The
Snow White
Syndrome:
A variety of symptoms that together indicate and characterize a frequently fatal dis-ease - the international, cross-cultural restriction and control of women.
For the prince it was love at first sight. She lay in her coffin, pleasing to gaze upon and warm to touch but silent, supine and pliant. As close to death as a body could be without rotting.
The little mermaid sold her voice for a chance to please the prince and his God. Every step she took on her new legs shot shafts of pain through her body; but she never complained.
Cinderella's sisters mutilated their feet by slicing bits off with a knife; a heel here and a toe there. A futile attempt to fit themselves into the glass slipper.
The tales that a culture tells to its children offer a clear view of what that culture deems to be good/acceptable behavior and bad/punishable behavior. Barring a very few contemporary re-writes our stories define acceptable female behavior as quiet and meek; quiescent in the face of mistreatment and injustice and unchallenging to authority. Inert rather than inactive a heroine works diligently at domestic tasks and the creation of wealth for her master. Despite her abilities in this area her only power springs from physical beauty and conformity to socially defined virtue.
Dynamic action and strength, knowledge, self-determination and wealth are exclusively the domain of heroes and villains. The women who demonstrate these qualities are portrayed as evil; defeat, humiliation and a painful death await them. They are dire warning to potential transgressors. Outside of fairy tales the models appear in numerous guises that blur the clear stereotypes. However, under the seeming variety the same definition of acceptable behavior lurks.
When a girl looks around to see what lies ahead; how she has to behave, look and think to become an acceptable member of society; she sees models that are impossible to emulate without an essential destruction of self. To fit into the glass slipper she must perform a mutilation of body, mind and spirit. To lie in a glass coffin; forever young, soft and unformed she must actively resist maturity and independence.
Going hand in hand with self-repression are external social, political and economic restrictions that enforce conformity to the deadly Snow White model of acceptability. Failure to comply results in punishment. While the laws and conventions may vary in form and severity from nation to nation their essential purpose is to curtail the independence and power of women.
It's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't: in the attempt to conform women suffer and die, while failure to conform results in punishments that lead to suffering and death.
Economic deprivation and excessive labor, restricted access to education, health-care and political power, eating disorders, depressions, cosmetic surgeries, genital mutilations, legalized rape and rates of malnutrition and mortality that are higher for female infants than male: The causes of suffering and death appear in myriad local variations; but, once again, beneath their differing form and severity lies the intent to restrict and control women.
Recent media discussion of 'globalism' in connection with politics, economics and communications technology miss the experience which is truly common to us all; the hegemony of patriarchalism:
"The power of the fathers: a familial-social, ideological, political system in which men - by force, direct pressure, or through ritual, tradition, law and language, customs, etiquette, education, and the division of labor, determine what part women shall play, and in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male."
Adrienne Rich:
Of Woman Born,
Motherhood As Experience and Institution.
W. W Norton 1995
To ensure its continuance this system must control everyone who poses a potential threat: basically every individual or group that is exploited by the system and who would consequently benefit from change. The interests of the working class, for example, are in opposition to those of the economically dominant ruling class. Consequently members of the working class, both male and female, must be made as powerless as possible via an array of 'carrot and stick' control mechanisms.
No matter how economically and politically impotent a man may be, however, patriarchalism ensures that he has dominion over the women around him. Men have an essential interest in maintaining the status quo that women, regardless of their status, do not. Women, but particularly working class women, are therefore inherently threatening to the status quo. To defuse the potential threat they must be prevented from achieving the power, confidence and unity to mount an effective challenge. Consequently women are subject to the most rhadamanthine controls of all.
By disseminating patriarchal beliefs, laws and values in a way that makes them appear both desirable and inevitable fairy tales play a key role in the process. Not least they offer models of femininity whose inert passivity makes them little more than walking corpses with a vast capacity for domestic labor.
However, fairy stories and 'wonder tales' are multi-faceted entities that abound with transformations and magical metamorphoses. They are efficiently used to 'encourage' changes in attitude and behavior that uphold the status quo. But the very transformative essence that gives them such power as tools of conservation can be even more effectively used in the cause of revolution.
Fundamental change is possible only when alternatives to the norm can be imagined. Consequently the status quo protects itself by insisting that it results from 'natural' rather than manmade law: all opposition is therefore useless because the system is inevitable and unchangable....
'Timeless' fairy stories with 'archetypal' themes may seem to support this view. But in fact a study of the modifications made within their recurring narratives allows the tales to speak of history's ever-changing conditions and attitudes; demonstrating just how constructed and unstable human systems of social organization can be. At the same time the shared concerns and delights of the stories can unite people across barriers of all kinds. Thus undermining another weapon of the status quo - divide and rule.
The stories we tell to each other and to our children are powerful tools with which to challenge accepted values and standards of behavior. But perhaps most potently of all they create a space for wishful thinking in which anything can happen. They allow us to dream upon possible utopias and imagine with hope the changes that might otherwise seem unthinkable.
So, while our current heroines are neither life-affirming nor empowering they can be so. They can awaken and change. Even Snow White may be re-energized and use the enchantments of wonder and curiosity to write herself a better future.