chasingtempest

[chasingtempest]

Grimms’ Tales, Team Delusional, A.S. Byatt

Forgive the mistakes, these are my notes for the rabbit hole I fell into.

Beth Greene is Snow White

I was clued into the parallel between the close up frame of Beth’s hand and the gun mirroring Disney’s Snow White’s limp hand and the poisoned apple after diving into Team Delusional (TD) research. A comparison you cannot unsee.

I had a copy of Grimms’ Tales from college, so I decided to read the original fairy tale of ‘Snow White’ (pp. 184-191). Unsurprisingly, tons of Beth symbolism. A huntsman sacrifices a boar, seven dwarves, three attempts on her life by the evil queen, falling down ‘seemingly dead’, and finally being put into a glass coffin only to be resurrected later.

Beth’s body being left in a car = glass coffin.

The glass coffin holds a character that is seemingly dead but not truly deceased. A theme reinforced throughout the flagship show and spinoffs with walkers in cars.

This was all happening while I was rewatching The Walking Dead (TWD), Coda (S5, E8), and I noticed they paused on Beth’s side of the hall before the exchange of hostages, and the room number next to them was clearly visible.

Room 506.

Thinking, what the heck, TD says numbers are important, I flipped my copy of Grimms’ Tales to page 506…

The page is shared between the end of ‘Snow White and Rose Red’ (pp. 501-506), and the beginning of ‘The Wise Servant’ (pp. 506-507), followed directly by ‘The Glass Coffin’ (pp. 507-512).

Well, all righty then. Coincidence. Why would TWD match a room number on screen to a book of fairy tales? 👀

Initial Notes:

Snow White and Rose Red

Snow White and Rose Red are two sisters who live with their mother in a hut. A bear, who is really a cursed prince, comes into their hut and ends up spending his nights by their hearth during the winter. A fire lit by Snow White. She will go on to marry the prince once the curse is broken.

The bear is a big symbol in TD, as far as I am aware, and @twdmusicboxmystery noted in her video about Dead City, S2, E7, how a bear made it’s way into the room with Maggie and Hershel. Then, during the action that followed, a knife was thrown, hitting the bear where Beth was shot. If Beth is Snow White, Maggie is Rose Red. There were more parallels, but I digress.

The Wise Servant

‘The Wise Servant’ is about a man who sends his wise servant, Hans, to find a lost cow. It takes forever—no Hans, no cow, so bossman goes looking for him. I found the dialogue interesting. But then, what really caught my attention, was when Hans said he didn’t look for the cow, and he found something better, “Three blackbirds,” said the servant. “And where are they?” said the master. The wise servant replied: “I see one, I hear one, and I’m chasing the third,” (p. 507).

Three Wise Monkeys reference. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

Emily Kinney’s three stuffed monkeys tweet during S5 secret filming.

The Glass Coffin

And finally, ‘The Glass Coffin’.

A tailor traveling in the wild finds shelter in an old man’s hut. A commotion between a bull (disguised old man/bad guy) and a stag wake the tailor, the stag kills the bull, then takes the tailor into the wilds, away from the world of men. He is taken to a tall wall of stone with a secret entrance at the base. When opened by the stag, the “flames poured from the doorway, followed by clouds of smoke that hid the stag from view (pp. 508-509).

Inside, the tailor comes upon two glass cases. One holds a castle, surrounded by farmhouses, stables, and barns. The other holds a beautiful maiden.

“She lay as though asleep, her long golden hair wrapped around her like a precious cloak. Her eyes were closed tight but the freshness of her face and a ribbon that moved to and fro as she breathed left no doubt that she was alive,” (p. 509).

The maiden’s eyes open, the tailor opens the case, and she uses words like prison and savior. She tells him her story.

The maiden lived in a castle with her brother. They loved each other so tenderly and were “so much alike in our thoughts and inclinations” (p. 510), they would not marry but stay together.

The maiden is Beth, but it could symbolize Carol, too, depending on the context. For Carol, the brother could then be Daryl, which is one part of my A.S. Byatt link.

A stranger comes along and was treated as a guest by the siblings. Things happen. So. Much. Symbolism. The stranger wants the girl, she says no, the stranger uses magic to turn her brother into a stag during a hunting trip.

Scared for her brother, the maiden rides out with a servant to find him, but the servant’s horse fell and broke its leg (thought immediately of Noah’s leg), and she was forced to leave him behind. She finds the stranger and learns what happened to her brother. The maiden flew into a rage “drew a pistol, and fired it at the monster, but the bullet bounced back from his chest” (p. 511), and into her horse’s head.

This is Beth and Dawn’s final confrontation. Scissors in Dawn’s chest backfired and Beth was shot in the head.

The horses’ fates parallel those of Noah and Beth.

“I fell to the ground, and the stranger mumbled a few words that made me lose consciousness. When I came to, I was in a glass coffin in this underground vault,” (p. 511).

TD’s car and resurrection theory.

With the tailor’s help, the maiden frees her home, her people, and is reunited with her brother. The girl marries the tailor.

A.S. Byatt

A.S. Byatt used Grimms’ ‘The Glass Coffin’ in Possession (1999) and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994). These stories have really great imagery. In the old man’s hut there is a great grey dog, in Byatt’s version for example.

In Possession, two of the characters, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, become intertwined to say the least. Without revealing spoilers, it could be argued that Ash and LaMotte mirror the tailor and the maiden.

In Daryl Dixon: The Book of Carol, S2, who helped Carol? Ash. His name is interesting for several reasons. Maybe Ash, in the part of the tailor, is the outside variable needed for Carol to confront her demons (to set them free so she can move on) and reunite with Daryl, ‘her brother’.

More analysis to come.

Faithful Johannes

‘The Wise Servant’ is not about Snow White but it is bookmarked between two stories related to Snow White. This led me to look up another story in the Grimms’ Tales, ‘Faithful Johannes’ (pp. 22-28). This story expands on the theme in ‘The Wise Servant’. I liked the last sentence. It ends with, “After that they lived happily to the end of their lives,” (p. 28). A line also closely echoed in ‘The Glass Coffin’.

Sounds similar to something else, too.

“We can live here. We can live here for the rest of our lives.”

-Beth Greene

Thank you for taking the time to read my post. Let me know your thoughts on my spiral into madness.

@galadrieljones @twdmusicboxmystery @wdway @frangipanilove @drewmoll03 @bookqueenrules @emsee22

[chasingtempest]

I just had to put a moodboard together with Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia as Sansa Stark and Jon Snow. Their energy is electric.