Month: April 2017

I was on the train home from my day job one evening when some article about true stories behind classic fairy tales popped up on Facebook. It took my mind into that place my fellow commuters never get to go and suddenly it dawned on me that the wicked Queen in the Snow White story sounded really fishy. Obsessing over another woman’s appearance, hunting her down, giving her gifts, going mad when she gets married, all because you’re jealous of her looks? Unrealistic. I’ve never seen a woman behave that way when envious of another. In real life, a woman only gets that sort of crazy when afflicted with a bad case of crush. Right?

I sought the original version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and more gay possibilities came up between the lines – “From that hour on whenever she looked at Snow-White her heart turned over inside her body… until she had no peace day and night.” “At first she did not want to go to the wedding, but she found no peace. She had to go and see the young queen. When she arrived she recognized Snow-White, and terrorised she could only stand there without moving.”

Of course, the Grimm Brothers cited vanity as the explanation for her behaviour – “From that hour on whenever she looked at Snow-White her heart turned over inside her body, so great was her hatred for the girl. The envy and pride grew ever greater, like a weed in her heart, until she had no peace day and night.” – but it made me wonder, what if their male heteronormative gaze simply misunderstood the Queen or whoever it was that served as inspiration for that character?

I arrived at my stop, got off the train and began to write the story from a completely different perspective. My kind of perspective with my understanding of what truly makes a woman that jealous. That’s how Snow White and Her Queen came about.

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of Snow White and Her Queen, do also read the Grimms’ version of Snow White’s story, written by the brothers in 1812:

Once upon a time in midwinter, when the snowflakes were falling like feathers from heaven, a queen sat sewing at her window, which had a frame of black ebony wood. As she sewed she looked up at the snow and pricked her finger with her needle. Three drops of blood fell into the snow. The red on the white looked so beautiful that she thought to herself, “If only I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood in this frame.”

Soon afterward she had a little daughter who was as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony wood, and therefore they called her Little Snow-White. And as soon as the child was born, the queen died.

A year later the king took himself another wife. She was a beautiful woman, but she was proud and arrogant, and she could not stand it if anyone might surpass her in beauty. She had a magic mirror. Every morning she stood before it, looked at herself, and said:

Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who in this land is fairest of all?

To this the mirror answered:

You, my queen, are fairest of all.

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Published 21 April 2017.

Before there was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there was another story some preferred not to tell.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all?”

“You, my Queen, are fairest of all,” the Princess had said, unravelling a nightmare of obsession and forbidden desire.

This intimate retelling of the popular Grimms’ fairy tale will change your understanding of the wicked Queen’s infamous jealousy forever.
Click here to read more or buy.

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