SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS

The December 21, 1937, release by Walt Disney of the animated feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (produced in 1937) was hailed by conservative newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler as "the happiest thing that has happened in this world since the armistice" that had ended World War I in 1918. Surely he was correct in seeing the big screen adaptation of the Grimm Brothers' fairy tale as a pleasant diversion for many from the problems of the Depression, and specifically of the renewed economic collapse of 1937 to 1938. Yet this Disney cartoon held a significance far beyond its provision of an hour-and-a-half of escape from the harsh realities of the Great Depression.

Snow White was a milestone in filmmaking: the first feature-length animation in color. It was a huge commercial success that proved the economic possibilities for feature-length cartoons. The great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein rated Snow White as the greatest film ever made. But the deeper importance of the film lay in the powerful message it sent audiences about "proper" gender roles. In addition to its other meanings and interpretations, this film can readily be seen as a plea for a return to the "normalcy" in gender roles that had been so disrupted by the Depression—and as a foreshadowing of the rise of what Betty Freidan would term the "Feminine Mystique" in the post-World War II era.

The Depression severely undermined the traditional male role of provider. Many men who lost their jobs came to feel that they had lost their manhood. It was not unusual for women to hold jobs when their husbands did not. There was a palpable desire to restore male dominance and female dependence. Snow White embodied these fears and desires in two major ways. First, it portrayed a powerful woman as ultimately evil and a completely naïve woman who embodies the characteristics of the nineteenth-century vision of "true womanhood"—domesticity, submissiveness, purity, and piety—as the ideal female. Even more strikingly, Snow White reverses the actuality of many downcast, jobless, nearly helpless men who were dependent on women to make them feel alive in the 1930s. The film instead portrays a woman who falls into the complete helplessness of "sleeping death," from which she can only be revived by a man, who will carry her off so that they can live happily ever after. For many men in the Great Depression, this was indeed the state of affairs for which they were wishing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barrier, Michael. Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. 1999.

Holliss, Richard, and Brian Sibley. Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the Making of the Classic Film. 1987.

McElvaine, Robert S. Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History. 2001.

Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney, 3rd edition. 1997.