The Snow Child

The story

A count and his wife ride out across a frozen midwinter landscape. Prompted by the white of the snow, a hole of blood and a black bird on a bare bough, the count wishes aloud for a girl as white as snow, as red as blood and as black as that bird. As soon as he has finished describing her, she is standing naked by the road, and the countess hates her at once. As they ride on, the countess tries to be rid of the girl by sending her to fetch things, dropping first a glove and then a brooch into danger, but each command rebounds on the countess herself, and as it does another of her own garments leaves her body and clothes the girl instead. Only when the countess sends the child to pick a rose does the trick hold: the girl pricks her finger, bleeds and dies. The count dismounts and rapes the corpse. When he has finished, the girl melts into the snow, leaving a feather, a bloodstain and the rose. The countess, restored to her furs, is handed the rose by her husband; it bites her, and the story ends.

A closer look

The source tale: Snow White stripped to its Freudian bones

Carter draws not on the familiar Grimm ‘Snow White’ but on an earlier variant the Grimms recorded and chose not to print, in which the child is born of the father’s wish rather than the mother’s. That single change is the whole engine of the piece. Where the well-known tale keeps the desiring parent and the murderous rival safely separate, this version fuses the plot around a father’s longing, so that the mother’s jealousy is not vanity about a mirror but sexual rivalry with a daughter her husband has literally dreamed up. Chris Power calls the result a story boiled down to a harsh Freudian reading, the jealous hatred of the older woman set against the lust of the older man, and one of Carter’s manuscript drafts even carried the ironic working title ‘The Sleeping Beauty’. The tale is closest of the ten to the flat, matter-of-fact surface of true folklore, and Carter uses that plainness as camouflage: the horror arrives in the same unhurried voice that grants the wish.

Method: the incantation of desire and the economy of clothes

The girl is spoken into existence. The count’s three wishes, ‘as white as snow’, ‘as red as blood’ and ‘as black as that bird’s feathers’, are a fairy-tale tricolon, but Carter loads each colour so that creation and violence are the same act: white is snow and skin, red is a hole of blood in the snow, black is a carrion bird. By the time she stands there, ‘white skin, red mouth, black hair and stark naked’, she has been assembled entirely out of the count’s appetite and given nothing of her own, not even clothes or a word. Carter names the relation exactly: ‘she was the child of his desire and the Countess hated her’. The countess’s power, meanwhile, is shown to be pure costume. She rides in ‘the glittering pelts of black foxes’ and ‘high, black, shining boots with scarlet heels’, and every time she tries to kill the girl, a garment deserts her for the child. The women are locked in a zero-sum exchange because everything either of them possesses is on loan from the count’s regard; strip the furs away and the older woman would freeze in the wilderness just as surely as the naked girl.

The central concern: women as tokens in a male economy

What makes the story shocking is not only the necrophilia but the flatness of the sentence that reports it and the bathos of ‘he was soon finished’, a clause that reduces the rape of a dead child to a chore briskly completed. Carter is not titillating; she is exposing. The girl has no interior life to violate because the tale never grants her one, and that absence is the argument: in a world organised entirely around a man’s wanting, a woman is a commodity that can be summoned, enjoyed and returned to the snow, while an older woman survives only by defeating her younger replacement. The countess is at once murderer and fellow victim, which is why the final image is so precise. When the count hands her the rose and it bites, the thing she has fought to keep, the man’s desire and its emblem, turns on her too. The rose is the only object that outlasts the girl, and it wounds. Nobody in this economy is safe, because the economy itself is the predator.

Key quotations

Quotation	Method	Why it matters
‘I wish I had a girl as white as snow’ (The Snow Child)	Fairy-tale incantation, tricolon of wishes	The girl is created by a spoken wish; desire alone conjures her, so from the first line she is property, not person.
‘white skin, red mouth, black hair and stark naked’ (The Snow Child)	Reductive blazon, asyndeton	She arrives as three colours and a naked body, assembled from the count’s appetite and given nothing of her own.
‘she was the child of his desire and the Countess hated her’ (The Snow Child)	Blunt declarative, cause and effect	Names the triangle exactly: the girl exists because the man wants her, and is hated because the woman must.
‘the glittering pelts of black foxes’ (The Snow Child)	Imagery of costume, texture	The countess’s status is worn, not owned; her furs are the loaned capital the girl threatens to inherit.
‘he was soon finished’ (The Snow Child)	Bathos, curt syntax	The necrophilic rape is dispatched in a clause; the flatness refuses to sensationalise and so indicts.
‘It bites’ (The Snow Child)	Terse final line, symbol	The rose, the token of male desire, wounds the surviving woman too: the economy preys on everyone inside it.