In the short story, Old Woman Magoun, Lily shares a parallelism with Snow White. Snow White is of course the fairy tale of a very innocent girl that is sheltered from the world around her by her step mother, the Evil Queen. She is at the well doing chores when she meets a stranger, a man, that shatters her world. She then begins to venture further and further from the watchful eyes of her step mother. Upon finding out that Snow White was more important and fairer than the evil queen, she had her sentenced to death. Because if she wasnt the best, then no one could be.
In the short story, Lily was raised by her grandmother and because the town was isolated with no bridge to connect to neighboring towns for many years, Lily was raised in pure innocence thus stumping her growth by physically and mentally. When the grandmother prompted the town to build the bridge, she was slightly allowing Lily to venture further away from her watchful eyes and let her gain a bit of evidence. Upon entering town, lily ran into her father that abandoned her mother when Lily was born. This shattered her innocence and world that her grandmother so carefully created and maintained. Upon realizing she couldnt have complete control over Lily's life, she lets her obliviously eat deadly nightshades, thus killing her. During her pre-death hallucinogenic state of mind lily was in, her grandmother allows the audience to know that she also killed her daughter when finding out lily was born because she wasnt able to control her either.
This gets at a lot of the issues we talked about with this story, Brittany. Do you think that the motives are the same in the fairy tale?
ReplyDeleteYour comparison between Snow White and this story is very intriguing, especially in delving deeper into the motives of each respective parental figure. In losing innocence, does the person become more alluring and thus more sought after? Does this remove the control over such a bewitching character?
ReplyDeleteI also like the comparison you made between Snow White and Lily, I actually wrote my paper on this. The story that you tell of Snow White, however, is slightly different than the one that I found by the Grimm Brothers. It is interesting how the story has changed over time and makes me wonder which, if any, version of the story may have influenced Freemen when she wrote "Old Woman Magoun."
ReplyDelete~Amanda Renslow