“Just as there was a first moment when someone rubbed two pieces of wood together to produce a spark, there was a first moment when someone felt joy, and a first moment for sadness. For a time, new feelings were continually invented. Desire was born very early, as was regret. Perhaps it was a certain counter-clockwise movement of the hips that marked the birth of ecstasy.” Forgive me, dear reader, for being so long in the quotation, but these few lines extracted from the sublime love story by Nicole Krauss agree with what I am about to develop. Be a eulogy of love. Either a eulogy of the most unequal feeling, of the most unjust, of the most painful, of the most undemocratic of feelings.
I might as well have started with the legendary We do not play with love of our national Musset, by the final monologue of the scene of the fountain: “One is often deceived in love, often hurt and often unhappy; but one loves, and when one is on the edge of one’s grave, one turns to look back, and you say to yourself: I suffered often, I was wrong a few times, but I loved. It was I who lived, and not a factitious being created by my pride and my boredom. (I am quoting Musset, yes, despite his disgrace among professional neo-feminists who reproach him for taking up WORD FOR WORD a sentence from George Sand in a letter to her lover to point out the systematic-invisibilization-of-women-by-the- (Patriarchy. It does not matter to them that Sand allowed herself to be robbed with pride and, precisely out of love, without feeling the hint of plagiarism, but the pride of absolute love.)
Finally, I could have quoted Philip Roth or even John Irving, a bit of the Brontë sisters and Houellebecq with a ladle (yes, yes, Houellebecq is the least well-read author in France and Navarre). I could tell the story of humanity by telling the story of love, I could take from George Sand, in a letter to Musset again: “Love is a path in the mountains, dangerous and painful, but which leads to sublime heights and which always dominates the flat and monotonous world where men without energy vegetate. So.
Snow White is no longer in love
So, why would we want today, in the name of progress or of an emancipation which is a regression, that women live in this “flat and monotonous world”?
If I take the time for such a long introduction, it’s because Snow White is no longer in love. It’s terrifying just to write it. Exit Prince Charming, exit the kiss of rebirth, exit Snow White. Rachel Zegler, the interpreter of the neo-Snow White (in a remake produced by Disney to be released in 2024) specifies in an interview with variety : “It’s not 1937 anymore. She will not be saved by a prince, and she will not dream of true love. She will dream of becoming the leader that she knows she can be and that her late father said she could become if she was fearless, righteous, courageous and true.” In 1937, Snow White is the first feature-length cartoon in history. Walt Disney worked on it day and night, he made his teams sweat, lived in the anguish of a single question: what if the spectators did not let themselves be moved by a cartoon? The emotion is there, which arises from the sadness of the seven dwarfs after the death of Snow White, from the budding and thwarted love between the prince and Snow White, from the non-silly innocence of the heroine, from her natural , and that she stubbornly opposes her absolute belief in the Good.
Where can emotion lie in the banal power struggle between a queen and a princess? Why is it better to be a “leader” than a lover? In what way would the two be incompatible? Since when is love a danger for women? Since neo-feminism decided that relationships of domination were unfavorable to women in love. And they sought this absurdity in their regrets and their inability to be moved. They made the choice to rot love in the name of an illusory struggle against the spontaneity of life. Snow White was never saved by the prince, but by her marvelous ability to see happiness where it is: in the present. She does not wait for the prince: she lives her life in the joyful gratitude of having found a refuge. Neofeminism is a dry heart that rots in the shadow of resentment.
* Abnousse Shalmani is a writer and journalist committed against the obsession with identity