Snow White

Snow White is invoked as a fairy-tale heroine in Simone de Beauvoir’s account of how stories teach girls to imagine love and happiness through waiting, passivity, and suffering. Her image, lying as if dead in a glass coffin, belongs to a wider pattern in which a heroine’s humiliation and apparent helplessness are made to precede a glorious triumph.

Place in the Fairy-Tale Pattern

Beauvoir groups Snow White with heroines such as Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella: women who receive and endure while a young man sets out, fights dangers, and acts. These stories repeatedly place the heroine in confinement or sleep, waiting for someone else to change her circumstances. Snow White’s role therefore exemplifies the waiting woman, whose future is imagined as dependent on rescue and a man’s love.

Suffering and the Promise of Triumph

Snow White’s apparent death in a glass coffin is part of a larger gallery of tender heroines who are beaten, wounded, humiliated, or abandoned. Beauvoir argues that such stories make suffering seem not merely something imposed on a heroine but a route to prestige and eventual power: the girl is taught to expect her greatest triumph when she has fallen into abjection and resigned herself to hardship. Snow White’s stillness thus carries the pattern’s central contradiction: apparent defeat is presented as the condition for a promised reward.

Influence on Girls’ Expectations

In Beauvoir’s reading, these heroines help make the martyr’s role appealing to girls, in contrast with the active heroism offered to their brothers. Snow White is not presented as an independently developed character with a personal history or changing actions; she functions as a cultural example. Her glass coffin gives a memorable form to the lesson Beauvoir identifies in fairy tales: feminine happiness is imagined as something awaited and received, while suffering and passivity are adorned with the promise of glory.