As she was born, she bore death. The child came in the recesses of a dull and barren winter, on a night that had been so cold that it felt hollow, like a jagged hole bitten out of the earth. The queen mother had died just hours after the birth—a fever, so they claimed, no doubt brought on by the miserable chill of the season. The sickness quickly spread to the other wet-nurses and servants—she passed from hand to hand in a succession of fleeting maternity, leaving her swaddled in mourning clothes.
They preferred to keep the child covered, for even a fleeting glance of her chilled milk-white skin and blood stained lips created a deathly shiver. The child was hungry too, it was said; what stores of food the kingdom retained were never enough, and a dozen nurses came and went but she was still unsatisfied. It was whispered that the girl consumed far too much for her status, lacking all the demure graces of a princess. She was more animal than girl, and so she grew with pinched ribs and ravenous eyes. As she grew, she grew death.
Though her appetite quieted when the king remarried, the rumors of the dead servants only became louder as the princess became more horrifying in appearance. What had made nurses shiver in childhood had only increased in age. It was a shame too, that she was a stroke away from beautiful. Her skin was as cold and white as snow, her lips soaked in the color of blood, her hair black as ebony. Each facet was unsettling against the other in a grotesque distortion—the hair too striking against the skin too pallid against the curve of the lips and fiendishly sharp eyes.
And still—though they were fewer—they found the bodies of the princess’s servants. Each was hollow and bloodless as through there life had been gnawed away and swallowed whole. But the clamor of outrage against the girl dared not rise above a whisper. When the time came for deliberating marriage, her princely suitors from the neighboring kingdoms could scarcely hold her gaze. They regarded her like a drawn knife: shining yet terrifying, harboring a looming threat such that they recoiled from her.
Matches drawn from faraway lands—who had not heard the whispers of the blooded lips and nursemaids—dissolved the lifting of a veil and an acrid kiss. And so the new queen, who had lived too long in the castle to know the reality of her corrupted charge, stands before the mirror and asks herself, “Who is meant to be the fairest? ” The duty fell to creature who could never be fair—from whom the kingdom must be saved. And in deciding she could longer hide the drained, bloodless bodies of serving girls and nurses, she forced the monster out of the castle into the raw and untamed wilds.
As she was abandoned, she abandoned herself. Outside the castle she was not confined to the blood of pathetic serving girls—now her cheeks could fill with the taste of earthen metallic blood, red strands leaking down her face. She drank from the hunters and wildsmen who subsisted on reaping the bounties of the forest, consuming from them what they have taken from nature. Their blood was thick with pride and vigor, yet when she drank she still starved. She left the bodies on the edge of the woods for the villagers to find in the morning.
When the rumors began to rise once again—of the monster in the woods with red in its jaw in the cloak of night—the queen followed her daughter out to the wilds. And the monster said, “I have been cursed to in my image, in my station, in my drive to consume life. I pushed to the ends of the earth. ” And the monster said, “I will never be satisfied. ” And the mother knew the only way to prevent the continued encroaching evil. So she removed her cloak and allowed the monster to bite her own heart, for it this is what she had truly sought: the consumption of love, denied for so long, only fully given by a mother.
And so the monster took her mother’s heart, poison as it was, and found that she was no longer hungry. And so she was lost in the ebony of the night and the white of the moon and the red of a dying curse, left encrusted upon the snow. Justification Paragraph: This story was intended to be a retelling of the classic fairytale “Snow White” with Gothic themes and undertones. I was intrigued by how these stories that we now tell to children in simplified, cute versions were once incredibly violent and dark, and I wanted to use the style of the Gothic to revitalize these elements in a new rendition of the story.
The presence of dark, creepy settings (instances of pathetic fallacy) in the “barren” castle and untamed wilds respectively are definite Gothic elements, as is the inclusion of supernatural beings to create a heightened sense of terror in the audience. One of the most prominent Gothic elements that I used throughout the story is the idea of the “uncanny”—that the princess’s appearance, thought to be beautiful in its individual elements, is considered “a stroke away from beautiful”; when these elements are placed together, the contrast between them is far too unsettling.
The feeling of the uncanny caused by the princess is further augmented by the association of her physical features with death and decay, causing them to further recoil from her, rejecting her from society and casting her out into the “wilds. ” This rejection of a monster due to its uncanny physical appearance and association with death is similar to Frankenstein, a paramount Gothic work. “Rumors” and “whispers” mentioned throughout the story are references to the effects of folklore and legends about supernatural creatures, and factor into both Dracula and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Additionally prevalent is the theme of maternal relationships and rejected creations. Much of the “Female Gothic” (Gothic novels written for any by women) related to the struggles of women’s condition in society and as mothers. The story emphasizes how the princess is limited by her condition as a woman, and is thought less of because she lacks the “femininity” and “softness” expected of her.
It is for these reasons that she decides to prey on the men of the forest and thus gain power by consuming what they had “stolen” from nature, which is tied to her own being. Additionally, maternal relationships are presented as having tense strife: the princess’s mother dies in childbirth and after this she receives no maternal guidance or connection, and is “passed from hand to hand” between various faux-maternal figures (the nursemaids), similar to the rejection of creation in Frankenstein.
The monster can only achieve piece when reconnected with a maternal figure, and allowed to consume (though a tad grotesquely) the love that could be “only fully given by a mother,” which is to say a mother’s sacrifice for the love of her child. Through the inclusion of these elements, I desired to drastically alter an age of story and allow it to transform into a piece with entirely new meaning.
