Who's the Fairest of Them All?

            In the Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the recently released rendition Snow White and the Huntsman, there is an Evil Queen who’s transformation depends on her appearance.
                   This Evil Queen wears lavish robes and jewelry to represent royalty, pride, vanity and arrogance.  Although she is a Queen, she has no interest in her kingdom.  In the tale, she is never seen doing anything to govern her people.  She is too preoccupied with her own appearance to care about anything else.

            

            She owns a Magic Mirror (which has a slave trapped within it) that asks it every day “Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”.  She is ordering the slave within to tell her what she wants to hear: that she was the most beautiful woman in the land.  As long as she hears that she is the most beautiful, she is happy.

The Evil Queen is Snow White’s stepmother and forces Snow White to work in the castle as a servant (when in the beginning of their relationship she was nice to Snow White).  This is because the Evil Queen is jealous of her stepdaughters’ beauty.  She makes Snow White work in dirty rags for clothing and uncomfortable wooden shoes, but even in dirty rags, Snow White’s beauty shines through.  The Evil Queen is informed one day by her Magic Mirror Snow White has become the fairest in the land.  She immediately became enraged and plotted her revenge.  She cannot handle that she is no longer the most beautiful in the land.  The Queen wanted to get rid of Snow White but her beauty hid her ugly personality.

The Queen hires a Huntsman to take Snow White into the forest and kill her and bring her torn out heart back, but he cannot bring himself to kill a woman with such a beautiful face.  Instead he warns Snow White of the Queen’s jealously. The Huntsman returns with a pig’s heart.  The Huntsman lie is found out through the knowledge of the Magic Mirror.  She then brews a concoction in order to turn herself into an ugly peddler.  This is when the Queen shows how ugly she truly is. 

This correlates to the essay written by Bonelli, “Fashion, Lifestyle, and Psychiatry”, “Fashion is able to influence human life significantly by initiating social trends, thus making people change lifestyles, attitudes and relationships and thereby affecting the human psyche as well” (p. 160). The Queen is so worried about being the most beautiful in the kingdom.  She no longer acts as a Queen of a Kingdom but acts as a self-centered queen.  Her attitude throughout the story changes further from just being self-centered to being violent and full of hatred.  And this changes her relationship with her stepdaughter, because she is jealous of her stepdaughter’s attractive appearance and wants to, therefore, kill Snow White.  The Queen’s whole life becomes occupied by her jealousy and her strive for ultimate beauty.

Further, many young women have the same issue that the Queen does (minus the violent urge to murder).  Beauty is made into a competition, from a young age and all women want to be told that they are the most beautiful girl.  Girls that feel the need to change themselves through plastic surgery are striving for ultimate beauty in order to gain self confidence, but if they would just step back and look, they would realize that they are just as beautiful, if not more beautiful, from the start.