white was still alive and fairer than she. She tried several
times to kill Snow-white, who fell into numerous deep
sleeps but never quite died. Finally the wicked queen
made a poisoned apple and induced the ever vigilant
Snow-white to bite into it. Snow-white did die, or became more dead than usual, because the wicked queen’s mirror then verified that she was the fairest in the land.
T h e dwarfs, who loved Snow-white, could not bear
to bury her under the ground, so they enclosed her in a
glass coffin and put the coffin on a mountaintop. T h e
heroic prince was just passing that way, immediately
fell in love with Snow-white-under-glass, and bought
her (it? ) from the dwarfs who loved her (it? ). As servants
carried the coffin along behind the prince’s horse, the
piece o f poisoned apple that Snow-white had swallowed
“flew out o f her throat. ” 8 She soon revived fully, that
is to say, not much. T he prince placed her squarely in
the “it” category, and marriage in its proper perspective
too, when he proposed wedded bliss —“ I would rather
have you than anything in the world. ” 9 T he wicked
queen was invited to the wedding, which she attended
because her mirror told her that the bride was fairer
Woman Haling
than she. At the wedding “they had ready red-hot iron
shoes, in which she had to dance until she fell down
dead. ” 10
Cinderella’s mother-situation was the same. Her
biological mother was good, pious, passive, and soon
dead. Her stepmother was greedy, ambitious, and ruthless. Her ambition dictated that her own daughters make good marriages. Cinderella meanwhile was forced
to do heavy domestic work, and when her work was
done, her stepmother would throw lentils into the ashes
of the stove and make Cinderella separate the lentils
from the ashes. The stepmother’s malice toward Cinderella was not free-floating and irrational. On the contrary, her own social validation was contingent on
the marriages she made for her own daughters. Cinderella was a real threat to her. Like Snow- white’s stepmother, for whom beauty was power and to be the most beautiful was to be the most powerful, Cinderella’s
stepmother knew how the social structure operated,
and she was determined to succeed on its terms.
Cinderella’s stepmother was presumably motivated
by maternal love for her own biological offspring. Maternal love is known to be transcendent, holy, noble, and unselfish. It is coincidentally also a fundament of
human (male-dominated) civilization and it is the real
basis of human (male-dominated) sexuality:
[When the prince began to search for the woman whose
foot would fit the golden slipper] the two sisters were
very glad, because they had pretty feet. The eldest
went to her room to try on the shoe, and her mother
stood by. But she could not get her great toe into it,
