The Evil Queen

## Queen Grimhilde

### Goals:

* To Kill Snow White, the seven dwarfs, and all others who are fairer than she herself is, so that she can become the fairest in the land
* Return to her castle and transform back into her normal form (both failed)

### Type of Villain:

Envious Tyrant

**Queen Grimhilde** is a *very* vain and power-hungry queen of a small kingdom. Determined to remain the fairest of all, the Evil Queen becomes insanely jealous of Snow White, the only one whose beauty surpasses her own. Her sole motivation is physical beauty and her ability to maintain it.

Cold-hearted, cruel, malicious, and emotionally abusive, the Evil Queen was driven to murderous insanity to surpass Snow White's beauty. Her evil and hatred come from nothing more than her fiendishly obsessive desire to remain the "fairest in the land" (no matter that Snow White is innocent and harmless). She eventually uses her skills in dark magic to transform herself into **The Ugly Old Hag**, in a final attempt to do away with her only, unknowing rival.

She is generally considered one of Disney's most iconic and menacing villains, once being voted the 3rd greatest movie villain of all time.

## **Physical Appearance**

The Queen is an icily beautiful woman with a serene, unfeeling face and a slender figure. She has pale skin, green eyes, chest-length black hair (as revealed during her transformation into her witch disguise), red lips, brownish-gray eye shadow, pink blush on her cheeks, red fingernails, and seemingly penciled-on eyebrows. The Queen is seen wearing a purple long-sleeved ankle-length gown and a red rope belt tied around her waist. She wears a black balaclava that covers her ears, her neck, and her hair, leaving her face exposed. The Queen wears a long black cloak that appears to be part of the cowl. The cloak is lined with a red interior and the bottom of the cloak is lined with white fur. She has a high white collar attached to her cloak. She also wears a golden pendant that seems to connect with the collar.

She also wears orange-yellow high-heel pumps. To top off her royal appearance, the Evil Queen wears a golden crown atop her head with five spikes on the front and a jewel on the tip of the middle and tallest spike. The color scheme of her attire represents her pride and vanity.

In her witch disguise, the Queen's physical appearance changes from that of a youthful queen with an unfeeling look on her face to that of an ugly, old peddler vividly displaying emotions. She has long, tangled chest-length white hair, thick eyebrows, the same green eyes from her normal form, and dark rings around her eyes. Her nose becomes long and crooked with a large wart, and she only has one visible tooth on her bottom jaw. Her hands are gnarled and have pointed, dirty fingernails.

She dons a cowled black robe that retains the hanging sleeves of her gown. She also seems to wear gray slippers. Walt Disney described the Queen as "a mixture of Lady Macbeth and the Big Bad Wolf... her beauty is sinister, mature, plenty of curves... she becomes ugly and menacing when scheming and mixing her poisons; magic fluids transform her into an old, witch-like hag."

## **Personality and Traits**

The Queen wants nothing more than to be the fairest in the land and does not appear to be significantly involved in governing her kingdom (since she is solely focused on being the fairest in the land), though the skeletal remains of prisoners in her dungeon point to her being a villainous ruler. She is a cold-hearted, violent, egotistical, and possessive tyrant with an extreme vanity that made her utterly intolerant and conservative of rivals. Her vanity and jealousy of Snow White's superior beauty and the Prince's affections eventually drove her to unsympathetic and murderous insanity. She transformed herself into a hideous hag and conjured a poison named "The Sleeping Death" to achieve this end as a sign of her determination and desperation. Being an alternate form of the Queen, the Witch has some of her personality traits -- most notably her vanity and unstable jealousy of Snow White -- kept intact.

However, due in part to the transformation, she has also become more outwardly maniacal, sociopathic, vituperative, diabolical, and sadistic, constantly cackling insanely as well as once trying to play an extremely heartless joke on her pet raven by making it seem as though she wanted it to eat the poisoned apple. Despite her insanity, she was also extremely intelligent, manipulative (using Snow White's pity of the seemingly harmless old lady to her advantage), perspicacious, and calculating, wanting to ensure that she does not overlook anything in order to make her plans an absolute success.

This trait was especially evident in her stopping herself while gloating about how the poisoned apple will ensure Snow White's eventual demise in order to look up whether there was a cure for the effects of the poisoned apple that would be able to cause her plans to fail. However, the 2004 Daphne Skinner book My Side of the Story: Snow White/The Queen reveals that the Queen actually showed kindness to Snow White at first (she even has a portrait of her stepdaughter on one of the walls of the castle), but she gets too wound up in her jealousy, which ultimately results in her untimely end. The book also reveals her, when not in her castle, owning a grocery store (as seen in the last page of the book).

According to her explanation, she also made Snow White a servant in her castle to keep her stepdaughter from being lazy (The Queen also tells Snow White to do chores every day because it's a "good exercise" -- this is proven in one scene from the book where Snow White eats some cake, only for The Queen to snatch it away from her stepdaughter, telling her not to eat sweets because she is "still in growth and needs to diet"). Also, according to The Queen, she never asks the Magic Mirror who is the fairest in the land.

However, the Magic Mirror keeps complimenting on how beautiful The Queen is (in its opinion). In the scene where Snow White first meets The Prince and flirts with him, The Queen watches them from her window with a worried look on her face, concerned about Snow White's safety with an older boy (whereas in the film, she watches them with anger and jealousy of Snow White's beauty). In addition, the 2009 Serena Valentino novel "Fairest of All: A Tale of the Wicked Queen" paints her in a far more tragic light, that of an extremely broken woman who (due to emotional abuse from her father) was feeling extremely insecure about whether or not she was truly beautiful. It was also shown that she did initially genuinely care for Snow White as if she were her own daughter before the king's untimely demise.