The figure of the stepmother in Snow White and the Huntsman

TRABAJO FIN DE GRADO
Título
The figure of the stepmother in Snow White and the
Huntsman
Autor/es
Rebeca Lerena Repes
Director/es
José Díaz-Cuesta Galián
Facultad
Facultad de Letras y de la Educación
Titulación
Grado en Estudios Ingleses
Departamento
Curso Académico
2014-2015
The figure of the stepmother in Snow White and the Huntsman, trabajo fin de
grado
de Rebeca Lerena Repes, dirigido por José Díaz-Cuesta Galián (publicado por la
Universidad de La Rioja), se difunde bajo una Licencia
Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 3.0 Unported.
Permisos que vayan más allá de lo cubierto por esta licencia pueden solicitarse a los
titulares del copyright.
©
©
El autor
Universidad de La Rioja, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2016
publicaciones.unirioja.es
E-mail: publicaciones@unirioja.es
Resumen:
Este trabajo pretende analizar una versión diferente de ―
Blancanieves‖, el clásico de
Wilhelm y Jacob Grimm. A través de una mezcla de estudio comparativo y un estudio
basado en el análisis textual de la película, el ensayo examina la figura de la madrastra
de Blancanieves en la versión de Rupert Sanders, Snow White and the Huntsman
(2012), comparándola con otras madrastras presentes en cuentos de hadas y revisando
las secuencias principales en las que aparece la reina, con el fin de analizar el carácter,
la personalidad y los símbolos de dicho personaje. Esta versión es un giro moderno del
clásico cuento de hadas que podría incluso ser considerado como feminista, en el cual
Blancanieves no lleva vestidos, sino una armadura; y la madrastra, considerada como el
personaje más poderoso de la historia, no es derrotada por un príncipe sino por la
princesa.
Abstract:
The present dissertation intends to analyze a different version of a classical fairy tale,
Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm‘s, Snow White. Through a mixture of comparative and textbased analysis of the film, this study examines the figure of Snow White‘s stepmother
in Rupert Sanders‘s Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), comparing it with other
stepmothers present in classical fairy tales and revising the main sequences in which the
evil queen appears in order to analyze this character‘s personality and symbols. This
version is a modern twist of the classical fairy tale which could be even considered as a
feministic one, in which Snow White does not wear a dress, but an armour; and the
stepmother, considered as the most powerful character in the story, is not defeated by a
man but by the princess.
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THE FIGURE OF THE STEPMOTHER IN SNOW WHITE AND THE
HUNTSMAN
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction……………………………………………………...…………………..7
1.1. Introduction and justification………………….…………………………….7
1.2. Origin of fairy tales and the role of women…………………………………7
1.3. The contemporary American fairy tale……………………………………...9
1.4. Objectives of the analysis.……………………….…………………………10
1.5. Methodology used in the analysis……………….…………………………11
2. Snow White………………………………………………………………………13
2.1. Grimm‘s story……………………………………………………………13
2.2. Snow White‘s Versions.………………………………………………….15
2.2.1. Walt Disney ……………………………………………………15
2.2.2. Mirror, Mirror…………………………………………………..17
2.2.3. Blancanieves……………………………………………………17
3. The stepmother……………………………………………………………………19
3.1. The figure of the stepmother……………………………………………..19
3.2. Other villains……………………………………………………………...21
3.2.1. Maleficient……………………………………………………..21
3.2.2. Lady Tremaine…………………………………………………23
3.3. Other ―
evil queens‖ in Snow White stories……………………………….26
3.3.1. Disney‘s evil queen……………………………………………..27
3.3.2. Julia Roberts‘s evil queen……………………………………….29
3.3.3. Maribel Verdú‘s evil queen……………………………………..31
4. The figure of the stepmother in Snow White and the Huntsman……………….35
4.1. Charlize Theron……………………………………………………………35
4.2. Ravenna……………………………………………………………………37
4.2.1. Symbolism in the film……………………………………………41
4.2.2. Vanity…………………………………………………………….43
5. Conclusions…………………………………………………………………………45
References……………………………………………………………………………..47
Annex: Conclusiones………………………………………………………………….50
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1. Introduction
1.1. Introduction and justification
This dissertation examines the role of Snow White‘s stepmother, Ravenna, in Snow
White and the Huntsman (Sanders 2012), taking into account the role of women in
Anglo-American movies in general too.
When I chose this topic, I realized that nowadays, fairy tales are present
everywhere: bookshops, toys, clothes, advertisements; figures like Snow White or
Sleeping Beauty can even appear in porn films.
Why Snow White and the Huntsman? I had watched this movie before I chose it
and Ravenna got stuck in my mind. Her costumes, character, appearance, the halo of
mystery that surrounds her... I did not remember practicallty anything about Snow
White or the Huntsman, which is curious, the only thing I could recall was Charlize
Theron‘s character; like Rick Groen claims: ―
Yes, there are many splendid reasons to
see Snow White and the Huntsman – enough, maybe, not to care that neither Snow
White nor the Huntsman rank high among them.‖ (2012) And in Elizabeth Weitzman
words, ―
it‘s Theron who owns this film, imbuing her deliciously depraved Queen with
furious pain and deep-seated fear.‖ (2012) So I thought that, being Ravenna the real
protagonist of this film, the study of the stepmother would be a good way to revise a
classical story in a different way.
Lots of modern films are new versions of classical fairy tales, Snow White and the
Huntsman, Maleficient (Stromberg 2014), Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (Wirkola
2013) or Red Riding Hood (Hardwicke 2011). In these films they twist the original story
in order to give a different dimension to the fairy tale gender; we are going to go
through several films of this kind and, the final point will study the figure of Ravenna in
Snow White and the Huntsman.
1.2. Origin of fairy tales and the role of women
Roger Sale in his book Fairy Tales and After (1978) claims that ―
the term fairy tale is
only a convenience since few stories we call by that name contain fairies, elves,
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leprechauns or similar creatures.‖ (1978: 23) However, people agree on the kind of
stories that can be included in the category of fairy tales, such as myths, legends,
romances or folk fables. The stories we know nowadays were not written by Hans
Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault or Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm; they just compiled
them and they actually come from oral tradition.
For a correct understanding of the origin of fairy tales we must try to understand
how the literary fairy tale emerged in the France of the seventeenth century. According
to Jack Zipes (1994), fairy tales were not thought for children in the first place but for
well-educated adults and they were first developed in salons by aristocratic women as a
type of parlour game. By the end of the seventeenth century this practice became so
acceptable that women and men began to write down the stories and published them.
In 1700 there still were not literary fairy tales for children. Women used these
fairy tales as a way to evade reality; they imagined their lives improved, not following
the masculine standards. While this discourse was becoming accepted by women and
more slowly by man, it gradually became a way to moralize children.
Zipes claims that it was Madame D‘Aulnoy who changed this vision of the fairy
tales. She belonged to aristocracy and she dared to defy the patriarchal society; she
wanted women to be pictured from their own point of view with regard to topics such as
tender love, fidelity, courtship, honour and arranged marriages.
She played an important role defending women within her writings: women she
described were in control over their lives and destinies. Moreover, she exposed the
decadent practices and behaviour among the people of her class.
Nevertheless, her female protagonists still follow a patriarchal code, in which
they are submissive; although she is very critical with certain aspects such as arranged
marriages. She was taken as a model by other fairy-tale writers of her time.
This model of fairy tales that try to be feministic but still present women that
follow patriarchal code has a lot to do with Snow White and the Huntsman (Sanders
2012). In the movie, the only women who does not follow patriarchal codes is Ravenna,
she is the queen and there is not a person more powerful than her; however she ends up
being killed. Snow White is an example of these feministic characters that still need
men in order to survive: she is the heroine in the movie, but without the Huntsman‘s
help she would have died on the woods.
Back to the subject matter, the origin of fairy tales for children has not a clear
date, but it is estimated that it arose during 1720s or 1730s approximately. Due to this
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change of receptors, the social function of fairy tales changed too: now they were meant
to educate and amuse at the same time. Children of the upper classes were the first
receptors of this new genre.
Zipes (1994: 33) claims that it was Madame Beaumont who institutionalized a
model of fairy tales for children: they have a didactic function, they must be short so
children can remember them, they must be restricted so they can be easily distributed,
they must address social problems as class or sex roles, they must be appropriate to use
them at school and finally they ―
must reinforce a notion of power within the children of
the upper classes and suggest ways for them to maintain power.‖ (1994: 33)
1.3. The contemporary American fairy tale
In order to illustrate the evolution of fairy tales, we will use the theory of Friedmar
Apel, which states that the main fight of fairy tales is imagination against reality. Apel
claims that nowadays we do not believe the worlds that fairy tales present to ourselves
so the basis of fairy tale is not legitimate anymore:
This position is quite radical and must be qualified but if we take Walt Disney as
an example we observe that this industry has distributed sweetened versions of
traditional fairy tales. Nevertheless, we must take seriously amusement and distraction,
because the fact that we enjoy fairy tales does not mean that they do not have
ideological function. So, in spite of what Apel claims, the current fairy tale has
maintained its utopian vision and message.
One of the things that distinguish American fairy tale in the twentieth century is
that it has questioned gender roles and defied patriarchal society. However, as Zipes
observes:
just as feminisms and feminist movement have been culturally
exploited and compromised by the mass media and turned against
themselves, the fairy tale that seeks to maintain its utopian purpose
and social critique is always in danger of being defused and
transformed into mere entertainment. (1994: 141)
Several examples of this American fairy tale are TV series based on fairy tales as
Michael Ende‘s Neverending Story (1979) or Once Upon a Time (Horowitz and Kitsis
2011) which focus on the story of Snow White‘s daughter in the beginning but ends up
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dealing with every fairy tale/Disney movie that exists. All the characters of fairy tales
live in a village called Storybrook and they are unaware of their true identities because
they are under a magic spell. It can be found in this TV series, the feminist notion
previous mentioned: the heroin of the story is Snow White and Prince Charming‘s
daughter.
Nowadays fairy tales have evolved, and now they mask female submission and
male domination. The greatest example of this is Walt Disney movies. As Jack Zipes
claims, in Disney‘s version of Beauty and the Beast (Trouslade and Wise 1992), it
would seem that the story is completely different as Beauty is now a bookish woman
who is not afraid to speak her mind. It could even be seen as feministic. However, the
story is still the same: ―
the young woman who sacrifices herself for her father and for
the improvement of a monster such as the Beast. […] In addition, there is the macho
Gaston, who represents the evil violent male side as counterpart to the Beast.‖ (1994:
46) In fact, this version is very similar to Disney‘s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(Cottrell, Hand, Jackson, Morey, Pearce and Sharpsteen 1937): both Beauty and Snow
White wanted to change their lives and both of them are rescued by the same kind of
prince.
Rupert Sanders‘ version of Snow White; Snow White and the Huntsman is a clear
example of what has been discussed: in the story, Snow White is the real heroine and
the prince is not the one who rescues her, she is rescued by the Huntsman in the first
place but she is the one who kills the Queen. At first sight, this film could be interpreted
as feministic, but it is actually the Huntsman who makes Snow White survive, and the
only real powerful feminine character is Ravenna who ends up dead.
Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) is a modern version of Grimm‘s classical
story, which can have lots of interpretations, thus it is sometimes feministic but actually
follows patriarchal system. Its main aim is entertainment, yet it can be seen as
moralizing too.
1.4. Objectives of the analysis
The main objective in this dissertation is the study of Ravenna, Snow White‘s
stepmother in Snow White and the Huntsman (Sanders, 2012). Ravenna is one of the
most interesting characters in this new fashion of fairy tales twisted into modern
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versions, she is a powerful woman in a world made for men. In order to analyze
Ravenna we will study Ravenna‘s character, behaviour, dressing and in comparison
with other stepmothers and villains in fairy tales and also with other powerful women in
cinema in general in addition with the analysis of the most relevant sequences of the
film with regard to this topic. We will revise several films in order to understand how
the role of woman has evolved in cinema, if there are more feministic films than before
or if the patriarchal code is still imposed to women.
1.5. Methodology used in the analysis
In this analysis we will be using the comparative method and the text-based analysis
method, which examines the narrative and the iconic level (visual and sound codes) of
the film and the effect that these levels altogether produce in the spectator. In order to
follow this method we will study the images that characterise Ravenna in the film.
For the comparative part of the dissertation we will use Algirdas Julius Greimas‘s
theory which understands the characters as functions. Greimas thought of a narrative
model in which every subject tends to an object and this subject has helpers and
opponents and every story has an addressed and an addressee or recipient. In the general
structure (Table 1) of Snow White and the Huntsman (Sanders 2012): Snow White
would be the subject and Ravenna the opponent; the object would be the throne and the
dwarfs Snow White‘s helpers. In this film the huntsman would be at the same time
helper and opponent because he is first allied with the queen. The object would be the
throne, the sender would be Snow White, as she is the one who kills Ravenna and gets
the throne, and the recipients would be Snow White herself and the huntsman, because
he will marry Snow White once she has the throne. These character functions are very
important within this movie, as they will allow us to compare this film with others.
Sender: Snow White
Helper: Dwarfs/Huntsman
Object: Throne
Recipient: Snow
White/Huntsman
Subject: Snow White
Opponent:
Ravenna/Huntsman
Table 1
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As we are studying a movie we consider it important to use the text-based method
(complementing it with image and sound from the film) in order to provide the full
image of the character we are analyzing. However the original written version of Jacob
and Wilhelm Grimm must be taken into account to make this analysis exhaustive and
complete.
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2. Snow White
Snow White (1812) is the central work of the brothers Grimm and the starter of Walt
Disney‘s career in 1937 with his version Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
According to Sheldon Cashdan, Snow White meets the perfect fairy tale cycle: ―
a
threshold crossing, an encounter with a witch (the evil stepmother), the defeat of the
witch, and a happy ending.‖ (1999: 40).
In Snow White stories, the evil queen is a symbol of vanity and the young Snow
White fights the obsessive preoccupation with her appearance. The triumph of the good
is represented by the defeat of the queen and her death will be necessary in order to
make the victory of the good real.
The queen or the stepmother in Snow White is always presented to us as a
horrible person, it does not matter the version because the idea is always pretty much
the same. The fact that makes the queen such a hideous person is not just that she wants
Snow White dead, but that she wants to eat her guts. That provides the
readers/spectators the hate the writers are longing for, that gives them a reason to kill
her and they give us, as receptors, a reason to wish her death.
In this point we are going to analyze several versions of Snow White in order to
compare them with Rupert Sanders‘s Snow White and the Huntsman (2012). We need to
know what makes them special and what remains from the original version in order to
understand how the role of women has evolved throughout history
2.1. Grimm’s story
As it has been stated before, in this study we are going to deal with Sander‘s version of
Snow White, Snow White and the Huntsman and we are also going to compare it with
Grimm‘s Snow White which is actually the source for all the current versions of Snow
White. In Why Fairy Tales Stick (2006) Zipes recalls the beginning of this version:
The tale begins with a queen, who desires to have a child on whom
she wants to bestow particular traits that will enable her offspring to
survive – ―
a child as white as snow, as red as blood and as black as the
wood of the window frame.‖ She dies, and her child will be set in
competition with another female, ―
a beautiful lady, but proud and
13
arrogant and could not bear being second to anyone in beauty.‖ (2006:
135)
The first two paragraphs suggest that the background of the story is going to deal
with competition, selection, ambition and vanity.
The story plot is very similar to the most famous one, Walt Disney‘s although
Rupert Sander‘s version is closer to Grimm‘s but still very different. The beginning of
Grimm‘s story is the same as Sander‘s; the mother is alive and three drops of blood fall
into the snow, reflecting the bond between a mother (blood) and her child (snow).
Disney‘s version starts with the mother already dead, but the storyline is the same as
Grimm‘s until the moment Snow White meets the dwarfs. Once she is living with them
the story changes: Snow White is not only tempted once, but three times: first with
laces, second with a comb and third with the famous apple.
Sanders omitted the first two temptations that appeared in Grimm‘s story because
he did not want her strong and man-like heroine to be portrayed as weak.
The apple and the glass coffin are the greatest symbols of vanity of this story. The
apple embodies the vanity dilemma: what is more important, the surface (the perfect red
skin of the apple) or what is inside (poison)? With this, we try to teach children that
beauty lies inside but they are saturated with the vanity industry. We tell tales to avoid
such things, so stories like Snow White teach kids that we should not give too much
relevance to appearance.
The glass coffin is another symbol of vanity, even though Snow White is dead,
she is still beautiful and she cannot be buried because she must be admired.
In the first two occasions the dwarfs rescue her but the third time they find her
dead and they decide not to bury her because of her beauty so they put her in a glass
coffin instead. When the prince appears he falls in love with Snow White‘s appearance
so he wants to take her to his palace. When his servants are taking her, one of them
stumbles and the poisoned apple flies from Snow White‘s throat, wakening her. After
that, Snow White and the Prince celebrate their wedding and the Evil Queen, who
thinks Snow White is dead, is invited too. When she arrives she is forced to dance with
red-iron hot shoes to death:
When she entered the hall, she recognized Snow White. The evil
queen was so petrified with fright that she could not budge. Iron
slippers had already been heated over a fire, and they were brought
14
over to her with tongs. Finally, she had to put on the red-hot slippers
and dance until she fell down dead. (Zipes, 1992: 2041)
As the beginning stated, the queen considers Snow White a competitor for her
beauty and she wants to erase her. The moral of the story is punishment: the queen must
be punished because she must not kill her stepdaughter.
2.2. Snow White’s Versions
In this point, we are going to introduce three versions of Snow White that are very
relevant to our study: Walt Disney‘s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Mirror, Mirror
and Blancanieves. The first one must be analyzed because it is through Disney movies
that we first get in touch with fairy tales, while the others are kind of similar to
Sanders‘s: they are modern versions of a classical fairy tale that introduce twists in the
plot that tells us a lot about our society.
2.2.1. Walt Disney
Walt Disney managed to turn the German story of Snow White into a purely American
film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Cottrell, Hand, Jackson, Morey, Pearce and
Sharpsteen 1937). According to Zipes (2006: 203, 204) he induced several changes in
the film that made it an American story:
1. In Grimm‘s version, we witness the death of both parents while in Disney‘s
Snow White is already an orphan at the beginning.
2. The prince appears at the beginning and he is devoted to Snow White.
3. The Queen is jealous of Snow White‘s beauty and of the love of the prince.
4. Animals that help Snow White.
5. Dwarfs seen as hardworking and representing, through their names, human
characteristics.
6. The Queen is killed by accident while in Grimm‘s story she is punished to death.
7. Snow White is returned to life by her prince.
1
From: Zipes, J. ed. 1992 (1987). The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. USA: Bantam.
15
However, we observe that the changes made by Disney did not change the
essentials; women are portrayed as weak characters that need men‘s approval and help
to live their lives. The representation of male domination in this movie would be the
mirror, because he is the one that approves the beauty or ugliness of the queen and
Snow White and they, especially the queen, are ruled by it.
As Zipes points out, this story is, in fact, framed by the prince: he appears at the
beginning announcing his love to Snow White and does not reappear until Snow
White‘s dead, when he saves her and they live happily ever after. While the prince is
seen as powerful and the saviour, Snow White is pictured a ―
helpless ornament in need
of protection.‖ (2006: 205) This makes the biggest difference between this film and
Sanders‘s; here the prince is the hero but in Sanders‘s Snow White is at the same time
the princess and the heroine. In Ed Gonzalez words, ―
Though the film intriguingly
thumbs its nose at the Prince Charming fantasy, hinting that the huntsman, not the royal
William (Sam Claflin), is her true beloved, the story remains curiously reticent about
romance and what Snow White wants both as a woman and a warrior.‖ (2012) The
feminist version of Snow White does not care about conventions the same way as
Disney‘s did, but it still does.
The dwarfs represent the lower social class of workers that go work singing ‗Hi
Ho, it‘s off to work we go‘, but Disney pictured them not just as hard workers but as
miniature clowns too. In Grimm‘s story, the dwarfs took care of Snow White but in
Disney‘s Snow White looks after them. Moreover, they represent the patriarchal code
and the greatest example of this is when Snow White wakes up and meets the dwarfs;
they let her stay with them because she is going to take care of the home duties.
If we analyze this film in terms of Greimas‘s characters functions (Table 2):
Sender: Mirror
Object: Beauty
Helper: Dwarfs
Subject: Snow White
Recipient: Snow White
Opponent:
Stepmother/Huntsman
Table 2
As can be observed the subject, the helper, the recipient and the opponent remain the
same, while the sender and the object change. The object is not the throne anymore but
beauty: it is not a question of power but of vanity. The sender is now the mirror, as he is
the one who names the fairest of them all; like we said before it represents male
domination.
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2.2.2. Mirror, Mirror
Mirror, Mirror (Singh 2012) pictures women as silly, vain and dependent on men. One
of the main differences between this story and others is that the evil queen is the one
who tells the story with a cynical tone, and therefore it is her point of view we know, as
she states at the beginning of the film: ―thisis my story, not hers.‖
The storyline of Mirror, Mirror follows the same structure as Grimm‘s: Snow
White‘s mother dies in childbirth and her father marries again and disappears. Snow
White is once again abandoned by her parents to a hideous woman. In this version we
have no huntsman, but a queen‘s servant who is commanded to kill her. He spares her
life and she is rescued by the dwarfs, who are no longer honest workers but thieves.
The way the stepmother is defeated is similar to Sander‘s, Snow White defeats her
by breaking the curse the evil queen had put on his father.
This story focuses on the prince and Snow White‘s love story which has to
overcome difficulties like the queen‘s magic and the fight with the monster in the dark
woods, but in the end they marry and live happily ever after.
The fact that the queen and Snow White are not competing for the land but for the
love of a man, perpetuates the patriarchal code and makes Greimas character function
(Table 3) completely different;
Sender: Mirror
Object: Marriage
Recipient: Snow White
Helper: Dwarfs/King
Subject: Snow White
Opponent: Stepmother
Table 3
Marriage is the object they pursue now, and this contributes to perpetuate the
patriarchal code: women cannot live without a man in their lives, not even the powerful
queen. The sender is again the mirror, as it reflects now the thoughts of the queen. It is
not a magic image that respond the queen‘s questions, but her own reflection talking to
her. It is a kind of double personality that could remind us to Robert Louis Stevenson‘s
The Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).
2.2.3. Blancanieves
Blancanieves (Berger 2012) is a Spanish version of Snow White. It is a silent, black and
white movie set in Spain in the 1920s in which Snow White‘s father is a bullfighter. At
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the beginning of the film, the mother is alive but she dies during labour. The father was
almost killed by a bull called Lucifer, he is tetraplegic and he marries a nurse of the
hospital called Encarna. He is devastated and rejects his child, Carmencita.
Although Blancanieves has some specific details, especially the stepmother,
which can relate it to the original story, it is a free version. For instance, Carmencita
lives with her grandmother at the beginning of the film and it is when she dies that she
lives with her father and stepmother and, as they are living together, we are able to
witness the relationship between Carmencita and her father until the moment he dies.
Once the father is gone, the stepmother commands Carmencita‘s death and,
differently from other versions, the stepmother‘s servant does not spare Carmencita‘s
life, but he thinks she is dead when he leaves her. It is then when the dwarfs find her.
She becomes a bullfighter and the dwarfs, as she does not remember anything of her life
before meeting them, call her Blancanieves.
There is not a love story in this film, one of the dwarfs falls for Snow White but it
is not central to the plot.
The most relevant difference between this story and any other is that Snow White
does not wake up from her dream, so this story is much more hopeless the others. She
does not have anyone to save her so she remains asleep forever.
In this version, Greimas character function (Table 4) would be as follows:
Sender: Dwarfs
Object: Family
Helper: Huntsman
Subject: Carmencita
Recipient: Carmencita
Opponent:
Encarna/Grumpy
Table 4
As we said, this is a free version, so the object is neither beauty nor power but to
have a family. Although at the beginning Carmencita has a family, everyone she loves
ends up passing away and when she meets the dwarfs they become Carmencita‘s
family. One of the main differences here is that one of the dwarfs, we could say he
represents Grumpy, is jealous of Carmencita and tries to kill her instead of helper and
therefore he serves the function of an opponent along with Encarna.
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3. The stepmother
Good Bones and Simple Murders (Atwood 2006) includes There Was Once which is a
satirical short story/poem that deals with the stereotypes and conventions in fairy tales.
Atwood manages to criticize fairy tales conventions with a short dialogue in which a
girl is trying to tell a story and the listener attacks fairy tales:
"There was once a girl of indeterminate descent, as average-looking as
she was good, who lived with her wicked-"
"Another thing. Good and wicked. Don't you think you should
transcend those puritanical judgmental moralistic epithets? I mean, so
much of that is conditioning, isn't it?"
"There was once a girl, as average-looking as she was well-adjusted,
who lived with her stepmother, who was not a very open and loving
person because she herself had been abused in childhood."
"Better. But I am so tired of negative female images! And
stepmothers-they always get it in the neck! Change it to stepfather,
why don't you?" (2006: 23)
With this poem Margaret Atwood wanted to prove that language is a very
powerful tool that can suggest a lot of meanings. This piece of the poem criticizes the
negative connotations women are conveyed in fairy tales. The use of ―
wicked‖ to refer
to a stepmother or the fact that women are always the wicked ones has to do with the
analysis of the figure of the stepmother.
3.1. The figure of the stepmother
Before beginning with this point a point that concerns the study of women in
cinema must be discussed. There is a dichotomy called the Mother/Whore in which
women are either seen as good or evil creatures:
Women are frequently represented in movies as being either good,
dutiful mothers and wives or independent and sexual beings. This
polarization of women is often referred to as the mother/whore
dichotomy, which implies that if women are not traditional mother
19
figures, safely under the protection of a man, they are whores in spirit,
if not profession. The sexual woman is usually represented as
dangerous to herself and/or men. (Lehman and Lhur, 2003: 266)
If we take into account this dichotomy, in Grimm‘s Snow White we have both
figures: Snow White would be the mother as she ―
mothers‖ the dwarfs by taking home
duties and the stepmother would be the whore, because she is the evil queen and she is
dangerous to everyone including herself.
A clear example of this dichotomy is the movie Fatal Attraction (Lyne 1987) in
which the wife represents the mother, as she is a dutiful wife; while his lover is the
whore, as she is the powerful woman that has an affair with other woman‘s husband.
All these films have a clear message of warning towards these kind of ―
whore‖
women; ―
They warn both men and women of the dangers of independent sexual women
and either place such women under the safe control of a powerful man or punish them
with death‖ (Lehman and Lhur, 2003: 267). In Snow White and the Huntsman, the King
could not control Ravenna, so she killed him and Snow White ends up killing Ravenna.
The term ―
stepmother‖ is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English as ―
a
woman who is married to one‘s father after the divorce of one‘s parents or the death of
one‘s mother.‖ This is the technical definition and it is, of course, correct. But this
definition does not mention the negative connotations that the term stepmother conveys;
as Cashdan puts it ―
The witchlike nature of the stepmother is compounded by her use of
magic to perform her evil deeds. […] Modern critics claim that negative portrayal of the
stepmother is part of a misogynistic streak in fairy tales.‖ (1999: 17, 18) Grimm‘s fairy
tales are a great example of this notion; stories like Cinderella or Snow White represent
accurately the evil stepmother that forces her husband‘s child to be her servant and
treats her miserably.
The constant presence of a stepmother in fairy tales has actually a historical
explanation: a lot of mothers died during labour thus it was common that the father
would marry again to replace their former wives in order to have someone looking after
house duties and children. The reasons were more practical than romantic.
The fact that fairy tales always begin with the death of the mother or with the
mother already dead is a way to protect the mother from the witch. In Cashdan words:
―
Though her [mother‘s] absence makes the child highly vulnerable, her peaceful
departure is preferable to a scenario in which she dies a violent death.‖ (1999: 42) Once
20
the mother is out of the story the children have to face the world by themselves, in our
case, Snow White has to face Ravenna by herself because she has no parents.
As we have stated before, stepmothers are always pictured as evil creatures. We
must revise now the death of the which, which should be seen as something not only
necessary but compulsory.
The death of the villain at the end of the tale can be condemned when you think
about children, however it is something necessary: to close the story, the witch must die.
The witch, the stepmother in this case, represents the sin that both she and the heroine,
Snow White, share: vanity. In order to end with Snow White‘s vanity impulses the
stepmother, who embodies the temptation with the lace, the comb and the apple, needs
to die. In Grimm‘s Snow White, the witch is forced to dance with red-iron shoes to
death, in Disney‘s she is killed by accident in order to soften the impact of the original
story. Sander‘s version is quite different; Snow White is the one who ends Ravenna‘s
life in order to consolidate her power as a woman and the legitimate queen.
3.2. Other villains
In this point we are going to analyze two fairy tales villains that are relevant to our
study: Maleficient, from the film Maleficient (Stromberg 2014) and Lady Tremaine
from Disney‘s Cinderella (Geromini, Jackson, Luske 1950); as they have several
characteristics that are very useful to prove our points: the first one is a modern version
of fairy tales and the second one, in fact, has the same storyline as Snow White.
3.2.1. Maleficient
The Disney film Maleficient is a version of Disney‘s Sleeping Beauty (Geromini, 1959)
in which the story of the princess Aurora is told by the villain of the story: Maleficient.
Maleficient is a powerful woman and she proves her power from the very beginning of
the film; as we can see in this extremely long shot she can fly (F01) or heal broken
things, like this sequence shows (F02). Moreover, when she grows old she rules the
army against the king.
21
F01
F02
However, she is defeated by love; she trusted a man, Stefan, and he betrayed her,
he cut her wings to become king. She decided to take revenge by cursing Aurora, the
king‘s child, in her christening. In this medium shot, Maleficient seems more powerful
than ever (F03). As love has betrayed her, Maleficient does not believe in it and that is
why she says that Aurora can only be saved by true love, she wants to condemn her
forever: the true love kiss is a symbol of the power fairy tales attributed to men.
F03
Maleficient has become a mean person because of Stefan but Aurora makes her
good again. When Aurora gets older, Maleficient tries to remove the curse but she
cannot. When her kiss saves Aurora, Maleficient understands that true love does exist,
but she had not met it yet. The transition from good to bad and then to good again is
clearly reflected in Maleficient‘s dressing. At the beginning, she wears ochre and golden
colours and her hair is loose (F04), however when Stefan cuts her wings she starts
wearing black costumes and tying her hair (F05). This change in the hair is reflected in
Ravenna too, when she is acting good at the beginning her hair is loose like
Maleficient‘s but when she reveals her real self she ties her hair. At the end, when
Aurora brings the good Maleficient back, she dresses as she did in the beginning (F06).
22
F04
F05
F06
If we compare her to Ravenna we can spot several similarities but the one that
highlights the most is the importance of the figure of the raven; Maleficient chooses an
animal to be her servant and it is a raven, not only a raven but a raven that is trapped in
a net and cannot use its wings, just like her. Ravens symbolize the darkness in
someone‘s heart and soul and that is why they are so important for Maleficient and
Ravenna (as we will see later on, raven is a key symbol in Ravenna).
However at the end Maleficient, unlike Ravenna, regrets what she has done and at
the end it is she who saves Aurora with a kiss of true love.
Maleficient is at the same time hero and villain: at the beginning the only thing
she wanted was revenge but in the end she gets trapped in her own curse, as she loves
Aurora more than anyone in this world.
3.2.2. Lady Tremaine
Lady Tremaine is Cinderella‘s stepmother in Walt Disney‘s Cinderella (Geromini,
Jackson, Luske 1950). This is a key character if we want to study the role of
stepmothers, because the storyline of Snow White and Cinderella is actually very
similar: a little girl whose mother died during bird and her father remarried with a
hideous woman that, once the father is gone, mistreats the child.
23
In Disney‘s version, Lady Tremaine is a powerful woman who abuses Cinderella
and uses her as a servant when she is, in fact, the owner of the house.
The first appearance of the stepmother in the film shows us that we must fear her;
the room is slightly dark and the only thing we can see are Lucifer‘s, her cat, eyes (F07).
The fact that her cat‘s name is Lucifer, like the devil, is also a warning towards the
stepmother, as he appears in the film before she does.
F07
When she speaks she is very cynical, her tone is nice, but her intentions are mean.
When Cinderella asks her to go to the royal palace she says she could go if she finishes
her duties. She does everything in her hand to avoid Cinderella‘s happiness. But
fortunately, just as Snow White had the dwarfs Cinderella has her mice and they make
her a beautiful dress to make sure she will be ready in time. However, when Cinderella
is ready her stepsisters shred her dress because their mother lures them into (F08).
F08
This film, like most of Disney‘s, has clear sexist discrimination reflected in the
mice, specially when they are making the dress and one of the male mice says he wants
to use the needle and a female mouse answers that sewing is for women (F09).
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F09
As an opposite of Lady Tremaine we have the fairy godmother (F10), who makes
it possible for Cinderella to go to the palace in time. It is the maternal figure that is
missing in Snow White‘s stories.
F10
As we have said, Lady Tremaine would do anything to avoid Cinderella‘s joy.
She wants her children to marry the prince, but once she knows that is impossible, she
prefers breaking the glass shoe on purpose (F11) rather than Cinderella having a happy
ending. Fortunately Cinderella had kept the other shoe and she finally married the
prince and lived happily ever after.
F11
25
These two first shots of the stepmother shows that not only does she not regret
what she has done, but she is pleased when she thinks Cinderella has nothing to do
(F12) and is horrified when she finds out that Cinderella was actually the woman who
danced with the prince (F13).
F12
F13
Lady Tremaine‘s last appearance in the movie is the previous image. In this movie
we do not know anything else about Cinderella‘s stepfamily after her happiness.
However, in Grimm‘s version they go to Cinderella‘s wedding and birds picked out her
stepsister‘s eyes and they were condemned to be blind for the rest of their lives.
3.3. Other “evil queens” in Snow White stories
Now that we have analyzed two villains that play such an important role representing
women in cinema, we must go into detail in the versions of Snow White‘s stepmother in
three different films that we have already studied in point 2.2. Snow White’s Versions
which are Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Mirror, Mirror and Blancanieves.
26
3.3.1. Disney’s evil queen
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Cottrell, Hand, Jackson, Morey, Pearce and
Sharpsteen 1937) is the most famous version of this story because Disney movies are
what introduced many people to fairy tales. In this version Snow White‘s stepmother is
nameless, she is just the queen.
The movie starts with an image of the castle and then it zooms the window in
which the mirror is. The first time we see the queen we do not actually see her face, but
her reflection (F14), which marks the plot: vanity and appearance are the frame to this
story. The queen asks the mirror the question: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the
fairest one of all? And the mirror answers that although she is beautiful, Snow White is
the fairest and that rages the queen.
F14
As it was stated before, Lady Tremaine is very similar to this queen; they both are
cruel and dominant and married to a man that had a child, only to mistreat her once he is
gone. However, there is a huge difference, Snow White‘s stepmother is a witch and she
dominates dark magic.
F15
27
We also see her becoming an ugly old lady (F15) that actually looks like a witch
(she even has a wart in her nose), and making the poison for the apple (F16).
F16
It is important that in the moment just before she drinks the potion we see her face
reflected in the glass (F17), the last time we will see her face will be just like the first, a
mere reflection of herself.
F17
The figure of the raven also accompanies this evil queen (F18) and here it appears
with a skull, which symbolizes death.
F18
When she makes the apple, we see the symbol of death in it but she makes it as
appealing as possible so Snow White will not reject it (F19), again a symbol of vanity:
Snow White would not have eaten the apple if it did not look delicious.
28
F19
The fact that the witch renounces to her appearance, the thing that she most values
in the world, to kill the only person more beautiful than her tells us how much she
wished to be the fairest one of all.
Once the witch has the apple and her new ugly appearance she persuades Snow
White to eat the apple. When she is escaping from the dwarfs she tries to kill them but
she is the one who gets killed, by accident (F20).
F20
In the end this witch gets what she deserves, she dies ugly and nobody misses her
while Snow White is saved by her prince and she stays beauty and happiest than ever.
3.3.2. Julia Roberts’s evil queen
Julia Roberts interprets the, again nameless, evil queen in Mirror, Mirror (Singh 2012),
the sweetest version of Snow White in which the queen and Snow White do not
compete for power neither for beauty, but for the love of a man.
This queen is not as evil as the others, she is more cynical and her colour is not
black, but white, red and golden. The queen appears after Snow White and when she
does we see a full shot of herself in which we can appreciate how vain and preposterous
29
she is; she is sitting in the throne with a ridiculously big dress that matches the colour of
her throne, golden (F21).
F21
She has beauty rituals like Ravenna; in order to stay pretty she covers herself with
disgusting and hurting things like bugs, shit, bees or scorpions (F22).
F22
As an opposite of Ravenna, who is an independent and strong woman, this queen
is reliant on men; she is seeking for a man to take care of her and her kingdom. Ravenna
wants to kill Snow White because she wants all her power back but this queen only
wants the prince, she is jealous.
In the end, Snow White defeats the queen, she is destroyed by her own vanity and
she melts in Snow White‘s wedding (F23).
F23
30
3.3.3. Maribel Verdú’s evil queen
To finish with this point of other evil queens we want to study one more character:
Encarna from Blancanieves (Berger, 2012). Encarna, along with Ravenna, is the only
evil queen that has a name and like the other stepmothers she marries Carmencita‘s
(Snow White‘s) father and once she is dead she mistreats her.
However, this stepmother is the cruellest of them all: she settles Carmencita in a
stable, cuts her hair (taking her beauty away from her) and feeds her with her pet, a cock
named Pepe (F24).
F24
The raven is also a symbol to this stepmother, we can see her wearing a hat with a
raven in this shot (F25).
F25
31
She mistreats Antonio (Carmencita‘s father) too: she does not take proper care of
him and cheats on him. Moreover, she is not only responsible of two attempts of
murderer against Snow White, she is also guilty of Antonio‘s death (F26).
F26
After Antonio‘s death, Encarna dresses him as a bullfighter and hires a
photographer to take pictures of him with people attending to his funeral (F27).
F27
After killing her father, Encarna tries to kill Carmencita but she is left alive by
mistake. Encarna finds out that she is alive when Carmencita‘s picture as a bullfighter is
the cover of the magazine Lecturas and not herself as she expected (F28, F29).
32
F28
F29
In order to check if Blancanieves is actually Carmencita, Encarna goes to a
bullfight. At the end, after Encarna realizes it is actually Carmencita, she offers
Blancanieves a poisoned apple (F30) and she bites it twice and dismays.
F302
After that the dwarfs, that know it was Encarna who poisoned Carmencita, try to
kill her but instead she is killed by a bull when she is trying to escape (F31).
Notice that this resource of a skull to show that the apple is poisoned is the same as Disney‘s Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs that was shown above in F19.
2
33
F31
Although this is a free version of Snow White, Encarna is more similar to
Ravenna than any other queen, she seeks power and beauty and she does not regret
anything she has done and at the end she ends up dead, just like Ravenna.
34
4. The figure of the stepmother in Snow White and the Huntsman
Now we are going to analyze the figure of the stepmother, starting with Charlize
Theron, the actress that interprets Ravenna, and then studying Ravenna herself.
4.1. Charlize Theron
When it comes to talk about actors we must differentiate between actors and stars. As
Peter Lehman and William Lhur point out in Thinking about movies (2003), we often
talk about stars‘ personality, private life, habits or talent, that is to say, things that go
beyond the role of an actor in a particular movie; in Lehman and Lhur words ―
Few
people speak of these things with reference to the actor who played the President of the
United States in Clear and Present Danger (1994), and yet many people bring such
issues when talking about Harrison Ford.‖ (2003: 145)
Stars are an essential part of the filmmaking process, but we sometimes wonder
why they are so important, why they earn so much money; ―
Harrison Ford earned $20
million for playing the President of the United States in Air Force One (1997), which is
a hundred times the salary of the real president of the United States!‖ (Lehman and
Lhur, 2003: 146). The answer is actually quite simple, it is because they are the visual
part of the film and people pay to see them. There are people who watch every film their
favourite actor or actress play, even if they do not like the genre or the argument.
Charlize Theron is one of the members of Snow White and the Huntsman‘s cast,
which is, according to Michael O‘Sullivan, ―
Overlong, overcrowded, overstimulating
and with an over-the-top performance by Charlize Theron as the evil queen Ravenna,
the movie is a virtual orchard of toxic excess, starting with the unnecessarily sprawling
cast of characters.‖ (2012) She, along with Kristen Stewart and Chris Hemsworth are
the stars in this production of a different version of the Snow White‘s story. We must
revise Charlize Theron‘s star persona3, in order to relate it with Ravenna.
Charlize Theron was born in Benoni, South Africa in 1975. Theron‘s father was
an alcoholic and when Theron was 15 her mother had to kill the girl‘s father because he
had attacked them. In 1995 she started her successful career in acting and she is now
considered a great film star.
The meanings that are attached to a famous person, not because of their personal life but because of the
things they are known for. A star persona combines its own personality with the marketing they are given.
3
35
Moreover, she is also a philanthropist and social activist. In 2008 she became the
United Nation‘s tenth messenger of peace. In addition to all this she is an advocate for
The Global Fund, an institution that fights AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
Charlize Theron may be the most versatile actress of this film, as she is not typecasted as her colleagues; Kristen Stewart as Bella in The Twilight Saga (Twilight
(Hardwicke 2008), New Moon (Weitz 2009), Eclipse (Slade 2010), Breaking Dawn –
Part 1 (Condon 2011) and Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (Condon 2012)) and Chris
Hemsworth as Thor (Thor (Brannagh 2011), The Avengers (Whedon 2012), Thor: The
Dark World (Taylor 2013) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon 2015)).
Like Elizabeth Weitzman claims ―
such a strong heroine [Snow White] requires a
confident, muscular portrayal. And Stewart‘s characteristic hesitancy — so fitting for
the ―
Twilight‖ franchise — undercuts her character‘s impact. Though designed as a
regal Joan of Arc, Snow too often comes across as an overwhelmed Bella Swan.‖
(2012) Stewart has embraced Bella Swan so deep inside, that sometimes while watching
the film you expect Robert Pattinson to come to save her instead of Hemsworth.
Theron is best known for her roles as Candy Kendall in The Cider House Rules
(Hallström 1999), Sara Deever, a very special girl who wants to change others‘ life, in
Sweet November (O‘Connor 2001), the safecracker Stella Bridger in The Italian Job
(Gary Gray 2003), the serial killer Aileen in Monster (Jenkins 2003), Mary, a superhero,
in Hancock (Berg 2008) or Mavis Gery, a recently divorced fiction writer who goes
back home in Minnesota in order to get her former boyfriend back, in Young Adult
(Reitman 2011).
Even though we are not going to expand on Ravenna until the next point we must
compare her with other characters. Her roles in films such as Sweet November or The
Cider House Rules are opposite to Ravenna; in both of them Theron interprets a sweet
girl that does not want people to suffer, that sacrifices her happiness by the sake of the
others; in The Cider House Rules Candy loves Homer, but she stays with Wally because
he is not self sufficient anymore. On the other hand, Ravenna is selfish and the only
thing she cares is her own beauty. Aileen (Monster, Jenkins 2003) was Theron‘s
interpretation worth an Oscar. The curious thing about this character is that she has
burns all over her face and she is disfigured, a woman as beautiful as Charlize Theron
has only one Academy Award and it was Aileen who got it. The character of Mavis
Gery in Young Adult would be more similar to Ravenna than any other, Mavis wants her
ex-boyfriend back but he is happily married and has just had a baby girl; Mavis is
36
selfish and conceited and she does all kind of things in order to fulfil her goals. This is
very similar to what Ravenna does; she is capable to sacrifice everything, even her own
brother, to stay beautiful.
4.2. Ravenna
Now we are going to go into detail in the figure of Ravenna studying the symbolism in
the film and vanity, the two key elements within this film.
Before starting with Ravenna‘s analysis we are going to introduce her as a
character.
Ravenna came to Tabor as a prisoner, and the king, whose wife had passed away,
bewitched by Ravenna‘s beauty decided to marry her, making her queen. In the
beginning, she has an angelical appearance, we could say that she looks like a child, and
she wears bright colours like for example white (F32).
F32
In this point of the film she is very nice with Snow White, she tells her that she
cannot replace her mother and acts like a comprehensive stepmother.
In her wedding the dress she wears is covered with a kind of armour that can
remind us of a bird skeleton (F33), symbol that is used all along the film as we will see.
F33
But she was not actually a prisoner, it was a trick, all of this kindness was a mask
to become queen; she explains the king that she hates men because the only thing they
want is to use women to their benefit and when women are ruined men get rid of them.
She covers her skin with poison and in her wedding night she kills the king (F34). She
claims ―
When a woman stays young and beautiful forever, the world is hers.‖
37
F34
After that, her look changes, she starts wearing dark clothes, combing her hair,
and looking more powerful in general. The angelical expression on her face disappears,
leading to a face to fear. You can even appreciate the change in her voice. Ravenna is
now a powerful, selfish, merciless, vain and dark woman. Moreover, she is to be feared
because she dominates dark magic. As Rebecca Cussey states ―
Charlize Theron
becomes the real star of the show with her fantastic, single-minded performance. Her
costumes are almost a character in themselves, so well do they reflect the heart within:
cloyingly innocent as she lures the king into marriage, all sharp edges and death after
she cements her queenship.‖ (2012)
In order to stay young and beautiful Ravenna has a ritual in which she baths into a
white liquid (F35).
F35
A similar ritual appears in Jupiter Ascending (Wachowski, 2015) a film that has
been said to have many similarities with Snow White and the Huntsman. Both Ravenna
and the queen of Jupiter Ascending bathe in a youth serum in order to stay young and in
Jupiter Ascending this serum comes from harvesting organisms such as humans. This is
very similar to one of Ravenna‘s practices in order to stay young, which is sucking life
out of young girls, as we will see later on.
Apart from this youth serum, the general plot of the movie is quite alike
Sanders‘s, a young girl that scrubs toilets for a living who is not aware of the fact that,
in Claude Brodesser-Akner words, ―
she actually possesses the same perfect genetic
makeup as the Queen of the Universe and is therefore a threat to her otherwise immortal
rule.‖ (2012) So, one of the heirs sends a bounty hunter who instead of killing her ends
up falling for her. In this film the queen bathed into a special liquid and she emerged
younger (F36).
38
F36
However, as stated above, the most fearful thing Ravenna does in order to stay
beautiful is sucking the youth out of young women (F37). When she is done with the
girl, she looks much more younger and the girl looks like an old lady (F38).
F37
F38
People fear Ravenna so much that women make themselves hideous scars (F039)
when they are young in order to prevent her to catch them, because what the queen
needs are beautiful ladies.
F39
As stated above, the queen is merciless and the highest proof of that is that when
the huntsman kills her brother, Ravenna feels it (F40), and feels him imploring help, but
39
she decides that that would weaken her too much, so she mutters ―
Forgive me, brother‖
and lets him die.
F40
As it can be seen, when he dies she looks older than usual and her brother also
gets older in the moment he dies (F41).
F41
In her attempt to kill Snow White she disguises as William, Snow White‘s
childhood love, and she proves once again that men‘s love is what ruins women.
She tells Snow White that she was the only one that could break the spell and
destroy her, the only one that could save her, but before killing her, William and the
Huntsman appear and she disappears, becoming a flock of ravens (F42).
F42
In the final fight, Ravenna and Snow White are finally face to face and they are
going to confront each other. Ravenna uses magic in order to assure her revenge; she
wants this to be between Snow White and herself. In the end, she is defeated by Snow
White and dies as an old woman (F43).
F43
40
4.2.1. Symbolism in the film
The first thing to take into account when analyzing this character is the symbolism of
her name. It must be highlighted that in other versions of Snow White, except for the
Spanish version, the queen nameless, so her name here is neither random nor irrelevant.
Ravenna, coming from ―
raven‖, conveys that the queen has a dark mind and soul
because everything in her, even her name, is dark.
As explained before, Ravenna‘s character is reflected in the way she dresses: in
the beginning she wears white dresses but after killing the king her dressing symbolizes
a raven in many occasions (F44, F45, F46). In image F45 it can be appreciated that not
only her dress makes her seem as a raven, but it also has raven skulls sewn and what
falls over her forehead in the crown are tiny bones, which seem those of a raven too.
F44
F45
F46
Sometimes, she does not even need dresses in order to symbolize a raven, in this
shot her back looks like a bird and its wings (F47).
F47
41
The figure of the raven has been used a lot regarding symbolism of a bad heart
and soul. In Edgar Allan Poe‘s The Raven (1845) we find this resource of darkness
being symbolized by a raven, in which a man who has lost a woman named Lenore, is
alone in the night and hears something tapping his window. He first thinks it is Lenore,
but when he opens the door he sees a raven, which says ―
Nevermore‖, reflecting the
despair in the narrator‘s soul. This raven symbolizes death, it is a sign that he will meet
with Lenore sooner or later.
Once again, the figure of the raven symbolizes death, and this narrator, like
Ravenna or the other stepmothers in Snow White‘s stories will face death and no one,
not even Ravenna can avoid it.
In addition to the figure of raven, we cannot forget the symbolism of the relation
between Ravenna and Snow White that is present in the movie.
As explained before, the figure of the stepmother was something normal in fairy
tales because it was normal in real life too. Ravenna tells Snow White in the beginning
that she does not mean to replace her mother but in some way she actually does. In the
beginning of the film Snow White‘s mother appears and three drops of blood fall into
the snow, symbolizing the birth of the princess (F48). In the same way, at the end of the
film when Snow White kills Ravenna, three drops of blood fall into Snow White‘s
armour (F049), reflecting her triumph.
F48
F49
In the same way that her mother‘s blood announced her birth, her stepmother‘s
shows her victory, and in some way that she has been reborn.
There is also a clear parallelism between these two characters reflected in the
woods: the dark wood, which symbolizes death, it is a reflection of Ravenna; while the
42
fairy wood represents Snow White. In the dark Snow White almost dies, but when they
are with the dwarfs and the fairies she feels like home.
4.2.2. Vanity
Snow White‘s story is about the desire of a woman to be the ―
fairest of them all‖. As
Roger Sale puts it ―
The term ‗narcissism‘ seems altogether too slippery to be the only
one we want here.‖ (1987: 41) The feeling that surrounds the whole story is envy, the
Queen realizes that both Snow White and she are getting older, but she is the one that is
going to lose her beauty to Snow White‘s. In Zipes‘s words: ―
For the aging stepmother,
the young girl‘s maturation signals her own waning sexual attractiveness and control.‖
(1986: 212)
The vanity topic is the key to this fairy tale, it affects every action of the queen;
for instance, she spends hours just standing in front of the mirror, and vanity is the
reason why she orders the huntsman to kill Snow White.
However, in the original story the Queen is not the only conceited character, if we
think about it we will realize that Snow White is also vain. Nevertheless, there is an
explanation to Snow White‘s vanity; the child needs to identify the sin not only with the
evil character, but also with the good one, because if the sin is only placed in the evil
character, children would not identify it as a sin, but as an isolated situation of a mean
person.
Ravenna does not have a mirror, but a kind of oracle; when she pronounces the
famous sentence: ―
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?‖ a golden
figure appears in front of her and she talks to her (F50). She is the only one that can see
it and it is not specified in the film if the others cannot see it because it is magical or if it
is because Ravenna is delusional and she imagines it.
F50
In Snow White and the Huntsman we do not find vanity impulses in Snow White.
She is portrayed as a victim that does not care about her beauty, the only thing she
wants is to avenge her father and to get her kingdom back. Sanders transforms the
43
princess into a heroin and leaves the love story aside, Snow White does not wear
dresses but an armour, she is not saved by the prince but by the huntsman and finally
she is the one who kills Ravenna and restores the peace in the land. This Snow White is
less feminine than the one we all have in our minds, and therefore she does not
accomplish the feminine standards as, for example, caring about her looks.
However, Ravenna does care about Snow White‘s beauty, as she is beauty in the
outside but also in the inside. The moment Ravenna is about to kill Snow White she
claims that she is very lucky because she will not know what one feels when one gets
older.
Although vanity symbols appear in Sander‘s film Snow White and the Huntsman
(2012) Snow White is not driven by vanity impulses. In this film the only conceited
character is Ravenna, her beauty is the most important thing and she sacrifices
everything to keep it.
Another tale of vanity is Oscar Wilde‘s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) in
which a young Dorian is obsessed with his beauty and makes a portrait that will grew
old while he stays beauty. This highly relates with Ravenna‘s way of making her beauty
remain; she literally sucks youth and beauty from young girls. Both Ravenna‘s and
Dorian‘s personality bitter and their character deteriorates and when Ravenna stays for a
while without absorbing anyone‘s beauty and youth shows her real self, just like
Dorian‘s portrait shows his.
44
5. Conclusions
This dissertation has intended to examine the role of Snow White‘s stepmother in
Rupert Sanders‘s Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), along with the role of other
stepmothers in classical fairy tales. Ravenna is interpreted by Charlize Theron, and
according to many critics, she is the reason why it is worth watching this movie. She is
the most powerful of them all, her dressing characterizes her as much as her personality;
even her name tells us all we need to know about her, that she is as dark as a raven.
Starting with the origin of fairy tales, we have revised Snow White‘s story from
its beginning, from Grimm‘s to Sanders‘s. The study of this film has been done through
the comparative method and the text-based analysis method. In the comparative part of
the essay we have analyzed Ravenna and her film in contrast with other villains and
stepmothers and other films. The analysis of other stepmothers, such as Cinderella‘s
Lady Tremaine, shows that regardless the story, the role of the stepmother is always to
mistreat her stepchildren. The analysis of Snow White‘s stepmothers has proved that the
moral of fairy tales was true, if you obsess with your appearance, it will finish you off.
On the other hand, using the text-based analysis method has provided us a wide
amount of information about the figure of the stepmother in general, as we have revised
the main sequences of each film in each villain and stepmother. The study of Ravenna
has been more exhaustive than the others, she is the central character of this dissertation,
and the most remarkable character in the film. We have studied the symbolism
concerning Ravenna in the film, the most interesting part of her characterisation is the
raven, which is important in the other stepmothers as well; and the vanity topic, which
is central in Ravenna.
Appearance is what matters to Ravenna, every action she makes has something to
do with her beauty. The only thing she wants is to stay young and beautiful, as beauty is
what has given her power. The only person she loved was her brother, Finn, but she
preferred beauty over his life. The only true menace to her beauty is Snow White,
therefore she must be destroyed. As stated above, vanity is the key to this story,
Ravenna is vain and Snow White is not, and that is exactly what ruins Ravenna.
Sanders has managed to make the villain in his movie the most interesting and
memorable character. Moreover, he has given a feminist twist to it making two females
the strongest characters in the film and leaving aside the love story.
45
Ravenna and Snow White are two powerful women, it is constantly stated that this
fight is between them and male figures, such as William or the huntsman, can be left
over. The sentence that marks Ravenna‘s death is the clearest example of their fight, it
is uttered before by Ravenna when she almost kills Snow White ―
By fairest blood it was
done and only by fairest blood can it be undone,‖ they fight over power, and beauty
makes you powerful.
The highest mistake committed by Ravenna is that she does not repent, but that
makes her what she is; she is dark and mean and she does not have a place for love in
her heart. With her attitude she makes her death something compulsory, if she is alive
there will not be peace and thus, she must die.
Theron‘s interpretation is what leads Ravenna to her highness, and the election of
her for the role of Ravenna does not meet with Stewart‘s for Snow White. Theron
makes Ravenna shine, even in her worst moments. Although Ravenna is the most
beautiful of them all, Snow White is the fairest; her inside is as fair as her appearance.
The figure of the stepmother in Sanders‘s Snow White and the Huntsman is
actually not really different from the figure of other stepmothers, but still exceptional.
Ravenna is a unique character and she along with Theron‘s performance make the
perfect recipe to the most frightening villain Snow White ever had to face.
46
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49
Annex: Conclusiones
En resumen, la intención de este trabajo ha sido examinar el papel de la madrastra de
Blancanieves en la película de Rupert Sanders, Snow White and the Huntsman (2012),
en conjunto con el papel de otras madrastras en cuentos de hadas. Ravenna es
interpretada por Charlize Theron y, de acuerdo con la opinión de muchos críticos, ella
es la razón por la que ver esta película merece la pena. Ella es la más poderosa del reino,
su vestuario la caracteriza tanto como su carácter e incluso su nombre nos dice todo lo
que necesitamos saber de ella, que es tan oscura como un cuervo4.
Comenzando por el origen de los cuentos de hadas, hemos revisado la historia de
Blancanieves desde el principio, comenzando por los hermanos Grimm hasta llegar a
Sanders. El estudio de esta película ha sido realizado a través del método comparativo y
el método basado en el análisis textual de la película. La parte comparativa del ensayo
analiza a Ravenna y su película en contraste con otras villanas y madrastras en otras
películas. El análisis de otras madrastras, como la de Cenicienta, Lady Tremaine, nos
enseñan que sin importarla historia, el papel de la madrastra siempre es el de maltratar a
sus hijastros. El análisis de las otras madrastras de Blancanieves prueba que la moraleja
de los cuentos de hadas es cierta, si te obsesionas con tu apariencia, acabará contigo.
Por otro lado, el uso del método basado en el análisis textual de la película nos ha
proporcionado una amplia información sobre la figura de la madrastra en general,
habiendo revisado las principales secuencias de cada película en cada villana y
madrastra. El estudio de Ravenna es el más exhaustivo, ella es el personaje principal de
este trabajo y el más relevante de la película. Hemos estudiado el simbolismo que
concierne a Ravenna en la película, la parte más interesante de su caracterización es el
cuervo, que es importante también en las otras madrastras; y el tema de la vanidad, que
es central en Ravenna.
Lo único que le importa a Ravenna son las apariencias, cada acción que hace tiene
que ver con su belleza. Lo único que quiere es mantenerse joven y guapa, porque la
belleza es lo que le ha proporcionado su poder. La única persona a la que ha querido es
su hermano, Finn, pero prefirió la belleza por encima de su vida. La única amenaza
verdadera a su hermosura es Blancanieves, por tanto debe ser destruida. Como se ha
4
Ravenna viene del sustantivo ―
raven‖, que significa ―
cuervo‖ en español.
50
dicho anteriormente, la vanidad es la clave de esta historia, Ravenna es vanidosa y
Blancanieves no, y esto es lo que la arruina
Sanders consigue hacer del villano el personaje más interesante y memorable de
su película. Además, le da un giro feminista a la misma, haciendo de dos mujeres los
personajes más fuertes y dejando de lado la historia de amor.
Ravenna y Blancanieves son dos mujeres poderosas que mantienen una lucha
constante la una con la otra, lo que hace que las figuras masculinas como William o el
cazador pasen a un segundo plano. La frase que marca la muerte de Ravenna es el más
claro ejemplo de su lucha, había sido pronunciada antes por ella misma cuando casi
mata a Blancanieves: ―
Con la sangre más hermosa se hace y solo con la más hermosa se
deshace.‖, luchan por el poder, y la belleza te hace poderosa.
El mayor error cometido por Ravenna es que no se arrepiente, pero es lo que la
hace a ella ser quien es, oscura y malvada, una mujer que no tiene sitio para el amor en
su corazón. Con su actitud hace de su muerte algo obligatorio, si ella vive nunca
conseguirán la paz y por tanto, debe morir.
La interpretación de Theron lleva a Ravenna a lo más alto, y su elección para el
papel de Ravenna no concuerda con la de Stewart para el de Blancanieves. Theron hace
brillar a Ravenna incluso en sus peores momentos. Aunque Ravenna es la más bella del
reino, Blancanieves lo es tanto por dentro como por fuera.
La figura de la madrastra en la película de Sanders
Snow White and the
Huntsman en realidad no es tan diferente de la de otras madrastras, pero aun así
excepcional. Ravenna es un personaje único y esto, en conjunto con la interpretación de
Theron forman la receta perfecta para la villana más terrorífica a la que Blancanieves ha
tenido que enfrentarse.
51