Be serious! Be alert! Your adversary the Devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for anyone he can devour. ~ 1 Peter 5:8
No journey can be repeated the same way twice. I learned this the hard way while studying this tale. I expected it to be just like Sleeping Beauty: mapped out for me by previous sojourners into folklore, one story leading to the next to create a lovely jaunt through history. That was not so.
Snow White is incredibly close to Sleeping Beauty in many ways. In fact, I didn’t want to do Snow White at first for fear of falling into the same lessons I had already done with Sleeping Beauty. However, being newly married (and thus still on my best behavior), I didn’t want to reveal to my beloved husband just how much I’m willing to spend on books.
And since the Snow White tales were in the same anthology as the Sleeping Beauty tales I’d bought previously, I chose Snow White.
I did, however, have one more opposition: isn’t the theme of Sleeping Beauty – that God can overcome all evil, even death – the same lesson found in Snow White? Indeed, one Italian variation for Sleeping Beauty is exactly the same as another Italian variation of Snow White; they simply die through violent means of the enemy rather than falling asleep due to a spindle.
My Journey through Snow White
I read 31 Snow White stories. I became overwhelmed with the evil done to her, and I was depressed every time I put down the anthology. Where was the hope? Nowhere. I could always find the hope in Sleeping Beauty; but not in Snow White. Stripped of their names and stories, these women become faceless numbers hiding behind statistics. Just to give you an idea of all the sorrow:
- 19 women are locked/hidden somewhere. Of those, 15 Snow Whites are taken by the prince while they are still asleep and remain locked away…where only the prince can find them. He cries over them daily. It’s super creepy.
- 3 Snow Whites are about to be creepily taken back to the prince’s chambers, but are accidentally awoken en route. This is the path the famous Brothers’ Grimm tale takes.
- Only 7 lucky women get to see the prince before he carries her back to his palace.
- One third of the women in the stories experienced persecution from the enemy after their awakening.
The Enemy was thoroughly evil, the prince was often less-than heroic, and Snow White seemed completely helpless. But did you catch the difference between Sleeping Beauty and Snow White? The major change is the malevolent enemy. In Sleeping Beauty, there is no enemy that pursues the heroine (barring the Disney version, of course); but in all tales of Snow White, the enemy is a key feature. They even pursue Snow White after the “happily ever after” moment in some tales.
And that is the divine lesson for this beautiful and heartbreaking tale: there is an Enemy in this world who seeks to destroy us, even after we’ve been made white as snow through the blood of Christ.
