Red as Blood, White as Snow, Black as Crow: Chromatic Symbolism of Womanhood in Fairy Tales

Abstract

This article is intended as a modest follow-up on a classic study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. In Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, these two linguists showed that despite the proven ability of humans to discriminate thousands of color percepts, "a total universal inventory of exactly eleven basic term categories exists from which the eleven or fewer basic color terms of any given languages are always drawn" (2). This means that, as they put it, such "eleven basic color categories are pan-human perceptual universals" (108). 1 To my mind, this conclusion is eerily reminiscent of Vladimir Propp' s discovery that thirty-one functions are all that the human imagination needs to produce the myriad extant variations in fairy tales. So the question arises of whether fairy tales use colors, as they use functions, in a patterned way. To answer, one must pursue Propp' s sort of exploration of fairy-tale universals beyond formalism, in the realm of sensory experience-or, rather, of its encoding in color categories.