Slave in the magic mirror, come from the farthest space, through wind and darkness I summon thee. Speak!
-Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
The story behind the above lines of the epigraph in Speak has traced furtherer than that of Disney’s first-ever animated feature film in 1937. Published by Brothers Grimm in 1812 in Germany, “Snow White” is perhaps the most well-known fairytale worldwide. With elements such as the seven dwarfs, the poisoned apple, the Evil Queen with her spells and the magic mirror, the story appears most certainly fantastical. However, according to Allan Hall, some of the fairytale’s true origins were exposed when researcher Karlheinz Bartels discovered the heroine was modeled after Maria Sophia Margaretha Catherina von Erthal whose stepmother Claudia Elisabeth Maria von Venningen, Countess of Reichenstein, possessed a renowned “talking” mirror, famous for always speaking the truth. Considered as an “acoustic toy”, by reverberating the spectator’s voice the mirror constructed the illusion of communicating with the speaker (Egnal; Gillian). The historical proof for this innovative machine lies in Maria Sophia von Erthal’s Lohr Castle, present-day Spessart Museum, where the “talking mirror” is exhibited.
Credit: Manfred Scherer / Spessart Museum.
In Louisa Hall’s Speak, Alan Turing’s fascination with the movie of Snow White (“I saw Snow White three times, if you can believe it, and I have been crackling lines ever since […] I found it enchanting”, 172) fuels his imagination of a talking machine that, just like the magic mirror, has both the ability and capacity for conversation:
“I am quite confident our machine will exist. I even permit myself to imagine conversing with it in private. I picture myself (imagine this!) standing before it as the evil queen in Snow White stood before her mirror: Through farthest space, through wild and darkness I summon thee. Speak! Let me see thy face!” (157).
The parallelism between the mirror in Snow White and Turing’s ideal machine uncovers the desire of people to hold conversations with man-made mechanisms whose purpose was to reflect one’s voice as they did one’s image. The words of Alan Turing in his second to last letter to Mrs. Morcom display this desire for a machine echoing and preserving voices for eternity:
“I have always hoped to live in a different point of history, summoned over time and space, like the voice in the evil queen’s mirror. Such was the promise of our machine. It was the idea of a permanent vessel, into which my voice could be placed. My voice, and Chris’s.” (250).
Following the steps of the Evil Queen whose “mirror, mirror, on the wall” summons the voice in the looking glass, the characters in Speak call upon MARY3 to express their fears, concerns, and insecurities and to “mirror” their desires. In turn, much like the original talking mirror, she is only reverberating or echoing their own voices when she is conversing with them.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
However, contrary to Snow White in the movie who becomes a prisoner within the mirror that dictates her fate, wishing “to escape from ‘her’ fiction -the words which speak her and which she must speak- to find an existence beyond the voices articulating her existence” (qtd. in Bacchilega 15), the robot in Speak chooses to transmit her own voice in the “Prologue” and chapters “Stars”, “Sunrise”, “Light”, “Darkness” and “River”. Unlike her habit of reflecting the figure standing before her, the absence of a reflected image in those chapters could be interpreted as transfusing a voice to her character which, as if from a disenchanted fairytale, has broken free from spells and magic mirrors and has found its way home to the being it belongs.
To think about:
-Are there any other instances in the story when MARY3 acts as a talking mirror for characters such as Gaby, Karl, Ruth, Stephen and Alan Turing?
-What is the significance of the “mirror’s voice” in Alan Turing’s conception of his machine?
-Can you think of any other historical talking machines the novel could be referring to?
References:
Bacchilega, Cristina. “Cracking the Mirror Three Re-Visions of ‘Snow White.’” Boundary 2, 15/16, 1988, pp. 1–25. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/303243.
Egnal, Cleo. “Was There a Real-Life Inspiration for Snow White?” Ranker, 22 Aug. 2019, https://www.ranker.com/list/real-life-inspiration-for-snow-white/cleo-egnal
Gillian, Joanna. “Exploring the True Origins of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Ancient Origins: Reconstructing the Story of Humanity’s Past, 12 Oct. 2015, https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/exploring-true-origins-snow-white-and-seven-dwarfs-004150/page/0/1
Hall, Allan. “How Snow White Lived Here Once Upon a Time: Town Claims Maria Sophia Margaretha Catherina Von Erthal Was Fairytale Model.” Calgary Herald, vol. A2, 2002, p. 2, https://search-proquest-com.aus.idm.oclc.org/docview/244913032?accountid=16946
