Fairytale Feature: Why You Don't Want a Godmother! (but you do want the book)

The most fitting poem I could find to start this month’s feature is from Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes. It’s too long to put up here without it taking over the entire post, so instead you can read it here, and my challenge to you is try to get through it without laughing madly. I bet you can’t.

Originally, Cinderella was going to be my inaugural feature. I was planning to compare it with either the Disney film of the same name, the Drew Barrymore film Ever After, or both. I didn’t purely because I went to see Tangled that first month, and so talked about Rapunzel instead. I think Cinderella and I would both have lost out had I reviewed it then, as I would have missed the chance to read Godmother: A Cinderella Story, and Cinderella would have lost the opportunity to be enriched by it. After reading Mermaid and Godmother, Carolyn Turgeon is going on the list of authors whose every word I must immediately devour. You’ve been warned – I loved this book.

The first recorded version of Cinderella came from China sometime between 1850 and 1860; the next version, published in 1697 was Charles Perrault’s. The Grimm Brothers’ got to the party quite late. Their version was originally called Ash Girl or Aschenputtel  in the original German, and does not feature a fairy godmother at all, but rather birds who drop down dresses and other such wish –fulfilling items from the hazel tree which Cinderella has planted on her mother’s grave.

During my (continuing) studies of women, feminism, and fairytales, the vast majority of the academic texts I have read make heavy reference to the figure of the fairy godmother. I find this really interesting, considering that the godmother doesn’t appear in the original tale, and of the three tales I’ve discussed Perrault’s is the only one in which such a character appears. I wondered why Perrault would add a magical woman into the mix when in other versions, animals suffice for all the purposes she fulfils. Is it purely because she is human? Having not read Perrault’s version, I’m going purely on the Godmother from the Disney film (probably not the best idea I’ve ever had...), who surely is there to provide the maternal element which is so lacking from the step-mother. The film provides Cinderella with many nurturing friends of the animal persuasion, but at the end of the day, none of them can give her a hug and tell her not to worry like the godmother can. Part of the Godmother’s magic is in her ability ‘make everything better’ for Cinderella, in much the way that a child goes to its’ parents for reassurance, relying on them to fix things. It is the failure to fulfil this maternal and nurturing role that tortures Lil throughout Godmother.

Coming to it from this angle (which the more I think about it, seems to make sense), makes for very interesting comparisons with Godmother.

As I’ve mentioned, I liked Godmother. In fact, it was absolutely so amazing that the word amazing does not suffice, and I cannot find a word that’s strong enough to express the intensity of the feelings that I have towards this book. The story was absolutely riveting – involving, unbelievably vivid, full of bright colours, beautiful dresses, and stunningly lifelike characters. Writing about it is frustrating me, because my vocabulary is NOT BIG ENOUGH TO EXPRESS THE AWESOME! I need word a day toilet paper or something...

The godmother of the title is Lil, banished from the world of faerie for failing to get Cinderella to the ball. Living in New York City and spending her days sorting second hand books at the used bookstore she works in (dream job – dreamy sigh), the novel follows her story, through flashbacks, as she attempts to atone for her failing of  Cinderella, by sending another beautiful girl, Veronica, to the ball. Lil’s story is poignantly told through interspersing chapters taking place in New York with chapters occurring in the faerie world, leading up to the tragedy which resulted in her exile, the reason for which is revealed in stages, so you do not realise the full awfulness until the very end of the book, but Godmother definitely plays on and develops the potential darkness contained in the original. The idea of concepts of femininity kept returning to me as I was thinking about this feature, as Turgeon plays around with them a lot. Although when we meet Lil she is obviously an old woman, during the part of the story involving Cinderella, she is young and stunning. Turgeon is then able to use this to explore ideas of sisterhood and rivalry; what if the Godmother fell in love with the prince? What if Cinderella wasn’t the perfect, beautiful, happy princess she’s always portrayed as being? What is she was, as the novel states, broken? Do only undamaged people get to have happy ever afters?

It was Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber which got me interested in the idea of reworkings of fairytales in general, and specifically from a feminist point of view, and I really enjoy the way that Carolyn Turgeon’s novels, like much of Carter’s, really play with ideas of what people  are capable of, and the potential that they have for darkness. If you’ve not read The Bloody Chamber , I highly recommend it although it’s not for the faint of heart. Throughout the collection Carter uses the genre to subvert and question concepts of femininity, and it’s just so clever. Turgeon’s writing is similar in its intentions, but provides more room for forgiveness, redemption, and hope.

“All my old loves will be returned to me” is a quotation written in French inside one of the old volumes in Daedalus Books, where Lil works, and it completely sums up the mood of the book while encapsulating the quest to belong present in the original story. In the case of Lil, the loves she has lost are many; she is filled with regret for loss of her sister and friends, the faerie realm, Cinderella, and the Prince. For Veronica, the sharp witted, vivacious young hair artist Lil befriends, her losses are less tangible, but there’s a bad breakup in there somewhere, and she has in some ways lost her sense of self, and for George, Lil’s employer and owner of the bookshop, his loves are the books that he collects, but although he has a shop full of books, his life appears to be devoid – he has suffered a bad divorce, and gives off a great feeling of isolation and sadness throughout the novel. I liked the cyclical nature of the book, and the way that, in the end, everybody’s loves were returned to them.

For me, Turgeon’s finest moment in Godmother was its triumphant ending. She brings the ideas of belief and perception to their extreme: Veronica cannot see Lil’s wings, begging the question of whether Lil is truly a faerie, or a crazy old lady. At the end of the day, it all comes down to what you believe. You have to decide, as J.M Barrie so rightly said, whether or not you believe in fairies, and for me that was the most amazing thing. I love that the story wraps you up and twists you around and engrosses you in Lil and her life and her secrets and the fact that nobody must ever find out, and then turns around and goes OH WAIT, HANG ON, IT MIGHT NOT EVEN BE REAL!!! Mindtrip!

My ‘original’, being as how it’s a Grimm Brothers version, does not have a happy ending. In fact, at Cinderella’s wedding the birds that substitute for the fairy godmother come and peck out the stepsister’s eyes as payment for their crimes against Cinderella. Where Godmother ends with the possibility of forgiveness, the Grimms are all about the judgement. It’s also interesting to note that in this fairytale, as in many others, it is other women repressing Cinderella and preventing her from fulfilling her true destiny. Women hold her back, while the Prince (a man, duh!) saves her. And yes, I am up on my ranting high horse, sorry about that! The Grimm’s Cinderella is held back by her family and saved by the Prince, where Turgeon’s Cinderella is held back by herself and destroyed by a combination of the Prince and her Godmother. In Turgeon’s version, love and destiny are not all – conquering, and sometimes the destruction of self can be so total that it’s impossible to see a way to be happy.

If you read Godmother in the way I did (basically, I believe in fairies!), the ending is a very happy resolution for all concerned: Lil finds forgiveness and escape from her self-torture, and Veronica and George each find their own happiness. It’s lovely, and personally I prefer it to the ending of the original – give me forgiveness over judgement any day!

April Fairytale Feature (in May..): Mermaids!

From The Mermaid Sets the Story Straight

By Debra Cash

Hans lied. He simply couldn't imagine


I would want to shed the blubbery tail


dragging behind me like a torn bridal gown


that I would prefer to stand on my own two feet


and walk on my own, love or no love.




Hans lied. He didn't know the prince was just an excuse


for me to change my life, to stop being a sister, a daughter.




He was right about the knives; even masochistic Hans


knew it hurts to walk alone even when the walk is downhill,


even when you know where you are going.


But it would have hurt my pride even more to stay,


modeling for those wooden women who face into the gale


steered by princes and merchants and pirates.




Of course I have a soul.


The foam of heaven, you know, is not that different


from the foam seething at the water's edge.




The full poem can be found here.

This month, I’ve taken on a lot. I found Mermaid by Carolyn Turgeon in the library, back in March, and took it as a sign that my next feature should be The Little Mermaid, or to give it Hans Christian Andersen’s original title, The Little Sea Maid. Obviously, that meant I needed to read Mermaid, The Little Sea Maid, and re-watch Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and all this in a month where I’ve not felt overly inclined towards writing at all! Despite literally having to force myself to sit down and begin writing this, I’m glad that Mermaid found me. It’s been interesting.
I’ve always adored the story of the Little Mermaid. I have a strange addiction to the sea, which is what led to us moving to live near it at the end of last year. When I’m standing looking at the sea, I find it really hard to tear my eyes away, or to concentrate on anything else but the water: the way that it looks and sounds and feels. It always seems to blur everything else out, and so reading and watching all the different versions of the story this month has been really calming for me, making me feel kind of like I’ve been submerged under the sea, floating around in the clear water, the sandy sea bed dappled with patches of sunlight, befriending cute little fish... obviously the sea in my head is Disney sea, not actual sea! My apologies if this gets a little long and/or feminist ranty. It wasn’t intended that way, but in my submersion, lots of issues have come up.

Hans Christian Andersen first published The Little Mermaid in 1837, and, unlike Rapunzel, my March feature, it doesn’t have too much of a history in the folklore or oral tradition. Andersen was its’ original creator. Undine, by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque is thought to have had an influence on the tale, and The Little Mermaid has been seen as a reaction to it. I’m still in the process of reading it - if anyone’s interested, it can be found here. 

I’d had Andersen’s story read to me as a child, and remember being really sad about the ending, where the little mermaid’s heart breaks because the prince doesn’t love her, and she turns into foam, but the version that I’m most familiar with, and I think this probably holds true for most people, is the animated Disney film. Honestly, having now read a lot about the little mermaid, I think I prefer the original.

Of the three, my favourite was actually Mermaid. I don’t know if it’s a little bit blasphemous to prefer a rewrite to the original – I feel like it might be, but at the same time, rewrites have more to build on, and Carolyn Turgeon’s version was, surprisingly, very close to the original story. In both Mermaid, and Andersen’s original, the mermaid saves the prince from a storm and drags him to shore, where another young girl from a convent discovers him. This is the girl whom he believes has saved him. In both stories, the girl in the convent is actually a princess, destined to marry the prince, and in both stories, the mermaid is given the false hope that the prince can love her, and eventually cast aside. In both stories, the mermaid refuses to kill the prince. However, while both mermaids are naive and tragic figures, Mermaid balanced the character of the mermaid, Lenia – similar to Disney’s Ariel, but with a lot more backbone and strength – not one to just hope things go her way -  who would do anything for love of the prince, with the tough determination and independence of Princess Margrethe, the girl in the convent. Turgeon has given her story a context; Margrethe is the daughter of the King of the North, Christopher (the prince), the son of the King of the South. When she helps Lenia rescue Christopher, Margrethe is in hiding in a convent. For many years there has been war between North and South, and although it is ostensibly a time of peace, the King still fears for her safety. However, when she finds out who the beautiful young man that she rescued is, she hatches a plan of her own. By offering to marry the son of the King of the South, she hopes to bring peace between the two kingdoms, with the added bonus that she gets to be with the guy she’s in love with, but I’m sure that hadn’t occurred to her at all, and it was all in the name of politics...

The rest of the story occurs in similar (although definitely much more adult) fashion to the Disney film. The mermaid trades her beautiful voice for legs with the sea witch (who, interestingly, isn’t the horrible monster she is in the Disney version, but rather just someone with a lot of wisdom, who knows that sometimes you have to let people make their own mistakes..), the prince finds her on the shore, and is convinced she is the girl he dreams about, until he discovers that she cannot speak. Nevertheless, he takes her back to his castle, and proceeds to fall in love with her. They have a very touching relationship, which is interrupted by the arrival of Margrethe, and the insistence of Christopher’s parents that they marry.

*****SPOILER ALERT******

In the original, the prince falls at the feet of princess, once he realises that she is the girl he thinks saved him, but not so here. After he realises Margrethe is the girl from the convent, , there are multiple times when he wants nothing to do with Margrethe, and many times he takes the (now pregnant with his child) Lenia’s side. Eventually, however, Margrethe and his parents wear him down, and he agrees to marry her, and it was the ending I thought, which was the most interesting of all. In Andersen’s version, the prince marries the princess, and the next morning, knowing that the mermaid will turn to foam, her sisters come to her, having traded their hair with the sea witch, for a knife, which, if used to spill the prince’s blood, will save the mermaid from death. The mermaid goes to the prince, and seeing him asleep with his new wife, and so happy, is unable to use the knife. She dives into the water and turns to foam.

In Turgeon’s book, the same thing happens. Lenia refuses to kill the prince, but Margrethe, seeing that Lenia is about to die, spills her own blood, saying that it is equal to Christopher’s now that they are married. She saves Lenia, who returns to the sea with her family, and raises Lenia’s child as her own. It was the bond between the two women which really made the book for me, and I loved the fact that the story was determined, even in the original, by the actions of the women.

The Disney film, I love for its’ sense of yearning. The entire film is about wanting, striving, being able to overcome everything, and I really do love that. I know it’s very simplistic, but if I’m honest, I quite often wander round my house, belting out ‘I wanna be where the people are’ at the top of my voice. Doesn’t everyone, particularly during adolescence (and basically the little mermaid is just a teenager, being a teenager..) wish they were somewhere else from time to time? Doesn’t everybody dream of a different world they’d like to belong to? Even if you don’t do it now, I bet you did as a kid. I wanted to live in Never Never Land with Peter Pan. I even used to sit out on the low roof outside my bedroom window, waiting for him, until my dad would come in and make me go to bed. As an adult, I still dream about ‘belonging’ to the ‘world of writers’. I have a vision of exactly what this would entail (for some reason it involves a heavy amount of gorgeous big oak desks, rooms lined floor to ceilng with books, and many many gorgeous notebooks...). My point is, that the longing of the little mermaid to be ‘part of that world’, is something that a lot of people can relate to. It resonates, or at least it does with me. The original version, and Turgeon’s reimagining both allow the mermaid some degree of inclusion, before finally excluding her, proving that people belong where they are, and there is very little room for movement, but the Disney version (because it’s Disney) allows Ariel complete acceptance into the human world, ending with her marrying the prince and living happily ever after.

Anderson does allow his mermaid redemption at the end of the story, when she is basically taken to purgatory, with the Daughters of the Air, and given the chance to gain an immortal soul and get into heaven, after three hundred years. It ends with a nice little moral for kids:

“’Invisibly we float into the houses of men where children are, and for every day on which we find a good child that brings joy to its parents and deserves their love, our time of probation is shortened. The child does not know when we fly through the room; and when we smile with joy at the child’s conduct, a year is counted off from the three hundred; but when we see a naughty or wicked child, we shed tears of grief, and for every tear a day is added to our time of trial’”

 (p89, Hans Christian Anderson: The Complete Tales)

I love this! It’s like telling your kids that if they’re bad, they’re denying the little mermaid her chance to get a soul. After all she’s been through. Tut tut, disappointed head shake, sigh. This is how I will be reading this story to my kids/nieces and nephews one day! Yes, I may very well be a tiny bit evil round the edges..

The poem I’ve extracted at the beginning of this article, I really like, as I’m very into feminist reworkings of fairytales in any form. I love the mermaid claiming her own voice, and speaking for herself over the (male) voice of her author. She totally asserts herself: why should she have to have a man as an excuse to want to stand on her own two feet? In the end, I find this the most hopeful of all. By its’ essence, The Little Mermaid, in any of the versions I’ve been discussing, can’t really help but be tragic and hopeless, when seen from a feminist point of view (and I can’t seem to help reading fairytales with at least a tiny bit of a feminist slant, I blame the dissertation obsession!), as happy ending or unhappy ending, either way she is subsumed by a man. Although I do love that the final image I had of Mermaid was of the strength of Margrethe, eventually, although she is the strongest character, she is just an aide to Christopher, who has wreaked havoc on Lenia, without even realising it. Margrethe is the saviour, but he is the King.

Now my brain hurts from thinking about the ‘oppression of women in fairytales’, and although I will doubtless in future months write much more eloquently on the subject, this month doesn’t seem to be the time for it, so I will direct any and all who may be interested here, to someone who puts it much better (although in relation to Russian fairytales specifically) than my tired brain can at the moment! I’ll just finish by saying that regardless of all I’ve said, I still love love love The Little Mermaid, in all of its’ formats, and I really do think that the story of wanting to belong is as important for adults as it is for children. 

I also read this book for the Once Upon a Time Challenge!

Autism Awareness Giveaway Winner! (and another apology)

I know I promised to post more this week, but on Tuesday I woke up with my face totally swollen up, and as a result of that I'm now on antibiotics which are making me feel beyond awful, so the whole having to leave the house to get to the library in order to post isn't really the most appealing thing in the world at the moment. I'm sorry, I will return soon!! Having said that, I just got a full time job (wooo but also terrifying!) and so until my first paycheque creates the ability to afford home internet, I'll only be able to post one day a week. Please bear with me, I promise I'll get back on track with the posts soon, I'm missing blogging lots!

Aaaanyway, what this post is really about is announcing the winner of the Autism Awareness Giveaway Hop!
The winner of my giveaway of House Rules by Jodi Picoult is......*drumroll*

Megan

I have emailed her, and she has until Sunday evening to get back to me with her details. If she doesn't, a new winner will be drawn. Congratulations!

I just want to say thankyou to all my new followers for taking the time to have a look around the blog, and thanks to all the old ones for putting up with my absenteeism! April's Fairytale Feature will be up soon - I've done all the reading, now I just have to find the energy to write it! I'm off to pick up the last installment of Noel Streatfeild's autobiography and struggle home to read it!

Happy Spring everyone!

Fairytale Feature - Disney & Rapunzel: Why did it take so long?!

I'm not going to talk about the poem this month, I just like poetry, and so thought I'd start off every feature with a poem!

Rapunzel

By Louis Untermeyer

Let down your hair,

That cloudy-gold lure,

The delicate snare,

That holds me secure,

Delight and despair

War with me now—

Let down your hair.

Shake out each curl

Swiftly, and be

Like Spring, a wild girl

With her hair flying free.

Bury me there,

And be buried with me...

Let down your hair!

This months’ feature was meant to be on Little Red Riding Hood, but I went to see Tangled at the weekend, so I figured I could do Rapunzel instead.

I’m a huge fan of classic Disney, by which I mean all of the films from Snow White, up until around about The Lion King/Hercules kind of time. I’d pretty much given up on them after such horrific films as Tarzan and Brother Bear, when The Princess and the Frog came along and restored my faith. For a while, at the beginning of Tangled, I was wavering again, but then there was an absolutely brilliant ensemble song in a pub, and all my worries disappeared out of the window. The fiancé and I were having a conversation this morning about why on earth Disney hadn’t done a version of Rapunzel years ago, when they were in their making damsel in distress films era. Having read the original (I say original, more on the history lesson later!) Brothers Grimm story, I can kind of see how it needed to be heavily adapted for children.

The idea of innocence is a strong one in most Disney films. The problem is that fairytales in their original forms, weren’t intended for children. They prevalently have themes of violence, repression, and sexual tension and liberation. As they are usually tales of growing up and self discovery, this isn’t really surprising, but for the most part, they have had to be heavily edited and rearranged to become the children’s medium that they are today.

Although the original tale of Rapunzel stems from the first Brothers Grimm collection, the story is based on a French tale, Persinette, by Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force (loooong name!).  Limited funds, and its’ unavailability online mean I haven’t yet been able to read this, but I hope I will in the future. Other versions of the tale include Giambattista Basile’s Petrosinella, and a 10^th Century Persian fairytale called Rudaba.

The basic plot of the Grimm’s Rapunzel is as follows. A couple live next door to an enchantress (as you do...). The woman is pregnant and is craving the flowers she sees in the enchantress’s garden. She tells her husband that if she cannot have some of this flower (named rampion, or rapunzel), she will die, and he is so worried that he climbs the wall to get her some. Of course, the enchantress catches him, and makes him promise to give her the child when it’s born, in return for all the flowers he wants. The girl is beautiful, and when she is twelve, the witch (named Mother Gothol), locks her up in a tower. Rapunzel has really long blonde hair, with which she pulls the witch up into the tower. One day a prince is passing by, hears Rapunzel singing, and falls in love with her. He waits by the tower, and seeing how the witch gets up, tricks Rapunzel into doing the same. He asks her to marry him, and she agrees, saying she’ll weave a ladder and when it’s finished they will escape together. Unfortunately before that happens, she accidentally lets slip to the witch that she’s been having a man up in her tower. The witch is furious, cuts off Rapunzel’s hair, and forces her live in a desert. When the prince comes back, the witch pulls him up into the tower with Rapunzel’s hair. On hearing what’s happened to her, the prince despairingly flings himself out of the tower, where thorns pierce his eyes and blind him. He then wanders the earth for ages, lamenting his lost love. Eventually he wanders to the desert where Rapunzel is living with her twin babies. Apparently the original edit talks about the ‘tightening of her dress’ as a reference to pregnancy, but as that’s been removed from my edition, I was totally blindsided by the arrival of babies...Anyway! Her voice draws him to her, and his sight is restored by her tears. They go back to his kingdom and live happily ever after. The end.

Tangled is much lighter, and accompanied, of course, by many spontaneous bursts of song. When the queen is giving birth to Rapunzel, she is about to die, so soldiers are sent out to find a magic flower than heals you and keeps you young. Unfortunately, Mother Gothol, a less scary than usually in Disney films old witch, is trying to keep the flower for herself, so she can be eternally young. As she runs away from the soldiers, she accidentally leaves the flower exposed. The flower saves the queen, and that baby inherits the magical properties of the flower in her golden hair. Mother Gothol discovers that as soon as the hair is cut, it loses its’ magical power, so she steals the child and hides her in a tower. The king and queen are distraught, and every year on Rapunzel’s birthday, they release flying lanterns, hoping one day she’ll return to them. Rapunzel sees the lanterns out of her window and wants nothing more than to go and see them, having no idea who she really is. Her ‘mother’ refuses to let her, in a (fairly epic) song about how mother knows best. While running away from some guards, notorious thief Flynn Rider ends up in Rapunzel’s tower, and Rapunzel (through means of bribery) gets him to take her to the lanterns. Basically the rest of the film goes as you would expect of a Disney film. I loved it, especially that it’s her kingdom that they go to live happily ever after in.

Rapunzel in the film is the very picture of innocence – all big eyes, long blonde hair, and floaty dresses, and the fact that her magic hair preserves youth is a very strong metaphor: keeping her locked in the tower, away from the world, means she will never become corrupted. She will never know who she really is, and thus never want to live her own life, always being content to stay home, taking care of ‘mother’.  The major thing that Disney have done with the film, is to give Mother Gothol a motive for keeping Rapunzel locked in a tower, which is never allowed her in the Grimm’s’ version. Because it’s for children, there must be a reason behind everything that happens, while in the original version, the enchantress takes and keeps the child for no reason other than because she can. Her dramatic actions in the story seem to be merely prompted by jealousy, selfishness, and a desire to keep Rapunzel innocent, and stop her from growing up, the film gives her a clear motive for wanting to keep Rapunzel close. Having said that, Disney films, and this one’s no different, often contain so much innocence that it can make the audience disbelieving. But then, fairytales in general require a state of suspended disbelief in order to read them at all.

****SPOILER ALERT****

The thing that I liked about both versions, is that they both very clearly believe in the redeeming power of love. I know that this is really cliché and makes a lot of people feel quite sick, but in both versions, the man is saved by the tears of Rapunzel,(at which point I started furiously whispering in Rhys’ ear ‘Pokémon tears will bring him back to life!’ – first Pokémon movie, anyone?) and they go on to live happily ever after. I did enjoy that the character of Flynn wasn’t a prince, though. I also loved that the characters were so accepting of each other, and the love story unfurled so naturally. While the Grimm’s’ Rapunzel never develops much of a character, Disney’s Rapunzel has tonnes of it, and is a great role model for kids (although not so much with the using frying pans as weapons..). She overcomes her fears, stands up for herself and others, and follows her dreams all the way. She is also not afraid to sacrifice herself for love. Far from the slightly pathetic Disney heroines of the past, I really felt that Tangled managed to accommodate the best of both worlds, still keeping the traditional Disney love story and happy ever after, while having a strong female lead.

The fairy tale adaptation as a genre has come a long way in recent years. It feels to me slightly like it’s going around in a big circle. The originals are often slightly terrifying, exposing characters to horrible, and often violent events, making people trade their children for some salad..and not even always having happy endings. Adaptations, especially those for children, often remove all the violence, and nasty bits – it’s the really spineless versions of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella etc I’m thinking of now (though don’t get me wrong, all films I love), but now they are again becoming stories with true backbones, with strong morals and messages for children. Although not quite reverting to the harsh reality of many of the originals, they are getting closer. From a feminist point of view (being that yesterday was International Women’s Day), many of the reworkings of stories such as Rapunzel, now have much stronger females than the originals, and women who stand up for, and ultimately save, themselves, can only be a good thing.

For me, a lot of Rapunzel is basically locking up childhood in a tower in the hopes that it’ll never turn into a screaming, hormonal adolescent, or even worse, a proper grownup who can think for themselves, and this begs the question, is the preservation of innocence even a valid pursuit anymore? Given the kind of stuff a lot of kids are watching nowadays from a very young age, is there any point in trying to soften the fairytale? Or could you just give kids the original, straight out the book? Even if it didn’t have the happy ever after...

Any thoughts?

Some other versions of the Rapunzel Story

·         The Wild – Sara Durst

·         Out of the Wild – Sara Durst

·         The Tower Room – Adele Geras

·         The Stone Cage – Nicholas Stuart erHerce TheGray

·         Rapunzel’s Revenge- Shannon Hale

·         Letters from Rapunzel – Sara Holmes

·         Zel – Donna Jo Napoli



A new monthly feature! (and a review..)

Oh my goodness, this week is already insanely busy! Due to working hours and hours more than usual, I won't be able to blog very much for the next week or so... So, rather than double posting, check out the new fairytale feature I'm planning here! I'll be comparing original fairytales with one or more retellings on a monthly basis, and I'm really excited about it! The good thing about all the extra hours is that we may actually be able to get the internet at home soon, fingers crossed! Yay for being able to blog/surf/chat after 6pm!

Anyway, on to the actual review...

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

This is one of those books which just followed me around until I finally read it! I decided I wanted to read it for the Historical Fiction Challenge. Then, as asoon as I'd put it on the list, I found out about the film, which I'm super excited about! And then I started seeing posts about it everywhere. I had to order it from my lovely library, and I'm really glad I did.

 

Synopsis from Goodreads:

Though he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski's ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own na...moreThough he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski's ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own narrow, irrational rules, its own way of life, and its own way of death. The world of the circus: to Jacob it was both salvation and a living hell.

Jacob was there because his luck had run out - orphaned and penniless, he had no direction until he landed on this locomotive 'ship of fools'. It was the early part of the Great Depression, and everyone in this third-rate circus was lucky to have any job at all. Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, was there because she fell in love with the wrong man, a handsome circus boss with a wide mean streak. And Rosie the elephant was there because she was the great gray hope, the new act that was going to be the salvation of the circus; the only problem was, Rosie didn't have an act - in fact, she couldn't even follow instructions. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio was one of love and trust, and ultimately, it was their only hope for survival

Since I was a kid, I have been obsessed with the Circus, (for which I blame a combination of Noel Streatfeild and my mum) so when I found out what the book was about, I was really excited to start it.

Water for Elephants was much less sparkly than I expected, but I learned a lot from it. It's an interesting depiction of the reality of living in a train circus in the '30s, and its particular effectiveness lies in Gruen's choice of narrator. Jacob Jankowski is a young student vet, who misses his final exams following the death of his parents, and jumps onto a circus train by accident. Told through the eyes of his ninety- three year old self, from a nursing home he hates, the novel is the story of him getting to grips with the circus way of life, and his realisation that in many ways, it does not live up to his expectations. For me, the absolute visciousness and violence was hugely memorable, and in parts very upsetting. I really liked that Jacob reacted to things the same way that I did, and you got the feeling that he would never accept, as the other members of the circus had, that the cruelty and evilness was 'just the way things are'. I also like the circular arc of the story, which goes from the repression of youth to the repression of living in a nursing home, and shows escape from both. 

What I loved most about the book, though, was not the central love story, fraught with secrecy, violence, and obstacles as it was, but the story of the relationship between Jacob and the elephant. Rosie the elephant (more a fan of whisky than water!) provided some humour in an otherwise very heavy book, and was also a focal point for shaping many of the characters' personalities. Gruen has created a very thorough and even view of circus life in '30s America, and I cannot wait for the film!

While I didn't finish the novel feeling uplifted, I was satisfied at having finished a very well told and engaging story.

Rating: ****