resistance to traditional roles

in our society, female sexuality is perceived as a more useful and powerful tool then
actual experience and maturity
Gaiman uses certain expectations of the horror genre to support this claim
WORKING THESIS: In the short horror story, Snow, Glass, Apples, Neil Gaiman
reverses the roles of the two main characters in the traditional fairy tale, Snow White
and the Seven

Dwarfs, to send a message that in todays society female sexuality is

perceived as a more useful and powerful tool than a womans experience, maturity and
intelligence.

BODY PARAGRAPHS:
SEXUALITY OVER MATURITY Snow White has sexual relations with the king, her
father. The queen who is older and more mature can not provide for him the way his
daughter can who uses her sexuality to get what she wants from him. The queen is
older, with more experience, yet the king still prefers his daughter even if it results in it
killing him.
1. I had my own chambers. My husband the kind, he had his own rooms also.
When he wanted me he would send for me, and I would go to him, and pleasure
him, and take my pleasure with him (Gaiman).
2. My husband, my love, my kind, sent for me less and less, and when I came to
him he was dizzy, listless, confused. He could no longer make love as a man
makes love; and he would not permit me to pleasure him with my mouth: the one
time I tried, he started, violently, an began to weep (Gaiman)
3. I ran my fingers across his skin as he slept. It was covered in a multitude of
ancient scars. But I could recall no scars from the days of our courtship, save
one, on his side, where a boar had gored him when he was a youth (Gaiman).
4. He died unshriven, his skin nipped and pocked from head to toe with tiny, old
scars (Gaiman).
1. Perhaps more importantly, she is depicted not as a child but as a young woman,
her corseted dress outlining her small but womanly curves, her face and hair
made up to reflect what was considered attractive for a young woman at the
time (Whelan 23).

2. At issue for parents, educators, and others is how culture, especially media
culture, has become a substantial, if not primary, educational force in regulating
the meanings, values, and tastes that set the norms that offer up and legitimate
particular subject positions-what it means to claim an identity as a male, female,
white, black, citizen, noncitizen (Whelan 27).
3. Looking at Snow White through the eyes of writers like Barthelme, Carter, and
Coover, then, involves more than renewing this narratives powerful image in the
modern world, it necessitates the cracking of that mirror so as to begin to imagine
female initiation and its narratives anew (Bacchilega 20).
OPPOSITE OF A SUBMISSIVE FEMALE She waits for her victims to approach her
first, and when they appear weak, she attacks. For example, it does not have to be a
sexual gesture. The queen simply strokes her cheek, and that is when Snow White bites
her.
1. They are not only lethal but they make ones skin creep. Characters regard them
not only with fear but also with loathing, with a combination of terror and disgust
(Carroll 54).
2. The progressive princess is a princess who rejects stereotypical behavior from
the past, behavior that was perpetuated by the first and second wave Disney
princesses. Such behavior includes characteristics considered to be unpalatable
to contemporary feminists, such as passivity, dutifulness, and subservience to
male characters (Whelan 29).
1. Snow White is the opposite of submissive. She takes authority and
controls her victims.
1. I had always been scared of the little princess, but at the moment I warmed to
her and, with my fingers, gently, I stroked her cheek. She looked at me and
smiledshe smiled but rarelythen she sank her teeth into the base of my
thumb, the Mound of Venus, and she drew blood (Gaiman).
2. I had been frozen by her, owned and dominated. That scared me, more than the
blood she had fed on (Gaiman).
USES SEXUALITY TO OVERPOWER MEN Snow White uses her sexuality to lure
men. For example, the monk in the forest pays her to have sex with him. She then has
sexual relations with him so that he becomes vulnerable and then she kills him.

1. If The Stepford Wives concerns itself with what men want from women, then
Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power, and what
men fear about women and womens sexuality (King 3).
1. Snow White also finds her own channel of power (sexuality) and uses it
against men who fear her.
2. Returning to horror: if we assume, in line with one-sex logic, that the sex of a
character proceeds from the gender of the function he or she represents, and
that the gender of the function proceeds from real-life perceptions of social and
bodily differences, then it follows that when we observe a consistent change in
the surface male-female configurations of a traditional story-complex, we are
probably looking, however obliquely, at a deeper change in the culture (Clover
16).
1. Society feels women are inferior, but Gaiman is saying that there needs to
be a change in our culture today. Unfortunately, the only way women
today can become superior is through the use of their sexuality.
3. The womens movement has given many things to popular culture, some more
savor than others. One of it main donations to horror, I think, is the image of an
angry womana woman so angry that she can be imagined as a credible
perpetrator (I stress credible) of the kind of violence on which, in the low-mythic
universe, the status of full protagonist rests (Clover 17).
1. Snow White is evil, therefore she has a strong personality, not exactly
anger but definitely in that category of traits, which is different that the
typical weak and vulnerable female in a horror story.
4. Female killers are few and their reasons for killing significantly different from
mens (Clover 29).
1. Snow Whites motivation for killing is primarily and dominantly to gain
power in status.
1. He grinned, as if it were a long time since he has seen another human, and
beckoned her over to him (Gaiman).
1. Snow White seduces the monk with her female characteristics. He is
desperate, therefore he is weak.
2. He pulled in his robe until he found a coina tiny, copper penny,and tossed it
to her. She caught it, and nodded, and went to him (Gaiman).
1.
3. She lowered her mouth to the nipple she had been teasing, her smooth skin
white on the furry brown body of him. She sank her teeth deep into his breast.
His eyes opened, then they closed again, and she drank (Gaiman).
1.

WOMEN WILLING TO GIVE BODY UP FOR WHAT THEY WANT IN EXCHANGE The
prince prefers women to be completely submissive when he is having sexual relations
with them, and the queen does not give him what he wants. Again, she is too
experienced and mature to act the way he wants her to. Snow White on the other hand
is willing to let this man take advantage of her body in any way so that she can get what
she wants in exchange.
1. Frustrated with the companys appropriation and ultra-feminization of
what could otherwise be seen as powerful pro-feminist archetype, feminist
critics and authors attempted to reclaim the princess narrative by either
retelling those lesser known tales or putting a more feminist spin on those
Disney had already retold (Whelan 24).
2. For generations, Disney has used the princess narrative to instill in its
viewers an understanding of the position of girls and woman in American
society (Whelan 27).
3. Some people escape from the imminent reality of such horrors by
denying their existence and by clinging to a perpetual suspension of
disbelief (Magistrale 2).
1. In society people are convincing themselves that what happens in
stories isnt actually true in real life, but Gaiman is saying that yes
these things actually happen in real life. Specifically, he is talking
about how women disrespect their own bodies by letting men do
whatever they want with them just so that they can get what they
want in exchange
4. Thus, horror inspires a repulsion-attraction reaction in even its most
ardent admirers: we are repulsed by images that are meant to threaten
our security, yet simultaneously attracted to the drama and meaning of
what they reveal (Magistrale 3).
1. Women read about Snow Whites actions and think that what she is
doing is immoral, yet it reveals to them that they do the same thing
in their own lives.

1. Then he asked me to lie upon my back, with my hands folded across my

breasts, my eyes wide openbut staring only at the beams above. He told me
not to move, and to breathe as little as possible. He implored me to say nothing
(Gaiman).

2. I tried, but he had lost whatever force it was that had made him virile; and some
short while later, I left the Princes room, his curses and tears still resounding in
my ears (Gaiman).