White As Snow by Tanith Lee

I have continued my reading in Terri Windling’s Fairy Tale Series with this adaptation of the tale of Snow White. I have dreaded writing about Tanith Lee’s White As Snow. I found the book almost repellent.

The story opens with Arpazia, a young princess, facing the conquest of her father’s city and her own certain death. She attempts to escape and is captured by the enemy king. After he attacks her, he decides to make her his queen. She bears his daughter Candacis, who is quickly rejected by her numbed mother and ignored by her brutal father. Arpazia finds some pleasure in life again when she becomes involved in the pagan fertility plays held at night in the woods. When her daughter becomes old enough to usurp Arpazia’s role in these rites, Arpazia pays someone to kill her.

Lee combines the Snow White story with the Greek myth of Persphone, Hades and Ceres. Snow White (Candacis) is conflated with Persephone, and the queen who seeks her death is also her mother, Ceres, searching for her throughout the world. Names accrue around the characters as the story goes on, until each character has several. This serves to depersonalize the character, so that the mythic role they play becomes more important than their individual identities. The inescapability of fate and the inevitable repetition of pagan cycles features largely. The magic in this story only highlights its despair. There is neither hope nor solace in this version of Snow White.

The contempt for men expressed in this book borders on revulsion. The female characters, though tormented and possibly evil, are nevertheless full human characters. Their motives can be understood and may even garner sympathy. The men are merely bestial. Most are flat, cartoonish figures without reasons for their behavior. The only vaguely positive male character is a dwarf who, like the female characters, has been tortured and enslaved most of his life, so he is allowed an almost human quality.

This is the first book I have read by Tanith Lee. Perhaps she has other novels where something other than despair, meaningless and inescapable, happens. But this sample of her work leaves me disinclined to try anything else.

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