The Hidden Meaning of Snow White (Part VI): Purity

The French film Blanche Comme Neige (2019) — which literally means ‘White as Snow’ — was released in English under a slightly different title; that is, Pure as Snow. This choice of translation speaks to the figurative meaning of the color white. As Michel Pastoureau writes in his recently published History of a Color, ‘most of the ideas associated with white are virtues or good qualities: purity, virginity, innocence, wisdom, peace, goodness, cleanliness’. These are attributes we also associate with Snow White — but this is just one-third of her color triptych. She is ‘as white as snow’, ‘as red as blood’, and ‘as black as ebony’. According to Pastoureau, for a long time in Europe, these three colors ‘seemed to matter more than all the others, at least on the social and symbolic levels’. Red and black were, ‘from the historical perspective’, the two opposites of white: ‘until the appearance of printing and engraving — an absolutely decisive turning point in the history of colors — the true medieval opposite for white was not so much black [as many assume] but red’. Despite her Disney-inspired sanitization, Snow White does not represent purity — or for that matter, fusion — she represents, very specifically, contrast.

As Bruno Bettelheim writes in The Uses of Enchantment, Snow White has a ‘double nature’. She is ‘as white as snow and as red as blood — that…