THE VIEW FROM THE TOWER: What Rapunzel Tells Us...

The View from the Tower:
What Rapunzel Tells Us
About Ourselves as Women

(Lit 390B: Retelilng the Myth of
Romantic Love thorugh Fairytales)

The story of Rapunzel has always both fascinated and appalled me at the same time. As a little girl in love with very long hair, the story of Rapunzel, whose hair was so long, it could be fashioned into a ladder, represented something to be striven for. Not that one's hair could actually be grown long enough to create a hair ladder (and who would want to care for such heap if it could), but the fact that one girl -- even a fairytale girl -- had achieved it meant it was worth shooting for.

As I became older, though, the "very long hair" part became less and less attractive, and other, more sinister messages began to emerge. It bears mentioning that I was raised primarily by a single mother who was very, very progressive. Subliminal messages of my limitations as a female went largely unheeded by me, because it never occurred to me they existed. In my mother's house, they didn't. It was not until I ventured into the world that I began to see that Rapunzel, as well as other much loved tales from childhood, had deeper, subtler meanings than just "good vs. evil," "wrong vs. right."

Fairytales are a form of literature and, like most written and oral literature, exist to tell us who we are and where and how we belong in the world. As the cultures change, so do the stories. Rapunzel is one of the oldest of the tales that the brothers Grimm chose to tell, so the incarnations of the story reveal details about the difference in the cultures and people who told the stories, and the messages they wished to convey.

As near as can be ascertained, the fairytale Rapunzel, or at least the earliest of what Getty calls the “hair ladder” stories, has its origins in a tenth century Persian tale of a young woman, Roudabe, who is sequestered with the other young women. She has a secret love, Zal, to whom offers to lower her very long hair to her lover to help him up the wall, so they might be together. Zal politely (and quite sensibly) refuses because he fears it will hurt her head. (Getty)

Presumably, the story goes on from here to tell of the while adventures of the Persian princess and her forbidden love, but since those adventures do not involve climbing up a ladder of hair to rescue the helpless woman, they cease to be relevant here. The most relevant difference in the Persian story from its European descendants is that Roudabe’s home in the tower, away from the eyes of men, requires no elaborate explanation. Her separation from the society of men is a given, in a culture where men are fiercely overprotective of their women. And perhaps Zal’s refusal to climb the hair ladder, in spite of his adoration for Roudabe, is a further reflection of a society that has no tolerance for breaking the boundaries between men and women.

When the story of Rapunzel first appears in Europe, it is in Italy, where an Italian writer named Giovanni Batiste Basile began putting in writing the stories of oral tradition that had existed for centuries. He created an anthology called Il Pentamerone, which told the stories inside a framework story of a Prince and his bride who are told fifty stories by ten women of the kingdom over five days as their wedding present. In addition to Rapunzel, the stories of Snow White, Cinderella and others destined to become famous first appeared here. In this Italian version of the tale, there is no happy ending for the audacious prince and the disobedient maiden. They are sussed out by the fairy/goblin/witch (the maiden’s captor takes on several incarnations, and are, invariably, turned into frogs or giving pig snouts or otherwise cursed to a miserable existence.
Not until the story moves to France does it take on some kind of happy result. A lady-in-waiting to Louis XIV put her touches on the story by adding two important, lingering elements – Rapunzel’s exile and the prince’s infirmity at the hands of the witch, and their subsequent reunion and escape into Happily-Ever-After-Land. Further incarnations of the tale in France add the “pregnancy twist” – Rapunzel’s nightly assignations with the prince result in a pregnancy which the girl is too naïve to understand. When she is exiled (eventually to a hut in the desert), she lives there with her twins, a boy and girl, until the prince, blinded with an encounter with the witch, stumbles across them by chance. Rapunzel’s tears fall into his eyes, restoring his sight, and they all rush off to the prince’s father’s kingdom where they… well… you know…. (Getty)

Once the story gets to Germany, in the first collection by the brothers Grimm, it has been renamed The Maiden in the Tower, and it exists more or less as it does today, with only occasional variations between Grimm versions (notably, the elimination of the “pregnancy twist,” as the Grimms moved more from a PG to a G rating). However, the legacy of the tale of the maiden relegated to the tower, imprisoned by both the folly of her careless parents and the cruelty of the powerful witch/crone figure, is the stuff that post-modern analyses are made of, and the tale of the maiden in the tower has spawned many.

Canadian feminist author Margaret Atwood takes the story out for a feminist spin, breaking the tale into four elements that represent the repression and marginalization of women historically. She has broken the story into four elements – the maiden, the tower, the witch/crone and the prince/rescuer. In the Canadian telling of the tale, Rapunzel is not only exiled by the witch, but silenced by her as well. Atwood sees Rapunzel and the tower as two sides the same issue – women who have so internalized society’s set role for them that they are voiceless and imprisoned. Our prince is of little help, as he has been blinded, and his reunion with Rapunzel is not by his own doing, but comes about out of sheer dumb luck. The witch/crone is the powerful woman, always to be feared and ultimately foiled (or, in the extreme, killed). The parents in general – and the mother figure in particular -- are merely the shallow vessels to bring the beautiful maiden into the world, and are disposed of early in the tale (as are Sleeping Beauty’s, Cinderella’s and Snow White’s). As Atwood sees it, the danger in fairytales like Rapunzel is that women who internalize such stories are apt to create their own prisons by buying into to the notion that Rapunzel’s physical beauty, submissiveness and virginity are the most valuable things about her, the things which make her worthy of care and protection. When the crone discovers she’s no longer pure, and that she’s been disobedient, Rapunzel must endure physical abuse and mutilation (the cutting of her precious hair) and exile to the desert where, presumably for the first time in her life, she must find a way to take care not only of herself, but of her children. The lesson women learn, Atwood believes, is that a woman is only as good as she is virginal and beautiful (read, young), and that by being submissive, she can ensure her continued care and inclusion. (Wilson 138)

Psychologist Sheldon Cashdan predictably sees a different side of the maiden and the tower. In his book, The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales, he sees the characters as representing deeply repressed parts of the divided psyche, playing out the story of the human experience. In Rapunzel, he sees the maiden and the witch as representative of both sides of the self, good and evil. For Cashdan, fairy tales were created as morality plays that offered up consequences for things like foolishness, disobedience, premature sex, illegitimate pregnancy, but always offered the opportunity for redemption in the end (the “happy-ever-after”). The witch locks Rapunzel in the tower just as she reaches her sexual maturity, in order to protect her from herself. Rapunzel disobeys and meets with the prince clandestinely, which leads to her ultimate exile and abandonment. Rapunzel, Cashdan points out, is one of the few tales (Sleeping Beauty is another) where the witch is allowed to live at the end of the story.

But what about the witch? Though she punishes both Rapunzel and
the prince for their illicit behavior, forcing them to five apart without
knowing the other is alive, she also survives. Why? Because, like Baba Yaga, she
is not evil through and through. Her decision to keep Rapunzel in the tower
flowed not from malice but from maternal concern. Unlike the evil queen in Snow
White, who is out to destroy the heroine, the witch in Rapunzel wants to protect
Rapunzel. If she were destroyed, it would be tantamount to destroying parts of
the self charged with safeguarding one's sexual well-being, a theme explored in
Robert Louis Stevenson The Strange Tale of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (Cashdan
160)

In spite of Cashdan’s focus on the wider, more universal significance of fairy tales (or perhaps because of it), many still believe that the subliminal messages conveyed in them – the very morality plays Cashdan identifies – are what cause the most damage to children trying to find their places in the world. For better or worse, fairy tales offer the only venue in children’s literature where the central figures are young girls. Contemporary children’s literature is heavily weighted in favor of boy characters. Unfortunately, it is a long-standing belief in literary circles (and film, for that matter) that boys will only read stories about boys, but girls will read stories about boys and girls.

According to Marcia K. Lieberman, in her essay “Some Day My Prince Will Come: Female Acculturation through the Fairytale,” Cashdan’s reasoning breaks down when one looks at the underlying messages of most fairytales, including Rapunzel. Lieberman sees key elements common in the most well-known fairytales which quietly teach young, impressionable girls what is valuable about them. First and foremost is what Lieberman calls “the beauty contest.” Beauty in fairytales is rewarded and honored. It is also despised and envied, by those less “worthy” (read, “beautiful”). Snow White’s beauty makes her a target of the aging Queen. Cinderella’s beauty makes her the object of her ugly stepsisters’ scorn and the object of the Prince’s affections at the Ball (the ultimate “beauty contest”). The beautiful maiden is so valuable, in fact, that she must be protected with any extreme measures possible – she must be locked in a tower, or hidden in the woods by dwarves, or kept squirreled away in a castle fast asleep until she is rescued. Which brings us to Lieberman’s second essential fairytale element. The rescuer, regardless of his level of ineptitude or folly, brings with him salvation for the maiden. He is usually titled – a prince, king or duke – and he is almost always wealthy. His whisking away of our heroine ensures that she’ll lead a life of happiness and leisure befitting her beauty and temperament (and we’ll get to that “temperament” thing in a moment). The most powerful messages entrenched in these symbols serve to teach girls lessons about what makes them important, Lieberman says, and those messages are as follows: a woman is only as valuable as she is beautiful, beauty is the primary thing that guarantees marriage, and marriage is the answer to all of our prayers.

As for the “temperament” issue, Lieberman and Getty both point out that it is a maiden’s primary duty to be “nice.” A girl who is both beautiful and malleable is guaranteed to win the heart of the prince. Passivity is almost as valued as beauty, and qualities which are converse to that – curiosity, willfulness, spirit – are punished in the fairytale. Sleeping Beauty is punished for seeking out the spinning wheel, though it was forbidden, by a 100-year sleep. Red Riding Hood is punished with everything from rape to being eaten (depending upon the version of the tale) because she dares venture off her given path. Rapunzel is mutilated (her hair is cut, thereby rendering her “ugly”), banished and forced into a meager, desolate existence with her two illegitimate children because she dared defy the crone/witch. Even the simple-minded Snow White, who has been told not to talk to strangers, cannot help but venture out to converse with old peddler woman (the queen in disguise), only to be poisoned by that cursed apple.

The image of what constitutes a “heroine” is one of the first things fairytales teach us, and once ingrained, it can be difficult to undo. Lieberman sees the biggest flaw in fairytales as the implication that it is important to girls to sit in the tower of her own making, remote and removed from the world, waiting to be chosen, rather than get up and “do,” lest they miss their chance at life.

There she sits, a waiting prize for whatever man can ride a
horse up the glassy slope. So many of the heroines of fairy stories,
including the well-known Rapunzel, are locked up in towers, locked into a magic
sleep, imprisoned by giants, or otherwise enslaved, and waiting to be rescued by
a passing prince, that the helpless, imprisoned maiden is the quintessential
heroine of the fairy tale. (192)

What Rapunzel, among other fairy tales, tells us about us is that we as women hold secret images and ideas locked deep inside, perhaps so deep that we do not even see them ourselves as they play out in our lives. The drive to partner might be one that pulls us from the strands of our DNA. But it might be directed by the stories we were told – and those which we’ve told ourselves – about what makes us important, valuable, needed and lovable. Only by discarding those old, antiquated notions, can we set our own value and find our own worth.