19 pages • 38 minutes read
Anne SextonSnow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Lack of Female Agency
In “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Sexton uses a familiar, centuries-old fairy tale to highlight the cyclical, deeply-embedded issue of women’s inability to have active roles in contemporary culture. From the first stanza, Sexton establishes the ideal of the virgin, or the kind of woman Snow White must be, describing her as a beautiful but fragile figure whose lone action is to “[roll] her china-blue doll eyes / open and shut” (Lines 6-7). She is a passive figure whose only roles are to be polite, saying “Good Day Mama” (Line 9), and to be a sexual object, awaiting the “thrust / of the unicorn” (Lines 10-11).
Things happen to Snow White, not the reverse; she is incapable of doing anything for herself, something Sexton continually highlights in her characterization of Snow White throughout the poem. In the forest, she walks aimlessly until she encounters the dwarfs’ home by chance, and when she meets them, she unquestioningly stays to “keep house” (Line 78) for them. When the queen tries to kill her, Snow White takes what her stepmother gives her and promptly faints, and only the dwarfs can resuscitate her. When they cannot save her after she bites the poisoned apple, she becomes a literal object to all of the men in the story, as the dwarfs place her in a glass coffin and the prince pines after her, until the dwarfs give him her body. Even as Snow White surprisingly comes back to life, she simply “became the prince’s bride” (Line 147), with no say in the matter.
In the ultimate demonstration of lack of agency, Sexton ends the poem with the suggestion that Snow White is doomed to become like her stepmother, “referring to her mirror / as women do” (Lines 163-164). Snow White suffers this fate because the world in which she lives values beauty above all else. The men in the poem value beauty as an object, and as such, Snow White has no worth as an active person. She is only useful as something to gaze upon, even if she is dead and in a glass coffin. Sexton’s poem offers both a harsh critique and a warning: Promoting female passivity in this way creates a cycle of pain and violence, as evidenced in the stepmother’s brutal death.
Cultural Expectations of Female Beauty
Sexton uses the Snow White fairy tale to expose the dark underside of a culture that values women for their external beauty. In the first stanza, Sexton sets up the fragility of this value, connecting beauty with items like cigarette papers, china, and fine wine. As she moves into the fairy tale, the reader learns that the queen is so consumed by the fear of losing her beauty that she is willing to cannibalize her stepdaughter, telling the hunter, “Bring me her heart […] and I will salt it and eat it” (Lines 44-45). Sexton writes this extreme response after the queen notices “brown spots on her hand / and four whiskers over her lip” (Lines 40-41), purposefully showing the queen responding to minuscule, hardly noticeable physical changes. Even the slightest variance, however, sends the queen into panic and despair, as she understands that the loss of beauty is the loss of the only thing of value she has.
In the final stanzas of the poem, when Snow White eats the poisoned apple and appears dead, she still has value as an object of beauty, and the dwarfs encase her in a glass coffin “so that all who passed by / could peek in upon her beauty” (Lines 133-134). Even in death (or perceived death), the men feed off of Snow White’s beauty, establishing an even more impossible standard for other women to live up to.
Virginity and Female Sexuality
Throughout “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Sexton critiques the cultural standard of the idealized virgin and emphasizes the sexual danger women are in when they have no agency in their own lives. The (aptly named) Snow White of Sexton’s poem fits into the “lovely virgin” (Line 14) ideal established in the first stanza. She is young, inexperienced, and expected to maintain purity and an unsullied body. The first time she experiences risk, as she walks in the wildwood after the hunter lets her go, she is subject to a threat of sexual violence, as she encounters wolves whose tongues “[loll] out like worm[s]” (Line 55). Because Snow White is merely a sexual object valued for her beauty, she is at great risk of violence against her by predators who see her not as fully human but as an object to possess. Sexton emphasizes this a few lines later, describing the snakes as “a noose for her sweet white neck” (Line 59). The phallic nature of the snakes implies a sexual threat, made more sinister by the comparison to a noose.
When the prince takes Snow White as a bride in the final stanza of the poem, Snow White is passive, with no sexual appetite or desires of her own. She must maintain the appearance of purity while also serving at her husband’s pleasure. The poem’s dark ending emphasizes the emptiness of this life, suggesting that Snow White’s virginal purity and perfection cannot help her escape from the fate her stepmother suffers.
