Follow Your Myth

The fairy tale Rapunzel has been told and retold for a long time and given different morals or what I call the takeaway from various writers.  

The story was retold again recently, in the Victor LaValle’s Changeling in episode 4 which appeared on Apple Tv.

In this episode it is Cal who is telling Apollo this fairy tale with the admonishment that it is about trying to keep our children safe, which apparently Apollo has failed to do.

Cal’s words resonate in this time of mass shootings across the country, in which we wonder to ourselves whether locking up our child in a tower may be more appealing than the risk of sending them out into the world.

Cal’s version of the story goes like this:

Once upon a time, an old man and a woman had long wished for a child. And once pregnant, the wife gazed longingly at a field of Rapunzel greens next door. So, her husband decided to steal some for her.  But a terrifying enchantress appears and said,

“How dare you, you thief! I will curse you!”

But she agreed that she would spare his life if they gave her their baby.

So how do we protect our children? That’s what Rapunzel is all about.  That’s the question that it’s asking.

You know the husband – he protects himself over the baby.  The baby gets snatched.  And then the enchantress, I mean, she won’t let that kid go anywhere in the world. She’s like a helicopter parent!

And still, the prince, he manages to find a way inside. I mean no matter what we do, the world finds a way in.

So how do we protect our children? That’s a question that has been asked for hundreds of years.   Ever since fairy tales were first told around an evening fire.

The new fears are the old fears and the old fears are ancient. But when it’s our turn to face them, they are made new.

Cal’s version of the story and her takeaway about keeping our children safe is not a bad takeaway for modern times or past times. 

In an unsafe world this would seem to be the underlying universal theme. 

When Rapunzel was written, the theme likely echoed the care needed to protect the “purity” of young women from the predatory men of the world, just as Red Riding Hood warns of this. 

Cal is saying that we still have reasons to wish to lock our children up in the tower and keep them safe. Whether it is gun violence, drugs or other reasons, parents may feel that urge.

In the story of Rapunzel, the ending is typically the same. Rapunzel meets a prince who climbs up her hair having observed the enchantress doing the same.  The prince though gets Rapunzel pregnant, and some versions of this story are more sexualized than the more sanitized Grimm brothers’ version.

In most stories it is agreed that the prince saves Rapunzel and she in turn saves him when he is blinded by the enchantress for what he has done.

DEPTH PERSPECTIVE

A Depth psychology perspective may take a different approach to this story, which in no way contradicts the main takeaways that have been underscored.  Like a dream that can be interpreted with different meanings, a fairy tale may have different takeaways.

From a Depth perspective we can look to some of what is being expressed as longings by both the prince and Rapunzel.  Although we can interpret Rapunzel’s predicament as being related to the times where women had less rights and freedoms than they have now, the hair implies a spiritual connection that connects her in her prison tower, to the world. Her remarkable hair is cast out and brings things back to her, and in this case, it brings back a prince who she falls in love with.  

Of course, even though she is isolated in the tower, it is also her voice which brings the prince to the tower, because he hears her singing.

I am making the most basic interpretation of this imagery. 

This does not speak to the confinement of Rapunzel and how her only choice in life is the ONE person who climbs up to her and also leaves her there.  She isn’t exactly given a choice of eligible bachelors. 

In this respect I have a different interpretation of the prince in terms of being villainous like the enchantress who trapped her in the tower.  

The reason for this interpretation is that the prince does not simply climb up and rescue her, he returns each night to a captive young woman, and eventually they even have a baby.  

In this way she is now subject to the whims of two people, the enchantress and the prince.

IT’S MYTHICAL WHAT WOMEN ARE CAPABLE OF

There are some motifs here repeated in LaValle’s story of the Changeling.  Apollo goes to the library where he hears Emma standing up to a homeless person who seems to struggle with some delusions. 

Apollo is drawn to her presence, her strength and her voice just as the prince was drawn to Rapunzel. 

Like the prince, Apollo returns repeatedly to the library to ask Emma out.  She turns him down, but we are shown that Apollo is nothing if not persistent.  

Then we are given the backstory to his father Brian, who took 9 years to get a first date with Apollo’s mom Lillian.

LOOK HARDER, LOOK HARDER, LOOK HARDER.

One of the things that I talk about with fairy tales is how each generation amplifies the same story with a different message.  

It is what I refer to as the takeaway.

For Rapunzel one of the messages that has been amplified in past generations is the purity and innocence of Rapunzel.

In the Disney version of Rapunzel, called Tangled, (2010), part of what is amplified in the story is Rapunzel’s strength, namely the magic of her hair to heal wounds and keep the enchantress youthful. 

Disney’s amplification is that she is not simply a fair maiden who is innocent, but rather there is something special about Rapunzel, whose hair is magical.   

The Changeling is not a direct descendent of Rapunzel, but the story’s protective enchantress Cal invokes Rapunzel and keeping our children safe from the dark creatures of the world.  

If I am not mistaken this means that Victor LaValle (and I have not read the book – and we are only on episode 6 currently) is amplifying a characteristic about women, and their implicit strength or “magic.”

What Victor LaValle amplifies and which I see people are missing, is the POWER of the women in the story. I have read armchair reviews where people suspect that Emma is possessed by a witch or other fairy spirits, and this is where I think people get off track because it was Emma’s natural power that drew Apollo to her.

In episode 5, LaValle narrates as Emma approaches the witch who grants her 3 wishes, but it is not the witch I believe he is talking about, it is Emma when LaValle says:

What LaValle is doing though is not something new, it is something that seems to get lost on us in reading fairy tales, and it is something I have explored in my thesis work more thoroughly than I can touch on here.

The hero of most fairy tales is not the prince, but we perceive him as so for various reasons I won’t get into here. 

The hero is a heroine, and much of what she represents is spiritual individuation, she is the divine feminine.

She is Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and the list goes on.  I believe that LaValle has tapped into that for this story (although clearly Apollo is also an integral hero of the story).  

What is touched on though is that there are those out there, the villains of the fairy tales who wish to steal from the heroine. They wish to possess her, take her power, and sometimes devour her – and that is a very old tale.

This does not mean that there cannot be male heroes to fairy tales, but I don’t think they are in the place we normally think to look.

Or at least they should not be represented by the prince, who through no doing of his own is born into a position of wealth and power – which he uses to also acquire beauty, and the power of the divine feminine.

If I am right, then Emma sets things in motion with the three wishes from the washer woman witch, but Apollo sets things onto a calamitous direction when he cuts the string breaking the agreement with the witch.  

Together they must go on this odyssey and in this they find their own strength of individuation.  In this it could represent a modern fairy tale that is about a man and woman on the path of individuation – but this is a dark fairy tale written in dark times. 

It is hard to know where this fairy tale will finish – but signs are this season will end in darkness, because Kinder Garten has warned us already.