The Fairest of Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters

by Maria Tatar

Overview

We think we know the story of Snow White from Disney and the Brothers Grimm. But acclaimed folklorist Maria Tatar reveals dazzling variations from across the globe.

The story of the rivalry between a beautiful, innocent girl and her equally beautiful and cruel mother has been endlessly repeated and refashioned all over the world. In Switzerland you might hear about seven dwarfs who shelter a girl, only to be murdered by robbers. In Armenia a mother orders her husband to kill his daughter because the moon has declared her “the most beautiful of all.”

The Brothers Grimm gave this story the name by which we know it best, and in 1937 Walt Disney sweetened their somber version to make the first feature-length, animated fairy tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Since then the Disney film has become our cultural touchstone—the innocent heroine, her evil stepmother, the envy that divides them, and a romantic rescue from domestic drudgery and maternal persecution. But, as every fan of the story knows, there is more to Snow White than that. The magic mirror, the poisoned apple, the catatonic sleep, and the strange scene of revivification are important elements in the phantasmagoria of the Snow White universe.

Maria Tatar, an acclaimed folklorist and translator, brings to life a global melodrama of mother-daughter rivalries that play out across countries and cultures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674238602
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Maria Tatar is the author of Enchanted Hunters, the editor and translator of annotated editions of works by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, and the editor of an annotated edition of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. She is the John L. Loeb Research Professor of Folklore and Mythology and Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, as well as a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction 1

Little Snow White 63

The Young Slave 78

The Death of the Seven Dwarfs 83

Maroula and the Mother of Eros 85

The Enchanted Stockings 89

Princess Aubergine 94

Snow-White-Fire-Red 102

The Magic Slippers 108

The World's Most Beautiful Woman 114

Silver-tree and Gold-tree 129

King Peacock 134

The Beautiful Daughter 138

The Mirror of Matsuyama 148

The Girl and the Dog 151

The Unnatural Mother and the Girl with a Star on Her Forehead 154

The Hunter and His Sister 165

The Witch's Daughter 170

Nourie Hadig 179

Blanca Rosa and the Forty Thieves 188

The Wonder Child 194

The Jealous Mother 200

Bibliography 213

Credits 221

Editorial Reviews

As a study of perhaps the best known of all fairy stories, this one is original and thought-provoking.

The Spectator - Susan Hill

Is the story of Snow White the cruelest, the deepest, the strangest, the most mythopoeic of them all? The answer must be yes. Maria Tatar trains a keen eye on the appeal of the bitter conflict between women at the heart of the tale, unearths retellings from far and wide, and spreads a feast of rich thoughts on the tale’s remarkable aesthetic migrations into literature and film. The Fairest of Them All is an exciting and authoritative anthology from the wisest good fairy in the world of the fairy tale.

Marina Warner

A fascinating volume…Far from demystifying fairy tales, Tatar’s analysis has the effect of deepening an appreciation for their magic…The Fairest of Them All delivers a trove of forgotten fairy tales to readers and returns the Snow White of Disney and the Brothers Grimm to her international context—as but one version in a strange, beguiling history of stories about beauty, jealousy, and maternal persecution.

Wall Street Journal

[A] fascinating collection of tales…Shocking yet familiar, these stories of regeneration and transformation even when written down retain the secret whisper of storytelling. This is a properly magical, erudite book that follows Snow White’s trail into the darker forests of the human psyche in which she originated.

Literary Review - Lucy Lethbridge

Tilt the magic mirror this way, that, and you’ll find in The Fairest of Them All nearly two dozen reflections, each dazzling, of the ur-fairy tale known as Snow White. With her trademark brio and deep-tissue understanding, Maria Tatar opens the glass casket on this undying story, which retains its power to charm twenty-one times, and counting.

Gregory Maguire

The Snow White tales that Tatar presents here are not as slick as the confections of the Grimms and Disney… What Tatar urges in her deft and thoughtful introduction is that we read each variation, whether it is from West Africa, Afghanistan or China, with equal attention… This provides a way of thinking about how fairy tales reveal more than the essentially early 20th-century upper bourgeois insights of Freudian psychoanalysts. There are plenty of examples of mother–daughter rivalries in these tales to be sure, but there is so much more of the material and temporal world—food, hunger, disease, and war—too.

The Guardian - Kathryn Hughes

Going to the root of a story is a journey to the very core of the soul. Reading across the world, the inimitable Maria Tatar offers us a maze of mothers and daughters and within that glorious tangle an archetype with far more meaning than we imagine when we say ‘Snow White.’

Honor Moore