Disney’s Snow White remake has faced a mammoth amount of criticism. According to myth and symbol expert Jonathan Pageau, this is especially warranted because political correctness has robbed the fairy tale of its true meaning.

Although slightly sanitised, the 1937 original version is much more faithful to the Brothers Grimm’s 1812 German story, with all its gruesome details that don’t sit well with modern readers.

Pageau has penned his own take, Snow White and the Widow Queen, as part of a new series of books for a new generation. And in doing so, he aims to recapture the fairy tale’s symbolism as traditionally understood.

In an exclusive interview, the Eastern Orthodox icon carver and artist shared highlights of the story’s true meaning as a feminine hero’s journey and revealed what the seven dwarfs (who are actually mythical fey creatures, not smaller humans) really represent.

What’s Snow White really about?

“Snow White is a classic hero’s journey, in the sense that it’s about someone who loses their access to meaning, loses their access to a hierarchy of participation, is thrown into chaos and then has to find their way through their darkness and then reconnect with a higher meaning. It is portrayed in the story as a transformation of a young girl, but it is a universal story of transformation. It can be applied to any type of change that you have to go through in your life.

“It is our human story from the feminine point of view. It is represented in the way that the feminine is being transformed in order to connect with the masculine Prince. But it’s not like it’s only for girls. Sure, they’ll resonate with it deeply because there is the whole idea of trying to manifest beauty in a way that isn’t weaponised and that isn’t cynical towards manipulation. But I think it applies to anyone.”

Snow White enters the chaotic wilderness of the dark forest and tames it as she transforms through puberty

“Taming the wilderness: that is definitely what Snow White needs to do in her transformation. You can see it in many ways, the idea of reaching puberty and coming into this moment where your body is transformed, things are happening to it, there's blood, there's pain, there's all these things. What the hell is this about? What is going on that? That is the wilderness, that is the transformation.

“But that happens to us in every moment when we face change. All of a sudden our world falls apart, and all of a sudden there's this big question of why is this what is happening? And then our work in that moment is, of course, to learn to tame and basically make sense of what is happening to us.

“In the original Disney version, there’s this idea of the evil forest transforming into animals that are tame. It is Snow White who is taming, making sense of the chaos, and then what Snow White does is she learns to become a woman. And it’s kind of a first. It's a bit of an annoying process, because in the Grimm Fairy Tale she learns to do the work that a woman traditionally does. She needs to clean and cook. But there’s still no reason for it. She’s serving these dwarves who cannot be her mate. She’s in this transformation. She's doing all these things, but none of it makes total sense. That's why the story has to move towards her meeting the Prince, because that's what makes sense of everything.

“She's becoming a woman. She's learning the annoying sides of being a woman, but then ultimately, that culminates in finding her husband. It's like, what's the reason for menstrual cycles? What's the reason for all these things? Well, that's finding your Prince. That's actually the reason. The reason is so that you can find a man and have a baby. And that's horrible for modern people to kind of deal with, but it’s so beautiful! And then you turn away from that you end up with declining birth rates and people not having children and thinking that it's all about their own self-satisfaction and mastering themselves in the way that it's represented in the new movie, basically becoming a leader and becoming a master of yourself. That doesn't make the world continue. That doesn't make the world continue to exist.”

The dwarfs are mythical fey creatures who embody idiosyncratic aspects of masculinity

“The dwarfs make so much sense if you connect the story to the idea of a young girl becoming a woman who will be married, because the dwarves represent the idiosyncratic aspect of masculinity. They’re almost like these old bachelors who have developed these quirks and they're kind of ugly, and they're not the appropriate for her. And so she is, in some ways, making them better, just through her innocence. But they're not the Prince. They can't be the Prince. And so they're an image of this transition of young girls into puberty, where they find themselves in a situation where all the boys around them are shorter than them and not as mature as them, and have all these weird idiosyncrasies and are kind of gross.”

Snow White and the Prince don’t return to the Castle’s Eden following her resurrection, but a Heavenly Jerusalem

The image of the innocence in the Garden is never completely brought back in the Christian story. At the end, what you have is a glorious city that has integrated all of the reactions to the Fall into its final glorious state. But you can’t just go back into the Garden and be innocent again. That’s what the Hero’s Journey is in itself. When you go down into the depths and go through this transformation, Snow White comes out and joins with the Prince. She has learned. She is no longer naive anymore. She won’t be tricked by the Evil Queen anymore. She’s not going back to how she was as this innocent teenage girl in the castle. She has integrated all of that into her new person. And she’s in a higher state for that.

It’s a resurrection story. And I think the original Disney version is really trying to allude to this idea of the Heavenly Jerusalem in Scripture, which is presented as a bride in the Book of Revelation. There's a cosmic aspect to this story, which is aiming towards the highest version of what the union of male and female can be with masculine and feminine joined together. That’s why it's so powerful. It has all of these layers together in this cosmic vision. There is a personal vision, there's a little bit of a political vision in the original Snow White, but it's balanced out with all of these other layers of meaning, and they're coherently stitched together. Whereas in the new Disney version, what you see is it's incoherently stitched together out of a lack of a deep understanding of the symbolic structure of the story.”

Jonathan Pageau’s The Tale of Snow White and the Widow Queen and The Symbolism of Snow White, are out now and can be purchased here.