Step parenting is a tough gig. There’s a lot of fears with which to contend: a parent being replaced, the child being replaced with other children, the step parent displacing the love of the parent. It’s a terribly anxious situation that can easily morph into an everyday horror story. In the case of Snow White: A Tale of Terror, these fears are explored through the dynamic of Lady Claudia (Sigourney Weaver) and Lily (Monica Keena), who represent the struggle and eventual damage an unwillingness to collaborate renders in the stepparent/stepchild relationship. Curiously, the film presents Claudia as a far more sympathetic character than our heroine Lily, begging the address of how film (and literature, by association) treats its step parents.

In the film’s introduction, Lily’s mother dies after an accident in a bid to save her unborn child, setting us up for an inevitable stepparent relationship. Years later (a bit too long, historically speaking), her father, Fredric (Sam Neill, who I still can’t look at the same way after Event Horizon), marries Claudia, who makes strides to connect with her young step child. At their first meeting, she crouches to the child’s level so that they can maintain eye contact, engages in conversation concerning a caterpillar, and even gives her new step daughter a puppy. There’s no dramatic speech concerning her being Lily’s new mother or how they have to get along; Claudia is acutely aware that this is difficult for Lily, and she wants to be liked. She goes out of her way to put a good effort forward. Lily, for her part, does not thank her new step mother for the gift, and spies silently on the new couple as they kiss in the hallway. The child doesn’t realize that her father and new stepmother are behaving like a normal couple, and so she stews. When it comes to the customary blessing of the martial bed, young Lily throws a small cup of wine in her stepmother’s face, though she does not throw anything at her father. In a sense, she can’t, because she is angry with Claudia for replacing her mother. This child does not want a step mother; she wants her mother back, as evidenced when she asks her father if her mother visits her from heaven. She explicitly asks for assurance from her father that he still loves her mother. Whether we want to admit it or not, there are a few facts of the time period with which Lily needed to make peace: a.) her mother was dead and was not coming back, and b.) her father would want to remarry, as was customary in that era. In fact, as Fredric did not have a son to whom he could pass his name and titles, Fredric would most definitely need a son as a measure of property succession, and marriage would be a step to attaining said goal. This is not meant to be cruel; it is merely an observation of the time period. Lily simply did not have a choice in the matter, and in that era, she would not have been afforded that luxury.

Claudia, for her part, has a pretty bitter pill to swallow in the form of reminders of the previous Lady Hoffman. Portraits are still hanging of the previous wife. A servant informs her, once in her new quarters, that the view out the window was also the view the previous Lady Hoffman enjoyed. This is within her first hours at the household. She then confides to her mute brother that she had a dysfunctional relationship with her own mother, and hoped for a happy life. This is a woman full of anxiety before marrying a man she loves, with constant reminders immediately that someone else was there first. To boot, the previous Lady Hoffman was well-liked, while she’s the newcomer. This is a tall order for someone that wants desperately to fit in.

Lily, at this point, shows some disturbing signs of an unhealthy view of her biological mother, which impacts her relationship with Claudia. As Lily has never met her mother, she develops a strange type of idealized version of her. While interacting as a young adult with Ilsa the servant, she states of her parents’ relationship, “My father worshiped her didn’t he?” The maid replies, “It’s not for me to say.” She’s getting dodged by the maid when it comes to reinforcing the ideals she has of her late mother, suggesting that her parents’ relationship was not as wonderful as she thinks it was. Even if Ilsa had replied to the contrary of Lily’s inquiry, Lily would have shrugged off the response because it didn’t fit into her worldview. In Lily’s mind, her mother was an angel, and she’s stuck with a stepmother she didn’t want. When asked why she would want to leave her “good home” and see the world, a brooding Lily replies, “Because it’s not the same home anymore. Hasn’t been for a long time.” Nine years later, she’s still angry that she has a step mother. Claudia can only fail in her eyes; she does not see the attempts to connect, only the absence of her ideal. Lily comes off as a petulant brat with an unhealthy Madonna complex of her mother.

Where’s her father in all of this? In a chapel, asking god for a son. Fredric has not mitigated his daughter’s behavior, nor has he defended his new wife. Fredric wants an heir. He storms off to pout when the baby is stillborn and there is no hope of him having said son. He does not offer Claudia any comfort in her anguish because she will never give him what he wants. Let’s just say what isn’t being said: Lily, as a female, is not good enough for her father, who does not hide this fact. Lily is either oblivious to or accepting of this blatant display of sexism. Claudia, however, is acutely aware of what Fredric perceives as a shortcoming.

The stillbirth is the breaking point for both women. While Claudia does not receive comfort from Fredric, she does receive her brother as a visitor after the birth, and begs him to rescue the baby’s corpse from being burned. In her grief, she turns to her magic mirror and asks, “Why is this happening to me?” She’s a broken woman at this point, turning to the occult for comfort in an unfeeling household that has rejected her from the moment she set foot in there nine years prior. This is where we start to see Claudia filled with rage. At first, she becomes silent: as she’s staring off into the distance a short time later, Lily approaches her and offers an apology: “I know we’ve never gotten along, I know I pushed you away… I must have blamed you for so many things. But I never meant to hurt you. Can you forgive me?” It took a dead baby for her to finally see that her treatment of Claudia was deplorable. She wants to mend that now. At this point, though, Claudia is suffering a psychosis and wishes to see Lily punished for her actions. During their conversation, Claudia compliments Lily’s beauty, but does not explicitly state that she forgives her for her behavior. When Claudia thinks that her brother has killed Lily, she tells him, “The blood you spilled was just the venom of a scheming child.” This is nine years of pent-up rage boiling over in the aftermath of the loss of children she desperately wanted; let us not forget how much she tried to parent Lily. Claudia was soundly rejected and now rejects Lily in return after years of trying and a heartbreaking loss. Her patience was thrown in her face, and her love was unrequited. She grows jealous and angry, and we can see how she got there. The character is much more human in this respect. As the film progresses, we can’t entirely forgive her for the subsequent murder attempts, but we can understand how she got there.

The tale is less about beauty and eternal youth and more about the ramifications of a broken relationship. I can’t help but wonder what type of story this could have been had one of the parties given in earlier and accepted the other. How much more evil would it have been if young Lily had decided that she wanted a mother and embraced Claudia, only to have her love and trust betrayed? What if Claudia had to fight an internal struggle and choose between the step child she loved and the chance to resurrect her only biological child? Consequently, how different would the story have been if both female characters had evolved into a familial unit and worked with instead of against each other? Those are equally valid options to the story which could have worked well. However, the writers gave us a cautionary tale concerning the unyielding rejection of a stepparent. We sympathized more with the grieving woman, the throw-away second wife, than we did with the petulant step daughter that hated her for not being her “real” mother; all the way up until the whole murder part, that is. This was one Snow White where we didn’t necessarily love the titular character as much as we should have. We got to see a human being that made mistakes, and we got to connect to our villain to remind us that yes, step mothers are people too.