What ‘Snow White’ Has to Teach Us About Purity, Corruption, Romance, and Civilization

Detail, "Snow White," date unknown, by Alexander Zick. Public domain

Walt Disney’s 1937 “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” rightly remains one of the most amazing American films ever made.

Originally dubbed “Disney’s Folly” because of the hundreds of artists and technicians involved in its animation, the movie was a box-office smash on its release and has remained a family favorite ever since. Renowned Russian director Sergey Eisenstein (1898–1948) called it the greatest film ever made. With its blend of movement and color, its extravagant collage of animated birds and other wildlife, its music, and its mix of comedy and horror, “Snow White” is indeed a work of art.

But technique and style alone do not elevate it to that status. This movie also resounds with truth, beauty, and goodness. Consequently, it has some lessons and warnings for us even today.

Virtue Versus Corruption

Snow White is a princess, the embodiment of innocence and goodness right down to her name. These virtues and her purity of heart add to her physical beauty. Even after she bites into the wicked queen’s poisoned apple and falls into a “sleeping death,” Snow White remains “so beautiful, even in death, that the dwarfs could not find it in their hearts to bury her.”

On the other hand, we have the malevolent, stone-hearted Queen. After her magic mirror reports that one with “lips red as the rose, hair black as ebony, skin white as snow” is now the fairest in the land rather than the Queen, she orders her huntsman to murder Snow White. When from pity the huntsman helps the girl to escape, the Queen disguises herself as an old crone, prepares a poisoned apple, and uses first lies and then compassion to convince Snow White to take a bite of the deadly fruit.

Today, we see the Queen’s tactics employed everywhere in our society. From the Orwellian politicians who promise democracy while promoting communism to the drug dealers who hide fentanyl in brightly colored capsules to media personalities who ignore facts to forward an agenda—these and many others seek to steer us away from truth, goodness, and beauty. Like the witch, they hold out their apples to us while in disguise, decked out in relativism and slippery language, twisting truth to their own ends and often appealing to our sense of compassion to encourage a bite of the poisonous fruit they offer.

The Demise of Romance

And like the Queen, others in our culture have attempted to poison Snow White and fairy tale princesses in general.

These are the radical feminists and cynics, male and female, who, when Snow White sings, “Someday my prince will come,” sneer at that sentiment. More than 50 years ago, some females in this camp proclaimed, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Women, so the thinking went, should be independent of men, defined by their jobs, their money, and their freedom to live as they chose.

Forgotten in that formula were its effects on men. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” runs the old saying, and many men have since decided that they don’t need women, marriage, or children. Once a natural bridge between men and women, romance as portrayed in “Snow White” seems, to many of today’s cultural commentators, to be on life support. Snow White’s desire to find a Prince Charming and to live happily ever after may still make the wish list of many females, but you’ll rarely hear that yearning expressed publicly. You will, however, hear some of them criticize the supposedly low state to which men have fallen while wondering why so many of them seem unsuitable for a relationship.

The answer to that question is simple, really: Without a princess, there can be no prince.

A Woman’s Touch

When Snow White first enters the dwarfs’ cottage, the place is a dump, like a frat house on a Sunday morning. Dirty dishes are stacked everywhere, dust covers the furniture, and unwashed clothing and linens litter the floor. Assuming that motherless children live here, and helped by her animal friends—deer, chipmunks, birds, and others—Snow White goes to work, sets the house in order, puts a large kettle of soup on the fire, and then collapses in exhaustion across some of the little beds upstairs.

After the dwarfs recover from their shock at these changes—they originally assume a monster has taken up residence in their house—at Snow White’s command they wash up for a supper of delicious soup, with promises in the future of apple dumplings and gooseberry pie. They then spend the evening in music, dance, and laughter. At bedtime, the “little men,” as Snow White calls them, insist that she sleep in their bedroom. As they settle down in the living area below, Snow White prays for them at her bedside. In the morning, she kisses each of them on top of the head as they set off to work, while they warn her to beware of the wicked queen.

What we see here is a profound metaphor for civilization, both the little civilization that changes a house into a home and the greater civilization that grows out of thousands and thousands of such homes. Snow White delivers the woman’s touch to the uncouth lives led by the little men. From those fundamentals of civilization there naturally follows culture—the dancing and the music. Exchanged between the dwarfs and Snow White are the traditional promises of care and protection once natural to the sexes, summed up in the chaste kisses of the princess and the chivalric instincts roused in the dwarfs.

For nearly 50 years, our society has neglected or denigrated the essential importance of homemakers and, as a result, the centrality of family to civilization. The wreckage of that neglect lies all around us.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

Right about now might be a good time to start.