Ungovernable

by Therese Oneill

  Witch-Mother chopped off her hair, threw her into a desert wilderness, then used the hair to trick the prince into the tower. Upon hearing that Rapunzel was lost, he tried to commit suicide but instead just landed eyeballs-first in briars, becoming blind.

  And… then he wandered a few years, eating berries and nuts. Eventually he found Rapunzel and the twins he’d impregnated her with in the wilderness. And they lived as happily ever after as can be expected.

  Q: In women’s studies class I learned that the tower is a phallic symbol and Rapunzel’s hair is actually her bisexual nature and the witch cut it off as a represent—

  A: Hey! Neat! But we want to be careful with overanalysis. Four-year-olds can be real slouches when it comes to applying queer theory or Jung to literature. So we’ll read these stories through their little eyes. And see if it doesn’t send us careening back to the path of mild-natured obedience.

  Snow White

  Grimm’s “Snow White” is pretty close to most other versions, even Disney’s. Though Disney glosses over how ever-loving dumb that girl was. Sure, she was also only seven when her stepmother began to hate her because of her superior beauty, and she was still a child, though probably at least twelve, when she ran away to the dwarves.

  But even for a twelve-year-old, Snow White was not the sharpest- cut diamond in the dwarf mine. Three times the stepmother came to see Snow White “in disguise”—each disguise being that of a tattered beggar lady. The first time she laced her bodice so tight that Snow White passed out but survived. So the stepmother came back a second time and gave her a poisoned comb, which made her pass out, but, again, she survived. Finally the apple. Snow White, who had wised up to the fact that every old lady who came to her door kept trying to kill her, wouldn’t eat it unless the queen split it with her. The apple had two very distinct sides, one regular and one beautiful and rosy. Guess which side was poisoned?

  Q: You know, “Fool me once, shame on you… fool me three times without altering your method in any notable way… and maybe I actually kind of deserve to die from a magic apple.”

  A: Be nice. She’s just a kid, after all. And it just so happens that after biting the poisoned apple she was only mostly dead (I said that in Miracle Max’s voice—did you hear it?). Dead enough to make the queen’s mirror happy, but still so lifelike that the dwarves put her in a glass coffin. Just for pretty. The prince came and begged for the beautiful dead girl and was given her.

  Q: Why did he want a dead girl in a glass box?

  A: I don’t… He probably needed a coffee table. Anyway, the jostling of her coffin by the Prince’s servants dislodged the apple chunk caught in her throat and she woke up, obliged to marry the not-creepy prince who was in the process of transporting her corpse to his home.

  The only part Disney softened was having the dwarves beat the queen to death off-screen with pickaxes instead of going Grimm’s punishment route, which was to make her wear molten lead slippers and dance till she died. Actually, that’s a toss-up.

  Cinderella

  Interestingly, in Grimm’s version of “Cinderella,” her father never died—he just could not be bothered. He lived with his new wife and his very pretty (not ugly) stepdaughters in comfortable indifference to Cinderella, who had been kicked out of her bed and had to sleep in the kitchen-fire hearth, thus the name. Her mom did die, however, and Cinderella planted a twig on her grave that grew into a magic tree, and it was from her mother’s corpse-tree that all the magic ball gowns and such fell, including the gold (not glass) slippers. The tree also contained magic animals, particularly doves. And the prince actually courted her for much longer than in most of these stories; they met two or three times before falling in love.

  Q: Hey, did it ever strike you in the cartoon that Prince Charming was gay, and that’s why his dad had to shove every single woman in the kingdom in his face and force him to pick one? Remember how he kept yawning as all these pretty women were presented to him?

  A: No… you’re doing it again. You can’t judge even made-up history by today’s standards. He was bored because he hadn’t met his soulmate yet. If he were gay he wouldn’t have fallen in love with Cinderella.

  Q: I think they were just buds. Like he saw her shiny dress from across the room and was like “Wow, I have GOT to find out who designed that!” And then they got to talking and it turned out they both loved dance-cleaning and landscaping with magic birds and she was probably like, “Dude, you need a beard so your dad will leave you alone and I’m totally fine with that because at home I sleep in a fireplace,” and so they agreed to—

  A: Doesn’t matter! You won’t be needing to show your children the Disney version. The prince isn’t so visibly disinterested in the female sex in the Grimm version. He’s still unable to recall Cinderella’s face or know anything about her except her shoe size, of course, as in every version.

  “Omg, girl! It fits you so fine! I love it! You, I mean! I love you!”

  Q: (Way too focused on designer shoes to remember what his “true love” looked like, huh? No, not gay at all.)

  A: Shhh. Please. Now, in the Grimm version, when the prince went door-to-door looking for a foot small enough to fit the mystery shoe, the stepmother made the first stepsister cut off her toes to fit it, and the prince was satisfied with this arrangement and set off with the stepsister. Honestly, these fairy tales call not so much for a suspension of disbelief in magic, but that humans can be so breathtakingly stupid. Luckily, the magic doves from the dead-mom tree flagged down the prince, pointed out that there was blood all over the golden slipper, and sent him back to look again for his bride. Which he did, this time carrying off the second stepsister, whose mother had sliced off her heel so the shoe would fit, whereupon the magic doves had to repeat their ministrations. “Go back to the house and find the only girl there whose feet aren’t mutilated.” The prince did, finally recognized Cinderella, and off they went to be married. The magic doves pecked out the eyes of the stepsisters.

  Q: Ew. Much worse than the Disney version. That’s disgusting.

  A: Yes, it’s a bit old-world gruesome. Now, the original tale of Sleeping Beauty, that’s disgusting.

  Sleeping Beauty

  If you just compare Grimm’s tale to Disney’s, they’re not too different. (Don’t complicate things with the movie Maleficent; nothing is more intolerable in Victorian culture than humanizing the villain.) But if you trace Grimm’s sources, you end up with a tale called “Sun, Moon, and Talia” written in 1634 by Gianbattista Basile. And here we descend into hell.

  In this old version of “Sleeping Beauty,” it was foretold that, yes, the princess would be hurt by a spinning wheel, and her father banished all spinning wheels from the kingdom. Still, Talia found one in her fifteenth year, and got some flax stuck under the fingernail. Which killed her in that fairy-tale manner in which beautiful women stop breathing but stay dewy fresh. One day a king, not a prince, lost his falcon somewhere around the tower in which Talia had been enshrined. He climbed up to retrieve the bird, found her instead, and in the words of the English translator “admired her beauty for a while.”

  Q: No. Oh, c’mon, no. Oh, no—don’t say it.

  A: And so, nine months later when still-sorta-dead Talia gave birth to twins…

  Q: DAMMIT!

  A:… one of the twins sucked the flax out from beneath Dead Mama’s finger, and she woke! And she was happy, overjoyed to see that she had… acquired some babies, whom she named Sun and Moon! The king found her now awake, and that was not a deal-breaker for him. In fact he liked her, and began spending time with his new family.

  Q: What happened to fairy tales providing clear punishment to evil?

  A: Well, this story has that! Not for the king, of course, because rap—… rapturously admiring the beauty of an unconscious teen girl under your dominion wasn’t considered evil in seventeenth-century Italy. No, the evil was what the king’s wife did when she realized he was cheating on her: ordering the twins to be brough
t to her personal chef so that she could slaughter and feed them to her husband in an elaborate meal as vengeance for his betrayal—

  Q. Stop. I’m out.

  A: Wait! Happy ending, though! The cook took pity on the twins and hid them and fed the king goats instead (which the text calls “kids,” so THAT’s funny).

  Q: Not laughing.

  A: And eventually when the king found out what his wife had tried to do he had her burned alive and married Talia, who became the new queen! And… oh, and… the cook who spared the children got promoted! Isn’t that great? Huh? So all’s well that ends well.

  Q: My child now officially only has books from Pixar movies and Dr. Seuss.

  A: I think Andy from Toy Story’s dad is probably dead, you know. Probably was a cop, which is why Andy is so attached to the law enforcers Buzz and Woody. So sad. Also Green Eggs and Ham supports caving to peer pressure and ingesting things that seem off to you. Like, get on my yacht and drop this groovy green acid and you’ll see a goat or maybe a freak-cat that wants to break into your house and smash stuff with his two little gremlin buddies…

  All in all, children don’t need a lot of parental guidance when they play. They grow by finding obstacles to what they want, and overcoming them. If we soften the edges too much, we get a kid who can’t take a bruise. If we make playtime crazy fun exciting with store-bought toys and constant parental attention, we get a kid who expects life to be nonstop thrills. And if we let them read completely sanitized children’s stories, we get a kid who can’t handle the injustices and unhappy endings real life dispenses. The Victorians knew that. We’d do well to apply that knowledge to our twenty-first-century broods.

  9

  How Many Leeches Should Be Applied to a Broken Bone and What Weapons Serve Me Best in the Valiant Struggle Against Rectal Worms?

  On Maintaining General Health

  I have addressed the subject of children’s health throughout this book, but since few other topics so seize the heart of a mother as the wellness of her child, I feel I owe you some further instruction. The majority of parenting books from the Victorian era focus on how to keep a child alive. I’m not going to do that. The twenty-first century, with its hygiene, safety practices, and medical science, will do the bulk of that work by itself, and may your gratitude for the time and place in which your child lives never cease.

  But there’s one area of medicine that Victorians knew how to do better than we do: Trial and error. By giving their children random plants and tinctures to see if anything happened, they often hit upon medications that, if not entirely effective or even safe, at least gave anxious parents something to do when their children fell ill. Which is a very powerful medicine indeed.

  Here are some trusty staples to have in your medicine chest according to a person calling himself “a Physician of Philadelphia” in 1835’s The Home Book of Health.

  Q: Are these all going to be poisons?

  A: You know, anything can be a poison if you use it incorrectly… But mostly, yes.

  Strychnine (also called nux vomica)—Nobody is saying this isn’t one of the deadliest poisons known to man. So, use it carefully, all right? It’s recommended for “cure of diseases of debility, for palsies, and amaurosis (sudden blindness). The commencing dose is half a grain of the extract in the evening, formed into a pill, and gradually increased to four or six grains.”

  Tin—“Tin is sometimes used for the purpose of expelling worms from the intestines.” Grind it into a powder, feed it to your child. It “disturbs the worms, and by its bulk and roughness carrying them before it.” It might carry out some stuff they need, helpful bacteria or shreds of intestine and blood, too, so get ready for some complicated bowel movements.

  Turpentine—Four ounces a day will flush tapeworms right out. It’s okay—turpentine is basically just toxic pine-tree juice. Also good for constipation, colic, and inflamed bowels, either in drink form or by enema. Topically you can use it on “indolent tumours and paralytic limbs,” although the doctor doesn’t specify anything curative will happen if you do.

  Nitrate of silver—Now, don’t let the scary chemical name put you off. This concoction is known in the vernacular as “lunar caustic.” Or “hell stone.” Ah. None of those names sounds comforting. But that’s okay—they sound something better. Effective!

  A strychnine a day keeps the mortician at bay! Maybe!

  To get lunar caustic, simply dissolve silver in nitric acid and harvest the powdered crystals when it dries. Easy peasy. You can use it, or at least the Victorians did, on anything you need to chemically scald off your body. And some of the things inside your body. Use it to remove “the callous edges of sores, strictures in the urethra, indolent ulcers and fistulous sores, and ringworm.” Plus, it’s an excellent dye for hair, ink, and, as your autopsy will later reveal, internal organs that are unfashionably pale.

  Q: Wow. If silver can do all that, I imagine gold must be able to cure cancer, the common cold, and stank-butt combined.

  A: Don’t be ridiculous. There is no cure for stank-butt, and if there were it wouldn’t be gold. Gold, according to the Physician of Philadelphia, at even one-fifteenth of a grain diluted into a neutral solvent, is a dangerous poison that will “excite severe and inflammatory symptoms.” If your child is still suffering skin distresses after the application of silver nitrate, try drinking sarsaparilla.

  Q: That sounds suspiciously pleasant!

  A: But if the sarsaparilla causes the child to sweat, that’s very bad and should “be checked by the addition of a little sulphuric acid.”

  Q: Ah… there we go. Hey, what’s “castor”? I always read about kids having to take their castor oil.

  A: Castor and castor oil are two entirely different medications, though both were used in the Victorian era. Castor is an oily fluid secreted from the anus pouches of the beaver. It was used for (not really at all) controlling epilepsy and in uterine complaints, until the price of beaver-butt oil became too expensive. Also, the smell was described as “nauseous.” It is seldom used now.

  “Oh, man! As if we weren’t anxious enough when all they wanted was our pelts!”

  Q: Thank Go—

  A: I’m sorry, “seldom used in medicine,” I meant to say. It’s a fairly popular food additive, helps round out the flavor of vanilla, especially. And as long as food companies use it in small enough amounts, they don’t need to identify it as an ingredient on the package. It’s usually listed as “natural flavoring.”

  Q: W… which foods? Which foods have the beaver-anus-pouch juice???

  A: I have no idea. I avoid “natural ingredients.” Never know what you’re gonna get. Now, castor oil was and still is an extremely popular laxative. It has nothing to do with beaver bottoms, except the theory that sellers used the term “castor oil” to tell buyers that this product would do what the now-overpriced castor (desire for beaver pelts and anuses quickly outpaced supply) could do, but cheaper. The oil is pressed from the castor bean, Ricinus communis.

  Deadly, disgusting, but oh, how it sluices clean your colon!

  Q: Wait. Is that pronounced like “rice-inis”? Ricin, as in the lethal toxin? The most popular old-timey child’s laxative comes from the same species of plant as ricin?

  A: There’s only one plant in the species, actually. So, yes, the deadly toxin and the medicine (still used today by itself and in the manufacture of other drugs) come from the same bean. It’s a really complex bean.

  “Madge, you get all that poison out of the castor bean before you squeezed the oil out? Well, never mind. Guess we’ll find out!”

  Q: This is what they gave to children? Who made it? Just some guy? What if they mishandled a batch? Complex bean?

  A: You were so upset when you thought castor oil was made from anus squeezings, and now you’re in a tizzy because it’s derived from something as bland as a bean! Honestly, if you stay this fussy I’m not sure you’re mother enough for Victorian health treatments.

  Now, the reason
the castor bean makes a good laxative is because its husk is indigestible to humans. In order to use it as a poison, you would need to crack it open, remove the bean meat, distill it into powder, and ingest it, whereupon, yes, you would die slowly and painfully. Or you’d have to chew the bean, which is very difficult, and not just one; it would take at least five beans to trigger an irreversible slide into death. More, if you have bad teeth!

  Plus it tastes just terrible, which is why “castor oil” was used for punishments. It weeded out the truly sick children from those who were just trying to avoid their daily birching for whistling on school grounds. All in all, a handy substance to have in your pantry.

  Although, if you listen to medical advice from earlier in the century, the best medicine is—

  “Too much blood!” The obviously overblooded physician prepares to needlessly bleed the sallow patient.

  Q: Laughter. Sleep. Fresh air. Love. Please, something not awful.

  A:—bloodletting.

  Q: Why would anyone ever assume a person has too much blood inside them?

  A: Bleeding as medical practice was finally being phased out during the 1800s, after millennia of use to “balance the humors.” During this time, the theory was that your health was controlled by your four most important organs—brain, lung, spleen, and gallbladder—and the fluids they secreted—blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile. If you were sick, physicians would determine which substance was crowding in on the others, and then try to drain some of it out of you. It wasn’t always by bloodletting. Sometimes the doctor would give you something to cause vomiting, diarrhea, or more frequent, more yellow, urination.