Red as Blood, White as Snow, Black as Crow: Chromatic Symbolism of Womanhood in Fairy Tales

Abstract

Red as Blood, White as Snow, Black as Crow: Chromatic Symbolism of Womanhood in Fairy TalesThis article is intended as a modest follow-up on a classic study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay.In Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, these two linguists showed that despite the proven ability of humans to discriminate thousands of color percepts, "a total universal inventory of exactly eleven basic term categories exists from which the eleven or fewer basic color terms of any given languages are always drawn" (2).This means that, as they put it, such "eleven basic color categories are pan-human perceptual universals" (108). 1 To my mind, this conclusion is eerily reminiscent of Vladimir Propp' s discovery that thirty-one functions are all that the human imagination needs to produce the myriad extant variations in fairy tales.So the question arises of whether fairy tales use colors, as they use functions, in a patterned way.To answer, one must pursue Propp' s sort of exploration of fairy-tale universals beyond formalism, in the realm of sensory experience-or, rather, of its encoding in color categories.Encouragingly, fairy tales make striking use of colors.Max Lüthi once remarked that whereas "[t]he real world shows us a richness of different hues and shadings . . .[b]y contrast, the folktale prefers clear, ultrapure colors" (27).And he gave a well-known example: "Snow White is as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony" (28).While in the following discussion I shall take advantage of the example of the three colors of Snow White, I must part ways with Lüthi' s ideas regarding the abstract style of fairy tales, for my

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.