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Trina Belansek
Culminating Assignment 1
Professor Delsandro
September 20, 2012
Back to Life
As Snow White lays there unconscious in the coffin, the Dwarves know that Snow
White’s evil stepmother poisoned her. They have a magical spell book that has every spell
known and the remedy to get rid of that spell. They go to the poisonous apple spell and it says
the only way to reverse the spell is that someone has to steal her stepmothers magic mirror and
give it to the person who got poisoned and the magic mirror tells them to wake up. The Dwarves
know that this task is going to be almost impossible to do.
Just then, a very handsome prince comes riding through the woods. He sees Snow White
laying in the glass coffin. He asks how long she has been dead for and the Dwarves say she has
been dead for five days. The prince is confused as to why her body looks like she is just sleeping
and she still has color in her face as if she’s still alive. The prince knows all about magic spells
and he asks what the cause of her death was to see if he could wake her up because he knows
that she is still alive. The Dwarves say that she was given a poisonous apple by her stepmother
and that the only way to wake her up was to steal her magic mirror and have Snow White look in
it so it can tell her to wake up. The prince is obviously smart, so The Dwarves ask him if he can
help them steal the magic mirror. Obviously, he says “yes” because he wants to save Snow
White.
The Prince and The Dwarves devise a plan to sneak into the castle in the middle of the
night while everyone is sleeping. They have to get inside of the castle, get the mirror and return
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it before her stepmother wakes up and notices that it’s gone. The Dwarves and the Prince set out
on their journey to get the mirror. Once they get to the castle they just walk right in the
unguarded doors, and tiptoe through the long hallway. Once they reach the end of the hallway,
they find a sleeping guard. They carefully walk past him and up the stairs successfully. Once in
the Queen’s room they go into her closet and find the mirror. They take the mirror down very
carefully and slowly and put it in their sack. They have to be very gentle with the mirror because
it is sleeping too, and if it is disturbed it will be very loud and wake everybody up. They finally
get downstairs and outside successfully. Now, they have to move very fast so they can return the
mirror by the time the queen notices that it is gone. They get back to where Snow White is and
awaken the mirror and after they explain the situation to him, he agrees to tell her to wake up.
They put the mirror in front of his face and he tells her to wake up, she doesn’t move and inch
and is still unconscious. He tells her again to wake up and she still doesn’t respond. He tells her
seven more times and she still doesn’t get up. Finally the Dwarves just tell the Prince that he
needs to take the mirror back because the queen is going to wake up soon. The Prince doesn’t
want to, but he knows that he has too. While on his way back to return the mirror, the Prince
remembers something! He remembers that all the remedy’s for reversing spells are wrong and
the only way to reverse a spell and wake Snow White up is a kiss from her true love. He hurries
back to where Snow White is laying and he kisses her. She wakes up! The Prince was so happy
because he woke her up and he was her true love. He took her back to the castle with him to get
looked at by the doctors. The doctor said she was fine and there was nothing to worry about.
After that, Snow White and the Prince started to hang out more and more, and he asked
her to be his girlfriend. After about a year of dating, he proposed to her, and she, of course, said
yes. Snow White was so happy because she started out with nothing living in a little cottage in
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the middle of the forest, to now, living in a palace and having everything she could ever imagine.
After months of planning, it was finally the day of the wedding. The wedding was gorgeous and
everyone in the town came to see her get married. After they got married, Snow White and the
Prince went on a honeymoon with their best friends who just got married too, Cinderella and
Prince Charming. Nothing bad ever happened to them again because they had each other, and
they lived happily ever after without any interruptions from the evil stepmother. The End.
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II.
Critical Analysis
While thinking of what to revision in my fairy tale revision of the classic “Snow White”,
I mainly thought about what normal fairy tales had in them. Of course, the prince always saved
the princess and they got married in the end. But did you ever notice that right after they met,
the prince would always ask the princess to marry him and she would always say yes and they
would then live “happily ever after”? In Snow White, after the prince kisses her, he asks her to
marry him; “The prince was overjoyed and said: ‘I love you more than anything else on earth.
Come with me to my father’s castle. You shall be my bride.’ Snow White had tender feelings
for him, and she departed with him” (Tartar 89). In this quote if you notice, the prince and Snow
White have literally just met for the first time. The prince doesn’t even ask her to marry him, he
just tells her to go with him and she will be his “bride”. In my revision of the fairy tale, I
actually had Snow White and the prince go through the whole process of being friends, then
dating, then finally marriage. In today’s time, male and female go through many many years of
getting to know each other and dating before they even start thinking about the idea of marriage.
When the time is right for them to get married, they don’t get married right away. Usually the
guy proposes to the girl and if she says “yes” then they get engaged, not even married yet. They
go through many months of being engaged before they finally get married to make sure they are
ready and sure about this very big decision in their life.
I made this change to the fairy tale because I wanted to give the story some
characteristics that were current and readers today could relate too. I thought it was important to
revise this part because most of the things that are talked about in fairy tales are not relatable to
readers no matter how young or old they are. A normal relationship is something everyone can
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relate to because everyone has been in a relationship and gone through the process at some point
or another.
The second change I made was instead of Snow White getting woken up from the spell
by her true love’s kiss, she had to first have the magic mirror talk to her and then if that didn’t
work her true love had to kiss her. The prince helped the seven dwarves go get the magic mirror
for Snow White. I had the prince have a bigger role in my revision of the fairy tale because in
the classic fairy tale the prince always has a small role. He usually just comes in at the end and
saves the day and marries the heroine of the fairy tale. I thought that it would be a nice change if
the prince had a bigger role in the story. Most people believe that classic fairy tales contradict
gender roles, because the woman has a big part and the man has the small part in the tale. Back
then, the man always had the bigger role, and the woman had the smaller role because she just
sat around the house cleaning all day; “Heilbrun endorses the notion of appropriating, revising,
and revitalizing ‘old tales’ in order to produce new social discourses that can, in turn, refashion
our lives” (Tartar xiii). The quote demonstrates that if we continue to write fairy tales with the
male having a smaller part and the woman having a bigger part in their lives, that it will
reconstruct our way of thinking and we will then make women have a bigger role and men have
a smaller role. I thought this was a necessary change to make because you don’t see many fairy
tales that have men having a bigger part than just coming in and kissing the heroine of the fairy
tale. I thought that I made necessary changes to the classic fairy tale, “Snow White”, and made it
my own without changing the whole meaning of Snow White all together.