no peace.. . . ” 5
Now, we all know what nations will do to achieve
peace, and the queen was no less resourceful (she would
have made an excellent head o f state). She ordered a
huntsman to take Snow-white to the forest, kill her, and
bring back her heart. The huntsman, an uninspired
good guy, could not kill the sweet young thing, so he
turned her loose in the forest, killed a boar, and took its
Onceuponatime: The Roles
37
heart back to the queen. T h e heart was “salted and
cooked, and the wicked woman ate it up, thinking that
there was an end o f Snow-white. ” 6
Snow-white found her way to the home o f the 7
dwarfs, who told her that she could stay with them “if
you will keep our house for us, and cook, and wash, and
make the beds, and sew and knit, and keep everything
tidy and clean. ” 7 T hey simply adored her.
T h e queen, who can now be called with conviction
the wicked queen, found out from her mirror that Snow-
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,
Onceuponatime: The Roles
39
for the shoe was too small; then her mother handed
her a knife, and said,
“Cut the toe off, for when you are queen you will
never have to go on foot. ” So the girl cut her toe off,
and squeezed her foot into the shoe, concealed the
pain, and went down to the prince. Then he took her
with him on his horse as his bride. . . .
Then the prince looked at her shoe, and saw the
blood flowing. And he turned his horse round and
took the false bride home again, saying that she was
not the right one, and that the other sister must try
on the shoe. So she went into her room to do so, and
got her toes comfortably in, but her heel was too large.
Then her mother handed her the knife, saying, “Cut
a piece off your heel; when you are queen you will
never have to go on foot. ”
So the girl cut a piece off her heel, and thrust her
foot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went down
to the prince, who took his bride. . . .
Then the prince looked at her foot, and saw how
the blood was flowing. . . . 11
Cinderella’s stepmother understood correctly that her
only real work in life was to marry off her daughters.
Her goal was upward mobility, and her ruthlessness was
consonant with the values o f the market place.* She
loved her daughters the way Nixon loves the freedom o f
the Indochinese, and with much the same result. Love
in a male-dominated society certainly is a many-splen-
dored thing.
Rapunzel’s mother wasn’t exactly a winner either.
*
This depiction o f women as flesh on an open market, of crippling and
mutilation for the sake of making a good marriage, is not fiction; cf. C hapter
6, “Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding. ”
40
Woman Hating
She had a maternal instinct all right—she had “long
wished for a child, but in vain. ” 12 Sometime during her
wishing, she developed a craving for rampion, a vegetable which grew in the garden of her neighbor and peer, the witch. She persuaded her husband to steal
rampion from the witch’s garden, and each day she
craved more. When the witch discovered the theft, she
made this offer:
. . . you may have as much rampion as you like, on
one condition — the child that will come into the world
must be given to me. It shall go well with the child, and
I will care for it like a mother. 13
Mama didn’t think twice —she traded Rapunzel for a
vegetable. Rapunzel’s surrogate mother, the witch, did
not do much better by her:
When she was twelve years old the witch shut her up
in a tower in the midst of a wood, and it had neither