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Author
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Comment
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Elizabeth Jane Baldry
Registered User
(1/20/06 1:41 am)
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Rapunzel
Hello. I'm a friend of Terri Windling and am currently writing a screenplay for Rapunzel. I really want to tap into the psychological depths of this story, and would be so interested to hear what you think of the tale and its meaning for you. Thank you.
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princessterribel
Registered User
(1/20/06 11:37 am)
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rapunzel
It seems that Rapunzel is something of a message to parents that they cannot keep their children locked up forever and must allow them to fly the nest as it were.
Perhaps it harks back to the middle ages when women were often kept inside...what I do find particualrly odd about the Grimm version (Considering that they tried to embed a protestant ethic in their tales) is the fact that Rapunzel becomes pregnant. There are definantly psychological depths to this story...only I fear I am not capable of expressing them.hehe
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Writerpatrick
Registered User
(1/20/06 11:56 am)
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Re: Rapunzel
If you're looking at psychology then you should look at the motivations of each character. Why did the witch want a child? How messed up would Rapunzel be after being locked up all her life? Would she develop agorophobia?
How would her parents feel? If her real parents lived just next door, wouldn't they have made some attempt at trying to get her back? (Or did the witch do away with them some time ago to prevent them from doing so.)
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(1/20/06 2:51 pm)
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Re: Rapunzel
I think in most versions of the story, the tower is in the middle of the woods, not in the next-door garden where the witch lived originally.
The Grimms eventually changed Rapunzel so that she did not become pregnant, but instead asked the witch why she was so much heavier than the prince, because to them, stupid was better than sexually active, I guess.
I find the significance of the haircut to be really interesting, as haircuts are a kind of rite of passage in so many cultures, and hair has so many different associations and meanings. What I find <i>really</i> interesting is that the Grimms' version turns a slightly annoyed fairy stepmother who banishes Rapunzel but provides her with food and shelter and every good thing even in her exile and eventually relents through love and welcomes R and her prince home into a wicked old sorceress.
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princessterribel
Registered User
(1/20/06 5:28 pm)
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oh yes
of course you are perfectly right about the pregnancy thing. Haven't read that version for a while. I did read somewhere that long hair was a symbol of virginity or chastity and that married women would cut their hair short...I do not know how true this statement is but perhaps it is something you might like to explore.
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Rosemary Lake
Registered User
(1/20/06 6:30 pm)
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Cabinet des Fees?
[[ the Grimms' version turns a slightly annoyed fairy stepmother who banishes Rapunzel but provides her with food and shelter and every good thing even in her exile and eventually relents through love and welcomes R and her prince home ]]
Do you mean the exile was R's time in the tower with the witch, or after R left it? I thought the Cabinet des Fees added the part about the prince being blinded and other gratutious suffering.
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(1/20/06 6:39 pm)
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Re: Cabinet des Fees?
No, I mean the post-tower interlude--in one of the Norton Critical fairy-tale editions--I can't remember whether it's The Great Fairy Tale Tradition or The Classic Fairy Tales, either Zipes or Tatar includes a pre-Grimm German version that involves a fairly benevolent fairy as the Mother Gothel figure who is trying to save Rapunzel from some terrible doom (from her later reactions to R's dalliance with the prince, the doom might have been out-of-wedlock-pregnancy, in true self-fulfilling-prophecy style) and furnishes the tower richly with everything R could want. When she gets annoyed, she banishes R to somewhere in the middle of nowhere with a well-stocked cottage and plenty of food and stuff, and then when the Prince finds R, the fairy, whose anger has abated with time, loves them all and they all go home, one big happy family. It may itself have been based on a Contes de Fees story, but the version included in the book was German, and predated the Grimms.
Princess--I just thought, cutting the hair of a woman when she gets married is a Jewish tradition as well. I was told folklorically (i.e. my parents and grandparents said) it came from the idea that now that she was a married woman, and didn't have to attract a man any more, you didn't want the cossacks/landowners raping her, and so by cutting off her hair, you rendered her unattractive. And there's so much wrong with that--my parents and grandparents were always very precise about how much was wrong with that set of statements--that I can't even be bothered to go into it, but it does confirm the idea of women's hair as sexual symbol. I don't know--perhaps there are people out there with more impeachable sources on what the Jewish hair-cutting-at-marriage tradition signifies.
Edited by: Veronica Schanoes at: 1/20/06 6:50 pm
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princessterribel
Registered User
(1/21/06 8:31 am)
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found something
Iv found a very interesting rapunzel discussion by chance in the archives, July 2000. It discusses similar elements.
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Daniel
Unregistered User
(1/21/06 9:56 am)
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Re: Rapunzel.
It might also be noted that the enforced cutting of a person's hair, especially a woman's hair, has been used as a punishment in many societies. At the end of the Second World War, as France, Belgium and other European countries were liberated from German occupation, women who had consorted with German soldiers had their hair publicly shorn by their compatriots.
Bearing in mind that the witch cuts Rapunzel's hair upon discovering the maiden's "amour" with the prince, could this be interpreted as a punishment for sexual betrayal?
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Elizabeth Jane Baldry
Registered User
(1/22/06 5:15 am)
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Rapunzel
Thanks everyone for your comments. THe character of Frau Gothel is an interesting one, very complex, that I want to understand fully in order to make her a convincing protagonist. Of course the teenage pregnancy and the sexual symbolism of the hair are all important too.
I would be particularly grateful for accounts of what this story means to individuals, or meant to them as a child.
Thanks again
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Raedyn L
Registered User
(1/22/06 4:40 pm)
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Re: Rapunzel
Hmm. Well, in one version I read the prince fell from the tower and was blinded by thorns, and when Rapunzel escaped with him her tears fell into his eyes and healed them.
It was a very interesting aspect that lent to the magic of the story--love conquers all.
Love certainly conquered the fear of a witch's ownership of the garden you were stealing lettuce from, and about sixteen years locked up in an inpenetrable tower, so blindness was probably a cinch :D.
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Gretel Breadcrumbs
Unregistered User
(1/25/06 1:13 am)
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Something to Check Out
I suggest you try checking out the book 'Zel' by the author Donna Jo Napoli.
www.amazon.com/gp/product...n=283155by
It pretty much explores all the psychological subtext of Rapunzel-sexual awakening, obsessive love, etc. I am ashamed to admit that as a child the story bored me as I did not grasp its meaning, but after reading Zel years ago, I finally do. I write screenplays myself and wish you all the best of luck!
Sincerely,
Gretel ;)
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Elizabeth Jane Baldry
Registered User
(1/25/06 9:24 am)
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Rapunzel
Thanks for your good wishes, Gretel. I've read Zel, and enjoyed it. Although my adaptation will be very different. The more I look into the story, the deeper and more haunting I think it could be. It's such fine exploring a tale like this.
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Rosemary Lake
Registered User
(1/29/06 7:11 pm)
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rite of passage for Chinese girl
www.english.uiuc.edu/maps...letter.htm
Here are several essays on a poem translated from Chinese, which many of the translators interpret as a child wearing hair short with bangs -- when later as a married woman she would wear it longer.
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Writerpatrick
Registered User
(1/30/06 9:27 am)
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Re: rite of passage for Chinese girl
That's interesting. It's sort of the opposite of a general cultural trend today of long hair on young girls and short hair on women. A haircut on a woman can be considered a rite-of-passage and a sign of sexual maturity. (This isn't an absolute, though.)
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friskymongoose
Unregistered User
(1/30/06 1:18 pm)
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shorn hair = adultery?
This may be a stretch, but I think it's useful to take all historical customs into account when looking at these tales. A thought that comes to mind (especially after Daniel's comment) is that Rapunzel's guardian may have been punishing her for "adultery" in an ancient sense of the word. In Naomi Wolf's wonderful book Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood, there is a section entitled "A Short History of the Slut", in which she chronicles many of the ways women and girls have been historically punished for "crimes" relating to their sexuality.
"The historian Tacitus felt that Rome in the first century was too easy on loose women. He praised, in contrast to his own society, the Germans. Among them, when a woman was accused of adultery, 'Punishment is swift, and is the prerogative of the husband: in the presence of relatives, the husband expels the wife from the house nude, with her hair cut, and drives her througth the whole villiage with a whip' " (77).
Wolf also describes how "During the Middle Ages, from the sixth through the eighth centuries ... Adultery included lovemaking outside the institution of marriage. According to the law of the Burgindians, the 'stench of adultery' was so loathsome that women found to have had sex outside marriage-whether the women were wives, unmarried girls, or widows-were banished from their homes and comdemned to die from strangulation, their bodies to be discarded in a marsh" (80).
A few pages later, Wolf writes of how she was struck by a photograph of the mummified remains of "a fourteen-year old German girl from WIndeby in Schleswig-Holstein, dating from the first century C.E." who had been "blindfolded, strangled, adn drowned, most likely as retribution for 'adultery'-for what we would now call a teenage love affair" (82).
Perhaps these customs, dating back to first century C.E. Germany, were still around when Rapunzel was created. At the very least, it is not hard to imagine that the attitudes they were based on lived on in story, for they are very much alive and kicking in the 21st century, from America to Africa and beyond....
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Elizabeth Jane Baldry
Registered User
(1/30/06 3:28 pm)
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Re: shorn hair = adultery?
That is absolutely fascinating information. A woman's hair as a symbolism for her sexuality is deep and widespread. It is also interesting that Samson's strength in the biblical story is tied up with his hair.
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avalondeb
Registered User
(2/3/06 1:41 pm)
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Re: shorn hair = adultery?
Although on the surface Samson's strength via the length of his hair seems an interesting parallel, the reason his hair was long was due to his religious vows involving his being a Nazarite.
Not cutting his hair was only one part of his vows. A Nazarite was bound by a vow to leave the hair uncut, to abstain from wine and strong drink, and to practice extraordinary purity of life and devotion, the obligation being for life, or for a certain time.
So his losing his strength after his hair was cut was more the breaking of a religious vow than just the act of haircutting.
Edited by: avalondeb at: 2/3/06 1:42 pm
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neverossa
Registered User
(2/4/06 5:53 am)
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long hair
That's interesting.
Just yesterday I went through a book about the figure of the Banshee (the death-messenger of the Irish tradition), and the author was reflecting on the long hair as one of the most important feature of the fairy woman. Long hair, she said, is also an attribute of mermaids. So it seems to be typical of fairy women, despite of their beauty - I'd say (it's just a thought) it seems to be an attribute of liminal states or liminal creatures. Water, the land of the mermaid, is a place of passage between life and death; the banshee is the death fairy; more, if we think of other cultures we find for example the Sedna of the Inuit and shamanistic tradition, which is an old woman, living under the sea, with very long, tangled hair, that the shaman has to comb to bring back fertility to the natural world.
Then there is Rapunzel, closed in her tower.
Rapunzel who's a girl, as everyone know, going to cross the sexual and natural boundary of womanhood.
When the witch discovers the change happened in R. she cuts her hair. As to say: R. crossed the boundary.
Can we say that Rampuzel is crossing a symbolic death - growing up - , and that her long hair testify for it?
Also the prince has to "die".
Nothing in fairy-tales is casual or just due to sentimentalism.
Becoming blind means "to see" in the otherworld (but that's another discussion).
Edited by: neverossa at: 2/4/06 6:17 am
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Elizabeth Jane Baldry
Registered User
(2/4/06 6:22 am)
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blindness
That's so important to stress that nothing in fairytales is casual.
The prince wanders in the wilderness blind for some years, and during this time, I believe he learns to see Rapunzel as a woman in her own right rather than loving her for her attributes of hair and siren singing voice.
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