Becoming a Woman

Victoria Draper

12 October 2019

While The Company of Wolves is an examination of the horrors within the adolescent female’s psychosexual development, Snow White and the Huntsman is an examination of the mother’s psyche: her realization of age, and the fear of death and being replaced. Both define the realization of womanhood as developing through stages of repression, violence, and release (menstruation) to finally achieve their sexual awakening.

In Snow White and the Huntsman, the first interaction between the stepmother, Ravenna, and Snow White is when Snow White compliments her beauty. This scene introduces the competition between women for their beauty by showing the youthful girl beside the aged woman. And, like in The Company of Wolves, the aged woman is the antagonistic force.

The Company of Wolves starts with a beautiful young woman bullying her kid sister, Rosalie, calling her a “pest” through the locked door while Rosalie fusses from a nightmare (Company 3:22). This beginning scene establishes the antagonistic force as the sister, but is later represented as the grandmother.

There is no show of animosity from Ravenna until she walks down the aisle and realizes that everyone is looking at Snow White trailing behind, instead of her. This scene summarizes the psychology of Ravenna throughout the entirety of the movie by showing the assumption of power, her obsession with beauty, and the unexpected fall caused by her obsession.

Ravenna’s assumption of power is closely linked to her obsession with beauty; her beauty is her power. She must frequently ask the mirror to divulge who is the “fairest in the land” in order to maintain this power (Snow White 12:20). What then emerges from the mirror is a masculine entity that either confirms or denies her beauty. This scene argues one’s beauty comes from the favor of the male gaze.

What Ravenna sees in the mirror is hidden from the outsider’s perspective (Snow White 22:40); the mirror represents one’s glance inward. Rosalie also uses a mirror when applying red lipstick after kissing a boy (Company 49:25) and the mirror is used by the wolf to distract her. In this way it represents self-awareness and self-indulgence; she enjoys the view of herself and sees herself as an object of desire. The mirror also reflects an image from Rosalie’s dream that wakes her (Company 41:10). The dream continues despite Rosalie’s consciousness, showing a boy turning into a wolf and shrieking in fear. The mirror projects the images within her unconscious that scare her, that is, corruption.

In the beginning, Rosalie rests in a locked room, similarly to how Snow White is locked in a cell, and both are antagonized by the elder. An outburst of violence in reaction to overwhelming repression sets in motion their journey into womanhood. Rosalie expresses her repressed anger towards her sister by enjoying a dream of her getting killed by wolves (Company 9:10). We see a direct shift in attention and power when Rosalie is standing over her sister’s coffin at the dream burial, and her mother transfers the sister’s necklace to Rosalie (Company 10:21). Snow White attacks Ravenna’s brother, who made unwanted sexual advances, and escapes the cell.

Partially free from repression, Rosalie’s mother and grandmother warn her throughout the movie not to stray from the path when walking through the wood, for “once you stray from the path, you are lost, entirely” (Company 13:22). This path acts as another form of containment, in terms of given direction as opposed to decided direction. It is not until the wolf shows her by use of a compass that she can decide her own direction, does she come to realize her power of choice (Company 1:11:12).

Rosalie shows a curiosity for sex early in the film. She wakes one night to see her parents having sex, and after they finish, her mother relaxes into a contented posture that Rosalie mimics (Company 35:42). She looks up to her mother as a woman who has experienced something she hasn’t. She asks her mother the next day if father hurts her when they are having sex, showing sex and violence are the same in Rosalie’s mind, by the teachings of her grandmother. Rosalie’s mother argues, “If there is a beast in men, it meets it’s match in women, too” (Company 36:20). This teaches that men and women are equally capable of showing aggression and initiative.

There is an obvious disagreement between Granny and Rosalie’s mother, which represents the clash between mother and daughter of a different generation. Both share their opinions on men; one represents a successful relationship with men, and the other is a lonely old woman.

The most important thing about Granny is her glasses. Glasses highlight her lack of sight. Without the lenses, she is blind, and with them she can only see with a limited, preconstructed vision that cannot be adjusted. Granny’s use of glasses contrast against the naked, young eyes of Rosalie that are still alert and perceptive to the subversive nature of wolves.

Rosalie describes the finished cloak as “Soft as snow […] red as blood” (Company 42:06). The colors not only directly relate to Snow White’s depiction of beauty, but also the image of purity clashing against a bold color of violence and menstruation.

Rosalie enters the gates before Granny, and eats a bad apple from the ground that has a worm inside (Company 14:16). This scene shows Rosalie’s lack of regard for her elderly grandmother and a child-like eagerness to enter into something she doesn’t quite understand. She bites into the fruit of temptation and is disgusted to see it soiled with a symbol of sex—the worm, representing the phallic.

Snow White also is lured into temptation by Ravenna, and is killed by the apple.

After kissing a boy, running off and climbing a tree, Rosalie puts on lipstick then watches eggs from a nest hatch in the tree. There are tiny glass babies inside (Company 49:47), symbolizing pregnancy and motherhood; womanhood.

Snow White possesses an inner beauty that affects the world and people around her positively, and she is not met with natural harm—like when the troll at the bridge shies from her gaze (Snow White 54:00), but it is this purity that holds her back. She describes the snow as a stillness, something unchanging (Snow White 1:29:56); as she is now, she is stagnant. Her purity needs to die by the poison apple (fruit of temptation) and be reinvented by the love of a man.

Nature calls Snow White to a deer; this symbol of purity is then shot, and the deer dissolves into butterflies; Virtue is not destroyed, but instead takes a new, more nuanced form (Snow White 1:15:55). After Snow White dies, she is revived by the kiss of the Huntsman (Snow White 1:35:00). He gives his love and leaves her; she is reborn in solitude. She emerges like Jesus and assumes her place of power, leading the men to war, and decides her resolve to kill Ravenna (Snow White 1:41:05). This scene of rebirth greatly contrasts Ravenna standing in fire to demonstrate her power (Snow White 1:57:11), as it depicts a scorned woman who holds bitter feelings towards the men that used her for her beauty.

Snow White’s rebirth represents her final awakening; she no longer is afraid to take on violence as an extended expression of her power in beauty as a fully-realized woman.

Ravenna represents the fate of the elderly woman, who has lost her beauty and power over men, she must eventually be “cut down”. As the priest in Company of Wolves says, “someone’s gotta cut away the old wood” (Company 42:32). This is demonstrated in Company when Granny offers the shawl meant for the dead sister to Rosalie (Company 14:45). Now that the sister is out of the way, Rosalie is favored. She replaces her sister completely when she grows older and wears a white dress like her sister’s (Company 36:41). It is ‘out with the old and in with the new’; their fate is a dead cow beside a live calf (Company 50:00).

It is in this way Granny proves an antagonistic force because, although she protects Rosalie from the masculine entity, she stands in Rosalie’s way of sexual maturation. But unlike Snow White, Rosalie is not the one to kill the antagonistic force. Granny, who is the oldest and therefore, head of house, is beheaded by the wolf who assumes her place in her rocking chair as the ‘head of house’ in a domestic sense (Company 1:15:00).

In the final act, Rosalie makes it to the house after the wolf, and upon passing the gate, sees blood on the snow (which represents menstruation) right before entering a domestic space with a man that is courting her (Company 1:16:26). Then, inside the house she “breaks glass” when stepping on her grandmother’s glasses, this action both symbolizes “breaking the seal” in sex and shattering the illusion of the lens (Company 1:17:18). Now that Rosalie is a woman, she can clearly see the complexity of the wolf.

Snow White’s final realization of power is when she stabs Ravenna with dagger. Violence that disrupts her purity but doesn’t fully remove it. Ravenna bleeds three drops of blood on Snow White’s armor—old blood falls onto “new blood” (Snow White 1:58:13) —that is the transfer of womanhood. The Queen dies in front of the mirror; her obsession is her undoing (Snow White 1:59:27), and Snow White takes her throne in end.

Rosalie establishes dominance by show of masculinity through the use of violence (Company 1:22:00) and becomes a wolf in the end. It is in this way the wolves are an allegory to adulthood in its complexity and duality. Rosalie’s grandmother fought back, but because her weapon (beauty) was weak, her power was weak. Rosalie survives because her weapon is stronger, as she is younger and more beautiful.

The dream comes crashing into reality with the wolves. Showing this entire experience is a glimpse into the young female psyche as she is developing into a woman, and the nightmare of it all. The wolves crash into her childhood bedroom room, crushing her dolls and toys, disturbing the purity, and Rosalie screams in horror.

In both Snow White and the Huntsman and The Company of Wolves the protagonist wins by showing masculine traits through violence. This violence removes their innocence and allows the shift from girl to woman.

Works Cited

Sanders, Rupert, director. Snow White and the Huntsman. Universal Pictures, 2012.

Jordan, Neil, director. The Company of Wolves. ITC Entertainment, 1984.

Fairfield University

Dr. Robert Epstein

EN 0311: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales