Who Is The Fairest of Them All?

Fantasy Retellings of Snow White

To add to my discussion of Snow White and of Disney’s assault on fairy tales, I want to offer a short list of what I consider the best fantasy retellings of the original story. This is by no means an exclusive list; just some of my favorites.

1. Tanith Lee, White as Snow (2000). Lee was an astoundingly talented and very prolific writer of dark fantasy. She is posthumously getting the recognition she deserves. White as Snow, like most of her fantasy novels, is a mixture of erudite mythmaking, history, eroticism, and unbridled imagination.

   

2. Another book by Tanith Lee, who may be the best modern fairy-tale writer, on a par with Hans-Christian Andersen and George Macdonald. This is a collection, first published in 1983, and each fairy tale in it is shocking, beautiful, thought-provoking, and magical. Lee’s stories mix motifs from different sources, so it includes two tales referencing Snow White: “Red as Blood” and “Black as Ink

   

3. Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (1979). This pioneering feminist collection of fairy tales is just as provocative as Lee’s stories but, in my opinion, has less of the enchantment of the folkloric originals. Carter was a postmodernist writer whose novels often exhibit stylistic innovations and complex POVs. I admire her, but when I want to lose myself in the magic of the Fairyland, I turn to Lee. The story closest to “Snow White” in this collection is called “The Snow Child”, and it IS shocking. Nowadays, it would be plastered with trigger warnings. Consider yourself warned

   

   4. Neil Gaiman, “Snow, Glass, Apples” (1994). Snow White in this tale is a monster. Of course, she is. Red as blood, white as nothingness, black as death, she lies in a glass coffin neither dead nor alive. She kills her mother. She is surrounded by monstrous nonhuman trolls. And no, I am not paraphrasing Gaiman. I am telling the Grimm Brother’s story and the ones that preceded it.

   

4. “Snow White and the Huntsman” (2012). Not a cinematic masterpiece by any means, it nevertheless picks up on some of the important motifs of the original: beauty is power; evil is as evil does; the dwarves are not “vertically challenged” humans but supernatural creatures akin to elves; and the happy ending is never either final or happy. It has some impressive visual effects, and Charlize Theron as the Queen is quite good. Its success shows that cinematic adaptations that respect the darkness and magic of the originals have an audience. Will Disney listen? I don’t think so

   

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