steps nor door, only a small window above. When the
witch wished to be let in, she would stand below and
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel! let down your hair!” 14
The heroic prince, having finished with Snow-white
and Cinderella, now happened upon Rapunzel. When
the witch discovered the liaison, she beat up Rapunzel,
cut off her hair, and cloistered her “in a waste and
desert place, where she lived in great woe and misery. ” 15
The witch then confronted the prince, who fell from the
tower and blinded himself on thorns. (He recovered
when he found Rapunzel, and they then lived happily
ever after. )
Onceuponatime: The Roles
41
Hansel and Grethel had a mother too. She simply
abandoned them:
I will tell you what, husband.. . . We will take the
children early in the morning into the forest, where
it is thickest; we will make them a fire, and we will give
each of them a piece of bread, then we will go to our
work and leave them alone; they will never find the
way home again, and we shall be quit of them. 16
Hungry, lost, frightened, the children find a candy
house which belongs to an old lady who is kind to them,
feeds them, houses them. She greets them as her children, and proves her maternal commitment by preparing to cannibalize them.
These fairy-tale mothers are mythological female
figures. T hey define for us the female character and
delineate its existential possibilities. When she is good,
she is soon dead. In fact, when she is good, she is so passive in life that death must be only more o f the same.
Here we discover the cardinal principle o f sexist ontology—the only good woman is a dead woman. When she is bad she lives, or when she lives she is bad. She
has one real function, motherhood. In that function,
because it is active, she is characterized by overwhelming malice, devouring greed, uncontainable avarice.
She is ruthless, brutal, ambitious, a danger to children
and other living things. W hether called mother, queen,
stepmother, or wicked witch, she is the wicked witch,
the content o f nightmare, the source o f terror.
42
Woman Haling
The Beauteous Lump of Ultimate Good
What can it do? It grows,
It bleeds. It sleeps.
It walks. It talks,
Singing, “love’s got me, got me. ”
Kathleen Norris
For a woman to be good, she must be dead, or as
close to it as possible. Catatonia is the good woman’s
most winning quality.
Sleeping Beauty slept for 100 years, after pricking
her finger on a spindle. The kiss of the heroic prince
woke her. He fell in love with her while she was asleep,
or was it because she was asleep?
Snow-white was already dead when the heroic prince
fell in love with her. “I beseech you, ” he pleaded with
the 7 dwarfs, “to give it to me, for I cannot live without
looking upon Snow-white. ” 17 It awake was not readily
distinguishable from it asleep.
Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow-white, Rapunzel
—all are characterized by passivity, beauty, innocence,
and victimization. They are archetypal good women —
victims by definition. They never think, act, initiate,
confront, resist, challenge, feel, care, or question. Sometimes they are forced to do housework.
They have one scenario of passage. They are moved,
as if inert, from the house of the mother to the house
o f the prince. First they are objects of malice, then they
are objects o f romantic adoration. They do nothing to
warrant either.
That one other figure of female good, the good
fairy, appears from time to time, dispensing clothes
Onceuponatime: The Roles
43
or virtue. H er power cannot match, only occasionally
moderate, the power o f the wicked witch. She does have
one physical activity at which she excels — she waves her
wand. She is beautiful, good, and unearthly. Mostly,
she disappears.
These figures o f female good are the heroic models
available to women. And the end o f the story is, it would
seem, the goal o f any female life. T o sleep, perchance
to dream?
The Prince, the Real Brother
The man of flesh and bone; the man who
is bom, suffers, and dies—above all, who
dies; the man who eats and drinks and
plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the
man who is seen and heard; the brother,
the real brother.
Miguel de Unamuno,
Tragic Sense of Life
He is handsome and heroic. He is a prince, that is,
he is powerful, noble, and good. He rides a horse. He
travels far and wide. He has a mission, a purpose. Inevitably he fulfills it. He is a person o f worth and a worthwhile person. He is strong and true.
O f course, he is not real, and men do suffer trying to
become him. T hey suffer, and murder, and rape, and
plunder. T hey use airplanes now.
What matters is that he is both powerful and good,
that his power is by definition good. What matters is
that he matters, acts, succeeds.
One can point out that in fact he is not very bright.
44
Woman Haling
For instance, he cannot distinguish Cinderella from her
two sisters though he danced with her and presumably
conversed with her. His recurring love o f corpses does
not indicate a dynamic intelligence either. His fall from
the tower onto thorns does not suggest that he is even
physically coordinated, though, unlike his modern
counterparts, he never falls off his horse or annihilates
the wrong village.
The truth o f it is that he is powerful and good when
contrasted with her. The badder she is, the better he is.
The deader she is, the better he is. That is one moral of
the story, the reason for dual role definition, and the
shabby reality of the man as hero.
The Husband, the Real Father
The desire of men to claim their children may be the crucial impulse of civilized life.
George Gilder, Sexual Suicide
Mostly they are kings, or noble and rich. They are,
again by definition, powerful and good. They are never
responsible or held accountable for the evil done by
their wicked wives. Most of the time, they do not notice
it.
There is, of course, no rational basis for considering
them either powerful or good. For while they are governing, or kinging, or whatever it is that they do do, their wives are slaughtering and abusing their beloved
progeny. But then, in some cultures nonfairy-tale