Rapunzel Reinvented

By Maitri Vasudev 

  
“‘Tut, tut, child!’ said the Duchess. Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.’” – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.

In the essay ‘The Historical Model of the Development of Children’s Literature,’ Zohar Shavit argues that there is a universal structure in the development of children’s literature. Over centuries, he claims that there has been a consistency in the way reading material for children has been produced. He does not mean that the very same ideas about books for children have been carried forward over time, but that the system for the generation of popular works for children has been very consistent. Ever since the Puritans made the difference between books for children and adults, there has been a clash in what has been considered appropriate by institutions and those texts that children themselves enjoy reading. Institutions – first the Puritans and then the moralists – inculcated the former, their ethics, into the latter, the commercial formats, borrowing chapbook stories and instilling morals into them, so that they were enjoyable and instructive together. Fairytales were only narrated in chapbooks and were frowned upon until the moralists realised that combining them with significant lessons could further their cause.

As a retelling of the story of Rapunzel, Disney’s Tangled is a very interesting version indeed. Grimm’s account of the fairytale, which can be assumed to be the most popular one ever since it came out in 1812 as part of Children’s and Household Tales, has been overturned completely here. As opposed to Rapunzel being the daughter of a poor couple who is bribed away by Dame Gothel in exchange for just a plant that the mother craves during her pregnancy, the protagonist in the story is a princess; by birth, therefore, she is more empowered and more likely to be rescued than in the earlier one. Prince Charming, on the other hand, is replace by Eugene, a.k.a Flynn Rider, who is no royalty but a plain thief.

The first edition of Children’s and Household Tales was heavily criticised as being far too unsuitable for children – the idea of childhood was well into its construction by 1812. In the consequent editions, sexual references were removed so that Rapunzel, instead of asking the witch innocently why her dress was getting too tight (indicating that she is pregnant), asks her why it is easier for to pull the prince up the tower than it is to haul her, which gives the game away. Evil mothers in Snow White and Hansel and Gretel became stepmothers, and the Little Red Riding Hood turned into a cautionary tale about how straying from the path could prove unsafe. Punishments meted out to wrongdoers in the tale became very intense, making the Big Bad Wolf fall into a well and die and Dame Gothel remaining prisoner in her own tower for the rest of her life.

Can Tangled, then, be considered a children’s tale at all? It follows neither the religious brainwashing nor the unrelenting moral scheme of earlier institutions. It does not even tell of a prince that rescues a powerless girl (they aid help other, and there are several people that aid both of them, including the horse). The premise behind Rapunzel’s captivity is more complicated and comprehensive – it is not in mere trade for a medicinal plant that the evil woman takes the baby away but the magic golden hair that will keep her young if only she knows the song to sing to it. This also gives the length of her hair some credibility, which, if cut, loses its powers. It could be called a romantic comedy at best, with humour that is too complicated for children to understand.

On the surface, John Locke’s advice, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, for keeping children constantly occupied at their business (he means books, but it could be taken as just keeping them occupied usefully) is followed thoroughly in the beginning, when Rapunzel makes sure that she has something to do all the time: cook, clean, paint, read and, finally, brush her impossibly long hair. However, the whole narrative is about how abandoning her work to fulfil her dream of seeing the floating lights, rebelling against the safety and protection that her mother has supposedly sheltered her in, leads her to her true parents, whom she was taken away from at the beginning of her life. All of John Locke’s principles of keeping children occupied at their fancy if they refuse to do their work, so that they tire of it and simply return to their books as a respite, is followed by the Mother Gothel in the hope that Rapunzel return to her and acknowledge that “Mother knows best,” but it does not work. Her plan to let the girl keep going, yet sabotage her relationship with Eugene, backfires when the protagonist finds out that it was from her that she should have stayed away, not the rest of the world. Locke, in all likelihood, would not have considered this worthy of a story for children.

A generic continuum, however, as M O Grenby puts it in his book Children’s Literature, is very obvious in this case with the older versions of the fairytale. Grenby points out in his introduction that no book that is meant for children can ever be completely original in itself (this is nothing new, as it could be said of nearly all literature ever written). His point, though, is that these continuities in genre prevail over differences in style and content. “In each intervening generation the formula has been modified in many new ways,” he says, so much so that the child that watches Tangled enthralled in 2015 would certainly find the Grimms’ Rapunzel dull or even ridiculous. Yet, several details have been carried over: the mother is healed by a plant in her pregnancy, a handsome man helps the girl out of her confinement and, most importantly, the power of healing in her tears brings Eugene back to life as it cures the prince of blindness in the earlier version.

The film definitely does not conform to the idea of children’s narratives that either the Puritans or the moralists followed, but Tangled actually verifies Shavit’s claim that the form that is enjoyed by children is eventually institutionalised; what is underground comes to light and takes over, thus contributing to dominant ideology. Disney uses animation, which is the most predominant form of telling a children’s story on screen, along with a well-known fairytale to make ideas that are creeping from the periphery up to the centre more accessible to children. The heroine is no longer a helpless girl singing in a tower, waiting for her Prince Charming to rescue her. Instead, she is a bright, young woman, very capable of knocking a man out and holding him captive in her cupboard, and then striking a bargain with him to take her to see the lights. Knowing fully well that he is going to die if he does so, he cuts off her hair in order to save her, so that she can be free, even without him, thus rendering the idea that a woman is incomplete without a man null and void. Finally, she is the princess, he is the thief; it is he who is empowered by their marriage, not her.

Tangled is, in conclusion, an anecdote for children that uses ideas in the process of entering hegemonic discourse in a form that has already been accepted by its audience. The story has a moral, just as the earlier versions do, as Mother Gothel – the wicked witch – perishes in the end. Yet, the notion that didacticism is no longer necessary is slowly becoming popular in young parents and teachers, and so Flynn Rider, who is a burglar, ends up a prince, a standing he would certainly not deserve according to Locke. Children’s Literature is constantly being redefined, and this movie has undeniably facilitated its passage.