★★★★★★☆☆☆☆
The visual appearance of women plays an important part in Grimms' tales filled with beautiful princesses and ugly witches . It's almost always connected with personality traits like in The Three Little Men in the Wood where one step-sister is "pleasant and pretty" and the other "ugly and hateful", or Mother Hulda where the women are "pretty and industrious" and "ugly and lazy". It seems that good traits are connected with having a good appearance and bad traits with having a bad one, but it's more complicated than that.
In Snow-white both the titular character and the queen, her step-mother, are incredibly beautiful but while one is kind and diligent the other is wicked and mean. It looks strange, but that's because brothers Grimm in their stories use beauty in two different ways. In case of Snow-white (as with most Grimms' princesses and the like) beauty stands as the physical representation of inner qualities, while her step-mother's appearance doesn't have that subtext. Hers is an example of corruption of the mind which comes with prevalence of the physical, which in turn arises from flattery and concentrating on the visual (both symbolized by the mirror). That is also the reason why the queen isn't more beautiful than Snow-white, for, as the story teaches us, real beauty comes from within.
It is important to remember that the tales come from an oral tradition, and the physical beauty could be imagined by every listener for himself while everyone knew what industriousness, loyalty and honesty are. However, in time people grew more and more visual and eventually appearance became the main criterion for nearly everything. It changed the way things are perceived so much that we lost sight of what is really important. Fortunately we still have Grimms' tales.
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