by Alison Lurie
Bruno Bettelheim remarks in his classic analysis of the fairy tale, The Uses of Enchantment, that “Rapunzel” is “the story of a pubertal girl, and of a jealous mother who tries to prevent her from gaining independence—a typical adolescent problem.” But it can also be seen as a story about the adoption of a poor and beautiful young girl by a prosperous but over-possessive older woman, who later takes drastic but eventually unsuccessful measures to isolate her foster daughter from the world and especially from men. This plot, of course, also appears in adult literature. Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations, shuts her ward, Estella in a huge, decaying house and tries to teach her to hate all men. In Henry James’s The Bostonians, Olive Chancellor essentially buys Verena Tarrant from her parents with greenbacks rather than green plants, takes her into her Boston mansion, and attempts to possess and control her life. In both cases the heroine eventually escapes, but only with great difficulty and not necessarily into a better life. (In none of the current versions of “Rapunzel” I have read is there any suggestion, as there is in The Bostonians—and even more strongly in Anne Sexton’s poem “Rapunzel” and Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch—that the older woman is erotically interested in her ward. Instead, the problem is always maternal possessiveness.)
In the traditional tale of “Rapunzel” the character who trades garden produce for a poor neighbor’s child is an unsympathetic figure. In Grimm she is called “Mother Gothel,” which at the time was a common designation for a godmother, but she is not the sort of good fairy godmother who grants wishes. She is not actively unkind, however, until her daughter falls in love with a man. Mother Gothel considers this a betrayal, and becomes enraged, but the love affair is presented as innocent and natural, and the story ends with Rapunzel and her prince living happily ever after in his kingdom.
Contemporary versions of “Rapunzel” often have a different emphasis, and perhaps for a contemporary reason. Over the last few decades, more and more well-to-do Americans and Europeans have adopted the children of poor parents, often from third-world countries; and because of local cultural prejudices, most of these babies have been girls.
Generally, adoptive parents are treated in the media and by friends and relatives, as good, kind, and generous. Many modern versions of “Rapunzel” take the same attitude. (“The witch was never unkind to Rapunzel. Indeed, she gave her almost everything the child could have wished for,” says perhaps the best of these retellings, by Barbara Rogasky, beautifully illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman.) The witch’s problem is that she not only wants to protect her child from the dangers of the world outside; she does not want the girl to grow up and leave her—fears and desires that many parents, perhaps particularly adoptive parents of only one child, will recognize. In the traditional story this natural wish takes a pathological form; yet in most versions the witch is not punished. As Bruno Bettelheim points out, her possessive love for Rapunzel is selfish and foolish, but not evil, and “since she acted from too much love for Rapunzel and not out of wickedness, no harm befalls her.”
Several modern adaptations of “Rapunzel” for adolescents seem to function as cautionary tales. They offer support to girls who need to escape an over-possessive parent, but also express sympathy for the mother who has trouble letting her go. They encourage teenagers to seek independence without feeling guilty, and parents to accept the inevitable. Zel (1996), for instance, by the best-selling author Donna Jo Napoli, is a lively, dramatic retelling of “Rapunzel” as a historical novel. It is set in the remote sixteenth-century Swiss Alps, where magic and the almost total isolation of the heroine seem more believable. It expresses both sympathy for and criticism of the witch, who will give her beloved adopted daughter anything but freedom, and ends up almost driving her mad in near-solitary confinement. “She had to be tied to no one but me,” the witch thinks. “Me, no one but me.”
Of course, Zel eventually meets and falls in love with a young man. Meanwhile the witch, exhausted by her own possessiveness, by the spells necessary to maintain Zel’s captivity in the tower, and by her own guilt, becomes a powerless ghost, able only to silently witness the traditional happy ending, which incidentally takes place in a warm semi-tropical country—the sort of country from which many adopted babies come today.
Some contemporary teenage versions of Rapunzel not only sympathize with the witch figure but also blame the original mother. Cameron Dokey’s Golden, for instance, splits Rapunzel into two different young girls. One is born totally bald, rejected by her mother, and brought up on a remote farm by the loving small-time sorceress Melisande. The other, who has yards of golden hair, is Melisande’s real daughter, who has been put into a state of suspended animation and imprisoned in a tower by a magician. The girls are more or less the same age, and can become friends and share adventures. Both end up with suitable husbands and remain close to Melisande. This story both excuses the guilt some adoptive parents may feel for depriving a mother of her child, and supports the search of grown children for their birth parents.
Adèle Geras’s The Tower Room (1990) is a realistic modern version of Rapunzel, though one that eventually reverses its moral. It is the first volume of an engaging and well-written trilogy set in 1962 in a posh English girls’ school, apparently based on Roedean (the alma mater of both Princess Diana and the sisters in Ian McEwan’s Atonement), where Adèle Geras herself was a student and the exact contemporary of her heroine, Megan. The girls at “Egerton Hall” are cut off from the world, but life there is described affectionately and in fascinating detail. Megan’s parents are dead; and her adoptive mother, Dorothy, a teacher at the school, is cool and distant rather than over-possessive. “In my heart,” Megan writes, “I regard her as only a guardian and never think of her as a real mother… . She did try to be like a mother to me during the holidays, but it was as though she were copying maternal behavior she had seen in other people, and not quite succeeding.”
As it turns out, Dorothy is in love with a young lab instructor called Simon, who hardly notices her. Instead he falls for Megan, climbs a convenient builder’s scaffolding to her tower room, and seduces her. When Dorothy discovers the affair, she flies into a hysterical rage and orders them both to leave. Soon Megan finds herself living in a squalid studio flat near Gloucester Road tube station and working in a coffee bar, waiting long hours for Simon to return from a distant ill-paying job. It takes her only a couple of months to decide to leave him and return to Edgerton Hall and her two best friends (who are ingenious contemporary versions of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty), finish her last term, and go on to Oxford. In a sequel she is also happily reunited with Simon. The lesson seems to be that if you are denied real parental affection, you should resist the impulse to compensate by quitting school and running off with a young man, even if he is your true love.
The colorful and lavishly illustrated Sugar Cane: A Caribbean Rapunzel, by Patricia Storace (2007), is intended for children rather than adolescents, but it also includes a partially sympathetic witch figure, a sorceress called Madame Fate. Though everyone on the island fears her, she provides her adopted daughter, Sugar Cane, with a beautiful garden, a lovable pet monkey, and—an unusual innovation—a first-rate education:
Since Madame Fate was a conjure-woman who could bring people back from the dead, all Sugar Cane’s teachers were special… . Her guitar teacher was a five-hundred-year-old Gypsy from Spain, and her piano teacher a jazz master from New Orleans. An Arabian philosopher tutored her in mathematics. She learned poetry from a Greek epic poet, and storytelling from an African griot.
Sugar Cane, like the Grimms’ version of the story, unites the lovers through music, when a young man hears the heroine singing in the tower. It also alters the traditional ending to include a happy musical reunion with both of Sugar Cane’s original parents.
Not all modern versions of Rapunzel show sympathy with the witch, and a few of them penalize her, though not severely, at the end
. This is true of Lynn Roberts’s Rapunzel, a groovy fairy tale (2003), which appears to take place in New York in the 1970s. Both text and illustrations are very much of the period—cartoonish, way out, and upbeat. There is no pre-story involving any variety of lettuce: the heroine simply lives on the top floor of an apartment building with her mean Aunt Esme, who rides a motorcycle with the license plate EV1L. When Aunt Esme discovers her niece’s friendship with a high-school rock musician, she forces her to climb down her own cut-off hair into what looks like a rather scary part of Manhattan. Rapunzel has to spend the night alone in a littered shop doorway, but she and her boyfriend and his band are soon happily united. Aunt Esme’s only punishment is that without Rapunzel’s hair as a kind of magical escalator she has to climb at least five flights of stairs to reach her apartment.
Barbie as Rapunzel (2002), which is based on a short Disney film, also features an unsympathetic adoptive parent. Again there is no prologue: we simply hear that the heroine is kept as a servant by “Gothel, a mean witch.” The text reads as if it were made up by a six-year-old out of bits of fairy tales and Barbie-doll promotional material. Rapunzel is a rather blank character, but this may be the result of a deliberate choice on the part of the author or publisher. As a former Mattel Company executive, Ivy Ross, puts it:
[Barbie] isn’t anything in particular, so she becomes a vehicle for [girls’] dreams, their aspirations—their dress rehearsal for everyday life. Even when she’s in a new movie, Barbie acts Rapunzel.
Barbie/Rapunzel, like most Disney heroines, has some embarrassingly cute animal companions—in this case a bunny rabbit and a fat little dragon with pink wings. Also, like all Barbies, she gets to try on different costumes, which presumably can be bought in the local Toys “R” Us. Eventually she goes to a ball, discovers her long-lost father (he is a king, making her a princess), and marries a prince who resembles Barbie’s boyfriend, Ken. The witch ends up imprisoned in her own tower. In the view of some psychologists, the final reunion with only the father (which also occurs in many versions of “Hansel and Gretel”) makes sense, either because it fulfills the daughter’s unconscious desire to have him to herself, or because the witch is really the mother in disguise.
In the Grimms’ tale of Rapunzel (though not in the Pentamerone), the prince is a fairly ineffective figure. After he climbs Rapunzel’s cut-off hair into the tower and is confronted by the witch, he jumps from the window in despair and is blinded by thorns. Both he and his beloved then wander about in misery for several years, but at last they find each other, and when Rapunzel’s tears fall on his eyes, his sight is restored. In many modern versions the hero is a stronger character. These stories usually omit his blinding, or treat it metaphorically: he gets a concussion when he falls from the tower, and cannot remember Rapunzel and his love for her; or his glasses are broken and he can’t see her, or he believes that she has abandoned him rather than been banished to the wilderness by the witch. In the end, however, the lovers are reunited, one way or another. Men may appear to desert or forget you, the moral seems to be, but not forever.
CLOTHES
Breaking the Laws of Fashion
For hundreds of years there were strict rules about what people could wear at different times of the day and year, and at different ages. At first actual laws limited certain colors and fabrics to aristocrats; later on, social custom rather than legal documents worked to enforce conformity. My father, for instance, always exchanged his gray felt hat for a pale yellow straw one when he left for work after breakfast on Memorial Day. When he got off the train that evening, he would be surrounded by dozens of other commuters in almost identical straw hats. After Labor Day, they all switched back to felt.
For women there were even more rules. In the 1960s, for instance, fashion magazines published illustrated guides to the proper length of the new miniskirt: “Grandmother’s” hem ended just above the knee; “Mother’s” three inches above the knee, and “Daughter’s” six inches. During most of the twentieth century colors were sex-typed and age-typed from the cradle to the grave: light blue was favored for baby boys and pink for girls, and primary crayon colors were right for small children. When a little girl entered grade school, brown and tan and navy were added, and remained correct for the rest of her life. A woman with a white-collar job was supposed to wear dull, solid colors like navy blue and tan and white at work, perhaps with a brighter blouse or scarf. At home more variety was allowed, but for many years black was taboo before eighteen, and a married woman who wore a bright red evening dress after thirty might be seen as inviting scandal. Later, as she aged, she was supposed to abandon bright colors in favor of dimmed ones: gray and lavender were believed to be especially appropriate and becoming for old ladies.
Men, too, followed invisible social rules: boys wore green and blue and brown and tan and khaki, and their fathers more subdued versions of the same shades, plus gray. If you were in business, a gray, brown, or black suit, with a white shirt and a striped or small-patterned tie, was necessary, along with lace-up, highly polished shoes. In certain professions, and at certain times of year, the laws might be slightly relaxed to allow pale blue or tan shirts, and possibly even a blazer and slacks.
Outside the home, middle-class dress was formal and subdued. In the New York suburb where I grew up, a respectable woman did not use dramatic makeup during the day, or go out to lunch or into the city without gloves and a hat. If she had a white-collar job she wore a suit or a tailored dress and pumps. College students were expected to wear dresses and skirts to class; slacks were forbidden except in the coldest weather. Blue jeans and sneakers were fine for girls and women on vacation, but you could not wear them to a dinner party without suggesting that you disliked or scorned the host. The older you were, and the more formal the party, the worse the insult.
In the early and mid-twentieth century it was fairly easy to guess a woman’s age. It wasn’t just a matter of clothes: many middle-class American females stopped exercising seriously after they got married, though they might walk around a golf course once a week or play a couple of sets of tennis. Many women also had domestic help: they did not need to cook and wash and iron and mop and push a vacuum cleaner. As time passed, even if they didn’t overeat, they gradually began to bulge in the wrong places, and their hair started to turn gray. There wasn’t much they could safely do about it: most hair dyes created a glaringly fake effect, and some could be poisonous; plastic surgery was expensive, uncertain, and sometimes dangerous.
After World War II, however, all this changed. Now only the very rich had full-time domestic servants, and it was usually necessary to clean your own house and cook your own meals. It also became more and more fashionable to exercise. Medical advances meant that it was no longer obvious that someone had had a face lift. The rules about color also changed drastically. Bright colors were fine at any age, and both babies and grandmothers wore red.
For centuries, hair was an important indicator of a woman’s age. Social custom required that young girls wore it long; after marriage it was covered with a cap or scarf, and/or confined in braids or a bun: in many societies custom still makes this obligatory. Even today, long hair, loose curls, and bangs all suggest youth; though if someone is under forty, a short stylish haircut can sometimes have the same effect, giving an adolescent gamine or tomboy look.
A woman over fifty who wears her hair very short will often be thought to have stopped caring about sex, especially if her clothes are drab and baggy. If her locks are long and flowing, she will be assumed to be interested, perhaps because the majority of men, according to report, prefer long hair; she may also be typed as either artistic or theatrical. But if she works in a business office, she may have a problem, since long, loose hair on the job is thought to indicate a lack of neatness and efficiency and attention to business, as well as inviting sexual harassment and decreasing your chance of promotion. Caught between the wish for professional success, and a nat
ural desire to look attractive, many women find themselves perpetually seeking the perfect hairstyle, to the permanent advantage of beauty salons.
Of course, clothes not only have an effect on the observer: they also influence those who wear them. In jeans and a T-shirt and flat shoes a woman can run and dance like a schoolgirl. Heavy clothes that physically constrict her will make her move more slowly and awkwardly: she will not only look but feel older and less flexible. A woman of any age who is zipped and buttoned into a heavy tight jacket and skirt or slacks may walk and sit like a more mature and more conventional person than she really is. Some people will feel uncomfortable around her, expecting criticism; others may see her as sturdily powerful, and expect help. Soft, loose fabrics and soft colors will make her feel warm and comfortable, and encourage others to expect affection and sympathy.
Shoes are important. High heels make women taller, and sometimes cause them to feel more powerful, but they also limit impulsive movement, making it difficult or even painful to walk rapidly for any length of time, or climb stairs. After a while they will start to hurt a woman’s feet, causing her to sit down at every opportunity. Then, if everyone else is standing, she will look and feel and possibly even act weaker and smaller. Since high heels also cause the hip-swinging unsteady gait that men are said to find sexy, they will encourage her to feel and act helpless, relying on charm rather than ability to get what she wants. Even worse, it may make it impossible for her to escape something that she definitely does not want. The old saying that clothes make the man is unfortunately even truer, sometimes dangerously so, for women.