Snow-White and her housework
To get the poison out of my computer, I have gone for the nuclear option: destroy every affected file that could not be restored, followed by a complete new set-up of the whole Windows system. Unfortunately, even though I managed to get rid of the more troublesome viri (that is the Latin plural for virus), there still is alien material in the machine - in the MS-DOS system, where I seem unable to get at it. And what this means is that I cannot do the set-up as I wanted, for, the moment I start the CD-ROM, I get a message saying that there is a MS-DOS program working and to turn it off because otherwise the setup cannot go on. So the end result is that I am left with a damaged system and no way to straighten it out - no easy way, at least. So my hatred of spammers and hackers just grows and grows.
Today's piece of writing is about the image of women in a certain Disney movie...
SNOW-WHITE AND HER HOUSEWORK
C.S.Lewis was the greatest English critic since Matthew Arnold. It stands to reason that his comments on any artform are likely to be worthwhile; and when he describes Disney's first animated feature film (in a book about Milton, of all places) as a "strange blend of genius and vulgarity", he surely strikes the right note. But his explanation of where vulgarity can be found is bizarre: he finds it in the "drunken, bloated, low comedy farces of the dwarves", which have "neither the wisdom, the avarice, nor the earthiness of real dwarves... but an imbecility of arbitrary invention". As Lewis had captured us with his first definition, so he loses us with this wrong-headed attack, with which hardly any spectator of the Disney masterpiece from 1938 to this day can agree. We all see the dwarves are among the great and lovable characters in fiction. Lewis was perhaps blinded by his friend Tolkien, then busy with Lord of the Rings, whose dwarves have all the characteristics he demands.
Nevertheless that single phrase "strange blend of genius and vulgarity" has the quality of truth, piercing and haunting; even if Lewis had given only his own prejudices as reason, nevertheless he had seen right. There is vulgarity in Snow-White. And I think we can easily see where it is. Not in the dwarves; not in the Prince (a stuffed dummy, but not offensive - just lifeless); not in the excellent figure of the Huntsman; and not, goodness knows, in the wonderful character of the Queen. It is not even in the forest animals, whose cuteness would be infuriating in a realistic context, but not in a fable. It is in the protagonist. It's hard not to find her unbearable, with a squeaky voice that makes you want to take up a collection for new and better poison apples, and a queasily false immaturity, all wide-eyed and unprepared for anything whatsoever, all high pitched squeaks of surprise, squeals, giggles, and every evidence of arrested development. This character is vulgar. Vulgarity need not come in the gross and odorous forms found on toilet walls and tabloid newspapers; it may take the form of false sensitivity, false respect, false sympathy - but it remains essentially crass, essentially insensitive, essentially trampling genuine sensitivities underfoot.
And indeed Snow-White is crass, depicting a supposedly good, supposedly kind, supposedly helpful female character in a light that would insult any man. She is an immature, affected, brainless, intrusive control freak. We need not doubt that we are expected to like and approve of her; there is not even a smidgen of self-conscious irony in her description; and as soon as we realize this, the stark fact of vulgarity - of crassness - of insensitivity - simply towers before us. What woman, what man, what human being, could possibly like such a portrait?
I don't suppose I have said anything novel so far. I think we would be hard-pressed to find anybody who likes that squeaky dummy, and Disney themselves never again produced such an unsufferable object. But it is worth taking a look at some aspects of the character's role in the plot, because they are historically very interesting indeed.
Snow-white's whole active role in the story may be summed up as housework and singing. Whenever she is initiating an action rather than reacting to somebody else's, that is what she does. We first see her on her knees, scrubbing her stepmother's stone floor and humming as she goes. Then, as soon as she is safe in the dwarves' house, she immediately sets about tidying it up; and then we have what Disney's all-male crew evidently conceived as her great scene - "Whistle while you work". She never seems to have any other interest or ability in life except to keep house and to sing and dance, and this scene combines them. The interesting thing is that it does not combine them at all well:
When there's to sweep the room
Imagine that the broom
Is someone that you love and soon you'll find you're dancing to the tune…
- this joins very bad rhyme (broom does not rhyme with tune) with very bad housekeeping. The girl has her mind more on "someone that you love" than on the job at hand.
What Disney's people have created is a curious conflation of two entirely male and entirely incompatible images of women: the prom queen (dances are a place of meeting between the sexes since time out of mind) and the housewife. As the core of the plot lies in the defence of the character of Snow-white against attack, she had to be worth defending; so they tried to make her the image of everything they liked about women - on one hand the dancing queen, on the other the housewife. But they made a terrible hash of it. Housework and dance/courtship are forced into a shotgun marriage that negates the reality of each: Snow-white does not dance at a ball and with her beau, but in the home, with a broom. At heart, and despite the excellence of the gags, the scene is silly and indescribably ignorant. You cannot be mooning about "someone that you love" when you have to keep your eye on drifting dust, reaching for the nasty little mounds in that dark corner, and brushing out the dustballs under the furniture. In fact, the only time when you can reflect on your private life is when you've put the broom down. Disney's mostly-male crew had its collective eye right off the ball. The point of housework is not to enjoy it (any more than the point of writing is to enjoy the motions of the pen on the paper); it is that the house should be clean and orderly. Take it from a congenital scruff, a neat room is a beautiful sight. And if the "whistle while you work" scene had concentrated on this one essential fact, it might have been effective. Instead, they try to submerge the drudgery of this important but unrewarding activity under wholly irrelevant reminiscences of the Senior Prom and the Policemen's Ball. The result is an embarrassment, and a blow to the very core of the movie; if Snow-white is a false and empty character, the whole struggle to defend her loses a lot of its urgency.
And it is false and empty. The Disney people's image of women must be taken as in some sense average, the collective product of the imaginations of several Americans, not particularly ignorant or inexperienced; but it seems oddly unreal, their expectations muddled. The notion that the ideal woman sings in a childish treble while engaged in house-work and that she is in many respects infantile seems more like a nightmare than anything else, and at any rate must be contradicted by daily experience; yet it was strong enough to be placed at the centre of the most ambitious (and otherwise successful) work of animation ever done. Nor is this an isolated fact: the retarded-child housewife was, if anything, a growingly popular stereotype that was to reach its peak after the war, and still twitters its way through today's screens in the female half of The Flintstones (a series whose popularity always baffled me, based on a detestably unfunny and fraudulent vision of Middle America family life). It is as though the experience of women was entirely silent, as though men had grown incapable of perceiving them. Why?
The movie itself, properly read, provides the answer. Through most of the movie Snow-white exists in a kind of no-man's-land, abandoned and persecuted by her stepmother, alone in the house with only the helping animals for company. At these moments the misunderstanding reaches its peak. I pointed out that the "whistle while you work" scene ignores the reality of housework. but later ones do not; they bring out what I described as its point, the experience of a clean house, beautiful in itself, rather than the tiring and dull process of doing it; and as the process is not kept in sight, neither are the authors' misconceptions. And why is that? Because the emphasis was on the Dwarves' experience of it; and the Dwarves are comedy males, but male nevertheless. Here, and nowhere, the movie catches a glimpse of reality, and it is through male eyes. As soon as they leave, however, as soon as we see Snow-white alone in the house, then the reality is completely lost from sight, and imbecile male dancing fantasies take over; housework is no longer seen from the point of view of its actual purpose, but as a fog of tiresome nonsense. (There is a direct connection between this and the most tiresome of male delusions, the implicit or explicit idea that only paid work is "really" work, and housework doesn't count; in Snow White, it's actually seen as fun!)
But I think there is something else, a central point, that we must notice. The Dwarves, as male, exist in a social context, talking, arguing, working together at the mine; Snow-white, the housewife, is a solitary social atom left in the house with her animals. The movie is the product of the first generation in which the majority of women experienced the home as a lonely place, a place not only of drudgery, but of solitary drudgery. Their mothers and grandmothers had lived in large houses, either as mistresses or as servants, but in a social context, forming a group. sharing experience and indeed authority; the mother of the family was apt to be a formidable figure. The housewife is a modern innovation; the Victorian family knew mistresses and servants, but not tired women slaving in empty houses while their men live their real lives somewhere else, their only support their distant mothers. (The mother-in-law joke is another modern invention.) Only the poorest families lived like that, and in their case the sheer overcrowding of poor quarters provided some sort of social life and cohesion.
The multiplication of tools to take the place of servants did not set housewives free: it nailed them to the washing machine, the dishwasher, the electric iron, and the hoover. The fact that one person could operate all of them in the time it would have taken many of them before, only meant that one person had to. Snow-white is left with a pack of helpful animals who help with the housework; a normal American housewife, more prosaically, with the mangle and the oven. Technology multiplied the number of lonely, disenfranchised, isolated suburban women. Their lives became empty; isolated in their semis, they found their lives revolving around a husband whose true life was away from home, and who was apt to pay no attention to what the solitary drudge in the house had to say. Any family or social circle she might have or find, he was apt to regard with annoyance, boredom or derision. He seemed to regard her as an eternal minor, because (one supposes) she could take no interest in his more or less adult pursuits; it is symptomatic that Snow-white is unable to cope when outside the house. And indeed the only time in such a woman's life in which she was involved in interesting things was before she married, when she took part in (yet another modern invention) senior proms and parties. Then she could have been admired, followed, paid attention to; which would somehow prop up the eternal minority of the housewife, with nothing to look forwards to, and what little interest her life held already behind her.
Clearly this is an uneal lifestyle; in that sense, the unreality of Snow-white is a faithful reflection of the country; having nothing positive to say for the housewife lifestyle, it retreated in Senior Prom fantasy. Indeed, the point of "Whistle while you work" is that any job can be tolerable if only you sing while you do it; a false point, but one that reveals a depth of unconscious dissatisfaction. Under the wallpaper, the cracks were creaking and widening; soon they were to tear through our whole social fabric the great chasm of Woman's Lib - still one of the dominant aspects of our life.
Today's piece of writing is about the image of women in a certain Disney movie...
SNOW-WHITE AND HER HOUSEWORK
C.S.Lewis was the greatest English critic since Matthew Arnold. It stands to reason that his comments on any artform are likely to be worthwhile; and when he describes Disney's first animated feature film (in a book about Milton, of all places) as a "strange blend of genius and vulgarity", he surely strikes the right note. But his explanation of where vulgarity can be found is bizarre: he finds it in the "drunken, bloated, low comedy farces of the dwarves", which have "neither the wisdom, the avarice, nor the earthiness of real dwarves... but an imbecility of arbitrary invention". As Lewis had captured us with his first definition, so he loses us with this wrong-headed attack, with which hardly any spectator of the Disney masterpiece from 1938 to this day can agree. We all see the dwarves are among the great and lovable characters in fiction. Lewis was perhaps blinded by his friend Tolkien, then busy with Lord of the Rings, whose dwarves have all the characteristics he demands.
Nevertheless that single phrase "strange blend of genius and vulgarity" has the quality of truth, piercing and haunting; even if Lewis had given only his own prejudices as reason, nevertheless he had seen right. There is vulgarity in Snow-White. And I think we can easily see where it is. Not in the dwarves; not in the Prince (a stuffed dummy, but not offensive - just lifeless); not in the excellent figure of the Huntsman; and not, goodness knows, in the wonderful character of the Queen. It is not even in the forest animals, whose cuteness would be infuriating in a realistic context, but not in a fable. It is in the protagonist. It's hard not to find her unbearable, with a squeaky voice that makes you want to take up a collection for new and better poison apples, and a queasily false immaturity, all wide-eyed and unprepared for anything whatsoever, all high pitched squeaks of surprise, squeals, giggles, and every evidence of arrested development. This character is vulgar. Vulgarity need not come in the gross and odorous forms found on toilet walls and tabloid newspapers; it may take the form of false sensitivity, false respect, false sympathy - but it remains essentially crass, essentially insensitive, essentially trampling genuine sensitivities underfoot.
And indeed Snow-White is crass, depicting a supposedly good, supposedly kind, supposedly helpful female character in a light that would insult any man. She is an immature, affected, brainless, intrusive control freak. We need not doubt that we are expected to like and approve of her; there is not even a smidgen of self-conscious irony in her description; and as soon as we realize this, the stark fact of vulgarity - of crassness - of insensitivity - simply towers before us. What woman, what man, what human being, could possibly like such a portrait?
I don't suppose I have said anything novel so far. I think we would be hard-pressed to find anybody who likes that squeaky dummy, and Disney themselves never again produced such an unsufferable object. But it is worth taking a look at some aspects of the character's role in the plot, because they are historically very interesting indeed.
Snow-white's whole active role in the story may be summed up as housework and singing. Whenever she is initiating an action rather than reacting to somebody else's, that is what she does. We first see her on her knees, scrubbing her stepmother's stone floor and humming as she goes. Then, as soon as she is safe in the dwarves' house, she immediately sets about tidying it up; and then we have what Disney's all-male crew evidently conceived as her great scene - "Whistle while you work". She never seems to have any other interest or ability in life except to keep house and to sing and dance, and this scene combines them. The interesting thing is that it does not combine them at all well:
When there's to sweep the room
Imagine that the broom
Is someone that you love and soon you'll find you're dancing to the tune…
- this joins very bad rhyme (broom does not rhyme with tune) with very bad housekeeping. The girl has her mind more on "someone that you love" than on the job at hand.
What Disney's people have created is a curious conflation of two entirely male and entirely incompatible images of women: the prom queen (dances are a place of meeting between the sexes since time out of mind) and the housewife. As the core of the plot lies in the defence of the character of Snow-white against attack, she had to be worth defending; so they tried to make her the image of everything they liked about women - on one hand the dancing queen, on the other the housewife. But they made a terrible hash of it. Housework and dance/courtship are forced into a shotgun marriage that negates the reality of each: Snow-white does not dance at a ball and with her beau, but in the home, with a broom. At heart, and despite the excellence of the gags, the scene is silly and indescribably ignorant. You cannot be mooning about "someone that you love" when you have to keep your eye on drifting dust, reaching for the nasty little mounds in that dark corner, and brushing out the dustballs under the furniture. In fact, the only time when you can reflect on your private life is when you've put the broom down. Disney's mostly-male crew had its collective eye right off the ball. The point of housework is not to enjoy it (any more than the point of writing is to enjoy the motions of the pen on the paper); it is that the house should be clean and orderly. Take it from a congenital scruff, a neat room is a beautiful sight. And if the "whistle while you work" scene had concentrated on this one essential fact, it might have been effective. Instead, they try to submerge the drudgery of this important but unrewarding activity under wholly irrelevant reminiscences of the Senior Prom and the Policemen's Ball. The result is an embarrassment, and a blow to the very core of the movie; if Snow-white is a false and empty character, the whole struggle to defend her loses a lot of its urgency.
And it is false and empty. The Disney people's image of women must be taken as in some sense average, the collective product of the imaginations of several Americans, not particularly ignorant or inexperienced; but it seems oddly unreal, their expectations muddled. The notion that the ideal woman sings in a childish treble while engaged in house-work and that she is in many respects infantile seems more like a nightmare than anything else, and at any rate must be contradicted by daily experience; yet it was strong enough to be placed at the centre of the most ambitious (and otherwise successful) work of animation ever done. Nor is this an isolated fact: the retarded-child housewife was, if anything, a growingly popular stereotype that was to reach its peak after the war, and still twitters its way through today's screens in the female half of The Flintstones (a series whose popularity always baffled me, based on a detestably unfunny and fraudulent vision of Middle America family life). It is as though the experience of women was entirely silent, as though men had grown incapable of perceiving them. Why?
The movie itself, properly read, provides the answer. Through most of the movie Snow-white exists in a kind of no-man's-land, abandoned and persecuted by her stepmother, alone in the house with only the helping animals for company. At these moments the misunderstanding reaches its peak. I pointed out that the "whistle while you work" scene ignores the reality of housework. but later ones do not; they bring out what I described as its point, the experience of a clean house, beautiful in itself, rather than the tiring and dull process of doing it; and as the process is not kept in sight, neither are the authors' misconceptions. And why is that? Because the emphasis was on the Dwarves' experience of it; and the Dwarves are comedy males, but male nevertheless. Here, and nowhere, the movie catches a glimpse of reality, and it is through male eyes. As soon as they leave, however, as soon as we see Snow-white alone in the house, then the reality is completely lost from sight, and imbecile male dancing fantasies take over; housework is no longer seen from the point of view of its actual purpose, but as a fog of tiresome nonsense. (There is a direct connection between this and the most tiresome of male delusions, the implicit or explicit idea that only paid work is "really" work, and housework doesn't count; in Snow White, it's actually seen as fun!)
But I think there is something else, a central point, that we must notice. The Dwarves, as male, exist in a social context, talking, arguing, working together at the mine; Snow-white, the housewife, is a solitary social atom left in the house with her animals. The movie is the product of the first generation in which the majority of women experienced the home as a lonely place, a place not only of drudgery, but of solitary drudgery. Their mothers and grandmothers had lived in large houses, either as mistresses or as servants, but in a social context, forming a group. sharing experience and indeed authority; the mother of the family was apt to be a formidable figure. The housewife is a modern innovation; the Victorian family knew mistresses and servants, but not tired women slaving in empty houses while their men live their real lives somewhere else, their only support their distant mothers. (The mother-in-law joke is another modern invention.) Only the poorest families lived like that, and in their case the sheer overcrowding of poor quarters provided some sort of social life and cohesion.
The multiplication of tools to take the place of servants did not set housewives free: it nailed them to the washing machine, the dishwasher, the electric iron, and the hoover. The fact that one person could operate all of them in the time it would have taken many of them before, only meant that one person had to. Snow-white is left with a pack of helpful animals who help with the housework; a normal American housewife, more prosaically, with the mangle and the oven. Technology multiplied the number of lonely, disenfranchised, isolated suburban women. Their lives became empty; isolated in their semis, they found their lives revolving around a husband whose true life was away from home, and who was apt to pay no attention to what the solitary drudge in the house had to say. Any family or social circle she might have or find, he was apt to regard with annoyance, boredom or derision. He seemed to regard her as an eternal minor, because (one supposes) she could take no interest in his more or less adult pursuits; it is symptomatic that Snow-white is unable to cope when outside the house. And indeed the only time in such a woman's life in which she was involved in interesting things was before she married, when she took part in (yet another modern invention) senior proms and parties. Then she could have been admired, followed, paid attention to; which would somehow prop up the eternal minority of the housewife, with nothing to look forwards to, and what little interest her life held already behind her.
Clearly this is an uneal lifestyle; in that sense, the unreality of Snow-white is a faithful reflection of the country; having nothing positive to say for the housewife lifestyle, it retreated in Senior Prom fantasy. Indeed, the point of "Whistle while you work" is that any job can be tolerable if only you sing while you do it; a false point, but one that reveals a depth of unconscious dissatisfaction. Under the wallpaper, the cracks were creaking and widening; soon they were to tear through our whole social fabric the great chasm of Woman's Lib - still one of the dominant aspects of our life.