In “Snow White and the Huntsman,” Kristen Stewart plays a princess who sets out to kill an evil queen. (Universal Pictures)
Ginnifer Goodwin in “Once Upon a Time.” She references the Grimm’s version, playing up Snow White’s vanity. (ABC)
For going on 400 years, Snow White has been the most boring princess in fairy tale history. Without magic or wit or nerve, she does pretty much nothing until the day she eats an apple and dies. She does, however, make a fetching corpse, displayed in a gleaming see-through coffin until her prince shows up and kisses her back into bliss.
Snow White’s main achievement, besides being pretty enough to inspire a wicked queen to try to kill her, is teaching the seven dwarves how to clean their own house.
Which wouldn’t seem to bode well for the hottest new heroine in Hollywood, the role actresses are clamoring to play.
Yet Snow White is this spring’s character of the moment.
“We’re modernizing [her],” explains Lily Collins, who plays the dwarf-befriending princess in “Mirror, Mirror,” out Friday. Helmed by Tarsem Singh (“Immortals”), it’s a lavish, comic update of the fairy tale about the clash between a young innocent (Collins) and an evil, narcissistic queen (Julia Roberts).
“She starts out as the familiar fairy-tale princess that everyone grew up knowing, wide-eyed and naive,” says Collins, “but she goes on to be a girl who fights for what she believes in.”
And fights would be the key word, both for “Mirror” and the other film following hot on its heels,“Snow White and the Huntsman,” out in June and starring Kristen Stewart of “Twilight.” Stewart’s Snow is clad in chain mail and wields a sword and shield. Meanwhile, Ginnifer Goodwin plays a significantly more self-possessed, if unarmed, version of the character on ABC’s fairy-tale drama “Once Upon a Time.”
Collectively, they’re rebranding the age-old fairy tale, making Snow White into much more than a credulous babe who whistles while she works and takes fruit from strangers.
Stewart’s Snow “is a hardened warrior and will no longer bow down to the pressure of the Evil Queen,” Chris Hemsworth, who plays the Huntsman in “Snow White,” told Web site SciFi Now.
“I, for one, am happy to see Snow White break out of the iconic virginal girl who needs to be saved, and to see her in action fighting for herself,” says Melissa Silverstein of the site Women and Hollywood. “We want to see strong women taking control of their lives, even if it is in a fairy tale. Maybe this Snow White will even be a feminist.”
It’s safe to say Snow White did not start out as a feminist; from her earliest incarnation, in 1634, she was “passive and dumb,” says SUNY Stony Brook research professor Ruth Sue Bottigheimer, author of “Fairy Tales and New History.”
The character came into being gradually, Bottigheimer says. “There’s a girl in a glass coffin in an early 17th-century story. And that sort of gets picked up about 150 years later and made into another story, and then the Grimms put it in the shape that we know it today.”
There have been theories that Snow White was inspired by a real person; a German scholar proposed than she was based on a girl of German nobility named Maria Sophia Margaretha Catharina von Erthal, born in 1729 and burdened with a hateful stepmother. (There is a “talking mirror” on display in the Spessart Museum in Lohr am Main, Germany, where Maria lived).
But this notion has been debunked by literary academics, including Bottigheimer, who points out that the story originated a century earlier than that. “There have been a couple of attempts to show that the story of Snow White is based on the fate of a historical figure, but they are pure speculation and not at all convincing,” says Donald Haase, a professor at Michigan’s Wayne State University who specializes in folklore.
The definitive version of “Snow White,” compiled by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, features a princess who is all sweetness and light, even though the tale overall — like every Grimm story — is full of menace, violence and grisly death.
In the traditional story, Snow White is born to a young queen who dies after giving birth. She’s raised by her father and his new wife, who is insanely jealous of her stepdaughter’s beauty — the queen’s talking mirror informs her she’s not quite as pretty — and thus enlists a huntsman to take the princess into the forest and kill her.
He can’t do it, so he lets her go, and she finds her way to a cottage inhabited by friendly dwarves. She’s eventually found by the disguised queen, bearing a poisoned apple. Although Snow White eats the apple and dies, it’s only temporary — she’s rescued by a prince who revives her and falls in love with her.
The final lines, which describe the wicked queen being forced to attend the wedding of Snow White and Prince Charming, aren’t the stuff of typical family fare:
“Iron slippers had already been put upon the fire, and they were brought in with tongs, and set before her. Then she was forced to put on the red-hot shoes, and dance until she dropped down dead.”
The moral there? Payback’s
a bitch.
As fictional tales, go, it’s a fairly dark one. For one thing, there’s a tinge of class prejudice in the wicked queen’s entreaty to the mirror: “Who’s the fairest of them all?”
“Having fair skin was a mark of beauty in the northern European world,” says Bottigheimer. “You contrast that with a ‘nut-brown girl’ in some of the medieval lyrics, that’s a farm girl. A fair girl is one who doesn’t have to go out and work.”
Nor does she have to be all that smart. Tellingly, says Bottigheimer, Snow White doesn’t only fall for the poisoned-apple. “That’s the third thing,” she says. “The first time she’s offered a poisoned comb. The second time, [her corset is] laced up so tightly that she can’t breathe.”
One thing she was always known for, though, was her domestic skills. “Let’s remember the central importance of a girl who’s not only beautiful, but keeps house well,” says Bottigheimer, referencing Snow’s upkeep of the seven dwarves’ cottage.
The cheerful, cleaning princess can be seen in Disney’s indelible 1937 “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” still the defining version of the story for most. Intended to be family-friendly, it was scrubbed of some unsavory aspects of the Grimm tale — the red-hot shoe torture, as well as the wicked queen’s request for the huntsman to bring her the “lung and liver” of Snow White as a token — and imbued with upbeat messages.
Perhaps befitting our solipsistic times, the makers of “Mirror, Mirror” have attributed a different message to their telling of the tale, turning the focus away from Snow White’s altruistic cleaning services and more toward her strength of character.
But they’re also chipping away at passive princess behavior. “In classic fairy tales, the princess waits for the prince to come for her,” says producer Kevin Misher. “In our story, the princess has to not only be her own rescuer, but also help the prince [Armie Hammer]. That’s a very modern spin on it, I think.”
“Snow White and the Huntsman” director Rupert Sanders takes the princess-as-rescuer theme further, making Stewart’s Snow White into a literal warrior. But he insists he’s not trying to fashion her into a kind of superhero.
“She wears a suit of armor, but she’s not suddenly Bruce Lee’s adopted sister,” he told IFC.com. “She is wearing armor for protection and she has to kill a queen. It’s very instinctual, it’s defensive. She knows she has to kill someone, and that sword lies very uneasy in her hand.”
Ginnifer Goodwin, while developing her own spin on the character for “Once Upon a Time,” says she came up with a more critical take on Snow White. “I read a lot about [her] vanity and her competition with her evil stepmother — and that greatly changed how I saw [her],” she told the LA Times. “The Grimms’ version tells of Snow White’s vanity, and her not being able to turn down the beautiful comb that was offered to her by the hag. The message was that her vanity would kill her.”
The empowered (but possibly self-obsessed) Snow White has seemingly been taken in every possible direction, which may be why Disney recently abandoned a plan to make a live-action movie loosely based on “Snow White.”
Still, it seems that we’ll never really tire of princess tales, whatever their format.
“The classic Snow White story has lots of appeal,” says Haase. “It includes some very vivid characters and motifs — like the magic mirror, the poison apple and the dwarfs — and it deals with some intense emotions and drama, like the mother-daughter relationship, jealousy, murder and rebirth.”
Plus, says Silverstein, “Snow White is the perfect fairy tale. You’ve got the good girl, the pure Snow White, and the bad girl, the Evil Queen. Which is pretty much the box that all women get put into.”
stewart@nypost.com