Let Down Your Hair

A presentation of Rapunzel by storyteller Omope Carter Daboiku

followed by discussion.

Rapunzel's Cottage (n.d.). Source: abouttowntours.com

A professional teller of tales, Omope Carter Daboiku has been affiliated with the Ohio Arts Council as an Artist-in-Education since 1990. She was among the first artists chosen for the Cincinnati Arts Association’s“Artists On Tour” program and is a regular teller for the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County and the Cincinnati Storytellers Guild. Her company, Homeside Cultural Programming, is included in the Cincinnati-based Association for the Advancement of Arts in Education catalog.

Rapunzel is a rich and layered story that has been told and retold for centuries. Don’t get Tangled in the many interpretations: come and participate. Join us as we try to understand why children and adults love this story.

And, yes. Jan and I are the discussants.

A king was hunting in a great forest and became separated from his men and lost. He comes across an old woman and asks her for directions. She consents, but only if he will marry her beautiful daughter. The king, afraid, consents. When she meets the girl she is not surprised to see him. She is beautiful, but “he could not look at her without secretly shuddering.” He weds the girl.

The Six Brothers Changed into Swans by their Stepmother Henry Justice Ford (1860-1940) 1894 Wood engraving Illustration for "The Six Swans." Scan and text by George P. Landow

The king had seven children by his previous wife: six boys and one girl. He loved them and he hid them from the stepmother in a secluded castle. The queen noticed his absences and bribed the servants to find out what was going on and how to find the children. She makes shirts for the children and sews a charm into each, then goes to their hiding place. The boys come out and as she throws a shirt over each of them they turn into swans and fly away. The girl had not come out with the boys and had seen what happened. When her father came she told him what had happened, but he did not believe that his wife had done the deed. The girl left and went to look for her brothers.

After a long day’s journey she found a small hut with six little beds and crawled under one of the beds to spend the night. The swans flew in through a window, blew the feathers off of one another and shed their swan skins to reveal her brothers. They could become human only a quarter of an hour each day. They warn her that she cannot stay in the hut, which is a robber’s den, and tell her that they cannot be redeemed, the conditions are too difficult. The sister must make six little shirts for them, sewn together from asters (or star flowers or gold or nettles or just plain thread) in six years, and cannot speak or laugh during that time. They turn back into swans and fly away. The girl resolves to free her brothers from the curse “even if it should cost her life.”

After a long time making shirts in a tree in the woods the girl is found by the king of the land who is out hunting. The huntsmen with the king try to get her. The girl thrown down her golden necklace to the men to satisfy them, then her belt, etc. down to her shift, but they climbed up and brought her down to the king. She remained silent. He fell in love with her and brought her back with him to the castle, where they were married a few days later.

The king’s mother opposed the marriage and when the girl, now queen, had a child a year later, the old woman stole the child while the queen was asleep and smeared the queen’s mouth with blood. She accused the queen of being a cannibal. The king did not believe the accusation and refused to allow the queen to be punished. A year later the same sequence of events happened, and again the queen remained silent, and again the king defended his wife.

A year later, after the third time, he could not. The queen was sentenced to be burned to death at the stake, six years to the day after she had set out to free her brothers. She had finished all but one arm of the sixth shirt.

As the queen was led to the stake the six swans came flying down from above. She threw the shirts over them and the swans transformed back into her brothers, save one arm on the youngest, which remained a swan’s wing.

The girl was able to tell of the treachery of the king’s mother who had stolen away the children and hidden them, and the mother was burned at the stake. The king, the queen and her brothers lived in happiness and peace.

This story has a great deal in common with others we’ve looked at . . . the mother-figures are hostile and even murderous and the fathers are unable to protect their children, though in this story the father seems to love and try to protect his six sons and daughter. The king tries to protect his wife, though we do not see him trying to protect the three stolen, possibly murdered, infants.

This is a story of filial love, devotion and sacrifice. The girl gives up all communication. In the face of humiliation and possible rape she does not speak or cry out. Faced with the king of the land asking her questions she does not answer. She does not speak during a wedding, nor does the talk with her new husband. She does not speak to her infants, and does not speak out to deny that she murdered and ate them. She does not speak to protest as she is being led to the stake to be burned alive. In this story, in contrast to so many other fairy tales, the girl is active. She makes the decisions.

Yes, there are the usual creepy fairy tale elements of a king who promises to marry someone he’s never met because he got lost, and another king who falls in love with a girl “as silent as a fish” because she’s pretty and has nice manners. Children disappear with no evidence of emotional turmoil on the part of the mother and the father. This is a popular fairy tale, though, and it must have some universal truth within it about the human condition or it would not have survived to be told and retold in so many forms.

Of the many versions of this story, some things are constant: the boys are all turned into birds or animals and the girl must remain silent while making them clothing for a long time, usually a year for each one, at peril of her life. She always succeeds, but there is usually some remnant of the bird or animal. The number of boys/birds does not seem important; as characters, they remain ciphers.

Let’s look at this irreducible core for a moment.

The Six Swans by Eleanor Abbott, from storynory.com

The active person in the story is the girl, and she goes from being a youngest sister, a little girl (for all the shirts the witch/step-mother made are little), to being a married woman, a queen, and bears three children of her own. But it’s hard to call this a coming of age story, since her marriage and her children come in the midst of her journey. The story is about her silence, her task and her pain. Hans Christian Andersen has her knitting nettles, and her pain is only assuaged by the tears of her youngest brother. Contrast this with Sleeping Beauty and Snow White: the death, the silence, the sleep that they experience is symbolic of the transition from child to adult. The protagonist here becomes an adult during her silence.

What about the boys? They really aren’t transformed in any sense other than physically. The first thing we hear from them is that they have given up hope, for the task their sister faces is too great. In most versions of the story we don’t see them again until the years have run their course. The most interesting things to consider about them: they ran headlong into the trap, they turned into swans, and they are almost completely turned back to humans.

I think that in trying to understand the deep and lasting appeal of this story, trying to find its heart, we should consider looking at the main characters as aspects of one person, and as symbolic pieces of one person’s struggle. Then we have the boys who rush headlong to greet the witch and are turned into swans as being representative of an animal nature, an id, an impulsive part of our nature. The girl’s struggle then is to bind that animal nature (with a shirt, something civilized and human). By abnegating her own urges to speak and to laugh, and by her industry in making the shirts she is able to (almost completely) bring that animal part of herself under control.

Why is the last shirt incomplete, the youngest brother’s arm still a swan’s wing? This is a masterful story-telling move, since it lends tension at the climax of the story: will the fact that the shirts are not all whole and complete mean that the enchantment won’t be ended, and that the girl will have failed?. But this could not be just a story-telling trope without some underlying reason that it rings true, and it does appear in almost all versions of the tale.

Have you ever met someone who seems just too dry and controlled, someone with no fire in the belly, someone whose mind has hospital corners? We are, after all, animals. If we are able to suppress our id, to bind our animal natures so completely that we cannot have those impulses then we cannot use those impulses to live a full and human life. We need to leave a wing free so that we remember to fly.

Once upon a time there were a fisherman and his wife who lived in a filthy shack by the sea. The fisherman caught a flounder who spoke to him, claiming to be an enchanted prince and asking to be set free. The fisherman did so, saying, “. . . there’s no need to say more. I can certainly let a fish swim away who knows how to talk.” He put the fish back into the clear water and it swam to the bottom trailing blood behind it.

from My Cabin: Folktales by Daryl Lorette

The fisherman went home and told his wife who told him he must go back and ask the fish for a little cottage. The man did not want to go, but did so because he did not want to oppose his wife.

When he arrived, the water was no longer clear but green and yellow. He called (invoked) the flounder. Various versions of the tale translate the invocation differently, and in some he uses a name, “Ilsabill,” for his wife. In all, he says that his wife wants what he does not.

The flounder comes and the man explains that his wife says he should have asked for something, and that his wife doesn’t want to live in a shack any more, she wants a cottage.

“Go home,” said the flounder. “She already has it.”

The man went home and his wife was waiting for him in front of the cottage, which was furnished nicely and had a yard and a garden and chickens and ducks. The wife seems happy and the man says “This is quite enough. We can live here quite well.” Ominously, his wife answers, “We will think about that.”

All went well for a week or two, then the woman was not happy with the cottage. “The flounder could have given us a larger house. I would like to live in a large stone palace,” and she demanded that the man return and ask for a palace. The man argued that the cottage is enough, but his wife insisted and he went back (though he said to himself, “this is not right,”). This time the water was purple and dark blue and gray and dense. He invoked the flounder with the same words as before. The flounder asked what the wife wanted, and said, “Go home. She’s already standing before the door.” Again, the wish was granted in surfeit. The wife seemed happy, and the fisherman said, “This is quite enough. We can live in this beautiful palace and be satisfied.” The wife’s reply again did not bode well: “We’ll think about it. Let’s sleep on it.”

The next morning she asked the fisherman to have the flounder make them king. When the fisherman protested that he didn’t want that, she said that she must be made king, then.

This time, the sea was dark gray and the water heaved up from below and had a foul smell. The flounder, again, only asked what she wanted and it was done. The fisherman went home, and his wife was not waiting for him, she was inside an even grander palace, and was now king. This time, however, it lasted less than a day. She demanded that she be made emperor . . . and commanded him as his king.

The water this time is black and dense and boiling, and a strong wing blew over the fisherman that curdled the water. The wife became emperor, then demanded, the same day, to become pope. Each wish is granted in an even more lavish way than it is asked. Each time the fisherman argues with her, but ends up asking her boon. Each time the fisherman returns to ask the wish the ocean, sky and land are even more disturbed.

“Wife, be satisfied now that you are pope. There is nothing else you can become.”

“I have to think about that,” said the woman.

She spent the night thinking about what she could become, and the next morning tells her husband that she cannot stand it when she sees the sun and moon rising because she was not the one to cause them to rise. She wanted to be like God. The fisherman begged her not to make him ask this, but “anger fell over her. Her hair flew wildly about her head. Tearing open her bodice she kicked him . . .”

This time there was a terrible storm that knocked over trees and houses. Mountains were shaking. The sky was black and there were great black waves as high as church towers and mountains. The fisherman again invokes the flounder, and tells the fish that his wife wants to be like God.

“Go home. She is sitting in her filthy shack again.”

And they are sitting there even today.

It strikes me that this is more a fable with a moral than it is a fairy tale. There is no real movement in the story: it ends where it begins . . . perhaps with a sadder and wiser wife. There is more than one moral here, though, so it’s not quite as clean as most fables.

Don’t be greedy. Greed undoes the wife. As a human being, there are limits.

If you know that something’s wrong, you must stand firm against it. The husband could have stopped this at each stage.

Still, there are some fabulous elements (in both senses of the word “fabulous”) that work on a number of levels and should be examined.

First, the flounder. A flounder is a common fish, it’s flat, it’s a bottom feeder and a food fish. As I write this I have a number of associations to it. First, moving through the water it seems a reflection of the subconscious mind, of that within us that can grant our own wishes. It certainly grants, without comment, each wish that the fisherman’s wife presents, grants them generously and instantly like a toddler’s ideal parent.

And that brings us to the fisherman’s wife for a moment . . . I’ll go back to the fish afterward. She seems a toddler. Each desire must be granted instantly, and granting each leads to a more extravagant wish. When it seems her wishes are to be thwarted she is first insistent, then angry, then throws a temper tantrum. And at each step the wishes are less for material things than for power. Her desire for power is evident not only in her demand to be king, then emperor, then pope, then as God, but also in her relationship with her husband. She waits outside the cottage and the palace, but he must go inside to see her when she’s king. He becomes supplicant.

There’s more to explore in the fisherman’s wife and with the fisherman, but I want to go back to the flounder. I feel that this form for the wish-granter can’t be accidental, and it brings to mind the fish as symbol for early Christians (possibly because of the resemblance of the Greek words for fish and Jesus). And in the story the fish grants each wish as a God might answer a prayer . . . until the wife asks to be like God. The fish anticipates each request, and the earth and the water are a reflection of the fish’s (emotional?) response to it. As the wish is expressed, it has already been granted. And Jan points out that perhaps the flounder did even grant the last wish, for in Christianity Jesus was born in a hovel.

Perhaps this is less a fairy tale or a fable than it is a parable.

I have to leave this here for now. I may add another piece of artwork to this post if the one I want becomes available.

We’ve started our Fairy Tales course, and I’ll do my best to blog on the stories we read, though some have already been worked on here. We did Snow White and we’ll do The Juniper Tree, which I looked at last year, but today we’re going after a class-requested story, The Fisherman and His Wife. I’ll post my thoughts on that later today or tomorrow.

I’m wading through a stack of books about fairy tales, madly trying to get ready to teach Fairy Tale Magic and Why Kids Love It at the Chautauqua Summer Institute July 25-29. Jan will be co-teaching. Here’s a link to the Special Studies Catalog.

My book list currently is:

Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar

Off With Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood by Maria Tatar

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim

The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales ed. by Jack Zipes

The Great Fairy Tale Tradition ed. by Jack Zipes

The Interpretation of Fairy Tales by Marie-Louise Von Franz (There has to be one Jungian represented, after all).

The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales by Sheldon Cashdan

Psychoanalytic Responses to Children’s Literature by Lucy Rollin and Mark West

from Amazon

Off the top of my head, there seem to be at least five ways to look at fairy tales critically. First, you can look at them as literary documents. That applies to tales from an oral tradition like those written down by the Grimms and Basile, those which are authored like those of Hans Christian Andersen, or even those first committed to film, like Edward Scissorhands. Second, you can look at them as an historian or a cultural anthropologist might, looking for clues as to what the culture of the time was like, and what truly was important to individuals at the time and place when the tale was first told. Third, the historian or cultural anthropologist could look for evidence of influences across cultures in the themes and details of stories and how they spread across time and distance.

from Amazon.com

Fourth, these are political documents. People who tell fairy tales to their children do not live in a bathtub, they live in a society with rules and rulers, with cultural norms and morays, and it should not be surprising that there are political overtones (or undertones) to any fairy tale. Nor should it be surprising that there are communist or feminist or other readings of almost any tale: these are valid approaches.

Fifth and finally, you can look at at fairy tales for their psychological and developmental content. That’s certainly what interests me most. But there is no one correct way to interpret these stories even from the psychological viewpoint. Like dreams, they can be approached by Jungians and Freudians, as well as from the point of view of an ego analyst or from object relations, and there is insight there to be found.

I’m really in it for the joy of understanding the story, and the joy of telling it. We’ll probably look a little at all of those levels in the course, but mostly we’ll tell the fairy tale, discuss what it’s like to tell the story to our children, and try to find out a bit about what the children respond to about the story.

Snow White by Jisuk Cho

The Queen/mother, in contrast, is all action. She seeks out competition and destroys it, over and over again. Even in the face of certain doom she chooses to go to her daughter’s wedding. Even her death is active. Yes, she’s tortured, but she dances to death in those red-hot boots.  My picture of her is that the boots are applied and she’s expected to scream and faint, but defiantly dances . . . OK, it’s not in the story that way, but I think it’s a better story that way.

There’s almost a yin and yang quality to the pair of them: the queen active, passionate, jealous and Snow White passive and . . . what? There isn’t a lot . . . She seems to reflect the latency industriousness of the dwarfs when they’re around, and when they’re not you can almost see her by the reflected light of her mother’s sexuality, trying on brightly colored silk laces for her bodice, looking at new combs for her hair. Even the love she feels for the prince almost seems a reflection of his for her. “I saw you laying there under glass and I fell in love with you (anyway, with what you look like and what I imagine you to be). I love you. Be my wife.” And you see her saying, “Um . . . OK.”

There’s a place-holding quality to the fairy tale hero: she’s never a full or rounded person as the story is told. The narrative of the story tells us that she is beautiful, and her actions say that she is not particularly courageous as she cries and begs the huntsman, not particularly honest as she’s taking the dwarfs’ dinner, not particularly smart letting the queen in three times . . . but sweet enough that the huntsman and the dwarfs are not put off by her. It all comes down to beauty—pleasant passivity as well, but mainly beauty.

No acquisitions editor today would ever buy this story. Readers, each of them would cheerfully and earnestly tell you, would never identify with such a passive main character; her actions and desires must drive the story. Snow White should trick the huntsman into freeing her and lead the dwarfs in a guerrilla war against the palace. As for falling in love with a creep who saw you sleeping and tried to buy you from some dwarfs . . .

And yet, since the fairy tale was written down 199 years ago by the Grimms it’s spawned more than a dozen movies as well as plays, an opera, and countless literary adaptations. Why does it survive?

Partly, perhaps, is that this is a told story.  You learn this story from someone you love so it becomes the shared experience and the shared affect. In the telling of the story by your mother, you learn that she, too, was a little girl just like you and that she grew up successfully.

Jan also points out that little girls love Snow White, the character: they take her as an ideal because everyone loves her. They imagine themselves as someone who is loved by all because their own wonderful qualities are visible to all. And most people do love young children on sight as children. Snow White is taken as a sexual competitor by her mother, and loved at first sight as an adult by the king’s son. She looks at the laces, the combs, the apple offered by her disguised mother and seems to want that same unconditional adult sexualized love as unconditionally as its childhood equivalent. This isn’t that unreasonable on the face of it. A child, girl or boy, does become a different person going through puberty, but this is hard for the person going through puberty to realize, at least to realize day in and day out, and often people around them react to them as their adult persona while internally they still feel like a child.

One of the lessons of Snow White is that we need time to make transitions, that it takes dying and being reborn to become an adult. (Life might be easier if we all had to sleep through middle school). Maybe Snow White, taking the apple and the other wares of the witch, was actively seeking a way to become an adult, to go through that transition, to die (temporarily).

I guess the answer to why Snow White can be such a wimp and get away with it is that the important thing about Snow White is not what she does but how the other characters in the story react to her, and the reason that is so is that the story is experienced by the daughter in her mother’s lap as events that happen to her and are shared by her mother. She’s not active, nor is Snow White.

Ideas, anyone?

Snow White's Stepmother copyright 2010-2011 by PaintingSaint

Snow White is awake. She has dined with the King’s son. He’s told her the story of her death, professed his love and asked for her hand in marriage. They arrange a wedding, and Snow White’s mother, the Queen, is asked.

The Queen checks with the magic mirror

You, my queen, are fair; it is true.
But the young queen is a thousand times fairer than you.

Snow White is now “the young queen.” The wicked mother was wretched and frightened, and did not want to attend the wedding, but could not stay away. When she arrived she was paralyzed by fear and stood still while iron boots were heated in the fire, and she was forced to put her feet in the red-hot boots and dance until she died.

When I talked about Cinderella I guess I didn’t get into the whole issue of shoes, but it is a big deal in fairy tales. Think about the glass slippers in Cinderella and the role they play–the wicked step-sisters cut off parts of their feet to fit into the delicate slippers. In The Red Shoes and in Snow White, the wicked mother-figure is danced to death in red-hot Iron shoes, and we’ve only scratched the surface. I won’t go too much deeper, except to point out that the essential quality of a shoe is that you put something into it. It is a vessel, a container for a body part . . . in other words, it is symbolic for woman’s sexuality.

In the context of Cinderella and of Snow White, the shoe is poetic justice: it is the destructive, jealous sexuality of the wicked queen-mother in Snow White and of the wicked step-sisters and step-mother in Cinderella which visits such harm on our young protagonists, and it is fitting that the pain inflicted on those wicked, jealous women comes from an object symbolic of the source of their jealousy. As Bettelheim says in talking about this fairy tale, “Untrammeled sexual jealousy, which tries to ruin others, destroys itself–as symbolized not only by the fiery red shoes but by death from dancing in them. Symbolically, the story tells that uncontrolled passion must be restrained or it will become one’s undoing. Only the death of the jealous queen . . . can make for a happy world.”

from domesticgoddess at womenwriters.net

OK, so let’s revisit the mother and daughter on the bed, a little drowsy, mother reading or telling her daughter the tale. This is where Bettelheim falls short. For him, the message is in the words of the fairy tale. There is a lot of meaning in those words for both mother and daughter, certainly. The daughter hearing only the words will hear a story that begins with a dire warning: don’t compete with your mother for daddy’s love or she’ll eat your lungs and liver cooked with salt. But the story goes on to show that after adversity and after a transition that can be like death, you will eventually find your own adult relationship, one that mother can’t be a part of, and that the wicked queen will be punished in a dreadfully appropriate fashion.

Now imagine yourself as the mother reading this story to your child–who do you identify with in the story? Do you actually identify with the wicked Queen??? NO. Your feelings are all with Snow White. You are the one who runs through the forest after the huntsman spares your life. You’re frustrated that Snow White lets the witch in, that she lets the witch comb her hair and lace her bodice, not elated.

And that’s the point. There really are two daughters there on the bed, sharing the adventure. Both are Snow White. The story really is reassuring for both mother and daughter; all mothers are also daughters. And as mother and daughter sit together as girls listening to this story, mother is also saying she gives permission to her daughter to grow up. The words are there and the meanings that we have seen are really there, but so is the sharing. The closeness and collaboration between story-teller and audience, mother’s arms and the affect in her face and her voice are at least as important as the words themselves.

Edwin Harris-Portrait of a Mother and Daughter Reading a Book-1903

One of the most profound differences between Newtonian physics and modern physics–Quantum Mechanics and Relativity and such–is the recognition that the observer makes a difference. In General Relativity, the accelerated observer carries with him a metaphoric clock and measuring stick, and Ernst Schroedinger’s cat has the observer opening it’s case to thank (or to blame) for the collapse of its wave function into a single state.

The observer is the mother reading the fairy tale to the child. So let’s continue our digression and talk about how fairy tales come to exist.

Snow White in the coffin

A fairy tale (most of the time) starts as a made-up story that a mother or nurse-maid tells to her child; that is, a story that comes from the needs and perceptions, conscious and unconscious, of the the parent. The parent/story-teller reaches out with the story to the listening child. This reaching out is a gift, really. It’s an attempt to show something–often something unconscious on the part of the story-teller–to the listening child. And, of course, the stories that survive are the stories that can involve both generations of story tellers and generations of children.

With that in mind, let’s wake Snow White. We’ll dance the wicked mother to death in her hot iron boots and wrap up next time.

Snow White’s in the dwarfs’ cottage in her crystal casket, surrounded by candles, and she sleeps. Here we recall that she was seven when she left the castle and not much time has passed: she’s a prepubescent child, a latency-aged child in the dwarfs’ cottage, and it was her interest in the Queen’s wares that led to her death. What was the Queen selling? Puberty. . .  Corset-laces, combs and sexuality.

Snow White, or at any rate, Snow White’s interest in adult sexuality, is now dead (temporarily) and in a glass or crystal coffin. Other associations here: a caterpillar in a cocoon, eventually emerging as a butterfly, or the coffin as a womb and Snow White reborn from girl to adult woman. And the quality of the coffin is that Snow White is visible as she sleeps and grows . . .  and matures.

A king’s son travels through the forest and comes to the cottage. He sees the sleeping (beauty) Snow White and falls in love. The idea of falling in love with someone at first sight with no clue as to sense of humor, character or intellect is one that shouldn’t go unexamined, but I’m going to leave it be for now to get on with issues more specific to Snow White.

Sleeping Beauty by Edward Burne-Jones

The prince tries to bargain with the dwarfs for Snow White, but they turn him down flat. It isn’t until he professes his love for her and talks about his need and how sad he would be without her that the dwarfs decide to let her go. This, on the surface at least, is creepy and smacks a little of necrophilia . . . but remember that this is a magical death in which Snow White doesn’t breathe but doesn’t decay. She stays life-like with color in her cheeks and if the prince is now attracted to her she must also have grown, gone through puberty and matured. In fact, there is an Italian Snow White tale of Basile’s called The Young Slave which states this, and says that the seven caskets (in that story) grew with her.

If you look at the dwarfs, as we did earlier, as a representation of Snow White’s development . . . the school aged, prepubescent child who is industrious, reliable and decidedly asexual, the dwarfs’ dealings with the prince make a little more sense; to leave that protected state and give yourself over to someone as a mature adult, you wish for a relationship that involves love. It isn’t until the prince offers this that Snow White can leave the cottage.

Theodore Hoseman 1852--from Wikipedia

What about waking up? Once the casket with Snow White has left the dwarf’s cottage it is either a negligent or a hostile servant who dislodges the apple from her throat and allows her to wake. It isn’t the prince. In other versions of the Snow White story an enchanted ring is slipped from her finger by a would-be thief, a gown is damaged by a clumsy servant and when it’s taken off to be replaced Snow White awakens. It isn’t the girl’s would-be lover (as it is in many Sleeping Beauty tales). Why the distinction?

Bruno Bettelheim, whose discussion of Snow White in The Uses of Enchantment is highly recommended, in fact gives the prince the credit for carrying the coffin and dislodging the apple Though he doesn’t address why the prince-future husband isn’t the person who dislodges the apple, I think his comment points us in the right direction. Bettelheim says “Snow White’s spitting out of the suffocating apple–the bad object she had incorporated–marks her final freedom from primitive orality . . .” In other words, her mother had tried to sexualize her while she was still a latency-aged child (think of a 9 or 10 or so year-old trying to imitate the clothing and attitude of any of a multitude of  23 year old pop stars). Giving up that inappropriately sexualized childhood is certainly a step Snow White would have had to take to become an adult and embrace the prince . . . but could the prince really have helped her do that?

Snow White awakens, and what do they do? “They sat down together at the table and ate with joy.” Snow White, now a free, awake and adult woman sits and eats as an equal with her beloved. She incorporates the joy.

Next time, the wedding, the death of the Queen and some effort to integrate this into our picture of a mother retelling the story to her daughter.

What does your daughter hear?

There are so many themes that pop up here and there in this story that you’ve heard before in other stories that it’s like listening to an old jazz group just jamming. The spindle and the sleep and the prince from Sleeping Beauty and the Goldilocks search through absent peoples’ food and beds for one that’s “just right.” I’m not going to get involved in the symbology of the colors of white, red and black or the numerology of 3′s and 7′s, though there is a rich vein of discussion there, but I’m more interested in the developmental content, and why it’s loved so much.

Disney's Snow White, with apple. copyright studio and/or distributor

Let’s start at the surface. The surface story, like Rapunzel and others, is that of a child becoming a woman and marrying. In Rapunzel, the mother-figure couldn’t bear to lose her daughter and kept her prisoner, but Snow White faces a different obstacle.

The daughter listening to her mother hears of a mother who is inspired by the sight of her own blood on the snow to wish for a beautiful child . . . her own creation involved pain to her mother, and bleeding. But still all was well until she became more beautiful than her mother. She must have been loved, cared for, but we never see this. It isn’t part of the story. All the listener hears is that her beauty was threatening to the mother, that there is some sort of competition of beauty going on, and winning it is life-threatening. The Queen/mother here seems brittle and dangerous.

Where’s dad?

I think that’s part of the competition and part of the Queen’s rage. I’m with Bruno Bettleheim–I think we see dad’s gaze (in this part of the story, at least) through the magic mirror, and that the Queen/mother sees that her daughter is winning the competition for her father’s love. And I don’t think this is necessarily love in the mature sexual sense, though that is part of it. The daughter listening to the story might hear it in a more general way, that the competition for dad’s love is the danger.

The Queen summons the huntsman . . . and this is another place that we see father, but as an ineffectual and cowed figure who does protect the girl from her mother’s wrath but can only do so surreptitiously; he won’t confront her. He kills a small boar and the Queen eats what she thinks are the lungs and liver (the life’s breath and the seat of the soul) with salt (this, too, is essential for life, but it’s also an essential part of tears). This is primitive and purely an acting out of emotion, one which the listening daughter will recognize as one of her own fears: her angry mother could eat her up. And the eating, too, means taking an essential part of the daughter into the mother, and while that’s undeniably scary and hostile, it can also be an expression of love . . .  ”I love you so much I could just eat you up.”

She runs away through a scary woods to a new life, a cottage with seven neatly laid-out places at the little table . . . a place that cannot be scary because of the neatness and the scale. All is small, all is orderly. The fact that there is food here, and a bed that is “just right” is reassuring to our little listener, too.

Disney from www.wallpapers8.com

There’s a feeling that the multiple little guys have to represent little siblings to the listening child, but I’m not sure that that’s true. These are small, harmless creatures, true, but what do the dwarfs do in the story? They work, they lay out dinner, they warn Snow White about the Queen and they set rules . . . she can stay if she’s responsible and cleans, cooks and sews . . . she can’t let anyone into the cottage, it wouldn’t be safe. When the Queen comes by and kills her (the first two times) they revive her. These are the jobs of a nurturing parent, of the father (now less cowed, but still not effective enough in protecting her from her mother). I think the dwarfs “feel like” the girl’s father.

In another way, they might be a reflection of a 7 year-old’s inner life; think about the school child who’s industrious, independent (relatively), and in general trying to be a little adult. That’s the latency-aged child. Snow White has gone from the dependent pre-schooler to latency in her journey to becoming an adult.

Even though Snow White is far away (OK, one day’s run but this is a story-book day’s run), the Queen still feels threatened by her very existence.  She approaches the cottage in disguise to kill Snow White, and Snow White, knowing she is in danger, still can’t resist the wares she’s selling. What is the Queen selling? She’s selling colorful silk ties for Snow White’s bodice and combs for her hair . . . she’s selling adult femininity. Again, the message to the listening child seems to be there: don’t compete with mommy, dearest. And yet, and yet . . . mom is reading or telling the story.

Snow White and the dwarfs--unattributed art

What about the apple? I’m not certain how a child would hear the apple, but it is round and full, red and sensual. The Queen poisoned only half the apple and shares it with Snow White. According to the narrative the Queen/mother eats from the white half of the apple and Snow White eats from the red. Perhaps the mother, telling the story hears that the Queen has shared Eve’s apple, sexual knowledge, with her daughter and the daughter is overcome, and falls to the floor, dead.

Not dead, for she remains fresh and looks alive, if not breathing. Snow White is placed in a crystal or glass coffin, surrounded by candles. She sleeps, grows, matures, for when she ate the apple she was ostensibly seven years old, and when she wakes she is mature and ready for marriage and sexuality.

In part 3 we’ll talk about waking up, the prince, the wedding and the death of the Queen . . . and try to put together what the listening daughter takes home.

Marge Champion was the model for Disneys Snow White

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as with most fairy tales descending from an oral tradition, exists in a number of differing forms. I’m going to use the Brothers Grimm 1812 version as the earliest written form of the work that we recognize. The most often seen form today is Grimm’s 1819 version. SurLaLune Fairy Tales elegantly annotates the 1819 version of the work, and D. L. Ashliman presents his wonderful translation of the 1812 version alongside some of the other tales that involve a jealous mother figure trying to kill her more beautiful child (Aarne Thompson 709), including Basile’s, The Young Slave. Bruno Bettleheim’s take on Snow White in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, just humbles me. It’s well worth reading.

As always, I’ll begin with a synopsis and move on to the discussion. Do read a complete version of the fairy tale, either at one of the links above or from your own well-thumbed copy of Grimm’s (or Andrew Lang’s collection, though I forget what color fairy tale book Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs shows up in).

Once upon a time in mid winter, when the snowflakes were falling like feathers from heaven, a beautiful queen sat sewing at her window, which had a frame of black ebony wood. As she sewed, she looked up at the snow and pricked her finger with her needle. Three drops of blood fell into the snow. The red on the white looked so beautiful, that she thought, “If only I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as this frame. Soon afterward she had a little daughter that was as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony wood, and therefore they called her Little Snow-White. (Ashliman)

The queen was vain, though. She sat in front of her magic mirror and each morning asked to be reassured that she was the most beautiful woman in the land. All of us know the refrain, “Mirror, mirror on the wall . . .”

All went well until Snow-White turned seven years old (yes, 7!!), and the mirror answered that that Little Snow-White was the fairer of the two. The Queen’s heart turned. She became jealous and hated Snow White from that moment on. The Queen summoned her huntsman and told him to take Snow White out into the woods and kill her, and to bring back the little girl’s lungs and her liver, that she might have them cooked with salt and eat them.

In the woods, Snow White begins to cry when the huntsman pulls out his knife to stab her, and he takes pity on her “because of her great beauty.” Besides, the animals will get her . . . Snow White runs far into the scary woods while the woodsman kills a young boar, which the Queen has cooked (with salt) and eats as promised.

(I pull back here and imagine a mother holding her daughter, sitting on the side of the daughter’s bed and telling the story of Snow White . . .)

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Snow White runs until dark, when she comes to a small cottage, neat and clean with 7 neatly laid out place settings and 7 beds, largest to smallest. She eats a small amount from each of the plates and tries each of the beds before the smallest is “just right.” She falls asleep and the dwarfs return from their day’s labor in the mine. Like the bears in Goldilocks, they each note that someone has been eating from their plates and trying their beds before the smallest finds the girl. They are struck by her beauty, and allow her to stay if she will cook and clean diligently, and warn her not to let anyone into the cottage, because they understand that she’ll be in great danger from the Queen.

The next day the Queen indeed checked her mirror and found that Snow White lived, and was still the fairest of all. The Queen tried three times to kill Snow White, each time in a different disguise. Each time the Queen approached the cottage with a different temptation, and each time, despite the dwarfs’ warnings and her own experiences, Snow White admitted her.

Snow White in the woods, by Franz Juttner (from childillustration.blogspot.com)

First, the Queen sold Snow White lace with which to tie her bodice (implying that Snow White now had a bust, and that perhaps “the next day” was longer than most and that Snow White was no longer 7 years old). The Queen laced the bodice and pulled it so tightly that Snow White could not breathe and fell to the ground, dead. The dwarfs returned at the end of the day and cut the ties. Snow White returned to life. Second, the Queen sold Snow White poisoned comb, and when she combed Snow White’s hair the girl fell dead. Finally, the Queen poisoned an apple and offered it to the girl (this she didn’t sell). Snow White was finally distrustful. The Queen cut the apple in half and ate from the white, unpoisoned, side. Snow White ate from the red side and died. The dwarfs could not resuscitate her, and mourned her. But since she didn’t decay or change her appearance “and still had beautiful red cheeks,” they did not bury her, but placed her in a glass coffin.

One day (here there is time for her to mature) a king’s son comes to the cottage. He falls in love with the girl in the coffin and asks if he can purchase her. The dwarfs refuse, and he begs them to allow him take her with, because he’s fallen in love with her. They relent and allow this.

In the 1812 version of the Grimm’s tale, Snow White is brought back to life when a servant, angry at having to carry the coffin all the time, opens it, sits her up and hits her on the back. Later versions have a servant stumble carrying the coffin from the dwarfs’ cottage to the castle. Either way, the apple is dislodged and Snow White and the prince are married. Snow White’s mother comes to the wedding and is placed into red-hot iron shoes and made to dance until she dies.

Again, I pull back and think of a mother reading this to her daughter. Whuwh!

There is a lot going on here, both on the surface and beneath it. Next post will begin to look at the story from the standpoint of what the child is hearing as mother tells the story. I’d love to hear from anyone out there about their Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs memories.