Mirror, Mirror On The Wall..

Shakespeare's Sister has a good series on beauty. She points out that you can never be beautiful enough, and that made me immediately think of the Evil Queen in Snow-White.

The Evil Queen's desire to be the most beautiful woman in the world is not subjected to any kind of analysis in the fairy tale. We are never told why she is that way, though I guess we are to assume that she is just thoroughly evil, that nobody would treat her at all differently if her beauty suddenly wilted. She is simply a woman driven by her own vanity, aging and ruthlessness. Fairy tales...