Snow White is the feminine ideal of a patriarchal society, given her beauty, passivity, dutifulness and submissiveness to authority. In her state of perfect, living death without decay, she symbolizes "the silence, the immobility, and beauty of the daughter-heroine displayed in a glass coffin" (Gilbert and Gubar, 1994, p
Their original tale portrays Snow White as virginal and pure, and so perfectly beautiful in every way that she drives the stepmother and evil Queen to violent hatred and jealousy. She is extremely vain and narcissistic, and always asking her magic mirror "who is the fairest of all?" (Grimm 1865, p
Snow White is not really the main character of the story, since she is so passive and submissive, a sort of ideal good little girl type. Rather, the evil Queen is the "driving force" compared to Snow White, who is "too pathetically good, too much the domestic, to be of major interest in the story" (Zipes 2001, p