Mirror, mirror,

on the wall,

who’s the fairest

of them all?

Last week we kicked off September by talking about the symbolism of the apple in Snow White. Today we’ll take a look at the magic mirror. And also celebrate, because Cold as Snow is out today!

Like apples, mirrors are a bit of a double-edged symbol. Many early cultures believed that the reflection in a mirror was actually a piece of the soul. Because of that, a mirror could be a scary thing–it might steal a soul away, for example, or if broken, it could bring bad luck. But mirrors could also symbolize honesty and truth, because their reflections are impartial.

In traditional tellings of Snow White, you could argue the Queen’s magic mirror represents both of those things. It tells the Queen the truth, but it also spells out some very bad luck for Snow White herself. Personally, I love the play on the mirror reflecting external appearances but also internal desires. (If you explore that theme even farther, you end up with stories like The Picture of Dorian Gray!)

In Cold as Snow, I play around with “fair” meaning “just” rather than “pretty.” And while the magic mirror does make an appearance, it isn’t in the hands of an evil queen–instead, Red’s neighbor and friend, Gloria, hangs the special mirror in her beauty salon. The mirror then becomes a catalyst for conversations about the contrast between how we look on the outside and what we look like on the inside. Readers of Beauty and the Alchemist will recall that Gloria (the titular Beauty!) had dark issues of her own to overcome. Now, in Cold as Snow, Gloria takes on a sort of mentor role for Snow as she comes of age amid murder and scandal.

Selected Sources

As always, I found Nozedar’s The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Signs and Symbols very helpful in organizing my thoughts!