The Snow Child

The three chapters that close Part 1 are critical in ensuring that the reader not get swept into Mabel’s desperate fantasy. These three critical chapters begin the process of humanizing Mabel’s fairy child and in doing so begin affirming the heroic dimensions of this very real woman-child.

When Jack lies to his wife, claiming he lost track of the mysterious girl in the woods, it is a measure of the widening chasm between husband and wife. We—not Mabel—now learn what actually happened in the woods and in turn first see the dimensions of this child’s real-time, real-world life, her gutsy struggle to survive in the wilderness despite her age.

When the girl finally accepts the couple’s invitation to eat with them, her coarse table manners indicate not only how hungry she is but how uncivilized are her ways. She is hardly a fairy princess as she shoves her food into her mouth. And then in perhaps the most dramatic moment of Part 1, this snow child finally speaks. That voice, weak only because her wilderness life provides little reason to exercise her vocal cords, gives her the depth of a human being rather than some fairy-tale creation. That her dialogue is not enclosed in quotation marks, however, sustains her unreal, fantastical mystique.

But it is the ghastly decomposing corpse of her drunkard father that most humanizes the mysterious girl. As she explains to Jack the reality of her reprobate father and how he would abandon her for long periods of time to drink, Jack (and the reader) begin to glimpse both her loneliness and her willingness to engage the brutal wilderness and survive on her terms. There is no mystery; Jack’s investigation in town reveals the reality of a Swedish lumberjack who we understand is the dead man in the woods. When the girl refuses Jack’s offer to stay with them even temporarily, her unwavering determination to remain in the woods remakes the child from some fragile fairy child into the embodiment of empowerment and freedom.