason Baum chooses to have Glinda sometimes interject herself (e.g. when she chases after Mombi in the sequel to Oz) but most of the time refrain. She’s an admirable and complex character in my opinion. And while I love both the movie and the play, the version of Glinda in them serves a different role. The original Glinda is a moral compass for all world leaders today.

So the next time you read a fairy tale, take a fresh look at the characters and see if you can spot how the author originally intended them and compare it to how they are represented today.