Ray Cluley discusses Angela Carter’s enigmatic and disturbing short story.
It may be the shortest story of The Bloody Chamber, but Angela Carter manages to pack a lot into ‘The Snow Child’. It takes the theme of jealousy from its fairy tale origins, ‘Snow White’, and uses a Freudian focus to explore aspects of male power and desire and how these dictate female behaviour and appearance. Going back further than the widely accepted version which ‘leaves the oedipal entanglements to our imagination rather than forcing them on our conscious mind’, according to Bruno Bettleheim, Carter goes back to where the oedipal desires of a father and the jealousy of the mother ‘are much more clearly stated...than in more common versions’.