19 pages • 38 minutes read
Anne SextonSnow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Metaphor and Simile
Sexton utilizes metaphor and simile to great effect over the course of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” particularly to characterize Snow White and her role as a victim of the patriarchal society in which she lives. Sexton establishes the fragility of Snow White in the first stanza, describing the ideal virgin as having “cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper” (Line 3) and being “white as a bonefish” (Line 13). These evocative, textured images draw the reader in and contrast with later similes as Sexton develops her critique. After Snow White joins the dwarfs, the similes describing her morph, demonstrating the failure of the virginal ideal. She becomes a “plucked daisy” (Line 97), a typical metaphor for a “ruined” woman who has lost her virginity before marriage. The more powerful dwarfs, however, overcome this, reviving her until she is “full of life as soda pop” (Line 100), once again a consumable item for their enjoyment. The metaphors increase in their criticism as the speaker compares Snow White to Orphan Annie and calls her a “dumb bunny” (Line 117), emphasizing her naiveté. Finally, when Snow White falls after eating the poisoned apple, she is “still as a gold piece” (Line 128), the ultimate object of value, as the speaker reveals Snow White has no value beyond her objectified beauty.
Food Imagery
Snow White is an object for men (and the queen) to consume. Sexton’s use of food imagery heightens this idea, making it more disturbing and violent. When the queen learns that Snow White is fairer than she, she asks the hunter to kill Snow White and return with her head so the queen can “salt it and eat it” (Line 45). When the hunter returns, deceiving the queen with a boar’s heart, she “chewed it up like a cube steak” (Line 48) and “lap[s] her slim white fingers” (Line 50). Snow White is literally a piece of meat to the queen, her beauty something the queen believes she can take for herself through violent means.
As Snow White travels in the woods, the wolves she encounters are “hungry” (Line 54) for her, again emphasizing her consumable nature. Later, to the dwarfs she becomes “full of life as soda pop” (Line 100), drinkable and pleasurable. When they cannot revive her after eating the queen’s apple, they “washed her with wine / and rubbed her with butter” (Lines 125-126), preparing her as they would a meal. She essentially becomes a meal for the prince, who feasts his eyes upon her seemingly dead body with longing, until the dwarfs give Snow White to him. Sexton’s use of food imagery highlights how the sexist culture commodifies Snow White’s body, making her an object for others’ consumption.
Modern Imagery
Sexton’s use of contemporary images sprinkled throughout the poem forces the reader to pause, considering the implications of the story in a modern context. In the second stanza, the speaker compares the mirror’s declarations to “the weather forecast” (Line 25), drawing the reader’s attention to this well-known aspect of the story, and asking them to consider it in a new light. Comparing the mirror to a weather forecast implies an objective, scientific approach, something that is impossible for an assessment of physical beauty; Sexton’s contemporary simile emphasizes this. Later intrusions of modern images like cube steak (Line 48), an Ace bandage (Line 95), soda pop (Line 100), roller skates (Line 151), and others also ask the reader to consider Sexton’s critiques of the fairy tale world in light of the contemporary one, as she suggests that Western cultural values have changed very little over the course of the decades between the original Grimm version of Snow White and her own.
