From Courtly Love to Snow White

Abstract

In chivalric romances, courtly love often entails the love between a single knight and a married woman. This love cannot be consummated in a physical sense and, if it is, disaster and death ensue. Courtly love therefore involves the agonies of unfulfilled love. What Lacan finds of interest in these chivalric romances is its symbolic aspect. The poetic exercise of courtly love raised by Lacan has various manifestations in Robert Coover’s “The Dead Queen”, Anne Sexton’s “Snow White” and Angela Carter’s “The Snow Child”, three contemporary revisions of the classical fairy tale “Snow White”, where the conventional utopia ending of “Prince and Princess live happily ever after” is rarely seen. Instead, twists, suspension, revelation, confusion and subversion often accompany the plots, and complicate the relations between heroes and heroines, which can find equivalents of idealizing themes in courtly love. These three revisions of “Snow White” draw a parallel between women in love and women in language, and are committed to disenchant the constructed feminine myth.