Comparing Sandra Gilbert's Snow White And Her Wicked Stepmother

In “Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother”, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar formulate the cycle in which fairy tale women are subjected by the patriarchal society’s imprisonment, then turned against each other so they remain in power and are destined to repeat the cycle. Gilbert and Gubar examine how a sexual reference, like “she pricks her finger, and bleeds”, begins the cycle of the metamorphoses of the mother “into a wicked ‘step’ mother” (Gilbert Gubar 292). The wicked stepmother then tries many times to kill Snow White, through various “female devices” such as tight laces, a comb and an apple (Gilbert Gubar 294). Both women are imprisoned by “transparent enclosures” given to them by men; the Queen is trapped by her mirror, while Snow is trapped by her glass …show more content…
Snow White’s death and her glass coffin are more dangerous to the Queen than Snow White being alive, as she “is an object to be displayed and desired” and becomes a the “ideal woman” to the patriarchy (Gilbert Gubar 296). Ultimately, Snow White defeats her wicked stepmother, but Gilbert and Gubar argue that her life will follow the same path of her wicked stepmother as she only “exchanged one glass coffin for another” and will “embark on that life of ‘significant action’ which, for a woman, is defined as a witch’s life” (Gilbert Gubar 296).
In his fairy tale “The Young Slave”, a less famous version of Snow White, Giambattista Basile’s story relates directly to the theory Gilbert and Gubar propose. Basile’s story starts with a young woman, Lilla, who finds “a lovely rose in full bloom” which this story’s symbol of sex. Lilla eats a leaf from the rose to hide that it has fall from her friends, which becomes the representation of sex; furthermore, Lilla becomes pregnant because of the leaf, “the cause of [the pregnancy] was