“It’s no longer 1937.” This seems to be Rachel Zegler’s catchphrase when speaking about her role as Snow White in the upcoming live-action remake of Disney’s first animated feature film. She says it with contempt. With raised eyebrows and an eye roll.
The original film is “extremely dated,” Zegler adds, in a recently resurfaced video from the 2022 D23 Expo. It leaves no room for “women being in roles of power” and is incredibly limited in its depiction of “what a woman is fit for in the world.” In other words, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is trash — horribly outdated and unforgivably anti-feminist. Good thing film historian and fairy tale scholar Rachel Zegler is here to set us straight.
Zegler, of course, is not a fairy tale scholar, nor is she a film historian — which is a relief. But she is an actress who has been hired to play a role, and, apparently, the entirety of her research into her character’s history can be boiled down to one insightful comment: “It’s no longer 1937.” Thank you for that, Ms. Zegler. We’ll adjust our calendars accordingly.
“The cartoon was made 85 years ago and therefore it’s extremely dated”
Snow White (2024) stars explain how they “reimagined” the story: pic.twitter.com/AA9XS22N7y
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 26, 2023
Sadly, Zegler’s apparent ignorance is common. We, as a culture, have forgotten how to read fairy tales. What’s more, we’ve forgotten that the original Disney princess movies were based on them. It may not be 1937 — the year in which Walt Disney’s groundbreaking film was released — but (shocker!) Disney didn’t write the story of Snow White. It exists within the canon of Western fairy tales made popular by the Brothers Grimm in 1812 and, later in the century, by the likes of Hans Christian Andersen and George MacDonald.
Fairy tales, we used to understand, are not meant to be taken literally. They are allegories, filled with symbolic elements that weave a metaphorical tapestry to impart universal truths. A dark forest represents inner turmoil, a mirror always reflects the truth, outer beauty is a stand-in for inner goodness, and so on. (You can read much more on this here.) Viewed this way, Snow White — Zegler would be shocked to learn — is a uniquely female story. It’s about women’s bodies and the changes that bring them into adulthood.
In her book Spinning Straw into Gold, Joan Gould makes the case that Snow White is a story about female puberty. It’s about the moment in which the older, menopausal woman discovers that the young girl in her care has become a woman. “Snow White’s body has begun to change by the time her story is under way,” writes Gould. “We know this from the violence of her stepmother’s reaction to her beauty.” And it culminates in Snow White’s encounter with the apple — a symbol, as in Genesis, of knowledge and awakening. Snow White falls asleep a girl and awakens a woman via true love’s kiss — the symbolic representation of her new role as a full-fledged woman.
Child psychologist and author of The Uses of Enchantment Bruno Bettelheim agrees: “[T]he central motif of ‘Snow White’ is the pubertal girl’s surpassing in every way the evil stepmother who, out of jealousy, denies her an independent existence.” In truth, this story is about a woman coming into her own. About puberty and periods. About a girl coming to terms with her womanhood and a woman raging against the effects of age. It’s a feminist story — in the true sense of the word. And it’s glorious.
But we’ve forgotten all that. In the years since Disney’s Snow White, a body of criticism has grown up around these fairy tales — and their Disney counterparts — that has become ubiquitous. You can see it in modern commentary on the film. A New York Times 1987 article on Snow White pretty much sums it up: “No sooner has she been awakened from her enchanted sleep than Snow White allows herself to be swept up by the handsome prince, deposited on horseback and led away to the prince’s castle, where there is undoubtedly more cleaning to be done.” In 2001, Roger Ebert wrote, “Snow White is, truth to tell, a bit of a bore, not a character who acts but one whose mere existence inspires others to act.” And now Zegler.
If you take Snow White literally, you end up with a story about a girl who’s stupid enough to accept a snack from an old hag and falls asleep until a stranger kisses her without her consent and marries her without asking. Looked at this way, Zegler’s contempt might be justified, and Gal Gadot (who plays the Evil Queen) might have a point when she celebrates that Zegler’s Snow White is “not gonna be saved by the prince.” But Zegler and Gadot are merely parroting modern talking points about stories that have been with us for centuries. Stories that have stayed with us for centuries. Because they mean something to us. Because they matter.
It’s no longer 1937. It’s 2023. Isn’t it time we remembered how to read fairy tales?