<P> The Grimm brothers invented the motif of the Queen's execution at Snow White's wedding; the original story sees her punished by the King . The Grimms noted on the margin of their 1810 manuscript: "The ending is not quite right and is lacking something ." Diane Purkiss attributes the Queen's fiery death to "the folkbelief that burning a witch's body ended her power, a belief which subtended (but did not cause) the practice of burning witches in Germany", while the American Folklore Society noted that the use of iron shoes "recalls folk practices of destroying a witch through the magic agency of iron". </P> <P> The Brothers Grimm collected the German fairy tale in their 1812 Kinder - und Hausmärchen ("Children's and Household Tales", more commonly known in English as Grimms' Fairy Tales). In the first edition of the Brothers Grimm story, the Queen is Snow White's biological mother, not her stepmother . This motif changed in subsequent versions, after 1819 . The earliest version was known as "Snow Drop". Jack Zipes said "the change from' evil mother' to' evil stepmother' for example, was because the brothers' held motherhood sacred' . According to Sheldon Cashdan, Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, a "cardinal rule of fairy tales" mandates that the "heroes and heroines are allowed to kill witches, sorceresses, even stepmothers, but never their own mothers". Zipes' 2014 collection of Grimm fairy tales in their original forms reinstated the Queen as Snow White's mother . </P> <P> According to some scholars, the story is constructed and characters are presented with ageist undertones . The University of Hawaii professor Cristina Bacchilega said, "I think there is still very much an attachment to vilifying the older, more powerful woman ." Roger Sale opined that "the term' narcissism' seems altogether too slippery to be the only one we want here . There is, for instance, no suggestion that the queen's absorption in her beauty ever gives her pleasure, or that the desire for power through sexual attractiveness is itself a sexual feeling . What is stressed is the anger and fear that attend the queen's realization that as she and Snow White both get older, she must lose . This is why the major feeling involved is not jealousy but envy: to make beauty that important is to reduce the world to one in which only two people count ." Terri Windling wrote that the Queen is "a woman whose power is derived from her beauty; it is this, the tale implies, that provides her place in the castle's hierarchy . If the king's attention turns from his wife to another, what power is left to an aging woman? Witchcraft, the tale answers . Potions, poisons, and self - protection ." According to Zipes, "the queen's actions are determined by the mirror's representations of her as exemplifying beauty and evil, or associating evil and vanity with beauty, and these mirror representations are taken as the truth by the queen . Had she perhaps doubted and cracked the mirror, cracked the meaning of the mirror, she might still be alive today ." Deborah Lipp, discussing the character's archetype, stated that "in fact Western culture had, for hundreds of years, associated the idea of powerful, commanding women with witchcraft and evil . That's why, I think, the most interesting women in stories have been villainesses ." Zipes opined that the Queen character is much more complex and "as a figure she is much more fascinating than this dumb, innocent, naïve Snow White . So why not focus on this figure who is tragic in many, many ways . We really don't know too much about her - where she gets her powers . She's mysterious ." </P> <P> Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar regard Snow White and her mother / stepmother as two female stereotypes, the angel and the monster . The fact that the Queen was Snow White's biological mother in the first version of the Grimms' story has led several psychoanalytic critics to interpret "Snow White" as a story about repressed Oedipus complex, or about Snow White's Electra complex . Harold Bloom opined that the three "temptations" all "testify to a mutual sexual attraction between Snow White and her stepmother ." According to Bruno Bettelheim, the story's main motif is "the clash of sexual innocence and sexual desire" and Cashdan wrote that the Queen's "incessant query,' Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?' literally reflects her fear that the king will find Snow White more appealing than her . It thus is the implicit sexual struggle between the young girl and the queen ." This struggle is so dominating the psychological landscape of the tale, that Gilber and Gubar even proposed renaming the story "Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother". </P>

What did snow do to the evil queen