SOURCE: "Donald Barthelme's Snow White," in Critique, Vol. II, No. 3, 1969, pp. 30-4.

In the following essay, Longleigh provides an analysis of Barthelme's treatment of the title character as an anti-heroine in Snow White.

As an archetypal heroine (counterpart of the anti-hero, as defined in recent criticism), Donald Barthelme's title character in Snow White is a significant example of the play of light and darkness at the heart of modern value systems. Very important is an analytic penetration into this character, for she may stand for each of us, time and flesh being like all things relative. She is a character of flux and stasis, a semi-virginal anti-heroine who is in the end revirginized in a daring apotheosis. In her we are at the nexus of the tumultuous symbolic Other, as in the last chapters of Moby-Dick, or the dream symbolism of The Tempest. Indeed, one begins to understand...