A. 

It begins with a queen being released into chaos. Snow White’s mother dies in childbirth. She who had been barren was already coming out of a kind of chaos, for chaos lacks the order that bears fruit. She gives her life to bear fruit but once. In the darkness of death, the soul leaves the body; that is, the one animating principle that holds together the plurality of particularities departs, and the body decomposes. From ashes to ashes, dust to dust. 

And so it all ends with a queen again being released into chaos. Snow White — she whose life her mother gave her own life to create — has matured into womanhood, and into motherhood. To do so, she has had to overcome the chaos present within vanity, loneliness, and death. The vain, lonely murderess she might have become otherwise, her stepmother the wicked Widow Queen, is not held in contempt by Snow White (as if she were in bondage to resentment), but is treated with compassion, being released from a dungeon in her withered, haggard state and allowed to take up residence in the dark wilderness of the woods. The chaos abides out there, beyond the edges of our consciousness.

These parallel scenes frame the chaotic potential out of which arises the active order of Jonathan Pageau’s book Snow White and the Widow Queen (Symbolic World Press, 2023) — illustrated so masterfully by Heather Pollington, whose symmetrical compositions mimic Pageau’s own, but here I’ll be concentrating on the sequencing of Pageau’s retelling. The full chiastic outline (with page numbers in gray) is as follows:

Snow White’s mate, the Prince — he who represents the principle of order in her life, giving her seed and unlocking her fertility — has his own story arc fractally nested within his wife’s. It starts with his first appearance in the second paragraph on page 10. (This had been the beginning of a new chapter in the story’s draft pre-illustration.) Upon seeing Snow White just once, the Prince is immediately mesmerized by her beauty, and thus is initiated their romance. Overwhelmed by desire and never slow to act, he climbs the vines to her balcony under the shadows of evening, but is told by chaste Snow White, “Do not awaken love until its time.” The Prince’s arc thus cannot conclude except in his discovery of love’s time. He had long been searching for her in the forests since the Widow Queen had driven her from the castle. One day, in a state of exhaustion, he is visited by an avian guide, a crow as black as his true love’s hair. He is led now, not by wanton, impatient desire, from which he has been purified in his suffering, but by a winged messenger — not up a prickly vine to a tower balcony, but through a dense wood thick with thorns and sharp stones to a clearing in the forest where Pollington depicts the black crow as having transformed into a dove as white as Snow White’s skin. Here the Prince finds his love, long asleep in a golden coffin, in affliction from the Queen’s poison. The Prince recognizes love’s time and gives Snow White life with a kiss. He shall be her husband, and the father of her children.

B. 

So the Prince’s arc is nested within Snow White’s, like seed in a fruit — but framed within his arc are the two longest passages that I’ve summarized in single lines. I shall take the time to unpack them here. These passages dramatize the conflict that ensues between Snow White and her wicked stepmother the Widow Queen, that conflict which keeps the Prince from his love, which conflict is then resolved by the Prince attaining his love. 

The first of the two sections begins when the magic mirror shows the Widow Queen aging from her envy of the Prince’s attention and for the first time names her stepdaughter Snow White as fairest in the land. In response she orders the captain of her hunters to take Snow White into the woods and kill her. His conscience afflicts him, however, and he chases her away instead, telling her not to return. This purgation of Snow White from the kingdom comprises the first of three parts to this sequence: 

Secondly, Snow White runs through the wooded wilderness, as though in circles, eventually being led by a crow to an opening in the wood and in it a strange small cottage. Though its dimensions are tight, she fits inside it and finds there sevenness in all its objects: chairs, table settings, beds. The sevenness signifies a sabbath, which day marks the uttermost limit of creation, from which time circles back upon itself. This is to where Snow White has been exiled. This is where Snow White cycles through all the plates of food, tasting of each, where she cycles through all the beds, trying each out; this is where she falls asleep, taking her sabbath rest, her consciousness lapsing back into a state of potential for the purpose of renewal. 

That sleep is a type of death, and so her waking is a type of resurrection. She arises, if in type, but only once she is first joined by the seven diminutive male occupants of the house. In the third sequence of the passage, the seven thieving dwarves arrive home to discover evidence of Snow White’s presence in their residence and eventually her own person in one of their beds. She being no threat to them, they mercifully let her sleep and join her in taking rest. Upon waking in the morning, Snow White wins the seven dwarves’ pity with her tale, and a living arrangement is struck. She may stay with them in exchange for domestic service. Locally to this passage of the story, this is a type of resurrection (a prefigurement of what is to come), but in a broader sense it is the culmination of her sentence of exile to servitude in the outer limit of creation. She is in domestic union with masculinity, but it’s a masculinity broken down into its unattractive constituent parts, each dwarf characterized by some unappealing idiosyncrasy. The thieving dwarves are not yet her Prince but as though the broken down components of her Prince. The union is infertile. She is in a state of living death. 

It’s the “living” part of that equation that irks the wicked Widow Queen when she eventually finds out about it. Chiastically returning to the part about the magic mirror and the Hunter, the story tells us that the Hunter has tried to mask Snow White’s exile by presenting the Widow Queen with a wild pig’s heart, instead of the maiden’s heart, but that the Widow Queen again consults her mirror for validation and thereby learns of Snow White’s location and condition. This revelation incites a threefold progression of escalating symbolism chiastically symmetrical with the sequence previously discussed. Thrice the Widow Queen devises a deceptive weapon by means of sorcery and in disguise visits Snow White in the woods with murderous intent. 

As Snow White had been sent into exile in a distant wood, so the Widow Queen’s first attack is as a wandering gypsy offering an exotic green belt from a distant land, secretly laced with poison (which Pollington helpfully illustrates as a serpent-like object). Snow White, in the vain hope of attracting her Prince with this exotic pleasure, naively allows the gypsy into the interior of the cottage, improperly incorporating the foreign with the domestic and thus incurring harm. When the Widow Queen slaps the belt around Snow White’s waist and flees, the poor girl is nearly suffocated and falls unconscious, but the dwarves arrive in time to save her. 

The mirror lets on to the Widow Queen about her lack of success, and the villainous woman tries again. As Snow White had previously discovered an empty little home at the limit of creation and familiarized herself with all its sevenfold contents, so the Widow Queen can tempt her with nothing exotic this time, but rather uses something familiar and nostalgia-inducing: a hairpin that had belonged to Snow White’s mother (secretly, of course, laced with poison). The Widow Queen arrives disguised as a thief offering her loot as a gift. Snow White knows not to let anyone in the cottage, but is tempted to see her mother’s pin through a window, at the threshold between interior and exterior. This is like knowing not to commit a sin in deed, yet harboring the sin in thought. The danger pricks all the same, as does the Widow Queen to Snow White with the hairpin, causing her to fall unconscious and requiring the dwarves to come save her again. Recovery from sinful thoughts, however, brings great spiritual benefit, as symbolized by the shame-induced reformation of the dwarves from their thieving ways. 

Again the Widow Queen consults her mirror, and again she sets about to consummate her fury, now for the third and final time. She won’t be able to get inside the cottage, nor will she be able to penetrate the window, so she arrives in the guise of an old beggar woman who falls and is in need, inducing Snow White into the exterior by weaponizing her compassion against her — the perfect temptation. The Widow Queen had tried using an exotic foreign object; she had tried using a nostalgia-inducing familiar object; now she would resort to a mystical divine object that encompasses both the foreign and the familiar. With her sorcery she prepares a lovely golden apple (laced with a potion that creates a “sleeping death”), which she identifies to Snow White as the same used by Eris, the goddess of discord, to incite vanity and envy among the goddesses and thereby initiate the Trojan War. The apple is foreign in that it is divine; it is familiar in that it reflects Snow White’s image back at her as “the fairest of them all.” It represents the temptation to see oneself as divine, and as such it reflects chiastically the moment at the beginning of the previously discussed sequence when the magic mirror first identifies Snow White as the fairest in the land and incites the Widow Queen to her murderous envy. 

Snow White is offered the apple, she bites, she falls. She enters the sleeping death from which the dwarves cannot revive her. The previous threefold sequence ended with Snow White in a living death, serving the dwarves as a maid in a little house that fit her like a coffin. Now, having failed her threefold temptation, she is laid in a real coffin — howbeit a glass coffin, one that allows in light — enduring a disintegration of consciousness from which only her masculine Prince can save her.

C. 

In the midst of these two threefold sequences, in between them, is placed a short paragraph that spaces them apart. It is inconspicuously presented in the final layout of the book, as just the first of three paragraphs on page 30. The original draft of the story, however, before any illustrations were made, before it was ever formatted to the page, consisted of thirty numbered paragraphs. That’s the skeleton of the story. So this paragraph I mention, numbered fifteen in that early draft, is a discrete unit of the book’s underlying structure. And what does it consist of? It tells of the Prince, aching for his desired bride, arriving in disguise at the castle gate and inquiring about the young woman he had fallen in love with, who the Widow Queen had told him was a mere servant. Here, from the servants and guards present, he discovers Snow White’s true royal identity, but he also discovers she has gone missing, causing great distress among the people. His misplaced trust in the Widow Queen thus broken, the Prince departs the castle in search of his love.

This little scene sits at the chiastic center of the Prince’s fivefold story arc, which itself comprises the chiastic center of the whole book’s fivefold story arc. And it is abundantly Christian in its typological symbolism. The little arc within the scene is of a prince, disguised as a commoner, visiting the castle of a wicked queen and departing it free from ignorance regarding his love, departing free from the deception of the evil one. It follows the pattern of Christ’s harrowing of hades. God, in the guise of a man, out of love for His bride, visits the kingdom of death and leaves of His own power, having conquered death, having undone the spell of lies that has separated man from his Bridegroom. In the story, it is not yet the resurrection of Snow White, but it is the chiastic cause of the resurrection of Snow White. If the whole cosmic story is universally a fivefold chiasmus of (A) Genesis, (B) Torah, (C) Christ, (B’) Ecclesia, (A’) Apocalypse, then the general resurrection that occurs in the apocalypse at the end is caused by the resurrection of Christ that occurs in the middle. The chiastic center is like the river of paradise, which breaks into four rivers that flow down the mountain of paradise and feed the whole world. Even creation at the beginning of time is chiastically caused by the Incarnation and Ascension of Christ occurring in the middle of time, as on the top of a mountain. 

The arc of the Prince within the story of Snow White follows this fivefold chiastic pattern — and it itself comprises the chiastic center of Snow White’s wider arc, after the fashion of a fractal. The tale of Snow White and the Widow Queen in effect, by means of typology, teaches the reader that the Incarnation of the Logos is the fractal pattern encoded in all creation. It is a story of death and resurrection, in the end of which evil is purged from the kingdom by a combination of the Logos’s judgment and mercy, represented by the fertile union of the Prince and Snow White.

B’. 

Man and woman, husband and wife, embrace as one flesh, being contained within each other. The Prince’s story arc contains within it the two long passages narrating the central crisis in his wife’s life (her stepmother’s several attempts at murdering her), the way a man shelters his wife from harm with his protection. In turn, the Prince’s story arc itself is embraced in the wider story of his wife’s life, at the center of her life, as I’ve said like seed in a fruit, or simply like a man in the arms of his bride. This is the natural recipe for fertility, for extending identity beyond the limits of biological life (or telling a story that lasts through the ages), reproduction itself (or storytelling itself) being a type of Christian resurrection. This is how typology works; a “type” is like the impression of a stamp, a firmly carved pattern reproducing itself in the wax of creation. Man and woman, husband and wife, themselves replicate the pattern of typology, which is just another reflection of how the Logos, the Godman, the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, is the story being told by creation on every level. 

Let’s look at the general outline again, and concentrate on the Widow Queen’s entrance into and exit from power on either side of the fivefold chiastic center.

While Snow White is a girl, her father the king is supposed to be the symbol of the Logos for her, this stamp-like source of order, identity, and purpose. His despair after the loss of his wife in childbirth, however, causes him to fail his calling. The adulterous foreign woman, a deceptive beauty offering wayward consolation and an outsized appetite for riches and attention — like an acidic liquid substance that resists the form of the stamp, liquifying it instead — seduces and murders him. The kingdom of Snow White’s parents falls under her corrosive power, all its wealth being redistributed in service to her vanity. Instead of royalty, Snow White is adorned in servitude. This downward development comprises the second leg of Snow White’s arc, even (on a macrohistorical level) the way sin and death prevailed in the age of the Old Covenant after creation and before Christ. 

After Snow White’s death and resurrection in the center of her arc, then, the fourth leg of her journey chiastically reflects the second. Where her old man failed, her new man succeeds. The Prince, as a type of principality — indeed, as a type of the Logos — gathers his resurrected wife Snow White, along with the seven dwarves, that is, the full range of all the component masculine idiosyncrasies, into one righteous political cause: the re-establishment of the kingdom. Returning to the castle, they find the Widow Queen gone, mysteriously missing. No battle needs to be fought, even as in the age of the Ecclesia, the saints typologically proliferate a victory that was already fought and won at the chiastic mountaintop of history. 

The pattern of how the risen Christ’s singular victory is apostolically replicated in all the plural nooks and crannies of creation can produce a more dramatic and elaborate story — the tale of Snow White itself is such a story. But within the retelling at hand, specifically within Snow White’s wider fivefold arc, this fourth phase of the pattern is quickly and simply typologized. It is contrarily more elaborate, as we saw, within the Prince’s arc nested within Snow White’s arc; I refer to the threefold attack on Snow White’s life by a disguised Widow Queen. But that typology is negative. As Snow White fails her trials at every turn, that sequence follows the pattern of anti-purification, anti-illumination, and anti-perfection experienced by the anti-Ecclesia. Historically speaking, as the Holy Spirit proliferates the Body of Christ in the inhabited world after Pentecost, so too does the body of antichrist take form in that time (even as sin abounded under the Torah, as the Apostle Paul explains). That’s the pattern of sin requiring the Prince’s mediation for redemption. And so that mediation occurs within the arc nested centrally within Snow White’s arc. But the positive correlation to that anti-ecclesial typology, something more indicative of the lives of the saints, is what occurs directly after that Princely mediation. The image of the king returns to rule the land. And not only does the land recover its former fertility, but the new Queen, unlike her mother, survives her first childbirth and many more thereafter, unlocking a fecundity of life much greater than what was known previously. They live happily ever after.

A’. 

Jonathan Pageau has personally confirmed to me my suspicion that all this chiastic, fractal patterning in the sequence of Snow White and the Widow Queen was beyond the edge of his consciousness when crafting the story, at least at the textual level. I don’t gather he thinks in terms of textual sequencing at all; he’s not an outliner. And yet he writes, in his companion explainer book The Symbolism of Snow White (Symbolic World Press, 2023), 

Snow White, like so many of the fairy tales, can be seen as a story of transformation — a breakdown of identity which is then recast into a higher identity after a version of death. This general account of narrative transformation, the basic “U” shape described by Northrop Frye in his 1981 book The Great Code, is found in the transition of a young princess who, after being lost and rejected, becomes a queen and finds her mate, her prince. Their newly formed union “lives happily ever after,” which is to say that it represents an eternal pattern of transformation. We could think of fairy tales as apocalyptic in this way, with the “happily ever after” serving as the equivalent of the Elysian Fields or Heavenly Jerusalem. (p. 6)

So the concept of a U-shaped transformation is by no means lost on Pageau, but it’s a concept for him, not something fractally present in the outline of a text. The same could be said for his fellow Canadian Northrop Frye, who opens the “Myth II: Narrative” chapter of The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1981) thusly, 

We referred earlier to the structure of the Book of Judges, in which a series of stories of traditional tribal heroes is set within a repeating mythos of the apostasy and restoration of Israel. This gives us a narrative structure that is roughly U-shaped, the apostasy being followed by a descent into disaster and bondage, which in turn is followed by repentance, then by a rise through deliverance to a point more or less on the level from which the descent began. This U-shaped pattern, approximate as it is, recurs in literature as the shape of comedy, where a series of misfortunes and misunderstandings brings the action to a threateningly low point, after which some fortunate twist in the plot sends the conclusion up to a happy ending. The entire Bible, viewed as a “divine comedy,” is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation. (p. 169)

The way Frye uses modifiers like “roughly” and “approximate” to characterize the U-shaped pattern indicates he thinks this is a heavenly concept, not one rooted in earthly detail. He writes about this concept in just one of the eight chapters of The Great Code; it’s not the driving idea of his book, not in terms of content. And yet he purposely structures the whole book in two four-chapter parts that inversely parallel each other: Part One, “The Order of Words,” consists of the chapters “Language I,” “Myth I,” “Metaphor I,” and “Typology I,” whereas Part Two, “The Order of Types,” consists of the chapters “Typology II,” “Metaphor II,” “Myth II,” and “Language II,” in that order. If with this outline he intends a down-and-up U-shaped pattern, that conceptual trajectory is lost on me. I suspect he maybe thinks of the form more in the sense of typological concentrism, as he writes in one of the two central chapters on typology, “Typology II: Phases of Revelation,” 

The content of the Bible is traditionally described as "revelation," and there seems to be a sequence or dialectical progression in this revelation, as the Christian Bible proceeds from the beginning to the end of its story. I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation, revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse. Five of these phases have their center of gravity in the Old Testament and two in the New. Each phase is not an improvement on its predecessor but a wider perspective on it. That is, this sequence of phases is another aspect of Biblical typology, each phase being a type of the one following it and an antitype of the one preceding it. (p. 106)

This sevenfold sequence, which Frye describes as though in ever-widening typologically concentric rings, covers the same span of biblical history as his later described U-shaped pattern, but to my knowledge he never puts the two models together. It’s not hard to do. His sevenfold sequence follows the same fivefold chiastic pattern I’ve described, just with a threefold linearly ascending middle the “center of gravity” of which is neither Testament Old or New but rather the divine Word of God peering out at us from amidst the cherubim:

That’s a conceptual match with the Genesis–Torah–Christ–Ecclesia–Apocalypse pattern I’ve outlined in relation to Snow White and the Widow Queen, just less theological, more historical. And it’s merely a conceptual pattern, a heavenly idea; Frye never sees it fractally present in the earthly detail of textual arrangement, and neither does Pageau. A creator like Pageau, though, clearly doesn’t have to. It occurs naturally in the work of any artist who is paying close attention to the nature of things. Pageau wrote a story, rife with symbolism, that, to his intuitive sensibility, flowed. It’s just very natural to check in on the Prince’s search for Snow White  briefly in between the longer sequences of the Widow Queen attempting to murder her. It’s useful to space those sequences out a little, and in their midst not to lose track of the other main character. It’s just a sensible composition. But it just so happens that that feeling of flow and composition has reasoning behind  it. There’s meaning there. The practical sequencing fractally reflects a very large conceptual pattern. 

So Pageau places Snow White’s deadly vision of her own beauty reflected in the golden apple in perfect chiastic parallel with the incident of the magic mirror first revealing to the Widow Queen that Snow White is fairest in the land, igniting thus the villain’s envy. He of course knows the symbolic correspondence of the apple and the mirror (and writes about it in The Symbolism of Snow White), but he doesn’t intend the perfect textual arrangement, not any more than Snow White intends to be kissed by the Prince when enduring her sleeping death. Pageau’s fidelity to the symbolic meaning of things even amidst modern degradation, you see, is like Snow White in this regard, she who retains her virtuous yearning for family and kingdom even amidst all the moral losses she accrues. And the textual arrangement that naturally gives order to symbols naturally perceived, allowing them to resonate in the text and be fertile with so much meaning ... is like the Prince — typologically the Bridegroom, the Logos, He who in great condescension buries Himself in our nature, He who we yearn will with His kiss give back to us the life we have lost, will bring us out of this wooded wilderness into which we have strayed, back to the kingdom of our birthright.

Pageau’s approach to composing a story represents one way of typologically reclaiming the kingdom. Starting with an orderly outline in a more masculine fashion is no less feasible, but such orderliness remains sterile if not properly wed to the kind of feminine fertility foregrounded by those who work more intuitively. Those artists who can work in either mode, switching as needed or else finding how one is contained in the other and combining them in a single prophetic approach, come closest to arriving at the beginning and end of our nature — and at the theanthropic chiastic core that causes it all.