Words and Worlds

by Alison Lurie

  Another possible political parallel concerns the Prison of Azekaban. This is an isolated place far to the east where those judged to be evildoers are exiled by the Ministry and tortured by Dementors. When the series began, it was unlikely that many readers would associate Azekaban with actual and notorious Near Eastern prisons, but today the connection seems unavoidable. It is also noteworthy that as time has passed, Rowling’s books seem to express a greater and greater suspicion of political authority. Nineteen years after the end of the series, not only Azekaban and the bumbling Ministry of Magic, but their Muggle equivalents, are still around.

  Bad Husbands

  Among the best-known fairy tales, “Bluebeard” is an oddity. Unlike “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and many others, it does not end with a marriage. “Bluebeard” is not even technically a fairy story: it contains no witches or fairy godmothers or magic transformations; there is only one minor supernatural element, the permanent stain of blood on the key to the forbidden chamber. Stories like “Cinderella” tell us that a troubled, often unhappy adolescence ends with a happy marriage; “Bluebeard” tells us that the real trouble begins after the wedding. In the classic tales, the prince is charming, but the heroine’s relatives are either hostile or weak or both. In “Bluebeard,” however, the husband has already killed several previous wives, and when the heroine discovers their bodies, he intends to murder her. She is rescued just in time, by her sister and brothers in some versions, her mother in others.

  The heroine of this story is also, depending on how you look at it, morally flawed or very unlucky or both. In the first printed version, as one of Charles Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose (l697), she initially finds Bluebeard hideously ugly. But after she and her family and friends spend a week at one of his luxurious country houses, where there are “dinner services of gold and silver, beautifully upholstered furniture, and carriages covered in gold leaf,” she decides that his beard “was not really so blue after all,” and agrees to marry him. Later, when he has given her the keys to every room in the house, but warned her to stay out of one small chamber, she can hardly wait to disobey his instructions.

  As Maria Tatar says in Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives, the two most vital ingredients of the tale are “the curiosity of a woman and the secrets of a man.” Though the moral at the end of Perrault’s version warns against curiosity, several readers have remarked that the wife’s inquisitiveness was justified, because she discovered that her husband was a serial killer. Tatar suggests that “our own culture has turned [Bluebeard’s wife] into something of a heroine, a woman whose problem-solving skills and psychological finesse make her a shrewd detective, capable of rescuing herself and often her marriage.”

  “Bluebeard” is widely known: there are British, French, German, Italian, and Appalachian American versions, and the basic plot reappears in modern fiction, though often with a different ending or a different moral. In both Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, for instance, the heroines, as Tatar puts it, “rather than aligning themselves with discovery and detection, become partners in crime,” accessories after the fact. Going even further, she presents Nabokov’s Lolita as a Bluebeard tale, one in which Humbert Humbert destroys Lolita and her mother not by murdering them, but by writing about them.

  One of the best and most original chapters in Secrets Beyond the Door deals with what Maria Tatar calls the “Bluebeard films” of the 1940s: films like George Cukor’s Gaslight and Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion, in which husbands who have large expensive houses and awful secrets try to kill their wives or drive them mad. In these films the wife gradually becomes strong and independent enough to uncover the secret, but she does not have a supportive family (often she is an orphan with no siblings) and she does not escape the marriage. As Tatar says, “The happy endings are, once again, a letdown. When the secrets beyond the door to marriage are solved, there is real closure. The woman who has passed beyond the door is now permanently encased behind it… . And this, above all else, becomes the real curse of living happily ever after.”

  Maria Tatar is also interesting on Bluebeard as a cultural hero, the victim rather than the villain of the story. In a chapter titled “Monstrous Wives” she traces a connection between modern fiction, drama, and film, and ancient views of women as insatiably and fatally curious, like the Biblical Eve and Lot’s Wife, and the Greek Psyche and Pandora (who opened a forbidden chest and released every known evil into the world).

  It is possible, of course, to read “Bluebeard” as a metaphor, a greatly exaggerated version of what marriage meant for many women in the past. In the seventeenth century, when Perrault first recorded the story, well-to-do and aristocratic women often married relative or even total strangers. In these marriages the bride was likely to be much younger and less experienced than the groom. Exogamy was traditional: when the woman married she left home and moved to wherever her husband lived and worked. Often she knew no one there. A nice girl was also supposed to be a virgin on her wedding day, while her husband was assumed to have known other women. This was a pattern that persisted in Europe well into the nineteenth and even the early twentieth century.

  Naturally, the new bride in such marriages was often curious about her husband’s past. Whom had he been involved with before he met her? If he had rejected one or more women, had there been violent, painful scenes? Was he a “lady-killer” in the conventional sense? Was his symbolic closet full of skeletons? Clues might appear in the form of letters and photos, friends might gossip, and sometimes the actual victims of the “lady-killer” would appear and tell their unhappy stories to the current wife.

  Speculating about the popularity of Bluebeard films in the Hollywood of the 1940s, Maria Tatar points out that this “was, after all, a time of crisis, when women in great numbers were marrying men who were real strangers—soldiers going off to war… . It was also a time when women were realizing that the men to whom they had been married were becoming strangers. After experiencing the dark horrors of combat, veterans returned home disaffected and alienated.” Many of these men had actually killed people—in a sense, like Bluebeard, they were murderers—and more often than not they wanted to shut these events away in a locked cupboard of their minds.

  Today in America, it seems to me, the Bluebeard story has a different sort of resonance. More than fifty percent of marriages end in divorce, and most divorced people remarry; thus, many brides and grooms come to their wedding with important emotional baggage. Unpacking this baggage, especially by force, can be a big mistake. The story of Bluebeard may be relevant again now because it warns women against obsessive curiosity about their partner’s past. The lesson is still delivered frequently, and now to both sexes; advice columnists warn their readers, both male and female, against revealing too much. They know that curiosity about this past can be destructive—even murderously destructive. Both women and men may discover that their spouses suffer from obsessive jealousy, not only spying on their daily life, but cross-questioning them about every date they have ever had. In this situation, “Bluebeard” still has meaning as a cautionary tale, warning us that though very few husbands or wives are serial killers, many have—and perhaps deserve to keep—their secrets.

  Rapunzel: The Girl

  in the Tower

  At first glance most fairy tales seem so implausible and so irrelevant to contemporary life that their survival is hard to understand. The story of “Hansel and Gretel,” for instance, asks us to believe that two children abandoned in a forest will soon find a house made of gingerbread. But these and other tales live on because they are dramatic metaphors of real life. “Hansel and Gretel,” for instance, represents the two greatest fears of young children—that they will be abandoned, and that they will be imprisoned. Many adults, if they think back, will remember one or both of these fears, though usually in a less extreme version. Most of us occasional
ly felt neglected, disregarded, unsupported—unloved. Or we felt over-protected, over-indulged, intruded upon—loved, but in a very possessive, almost scary way.

  The wicked stepmother who has no food for her children and the wicked witch whose house is made of cake and candy are dramatic, exaggerated images of two kinds of bad parent. They reappear symbolically in real life every Halloween, when the traditional warning “Never take candy from a stranger” is revoked; when we send our own children out into a dark world to forage for sweets, and stay home to give handfuls of foil-wrapped chocolates to kids we don’t know.

  Different features of a fairy tale may be important to different readers. When I taught children’s literature, I discovered that for one of my students, “Hansel and Gretel” was essentially about a brave and clever girl who saves her brother from danger. For another, it was about a brave and clever boy who figures out how to find his and his sister’s way home by marking their path through the woods. Later a friend told me that she had always thought of the tale as a warning against a greed for sweets.

  “Rapunzel” was once much less widely known than “Hansel and Gretel.” Currently, however, it has nearly three thousand entries on Amazon alone. Some of them are duplicates, but even the first hundred include fifty-one separate retellings, revisions, and spin-offs, including a pop-up book, a picture book starring Barbie as the heroine, mysteries, thrillers, romance novels, young adult fiction, and a pornographic S&M novel. There is a reason for this. “Rapunzel” is a complex story, which includes many classic themes, including a witch who is serially both kinds of bad parent: first imprisoning and then rejecting her foster daughter. It is also especially relevant today.

  The earliest known appearance of the tale in print occurs in the Pentamerone by Giambattista Basile, published in Italy in 1637. His “Petrosinella,” like the later and better-known version in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Household Tales, begins with two intense cravings: that of a pregnant woman for a plant that grows in a garden next door, and that of a witch for a girl child. In Italy, Spain, and France, the plant the expectant mother longs for is parsley; in Grimm it is called “rapunzel.” According to botanists, this is probably Valerianella locusta, known as feldsaladt in Germany, and in English as “corn salad” or “lamb’s lettuce”; in other versions of the tale the plant is “rampion,” Campanula rapunculus, known sometimes as Rapunzel-Glockenblumen.

  An ancient and widespread folk belief proclaims that the food cravings of a mother-to-be must be satisfied; if they are not, she risks bad luck or a miscarriage. There may be scientific truth behind the superstition: possibly in these cases important nutrients are missing from the mother’s diet. A poor woman who is pregnant in the wintertime, for instance, might lack vitamin C, folic acid, and iron, all abundant in dark-green vegetables, and one important characteristic of both parsley and lamb’s lettuce is that they are resistant to frost.

  Today, though between fifty and seventy-five percent of pregnant women in America report food cravings, a wish for salad greens is rare. Expectant mothers are more likely to crave fresh fruit, especially strawberries. A desire for chocolate or sweets is also common, and may suggest that the mother-to-be has previously denied herself sugar in order to remain fashionably thin. (On the Internet today it is possible to buy maternity T-shirts that read THE BABY WANTS CHOCOLATE, THE BABY WANTS ICE CREAM, or THE BABY WANTS STRAWBERRIES.) The medical disorder known as “pica,” a hunger for nonfood substances, may occur in pregnancy as a compulsion to eat clay, plaster, toothpaste, or laundry starch; it has sometimes been explained as a need for calcium.

  In the Grimms’ tale the expectant mother grows pale, weak, and sickly; she tells her husband that if she cannot have the rapunzel that grows in the witch’s garden, she will die. Responding to her desperation, he climbs the garden wall and steals the plant she craves. On a second visit the witch catches him; she allows him to take the greens, but only if he promises her the baby when it is born. In the Pentamerone it is the mother-to-be herself who steals parsley from the garden next door and has to give up her child, though not for several years. There is also a variant Italian tale, “Prunella,” that leaves out the pregnancy: instead the poor child herself steals plums from a witch’s tree, and is caught and imprisoned. From a nutritionist’s point of view, she, too, perhaps, lacks vitamin C.

  The heroine of all these stories has the same name as the plant, though sometimes in the diminutive form: Basile’s heroine is called Petrosinella, and in French she is Persinette. Symbolically, the child replaces and becomes what has been stolen and eaten. (There is an echo here of the still current folk belief that whatever a woman craves during her pregnancy will later become her child’s favorite food.) Popular experts on diet and cooking claim that we are what we eat, and it is not unusual for people to be called “Candy,” “Honey,” “Sugar,” or “Peaches,” both in real life and in fiction. (Though Judy Blume says that the names of her famous character, Fudge, and his little sister, Tootsie, were not consciously chosen for this reason, chocolate was for a long time her own favorite food.) More darkly, there is the implication that a child is a consumable commodity. As Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things (who were, he has said, based on his own aunts and uncles) put it: “We’ll eat you up, we love you so!”

  To many readers the most memorable feature of “Rapunzel” is the incantation, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” with its accompanying image of a beautiful young girl standing in the window of a tower with her incredibly long hair hanging down outside. At first, the witch who has adopted Rapunzel climbs up this hair to visit her, then a wandering prince does so with far-reaching consequences. Finally the witch hangs Rapunzel’s chopped-off tresses from the window, and the prince, deceived, starts to climb them and then falls. He scratches his eyes out on the brambles that ring the tower, and becomes blind. If Rapunzel’s hair had been of a normal length, none of this could have happened.

  What is this about? Of course, for centuries almost all women in Europe and North America had what we would now consider very long hair, though it was not always visible. As Marina Warner points out in From the Beast to the Blonde, for many years loose hair was the sign of a virgin or unwedded girl, and thus stood for youth and innocence. After a woman married, she pinned her hair up and/or concealed it under some sort of cap or wrapping, except in private.

  Long, thick hair has always been thought beautiful and erotically alluring: artists and writers have celebrated it as the sign of a lush, intensified womanliness. In nineteenth-century America it was a source of pride if you could actually sit on your hair, and to lose it was a disaster: when Jo in Little Women sells her thick chestnut mane, it is treated by her family as a kind of minor tragedy. Similarly, in “Rapunzel” and its variants the witch often begins her revenge by violently chopping off the heroine’s hair.

  The witch’s, and later the prince’s, demand that Rapunzel let down her hair echoes a colloquial phrase first recorded in print in the mid-nineteenth century, though it may be much older. To “let down one’s hair” (or “let down one’s back hair”) still means to relax and drop one’s reserve, to act or speak freely and unguardedly. This is what Rapunzel does, first when she accepts the prince as her lover, and then when she asks the witch why she is so much heavier to pull up than he is. (In the first and less bowdlerized edition of the Grimms’ Household Tales, Rapunzel also asks why her dress is getting so tight, alerting the witch to a pregnancy that later results in twins.)

  But though long, thick hair was often referred to as a “woman’s glory,” it was also her burden. Washing it, drying it, combing out the tangles, brushing it (fifty to a hundred strokes a day were recommended in ladies’ magazines), plaiting it, pinning it up, and taking it down took a lot of time and effort. The brilliant children’s writer E. Nesbit dramatized this problem in a 1908 fairy tale called “Melisande, or Long and Short Division,” where the princess’s golden hair grows so fast that she is almost
immobilized. The date is significant, since in the early twentieth century many women could and did decide to wear their hair short. This choice, which now seems more or less inconsequential, was seen at the time as a serious, even dangerous sign of sexual freedom and independence. It was also often criticized as unattractive and unfeminine: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 story “Bernice Bobs her Hair” is a famous exploration of these issues.

  In several modern versions of “Rapunzel” the heroine is oppressed by her magically elongated braid, which is so heavy and bulky that she can hardly move about her tower room. In the young-adult novel Golden by Cameron Dokey (2006), she exclaims, “You think this is beautiful?… You try living with it for a while. I trip over it when I walk. Get tangled up in it when I sleep. I can’t cut it.”

  Another teenage novel, Letters from Rapunzel, by Sara Lewis Holmes (2007), takes a scientific approach to the problem of Rapunzel’s hair. Here the first-person heroine is not really named after a plant; she adopts the pseudonym because she has to spend hours every day in study hall supervised by a teacher she calls The Homework Witch. Though she feels helpless and imprisoned, her essential problem is one of parental abandonment. Her father is also confined—hospitalized with depression (which she calls The Evil Spell) and her mother works long hours to support the family and spends most of her free time visiting her sick husband.

  Having learned that human hair grows an average of six inches a year, the narrator calculates that the real Rapunzel must have been in her tower for eighteen years, which would make her thirty-one. For a junior high-school student this is an impossible age for romantic adventure, so she concludes that Rapunzel did not age in captivity. The lesson is clear: if you remain confined, you cannot grow up. Holmes’s heroine doesn’t just wait for a prince; instead, like the heroines of most young-adult novels, she eventually manages to rescue herself by taking responsibility for her own future.