Parable

A parable is a story that answers a question or illustrates a moral or lesson. In a ‘true’ parable detail for detail parallels the situation that has inspired the parable in the first place. I think of the parable of the prodigal son that parallels the willingness of God to accept even the profligate and sinner who has now returned. Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper is a parable concerning the necessity of preparing for the future before one turns to pleasure and play. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a parable that depicts the danger of a creeping fascism and the corruption of ideals that often accompanies and characterizes totalitarianism.

 So I’ve been thinking of Snow White. In Grimm’s tale when she asks the Queen’s mirror tells her that she is the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, and she is happy. Then she has a child, a baby girl, whose beauty exceeds even that of her mother, and so when the Queen next seeks confirmation of her unsurpassed (and unsurpassable) beauty the mirror announces that though the Queen is beautiful in fact, her daughter, Snow White, is more beautiful. Jealous beyond comprehension the Queen sets out to rid herself of her daughter by hiring a huntsman to take her out to the forest and kill her and to bring back her inner organs that she will cook up with salt and eat. But the huntsman sympathizes with Snow White’s pleas and lets her go without harm, though he believes she will die alone in the dark forest anyway.  In Snow White’s escape through the forest she discovers the home of the seven dwarfs where, discovering it absent she lies down for a rest. 

     I know, I know, there is certainly a misogynist aspect to Snow White’s residence in the forest: the dwarves offer her a home if she will care for their domicile and cook and clean for them. But when the Queen subsequently asks the mirror who is the fairest of them all, the mirror tells her that though she is fair her daughter Snow White is fairer. The Queen, appalled that Snow White remains alive, sets out to eliminate her, but Snow White is twice saved until finally she is poisoned by the apple. Placed in a glass coffin she is retrieved by a prince who vows to maintain the glass coffin and keeps it before him at all times. But carrying the coffin out of the forest the prince’s servants drop it and the poisoned apple piece lodged in Snow White’s throat is freed and she awakens. The prince asks her to marry him and Snow White agrees. But back in her palace and thinking Snow White is dead, the wicked Queen goes confidently to the mirror only to discover that her daughter’s beauty still surpasses her own. The Queen is incensed and invited to Snow White’s wedding she is made to dance in iron boots that have been heated red hot. The Queen falls down dead.

     I suppose a perfect parable would correspond perfectly to the situation upon which it is meant to comment but, well, nobody’s perfect. I’m thinking about Snow White following Trump’s unhinged tweet storm following President Obama’s speech last evening at the Democratic National Convention excoriating Trump and his administration for their incompetence, their corruption and their venality. Not only did the mirror say the would-be king wasn’t the fairest one of all but the speech of the one who was most fair gave evidence of that beauty even while depicting the ugliness that Trump could not hide. 

     May he have to dance in red hot boots until he can dance no more.