Heigh-Ho

Digging for significance in Disney's new Snow White.

The problem with updating Snow White…well, there are a few problems, but the obvious one is that no matter how revisionist you think you’re being, you’re still liable to end up with a story about a character named “Snow White”. Not that this has anything to do with race, obviously. That is, not unless you’re Bob Clampett in 1943 working on the grotesque Merrie Melodies parody Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarfs, which for all its jaw-dropping stereotypes is not doing much more than kicking over a rock and allowing us a clear look at the assumptions underlying the 1937 Disney version, to say nothing of what came earlier.

It’s true that Disney and his team followed their source material in giving their heroine “hair as black as ebony,” rather than making her “fair” in the sense Shakespeare punned on relentlessly in the sonnets. But there’s no reason to think anyone involved in the film’s making saw any problem with identifying whiteness as a core component of beauty, any more than the Grimm brothers did in the early 19th century when the tale was first written down (in case you haven’t checked lately, in their version the heroine is identified as “the fairest in the land” at the age of seven, and the queen is a would-be cannibal who is tortured to death at the happy ending, but we digress).