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Criticism Of Snow White

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If the mirror is interpreted as the symbol of a husband, it might explain the literal absence of the King in the story (Barzilai, 1990). It is possible that the Queen is fighting for the attention of her husband. The growth of Snow White to become a more beautiful female than her mother means the end of an era for the Queen. She is no longer a youthful lady, but a mother of a grown up daughter. It is very common in patriarchal societies to view woman as ‘mothers’ after a certain age. Giving birth resonates with a distorted body image. Mothers carry the marks of birth giving and breastfeeding on their bodies. They transform from a state of seductiveness to a mother. Their role is reduced to a domestic caretaker for the children. It represents …show more content…

However, it does not mean that he is altogether absent from the narrative. He might not be mentioned for a lot of reasons, such as not to demonstrate a direct interference, but some interpretations consider him to have a strong existence in the sub-text. Barzilai (1990) makes an analysis of Snow White based on the father’s law in psychoanalytic theory and she examines the story from the mother’s (Queen) perspective.
According to Barzilai (1990), Freudian theory could be applied to the reading of Snow White. The story is based on the love for one parent (King) and hate for the other (Queen). Although Electra complex is not credited as much as Oedipus complex in the literature of psychology, it presents a strong critique of the …show more content…

When we apply this view to the story of Snow White, we can see how Queen is made to be an evil female character. Before Snow White was born, the Queen did not have diabolic characteristics in the text. She was a woman peacefully dreaming about having a beautiful daughter. She did not gain the evil features attributed to her until after Snow White came to a certain age. At that point, Snow White was declared as the new beauty by the mirror. In other words, patriarchal forces placed her crown on her daughter. On the other hand, Gilbert and Gubar’s view that the monster and the angel might be in the same body, mean that the Queen and Snow White are one and the same personality. It might be interpreted that the patriarchal system breaks them apart instead of letting them live in harmony in the same house. When the whole breaks apart, one of them takes the monstrous side and the other one takes the angelic side forming a binary

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