THOSE TWO YOUNG SIRENS, my nieces, have been a source of endless amusement and instruction to me lately. I can't recall ever having spent so much time shopping and looking at things that were pink, and the varieties of Barbie type dolls have left me feeling slightly bewildered about this pre-teen world. But I've also noticed some other things.

Usually girls go shopping with their mothers, or their friends' mothers, so I'm a bit of anomaly in the aisles of Target, but I couldn't help noticing the way girls are exposed, more and more, to sexualized images of themselves. Barbie, as I've mentioned, and Bratz and all the rest, are all about looking good in the way that Cabbage Patch dolls never could be. Then, the other day I found myself standing quite close to a child who must have been about nine, and her mother was talking with her about pedicures and getting the girl's hair styled. Nothing wrong with that, you may say, except that the mother in question was a walking advertisement for every cosmetic and beautifying product one could possibly imagine. Her high heels alone made me fear for the chiropodist's bills later in life.

This set me thinking about the story of 'Snow White' and what people will do to remain beautiful. We all know this tale, but sometimes we blank out on the important details, and it is frequently in the details that real meaning lurks. We'll recall that the wicked step-mother becomes jealous of Snow White, and tries to have her killed, but Snow White escapes to live with the seven dwarfs. Even this is not enough, though, because the step-mother pursues the child, and comes disguised to the door of the little house to tempt the girl.

Most of us forget what these temptations are, but this is where the story becomes truly interesting. The first thing she tempts Snow White with is a set of 'stays' - according to the Grimm Brothers' version. Now, stays are the old-fashioned version of body shaping corsets, and Snow White is eager to try them. But wait. In the tale we're told that the girl is only about seven years old when she leaves the castle, so she's probably only eight or nine at this point, even if we stretch things. In fact the title of the tale in the Grimm Brother's collection is 'Little Snow White'. So she's way too young to be trying on what amounts to Victoria's Secret lingerie. Stays were corsets that were designed to reshape the female body, by squeezing the waist and pushing up the breasts. This is hardly age appropriate for this child. Yet, just like any kid who has ever gone to her mother's closet and played dress-up with the clothes she's found there, this is what little girls will do.

The wicked step-mother laces Snow White tightly in the corset, so tightly that she passes out. It's only the timely arrival of the seven dwarfs that saves her from suffocation.

What we can do is to look at this as a metaphor. The step-mother is obsessed by her own appearance. She's the one who goes to the mirror and asks it, compulsively, 'Who is the fairest in the land?' She becomes enraged when she discovers it's not herself, but Snow White. That's why, in her jealousy, she goes to find the child and attempts to kill her by using the same sorts of things she focuses on in her own life that would enhance her appearance. And if Snow White were about ten years older this might be something she'd be ready to consider, too. The step-mother is all about appearances, and she wishes to destroy her step-child through the machinery of appearances, of course. She tries the same thing with the poisoned comb, as well, and again the dwarfs rescue Snow White in time. The comb is an adult beauty aid, really, and functions in the same way as the corsets.

So what does this all mean? Well, little girls love to play at being like their mothers or step-mothers, yet here this wish is used against the child. And the hint is that if we allow these sorts of sexualized behaviors to be taken too seriously, too soon, something in the child is killed. The child who is dressed for the beauty pageant circuit, groomed for the parade, forced to be grown-up too early - this child can be damaged in the process. Sometimes this happens because the mothers, or step-mothers, have such unhappy lives that they seek to gain prestige and importance by having a beautiful child, a photographic model, or a child-actor to boast of. And that reminds us of Snow White's step-mother, because the poor thing really hasn't got anything else in her life except her physical beauty, and that will fade one day. After all, the major absent figure in the fairy tale is Snow White's father. He must exist because he married the step-mother, presumably for her beauty, but he is never mentioned. But he's certainly not protecting his child, and neither is he giving his wife the attention she needs. If she truly felt loved she wouldn't have to care about her rivalry with her step-daughter.

In fact the people who do protect Snow White are the dwarfs. They are male, certainly, but they're not full sized, so they represent the safe males of the world who offer her unconditional love and acceptance at a pre-pubescent level, one that has no sexual threat in it. I'm reminded here of my own schoolyard days. One of the girls, called Joan, when we were all about eight or so, appeared one day at school with polished nails and a full professionally administered perm. That perm was a formidable thing. She had to be careful, she told us, not to mess up her hair, and so she didn't join in the games, at least for a while. Soon, though, her little chums had her running around again as usual. The next day she came back to school and her mother had told her she absolutely must not join in the games, because she couldn't mess up her hair, her nails or (and this was something that hadn't been part of the situation the previous day) her new sweater. That resolution lasted until about lunchtime. The third day Joan appeared looking a little frightened, and this time her mother had given her strict orders, and added a pair of new black mary-jane shoes to the mix. That day Joan didn't join in the games at all, nor the next. We were sad at first but gradually we forgot about it and just accepted the situation. Joan, on the other hand, did not forget. She was sad and became lonely, and perhaps because of that she spent more time paying attention to her clothes than ever before. Looking back now I can see that something in her died that day. What had died was that authentic, spirited, sassy kid we all liked.

Mothers, specifically mothers who need to prove something through their daughters, can offer this sort of temptation because children want to be like their mothers and they want to please them. The mother may get what she wants - a child to be able to boast about - but at the expense of having destroyed the individual spark of the child. I think that's what the fairy tale is conveying to us as a possibility.

The final temptation for Snow White is the poisoned apple. Apples offered in a deceitful way by an evil person, especially in the time of the Grimm brothers, would have made everyone think of the apple offered by the serpent to Eve in the Garden of Eden. This is the temptation that catches Snow White, and it surely has some sexual echoes to it. So what it is trying to convey to us? The girl who starts dressing sexily, with her mother's connivance, at a very early age is likely to be the one who finds herself involved, all too soon, with the sexual attention of boys. With the numbers of schoolgirls under the age of 16 who report having had sex running at around 60% in some surveys (and 80% in others) we might want to pay attention to this. Snow White bites the apple and 'dies'. It's not until years later when the prince arrives, sees her in her glass coffin, and tries to move it that the apple is 'dislodged' and she wakes up. 'Dislodged' is a euphemism for vomiting it up. The hint is pretty strong; the girl who has sex too young can be in a sort of shock, and it may take her years to recover. She can recover, but only when she is purged of that early insult to her system, and only when she is facing a real, loving partner.

Which brings us back to the toy section of Target and the overly made up mother trying to turn her daughter into a woman years before her time. Snow White can tell us about this, and why mothers allow something that kills their daughters' spirits. But we have to read that tale and pay attention. We may try to blame the manufacturers of the toys, but sometimes I think we might want to look at what's happening within the families before rushing to conclusions.

My nieces, though, had got excited about something and were waving me over. A short discussion ensued. The result was a slickly packaged badminton set - which kept us all very much amused for several weeks, during which we frequently laughed ourselves into hysterics. It also resulted in flattened rose beds and wore my lawn until it looked more like the Oklahoma dust bowl than anything you might like to call a garden.

I couldn't have done a better deal if I'd tried.

© Dr. Allan Hunter, 2009

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Allan Hunter was educated at St John’s College Oxford and is presently a professor of Literature at Curry College, Milton, Massachusetts, and a therapist. His two books on archetypes are Stories We Need to Know and The Six Archetypes of Love, both from Findhorn Press.

Visit www.allanhunter.net or www.sixarchetypes.com to find out more.