The New Yorker:

From 2012: Fairy tales were engineered to accommodate changes in cultural values and conflicts. “Snow White” is no exception.

By Maria Tatar

Fairy tales are good to think with. Compact yet also capacious, with roots in myth, they were engineered to accommodate changes in cultural values and conflicts. “Snow White” is no exception. Rupert Sanders’s film “Snow White and the Huntsman” the latest version of the tale, takes us into a wilderness of environmental depredations and dynastic conflict. Charlize Theron’s fair-haired wicked queen presides over subjects with ravaged faces in landscapes that resemble toxic oil spills; in her shape-shifting magic, she reconstitutes herself at one point from what looks like a flock of crows caught in an oil slick. Her rule has no doubt created the viscous black horrors that Snow White encounters in the denuded woods to which she flees. The film’s raven-haired heroine, by contrast, soothes savage beasts with her compassionate face and, as a digitally miniaturized Bob Hoskins, playing one of the seven dwarfs, proclaims: “she will heal the land.” But she’s no passive, guiltless damsel. Her exquisite beauty, combined with charismatic leadership, enables her to defeat the evil queen and redeem the desolate landscape of the kingdom.

This Snow White is very different from the one we find in the canonical literary version recorded in the early nineteenth century. The Brothers Grimm called their story “Little Snow White,” to emphasize the innocence and vulnerability of a young girl persecuted by her jealous stepmother. Their heroine is precociously stunning—“When she was seven years old she was as beautiful as the light of day, even more beautiful than the queen herself”—and her beauty inspires huntsman, dwarfs, and prince alike to protect her from a less fair, wicked queen. The early tale is also a reflection on children’s fears about the cruelty of stepmothers, at a time when mortality rates for child-bearing women were exceptionally high. The concept of the “blended” family was foreign to the Grimms’ era, and it remains so in new inflections of the tale. Snow White delivers a timely message about survival even when the odds are not in your favor, as they surely are not for the heroine of “Snow White and the Huntsman,” who must now stand up to both a perverse stepmother and a hostile Mother Nature.

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