Crafting the Witch by Breuer Heidi;

Author:Breuer, Heidi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

4

The Lady is a Hag

Three Writers and the Transformation of Magic in Sixteenth-Century England

I. WHO IS THE FAIREST ONE OF ALL?

The first thing we hear from the lips of the Wicked Queen in Disney’s Snow White isn’t the line for which she is famous, the line repeated by generations of American children, “Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” Instead, her first words summon the spirit within the magic mirror, commanding her “slave” from the “furthest spaces” to attend her. Her spirit possesses secret knowledge, knowledge that allows the queen to make important personal decisions, like whether or not to kill her stepdaughter because of her unparalleled beauty. The evil Queen is known for being vain and self-serving, but we seldom remember that she’s a conjurer of mysterious, knowledgeable spirits. First and foremost, in fact, the Queen is a conjurer, what medieval and Renaissance audiences might have called a necromancer or a demonologist.

Her interest in beauty is undeniable—she does seem to care very deeply about her success on the local fashion scene. Isn’t it true that beauty is power, after all? Especially for women, the (beauty) myth goes.1 The Queen is quite shrewd, actually, to watch the competition closely, but her Machiavellian tactics in her dealings with Snow White make her unsympathetic. Some mother, right? Her apparently vain interest in outward appearance only seems vain when read in the context of the late twentieth-century U.S., where it has become unfashionable to value beauty overtly (even as our mass media joyously engages in worshipful adoration of outward beauty and youth). In medieval texts, as we have seen, outward physical appearance reflects inward moral character: when we meet a grotesque hag in the forest or a club-wielding giant on the road, it is a clear signal that Something is Up. But the evil step-mother of Disney’s Snow White is not a grotesque hag, nor does she have the exaggerated features of the “ugly” sisters in Cinderella, Drizella and Anastasia, though her story is also an adaptation of a fairy tale collected by the Grimms (called “Schneewittchen”). Quite the contrary, in fact—she’s beautiful, with sumptuous clothing and a delicate red mouth under dark, mysterious eyes. The action of the tale requires the Queen to be vain about her beauty.

I think the Wicked Queen is quite lovely. But as far back as I can remember, whenever I watched the film, she scared the bejesus out of me. When her pale face first appears, reflected in the smoky magic mirror, it still sends shivers skating across the back of my neck. She’s beautiful, but she’s eevil! She’s the opposite of the loathly lady, whose grotesque shell hides a pearl of goodness: the queen’s beautiful veneer covers a core of pure hatred and ill will. Her transformation into the old hag with the tempting apple reconstructs her figure in a way that aligns it more closely with medieval typology—it is as if her moral character has been moved from the inside to the outside, the mask removed.

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