In ‘The Snow Child’, the Countess’s jealousy motivates her ill-treatment of the girl. The narrator states that ‘the Countess hated her’ since ‘she was the child of [the Count’s] desire’. The child who is created according to the Count’s ‘desire’ is a means through which the Countess manifests her evil. This is further proven by the verb ‘hated’, as it builds the notion of jealousy, which acts like an incentive for the Countess to destroy the girl. Indeed, she does not attempt to free the girl from a state of subjugation, as she further deprecates the child’s status with the intention to get ‘rid of her’. This idea is made clear when the Countess ‘threw her diamond [in] the ice’ and orders the girl to ‘dive in and fetch it for me’, as a result
