Superior lessons in self-love from story's most evil queen

The myth of jubilant envy: How to surrender your red-hot iron slippers

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Have you ever struggled with a particularly jealous person in your life? Have you battled with the inner turmoil that is envy for yourself?

When I was in my early 20s, I worked in a bar, and for a while, there was one other bartender who we all had a hard time liking due to her being really quite mean. One winter, I spent a few long, boring shifts entertaining myself by making little bluetack animals to sit among the dusty bottles behind the bar. It wasn't art by any stretch of the imagination, but I had put time into it, and it made people smile so when I came into work one morning to find my carefully crafted animals all smashed together into one big angry ball, I was quite hurt. Why would someone just destroy something like that for no apparent reason?

When my friends and I discussed this over our shift, everyone just shrugged and said, "Maybe she's jealous?"

Now, I have no idea if that was really it. I didn't have much to be jealous of at the time, but anything's possible. Either way, this story often springs to mind when I consider jealousy. I think we've all had experiences, one way or another, with the green-eyed monster. In this article, we're going to dive into why this nasty critter can be such a b-word, and what we can do about it.

Before we jump in, I should point out that envy and jealousy are two technically different emotions. In short, jealousy is that resentful, suspicious feeling we get when we think that someone is going to take something of ours away, like a partner or job.

Envy is the covetous feeling we get when we witness somebody having something that we want but don't have – bitterness about someone's good looks, cool possessions, qualifications, great relationship or any other thing that we feel we lack (regardless of whether that's objectively true or not).

I have talked about this difference in the past, but here, I think it's fair to lump both envy and jealousy into the same category of "sin". So, for the time being, when I say "envy", I mean jealousy, too.

"Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy" – Hereclitus

Now, unlike some of the other sins on the list of seven, envy is one that seems, at least at first, a bit more black-and-white. What I mean is that while, for example, pride and lust can feel pretty positive a lot of the time, envy very rarely does. Be that as it may, just like all others, it does have a bright side.

To explore this, let's start by looking at how envy gets described in the archetypal records of human history.

Snow White and the Evil Queen's envy

One of the most famous stories to represent envy as sinful is Snow White, the envy belonging, of course, to Snow White's stepmother, the Evil Queen Grimhilde. The tale, popularised (but not written) by the Brothers Grimm, goes something like this:

The princess Snow White lives in a castle with her evil stepmother who owns an enchanted mirror that tells her who is the most beautiful woman in the kingdom.

“Mirror mirror on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all?”

The queen spends many years asking this question and taking comfort in the fact that she only ever hears only her own name in response. But then, the day her step-daughter turns seven (frighteningly young, by the way), the mirror answers differently:

"Snow White," it says, "is the fairest of them all."

Upon hearing this, the queen flies into a fit of jealous rage and charges a huntsman to capture Snow White, take her into the woods and kill her, demanding that he return with her heart as proof.

The huntsman accepts this task and leads the girl into the forest but, as he raises his knife, little Snow White begs for her life and promises to run far away if spared, never to return to the kingdom. The Huntsman – reluctantly, because he's afraid of the queen – takes pity on the girl and frees her, killing a wild animal instead so he has a heart to present back at the castle.

So, now, Snow White wanders through the forest, lost and alone, and eventually comes across a little house inhabited by seven dwarfs, which she makes her home. But of course she isn't safe because when the queen next consults the magic mirror, it reflects the truth: Snow White is alive, and still the fairest of them all.

Deeply vexed, Grimhilde takes matters into her own hands. She disguises herself as an old woman, makes her way into the forest to find Snow White, and gives her a shiny red apple, which has been laced with poison. Trusting the old crone, Snow White takes a bite and instantly falls down as if dead. Satisfied, the queen withdraws.

Later, returning home from work (hi ho, hi ho), the dwarfs find their lovely friend, and, believing her dead, place her in a glass coffin.

Some time after this, a prince riding through the forest sees the beautiful Snow White in her coffin and asks to take her back to her father’s castle. During the journey, though, one of the men carrying the coffin trips, causing the piece of poisoned apple to dislodge from Snow White’s throat. She wakes up, fully revived, and the prince asks for her hand in marriage.

They then travel to the prince's kingdom where they have the most glorious surprise wedding. Everyone in the land is invited except for the evil queen. Furious to be left out, Grimhilde goes to the wedding anyway, and is overcome by rage when she sees that Snow White – still alive – is the bride.

But she doesn't get to hatch yet another devious plan, because this story ends with the prince ordering her to wear red-hot iron slippers and to dance until she dies, leaving Snow White and her love to live happily ever after.

The psychology of envy (red slippers)

So, what can we learn from this story about envy/jealousy? As with all of these explorations, the first thing we need to do in order to unravel all of this is put on our grown-up glasses and view the tale through the lens of compassionate curiosity as opposed to the binary black-and-white perspective of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong.

And why, I hear you ask, should we make the effort to empathise with an evil queen? Because, as a deeply archetypal character, she represents a fundamental aspect of the self – your self, my self, everyone's self. We don't get to opt out of envy. And as uncomfortable as it may be, this isn't actually a bad thing:

Envy first evolved as an emotion that's essential for the social and reproductive success of our species. We sit in a hierarchy; like it or not (and I do not like it), that's what it means to be human. What envy does, which is important for survival, is draw attention to the resources of other people – both those who might threaten our position by getting things that would advance them beyond us, and those we aspire to be like, who can therefore show us how to improve.

This means that envy is actually crucial for goal achievement. The downside, though, is that it can simultaneously cause us to feel perennially dissatisfied with what we do actually have.

Mirror, mirror on the wall

Social media, of course, magnifies this. In some ways, in today's culture, envy seems to have been taken to the extreme. Social psychologist Sherry Turkle puts it like this:

“We look at the lives we have constructed online, in which we only show the best of ourselves (...) and we don’t measure up. We look at the self as though it were an other and feel envious of it.”

“This creates an alienating sense of ‘self-envy’ inside us”, she says. “We feel inauthentic, curiously envious of our own avatars.”

This is what we see with the evil queen. She's not looking at TikTok or Instagram, obviously, but she is staring at what she wants to be a perfect, unsurpassable externalised self. This is her Persona: the mask she shows the world. And that illusion of perfection is so precariously fragile. Just like Narcissus, she has built her self-image up to such an impossible level that there's no way her true self can ever live up to it. Unable to accept the reality of who she is, though, she projects her fear and self-loathing out onto Snow White – a safely other target. Her externalised hatred then provides her with something to pursue (Snow White's demise) in order to try and quell her own feeling of inadequacy.

Sound familiar? Be honest. I bet you have at least once semi-wished for someone who was doing better than you to slip up. I would hope that most of us dismiss that thought straight after having it. But for a moment, it's there.

The pain of comparison

That deflating, diminishing feeling of seeing someone doing or being better than we are – especially at something we've linked to our self-worth – is a fundamentally human thing. And it hurts. The Evil Queen in Snow White has fused her winning beauty with a feeling of worth that she dreads being taken away. So, she checks in with her mirror in the same way that people might these days check on their social media accounts every morning to see how many likes they've accrued overnight.

That angst, alone, is not bad. It's not evil. The checking isn't really bad, either (although, it's probably not advised). The thing that makes this queen evil is the destructive, malicious way in which she responds to her envy. And this reaction speaks volumes about the vulnerabilities from which her "evilness" springs.

Is your envy healthy or unhealthy?

Speaking on BBC Sounds Seven Deadly Psychologies, Professor Windy Drydon makes an important distinction between healthy and unhealthy envy:

Unhealthy envy grows from irrational beliefs about ourselves in comparison to others. For example "I must have what he has in order to feel worthwhile" or "If someone else has what I want, it proves that I'm inadequate."

According to Dryden, unhealthy envy occurs when a strong desire to possess what another person has is combined with feelings of inferiority, resentment, and the belief that we are less worthy, or incapable of achieving similar success.

“Envy is wanting to destroy what someone else has. Not just wanting it for yourself, but wanting other people not to have it. It’s a deep-rooted issue, where you are very, very resentful of another person’s wellbeing – whether that be their looks, their position or the car they have. It is silent, destructive, underhand – it is pure malice, pure hatred.”

– For Patricia Polledri, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author of Envy in Everyday Life

All that, basically, is the perfect storm. It causes us to interpret the success of others as a personal failure. This, in turn, inspires the kind of defensiveness and defeatedness that can prevent us from focusing on personal growth, largely because we don't believe it possible. So, instead, just like poor old Grimhilde, we project our own discontent out and onto others, secretly hoping for their downfall, because it's the only way we can imagine being able to even the score.

Interestingly, unhealthy envy is experienced most often when we find ourselves pursuing things we don't really, actually, authentically want. The feeling is based more on making things even than heart-felt desire. Importantly, this means that unhealthy envy never gets satisfied, because even if we acquire the thing we're coveting now, there'll always be someone somewhere who seems to be doing better than us.

To make matters worse, because we're ashamed of envy (because it's a "sin"), we avoid it, repress it, fail to recognise it for what it is, and instead just foster a low-lying dislike for other people that we don't really understand, and that never goes away.

On and on and on it goes: a neverending nightmare that fuels, rather than heals, our insecurity, and can raze our relationships to the ground while we're at it.

In other words, to find ourselves in the grip of unhealthy envy is to put on a pair of red-hot iron slippers and dance until we die.

Cultivating healthy envy

Healthy envy, unsurprisingly, is a much better alternative. As the adaptive version of that same covetous feeling, healthy envy allows us to learn from others about the things we truly want – things that can genuinely improve our lives and also, often, the lives of those around us. That's a good thing. Healthy envy is motivating.

In order to get this positive version of envy, we need to address and develop two things:

First, we need to build our self-awareness.

And, second, we need to cultivate a very particular attitude towards other people.

Here's what it comes down to in four steps.

1. We need to be aware that what we're experiencing is envy. We need to own the fact that we are uncomfortable because someone has something that we don't.

2. We also need to be aware of the fact that it is both inevitable and okay for others to have things that we don't have – that this doesn't make them bad people (god, that sounds obvious to say out loud but that is what our minds try to convince us of when we're envious).

3. We need to remember that we can almost certainly survive without this thing that we currently want, no matter how much we want it.

4. Most importantly, we need to get hold – and never let go – of the knowledge that not having this thing we want does not, cannot make us less worthy.

Envy as unintegrated insecurity

Queen Grimhilde's envy is rooted in an unconscious fear of worthlessness. Her beauty is the only aspect of herself that she values, and when Snow White surpasses her, she feels as though her worth as a person is lost. She sees in Snow White the youth and beauty she once had, which stimulates feelings of grief and inadequacy. But instead of acknowledging these feelings, she projects them onto Snow White, and turns her into an enemy who must be destroyed.

Remember, the Jungian take on archetypal story is this: every character, every element of a myth or fairy tale represents an aspect of the psyche, which means that the Evil Queen is a part of Snow White (because we all have this potential), and it also means that Snow White is a part of the Evil Queen.

Don't banish your inner Snow White

Specifically, the beautiful but naïve and vulnerable Snow White represents the purity, kindness and innocence that Grimhilde has repressed and rejected. Lost and forgotten, the evil queen strives to maintain an image of perfection because she longs for affirmation. But if she'd only looked deeper… if she'd only put down that cursed mirror and looked inside – into the shadow of her true self – she would have found that her inner beauty had been there all along.

Unable to see the part of her that was already enough, Grimhilde sent her inner Snow White into the woods to be destroyed. In doing so, she banished the very thing she wished to find.

And we do the same when we give ourselves over to envy. The things we covet point to our most limiting stories. Those who don't believe they deserve success envy the success of others. Those who believe themselves unlovable envy the relationships of others. Those who believe that they're stupid or ugly or weak envy the wit or beauty or strength of others.

But here's the thing. No one doesn't deserve success. No one is fundamentally unlovable. No one is stupid or ugly or weak in every way. These stories are works of fiction, not reality. If we dare to rewrite them, then we'll get to take off our red-hot iron slippers and dance to a whole different tune.

References:

Reference: Dr. Anna Matron, speaking on Seven Deadly Psychologies, Becky Ripley and Sophie Ward, BBC Sounds

Reference: Prof. Windy Drydon, speaking on Seven Deadly Psychologies, Becky Ripley and Sophie Ward, BBC Sounds; and The age of envy: how to be happy when everyone else's life looks perfect, The Guardian

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Thank you for reading!

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.

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