Maybe you’ve noticed some drama around the new Snow White film. While I’m not going to get into the fray, I do want to share one man’s perspective that not only brings wisdom to the conversation, but also holds relevance in light of Rare Faith:

by Daniel Brett Stark
March 24, 2005

Oftentimes (not always, but often) when people criticize the past for being “outdated,” they’re judging it based on the modern context they live in. They aren’t even trying to meet the past on its own terms or understand the context it existed in. When people actually take the time to do that, they often become far less judgmental and a whole lot more understanding about why people in the past thought and acted the way they did.

The popular criticisms about Disney’s 1937 Snow White are a prime example of this. When people say that Snow White is just about a helpless woman with no agency who sits around waiting for her prince to save her, it screams that they haven’t put in any effort to understand the film within the context of its time period. Instead, they’re judging it strictly through a modern-day lens.

To really understand what Snow White meant to 1937 audiences, you’ve got to understand the world they were living in. During the Great Depression, about a quarter of U.S. citizens were unemployed, the Dust Bowl had wiped out farmland across the country, and just when things seemed to be improving, a second recession hit, spiking unemployment again — right before Snow White hit theaters. Meanwhile, across the globe, Japan was invading China, Spain was in the middle of a civil war, Stalin’s Kremlin was executing dissenters by the hundreds of thousands, and there was some major trouble brewing up in Germany (to put it lightly). In short, the world was a dark and bleak place for many, many people.

One of the first scenes in Snow White shows her picking flowers — right before she’s about to be murdered on the orders of the Evil Queen. When the Huntsman spares her and tells her to run far away and never return, Snow White suddenly finds herself with nothing— no home, no friends, no possessions or resources of any kind (other than the clothes on her back), and her only family wants to murder her. This is the part of the movie where she’s at her absolute lowest. She’s hit rock bottom — terrified, alone, and hopeless.

For Depression-era audiences, that moment would have hit hard. While people today still experience desperation and hopelessness, those feelings were far more widespread and deeply felt in the 1930s. People today sometimes describe the COVID-19 pandemic as the worst time in recent memory, but for the average American, 2020 was nowhere near as brutal as the Great Depression.

So when Snow White collapses to the ground sobbing, she’s not just sad — she’s overwhelmed by sheer fear and hopelessness. And for audiences in the ’30s, that wasn’t just relatable — it was reality. However, within minutes she wipes away her tears, apologizes for being afraid, and begins looking for ways to start over. She pulls herself up, shakes the dust off her feet, sings a happy song, and walks into the unknown with faith, hope, and determination that she’ll somehow figure out a way to make things work out.
Snow White doesn’t sing because there’s some cheesy song in her heart. She sings to endure the horrors and trials that surround her. She doesn’t clean for the dwarves because she considers it her womanly duty. She does it because she needs something from them, but doesn’t expect to get it for free. She doesn’t have animal friends just following her around for no reason like some manic woodland dream girl. She earns their trust by putting on a brave face even in her lowest moments.

In Snow White, we see the entire Disney philosophy and American dream all rolled into one. Good triumphs over evil and things work out for those who work hard. Not because we want them to, but because (especially for audiences in the 1930s) it absolutely had to. Audiences in the 30s needed to know that if they worked hard, were brave, and wished for a better life someday their dreams would come true.

Modern audiences often expect protagonists to go through a journey of self-discovery, and many Disney films from the late 1980s onward focus on identity crises. Consequently, viewers raised on these films may take it for granted that a compelling protagonist must undergo some kind of inner transformation. But it’s important to remember that self-discovery is just one type of character arc, and it’s not inherently heroic. Elsa choosing to “let it go” isn’t inherently good or bad for her community — what matters is what she does afterward. Finding yourself is only admirable if the self you find is actually good.

Snow White doesn’t change throughout the story — and that’s the point. At the start of the movie, she’s cheerful, hardworking, and yes, gullible. By the end, she’s still cheerful, hardworking, and gullible. But that’s crucial to her arc. It’s important that Snow White can lose everything, be driven through hell, fall down at death’s door, and still hold tight to her optimism and that good old American Dream. Her story isn’t about changing — it’s about enduring. It’s about showing that no matter how cruel or unfair life gets, some people can still hold on to their decency, kindness, and hope.

Finally, there’s the prince. A lot of modern viewers mock Snow White as a story about a helpless girl who just waits for her prince to save her. But those people haven’t truly paid attention to the movie. Snow White barely even mentions the prince throughout the whole film. Far from being dependent on the prince, there are long stretches of the film where he doesn’t even cross her mind. Far from waiting around to be rescued, she’s busy fighting to survive, and doing so with bravery, hard work, and unwavering optimism.

The truth is, the prince isn’t even a character. I don’t mean that he’s a bad character or that he has no character. I mean that he’s not written to be a character any more than the castle in the sky at the end of the movie. He’s a symbol of Snow White’s dreams coming true after all that she’s endured.

The prince’s role as a symbolic figure — rather than a fully fleshed-out character — was no accident. The prince isn’t Snow White’s goal; he’s the reward for her bravery, her kindness, and her perseverance. His arrival is at the moment when a girl whose known nothing but hardship is released from her burdens by a silent figure on a white horse and carried away to a glowing castle in the sky. It’s not a stretch to say that a generation who watched their loved ones work themselves to death would have found a far deeper meaning here than a simplistic “happily ever after”

Snow White is about a young woman who endures unimaginable hardship, faces death head-on, and still manages to keep smiling. For audiences who had lived through the Great Depression, her journey was more than just a fairy tale — it was a reminder that even when everything falls apart, hope and hard work can still win in the end. People who claim Snow White is just some outdated “damsel in distress” story aren’t trying to understand the film based on the context of its time period. If they did, they’d see that Snow White isn’t about a helpless girl at all — it’s about someone who loses everything, faces unimaginable hardship, and still manages to keep going, keep smiling, and keep believing that better days are ahead.

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