Gender Roles In Snow White By Jacob And Wilhelm Grimm

In the adaption of the classic fairy tale, Snow White, as told by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm the authors portray the feminist topics of the obsession with beauty and gender roles. In the story, a young girl named Snow White is target by her evil stepmother, the Queen, due to her beauty. In the story Snow White is deemed helpless and needs the protection of men. Both the treatment and actions of Snow White symbolises the gender roles and stereotypes of society.
For Snow White, in order to obtain protection and shelter at the dwarves house she had to perform the traditional roles of a woman such as cooking and cleaning. The dwarves told her, "If you will keep house for us, and cook, make beds, wash, sew, and knit, and keep everything clean and orderly, then you can stay with us,". This passage reflects the gender roles portrayed in the story, because If Snow White had been a boy the dwarves would have asked her to help the work in the mines or with other manual labor. The novel also describes Snow White as completely dependant on the dwarves for protection due to her characterization of innocence and foolishness. Unable to protect herself when the dwarves leave her alone, she falls prey to the Queen’s
death tricks.
Unlike Snow White, the Queen has escaped the typical gender roles for females as she separated herself from the men in her life.
The story described the Queen as, “ a beautiful woman, but … proud and arrogant,”. Her actions also implies a sense of distance between the Queen and King because the Queen’s arrogance and proud personality leads her to push the men in her life away. Thus the Queen appeared more powerful than the King. The King appears ignorant as he apparently turned a blind eye towards the Queen’s actions toward his daughter, Snow White. The King’s ignorance of the Queen and his failure to act in Snow White's disappearance leads the Queen to appear with absolute power. But, this also implies because of her power she can not hold a relationship with the
King.
Although the Queen obsessed over her superiority in beauty compared to Snow White, both the Queen and snow White use their looks to gain power. The Queen used her beauty to woo the King and thus become the Queen. In the beauty she used to gain her power she finds a hatred for her own stepdaughter, Snow White,
The queen took fright and turned yellow and green with envy. From that hour on whenever she looked at Snow-White her heart turned over inside her body, so great was her hatred for the girl. The envy and pride grew ever greater, like a weed in her heart, until she had no peace day and night.
The Queen’s obsession with her beauty led her to experience delusional thoughts where she saw Snow White as a threat to her power. The Queen viewed beauty as her only source of power and concluded that Snow White would ruin her life. Just as the Queen feared, Snow White used her beauty to manipulate the huntsman when the Queen wanted her killed, “Because she was so beautiful the huntsman took pity on her, and he said, "Run away, you poor child." In this passage, Snow white’s embodiment of the characterization the queen feared she would follow, symbolizes the Queen’s actions as a form of self preservation. “Snow White” has remained popular as a classic fairy tale for 204 years when the Grimm brothers published their book of fairy tales. Today it is adapted into thousands of movies, novels, and plays all of which contain similar feminist topics, which reflect the gender roles and stereotypes of today.