Deadlier Than the Male

Last week I touched very briefly on war goddesses in the general context of "humans feel weird about war." But they're rather fascinating in their own right. For instance: what makes a culture like, say, ancient Greece produce a total badass like Athena, who's smart, gorgeous, and aggressive all in one? Or Freya, creation of the wargoing Norse, who could be Athena's twin (now with 78% more marital issues)? What's the story behind Hathor's alarming transformation into Sekhmet? Can anyone really ever explain Inanna?

Well, probably not. But I'll do my best.

Creation of the Witchblade, Stjepan Sejic

There's one thing a lot of them have in common. It's very glaring, and very weird. War goddesses are intimately entwined with violence and sex, in about equal measure. Gilgamesh's rejection of Inanna consists of him reciting to her a list of the ex-lovers she screwed over on a whim. Sekhmet, mad with bloodlust, is the dark side of beautiful, sensual Hathor. Durga and Kali, the best-known Indian warrior goddesses, are both manifestations of Parvati, the beloved wife of Shiva most closely identified with fertility and motherhood. Freya, goddess of beauty and fertility, had a temper that could shake the halls of the Aesir and got prime pick of the fallen dead, before even Odin. And Athena, let's not forget, never took vows of chastity like Artemis, and was invested enough in her own beauty to claim Eris's golden apple as her own.

The disturbing and obvious conclusion is that a sexually voracious female is dangerous. She's dangerous beyond the warning inherent in a goddess like Aphrodite, who's aggressive but kind of dumb. Subtext won't do for someone like this; it's got to be blatant text. You've got to dress her up in armor and give her a sword or a spear to make sure everyone gets the point. Danger! Danger! This incredibly hot woman is going to destroy you!

The Washer at the Ford, lindowyn-stock

It gets weirder. It's not just sexual aggression in a woman that gets portrayed as dangerous. It's femininity, period. The three aspects of the Morrigan - Macha, Badb, and Nemain - have little if anything to do with sex appeal. Yet they're still goddesses of war, individually and together. Their primary domain is the fear and frenzy of battle. The symbol of the Morrigan is still the crow, the eater of carrion. One of the ways in which Badb foreshadows death in battle is by washing the doomed soldier's clothes - a very feminine act of caretaking, become suddenly ominous in context. Macha, whose husband made her race horses while pregnant, went into labor after her win and cursed the male spectators to feel the pangs of childbirth at the most inconvenient time possible. This forced femaleness incapacitated all the men of Ulster except for Cuchulain in battle. No wonder Macha was worshiped - no one wanted to become like a woman again.

Is it safe to say that powerful women scared the men of ancient times? Sure. Is that the only reason for these origin stories? Absolutely not. If they were so scary, why are there so many of them? Why are they available to pray to as protectors and guardians? The very power that freaked people out seems to have been a fact of life. One highly feminized war goddess would be an anomaly. So many of them present an organized front of acknowledged power that any sane person, male or female, would want on their side. So maybe Athena gets vain from time to time. It doesn't mean you want her fighting against you. It doesn't matter whether Inanna ruins her lovers' lives; she's an unstoppable force that you might as well court.

Having a war goddess like you is certainly better than the alternative. Remember, these women don't just get angry when they're slighted. They know the ins and outs of bloody vengeance. If you don't want to go into labor in the middle of a duel to the death, you had better respect the hell out of them.

And maybe, the next time your wife or your mother or your sister took your clothes to the river to wash them, you'd remember the war goddesses and respect your own women, too. It couldn't have hurt.

Tale as Old as Time

My favorite fairy tale, in any and every form, has always been Beauty and the Beast.

Beauty and the Beast, Mercer Mayer

It's as feminist as mainstream fairy tales will ever get: Beauty is an outspoken and brave heroine whose sacrifices and triumphs alike are directly due to her own choices. It upends the pretty-people-are-good theory that runs rampant throughout so many fairy tales; the Beast presents the best case of character development in folklore. It has everything anyone could ask for in a story: adventure, danger, glamour, magic, romance, jealousy, and an important point elegantly made.

I'm not alone in my love for this story, either. There are tons of variants on any fairy tale; Egypt and China have their own Cinderella stories, and the beautiful-girl-with-evil-stepmother story is ubiquitous in every culture. But not necessarily popular. Beauty and the Beast is so beloved a story that we've popularized its variants as well. Cupid and Psyche; East of the Sun, West of the Moon; Tam Lin: they're the same story in new clothes.

Possibly the best common thread in all the variants is the heroine. Whether her name is Janet, Beauty, or Psyche, the heroine of a Beauty and the Beast story will always be the kind of girl you'd want your daughter to grow up into. She'll be gutsy and independent and passionate. She'll own her mistakes and learn from them. She won't be afraid to defy authority, or to dream big, or to carve out a place for herself when she doesn't fit into any acceptable norms. She is, quite simply, a badass.

Eros and Psyche, Marta Dahlig

And the hero, while always a swoon-worthy sweetheart, will be oddly passive once the heroine comes onstage. His proactive steps to break his curse generally end after he procures the right girl. Cupid is perfectly happy never to appear to Psyche; the bear-king fetches a bride and then settles down to a nocturnal existence; Tam Lin, knowing he'll be used to pay the Fairy Queen's tithe to hell, is content to wait until Janet realizes she's pregnant and demands some answers before he tells her how she can save him. The Beast's nightly proposal to Beauty is actually the most go-getting strategy of them all. Unlike the others, he's not willing to hang around until the lightbulb goes off in Beauty's head; he keeps the question in her (and our) minds at all times, reminding us just how unhappy he is in his cursed form. And his gracious acceptance of her constant rejection, especially in the face of his obvious misery, ennobles him long before we realize he's a human.

Then there's the antagonist.

One of the most fascinating things about a Beauty and the Beast story is that it doesn't actually need a villain. It's not a story about defeating evil; it's a story about finding love and acceptance in unexpected places. It's about human nature, and human expectations of and responses to love. It's beautifully complex in the questions it asks about who we are.

Psyche at the Throne of Venus,
Edward Matthew Hale

But if you simply must have a villain, there is one who keeps coming back to plague our supernatural couple. Powerful, intimidating, tyrannical, and fond of toying with prey. And a woman.

Remember what I said about feminism? It is all over this story. Invariably, the final confrontation in a Beauty and the Beast story is between two strong-willed women deciding the fate of a passive man. Janet faces down the Fairy Queen. Psyche performs every task Aphrodite sets her, even the one that by rights should have killed her. The bear-king's wife tricks her way past the troll queen's magical cheats to snap her husband out of his trance. And even Beauty, when she finally tells the Beast that she loves him, shatters the spell laid on him by a vindictive sorceress. These are formidable foes, with lots of magic and very few scruples. It's abundantly clear that the heroes cannot win against them. The bear-king doesn't want to get engaged to the troll queen, but he does. The Beast can't break his spell alone. Running away on his own never occurs to Tam Lin. Cupid displays the most defiance, but it consists of marrying in secret and whispering hints to Psyche when his mother's back is turned. Only the women can defeat those who menace their men.

Charon and Psyche, John Roddam Spencer
Stanhope

And they don't even have to do it through traditionally feminine ways. Psyche's tasks - sorting grains, stealing golden fleece, traveling to the Underworld - are exactly the kind set for male heroes. The Underworld descent in particular puts her on a level with Hercules, the only other human to go to Hades and come back successful. (And Hercules was a demigod.) Janet's wrestling match with the transforming Tam Lin requires her physically to fight a lion, a snake, a newt, and a living flame, just as Peleus does when struggling to capture Thetis. The heroine of "East of the Sun,

Beauty and the Beast, Edmund Dulac

West of the Moon" pulls off the kind of deception that would make Loki proud. Beauty's task is easier, since her variant has no physical antagonist, but she still suffers the trauma of believing she's come too late to save her beloved, and has to search for him in a vast garden at midnight. We're not talking the cliched healing-power-of-a-woman's-love here. This is battle on the front lines. This is facing death and nightmares and coming back victorious.

But the best part, of course, is the end. So many fairy tales have an incredible protagonist who defies the odds for the love of someone who just doesn't seem worthy. The Little Mermaid gives up everything for a truly dopey prince who never really gets it. The soldier who solves the mystery of the Twelve Dancing Princesses has to marry someone who plotted his death. Tons of third sons fall for haughty princesses who set them impossible tasks before they'll deign to look twice at them.

Tam Lin, Dan Dutton

But in a Beauty and the Beast story, there's no such unequal relationship. These couples don't deal in love at first sight. They spend time with each other. They get to know each other. They fall in love with personalities, not with outward appearances. And when the spell is finally broken and they're free to be together, the story has created an actual romance that an audience can believe in. "And they lived happily ever after" isn't just a conventional platitude in these stories; it's a statement of fact, built on an established and proven relationship.

There's even some equity in the ultimate resolution of who winds up where. Psyche and the bear-king's wife take up residence in their husbands' worlds; Tam Lin enters Janet's. The Beast and Beauty do a lovely little trade-off: the broken spell allows him to be an acknowledged part of her world, and her marriage to him makes her part of his. These couples are a match for each other in every way. Rewarding the courage of one means rewarding the dedication of the other.

A Beauty and the Beast story requires you to think. It raises questions about equality, the flaws of humanity, and the nature of love. And it provides answers by presenting us with the most developed and sophisticated sets of lovers in any fairy tale. It's that rare treasure, something popular that is also something good.

Fighting With Gods

Thor vs. the Fire Trolls, Howard David Johnson

War. What is it good for?

Well, it produces some rather entertaining gods. Ares very kindly volunteered to be the butt monkey for the entire Greek pantheon. Thor's tempers are quite literally the stuff of legend. Durga, created to defend the world from a rampaging demon, trounces Mahishasura in what had to be the best show ever seen on the face of the earth. Nothing draws the eye quite like a war god out to make a point.

The really militant cultures understandably put the most thought into their war gods. Ares might get trapped in a jug and run screaming from the plain of Troy, but he does also have Terror and Fear pulling his chariot. And his affair with Aphrodite points up the seductive appeal of war in a culture based on fighting. Eighteen-armed Durga also represents the force of compassion; joined with fierce fighting energy, her very existence makes a fascinating argument for humanity in warfare. The Mithras cult, a favorite of Roman soldiers, provided a forum for sworn brotherhood; the god's very name might come from the Sanskrit word mitra, meaning friendship. Hachiman isn't just an ancient Japanese war god, he's the patron and teacher of warriors, as well as the particular god of an entire clan. These aren't just creatures of bloodlust - they're complicated deities with lots of responsibilities, both in their stories and symbolically.

Inanna, Luis Royo

And that's not even getting into the war goddesses. The Mesopotamians, one of the most bloodthirsty ancient cultures out there, had Inanna, goddess of sex and war. (She saw no reason not to mix the two; mythical humans rejected her as a lover at risk of their lives.) Freya has been bastardized down to the goddess of beauty, but in her day she got first pick of the battlefield dead, to take to her own halls. Athena combines wisdom and warfare, much like Durga; Bastet's most familiar manifestation, as a cat, means that she's also one of the patron goddesses of the pharaohs. Even Aphrodite enters the fray when she's needed, and is quite capable of rescuing a son here and there.

In short, we're ambivalent about war. Even in cultures that glorify strife and battle, war gods come with a mitigating circumstance built into their worship. You can pray to Thor as a thunder god, not just as a death-dealer, and if it's glory you're after, you might be better off talking to Tyr or Odin anyway. Nobody is quite easy with letting a god represent only the savagery of the field.

Ares, j-art

And that savagery is there in spades. Ares never goes anywhere without the goddess of discord; all three aspects of the Morrigan are intimately identified with death and killing; Hathor, who represents beauty and music, gets so angry at one point that she turns into Sekhmet, the lion-headed war goddess, and goes so out of control that Ra has to trick her into thinking beer is blood. Thor, the main Norse war god, is not in charge of honor or victory, only of the act of war itself.

So what creates this very real concern with war? We're not afraid of glorifying it; if we were, we wouldn't be the kind of life form that creates war gods. It could just be a storyteller's reluctance to let a perfectly good god be one-use-only. It's easy to make the leap from thunder god to war god, from sexually voracious to aggressively combative. If Inanna stories are popular, why not expand her mythos?

It could also be the up-close nature of these cultures' relation to war.

The Battle on the Ice, Boris Olshansky

If we're still talking about an ancient culture, you can bet anything they had lots of personal encounters with war. (Their enemies - the ones we've forgotten about - might not have had so many war gods.) A Norse berserker, coming off the high of a battle frenzy while surrounded by corpses, might well draw a distinct line between war and honor. The path from doer to teacher is a perfectly logical one; since Hachiman started out as the patron of fishermen, it's not hard to see how he might have become a patient instructor rather than a battlefield threat. Wisdom and compassion are very desirable things to have tempering bloodlust, especially for people who saw little of either. (Let's not forget the Iliad's massive death lists, or the straight-up anti-war sentiments of Lysistrata and The Trojan Women.) And while you'd definitely want your war gods aggressive, you'd probably prefer that the protector of your king be rational Bastet, consort of levelheaded Anubis, rather than kill-crazy Sekhmet.

Humans know it's easy to lose control when emotions are running high. But we want our gods to be better than us. We want there to be a reason to need their help. It makes sense, for whatever reason, that we'd create war gods with other things on their minds. If they can maintain control, maybe they can show us how. If they could devote themselves to other aspects of life, maybe ancient worshippers who didn't like the people that they became in war could hold out hope that there was still a better side to themselves. Either way, it shows us that even in highly war-based cultures, people still wanted their gods to have something to fight for.

How the Trickster Won His Spurs

Pretty much everyone agrees that honor and glory are nice things. We like them. We like people who have them. We especially like ourselves when we have them. Most of legend's "good guys" are honorable men. But sooner or later, every culture gets fed up with unblemished golden boys. There comes a time when we all just want to hear about someone who can think.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... the trickster!

The Theft of Apollo's Cattle, Elizabeth Phillips

We've all got one. Talk about a universal character. He fits into any story; he can get away with anything; he's the life of the party, the funniest guy around. There are tons of tricksters, from Anansi to Raven to Loki, and the second they appear onstage they steal everyone else's thunder. Nobody cares that Apollo just lost all his best cows; all we care about is how Hermes will get out of this one.

So yes, you've got to have a trickster. But that doesn't mean that everyone has to like him.

The trickster may be the most morally complicated character in any pantheon. He's the undeniable audience favorite, but he also screws everyone else over like it's going out of style. Poor stupid Tiger trusts Anansi once and gets his balls stolen forever. Puss in Boots gleefully murders a passing ogre to secure a comfortable life for himself and his master. When the Norse gods call on Loki to fix a crappy situation, it's even money that Loki himself created it. Just try telling these guys that crime doesn't pay. They'll laugh in your face, ruin your life, and saunter on back to their paradises.

Brer Rabbit and the Briar Patch, Disney

And then you start asking questions about the tricksters' companions. How can they be so blind? If Odin knows everything, why doesn't he cop to Loki's double-dealing? If Raven comes to court your daughter, why don't you just shut the door and hide the valuables? No matter what Brer Rabbit tells you, why would anyone with sense ever believe him? Honor, glory, and even plain old goodness undergo a very disconcerting alchemy in the presence of a trickster; they blend together into one single, unappealing, trait: stupidity.

Loki's Punishment, Tudor Humphries

Which may be why some cultures go out of their way to tell stories in which the trickster is humbled. When Raven, who wants lots of delicious dead eyeballs to eat, forbids humans from having more than one life, his furious subjects kill his son and daughter to make him understand their pain. Coyote once courts a beautiful girl who tries to commit suicide when their liaison becomes public knowledge; he finds her in the nick of time, but the two of them are turned into ducks and can never return to her people. Loki reaps the worst punishment: when his mischief turns to malice in the killing of Balder, he's bound in a cave with a serpent dripping venom on his face until Ragnarok, when he dies in battle against the Aesir. Mess with the higher powers one too many times, and they'll have something to say about it. No one likes being made to look a fool.

Coyote Went up the River, Frederick N. Wilson

But plenty of cultures let the trickster get away scot-free. The one time Hermes gets caught (and taken to court) by Hera, he pleads his own case so eloquently and hilariously that everyone votes not to punish him. Robin Goodfellow wreaks endless household havoc and never gets called to account; instead, he gets a whole ballad in which he boasts of his exploits. Seasoned tricksters even have get-out-of-jail-free cards. All it takes to resurrect Coyote is for his friend Fox (another notable trickster) to walk over his bones.

Audience sympathy is a powerful thing. When your creator can't bear even to punish you, let alone kill you off, it's a good sign that you're here to stay.

It makes the trickster the oldest outsider in the book. He exists to upset the status quo. Having him around makes life dangerous and unpredictable; it's no wonder that he has to con his way into good fortune, since most of his fellows avoid him and the chaos he brings. It's hard to say whether he's outcast because of his tricks, or whether his tricks created a scenario in which he had to be cast out.

And it's that trait, more than any other, that makes him the popular character audiences identify with. Of all the characters in any given pantheon, fixed and steadfast in what they represent, the trickster is the only one who can change.

No wonder we like him so much. We see most of ourselves in him. He's the one who not only adapts to a new world, but shapes that world to his liking. Who wants to be a boring paragon when you could be a dynamic change-maker? Who wants to sit still when you could have fun?

Give a Girl a Break

The Peacock Complaining to Juno, Gustave Moreau

As every Greek myth will tell you ad nauseam, Zeus's wife Hera is one jealous meanie. She's territorial to the point of obsession, with a nasty vengeful streak and a vivid imagination. The queen of the gods is, to put it bluntly, a cow.

All of which is true. As gods go, she's one of the worst to cross. (Only Artemis really equals her in terms of vicious retribution. The men, in contrast to either woman, are sissies who can't deal out pain.) But the classic portrait of her is rather one-sided. She deserves far more of a break than she gets.

Why, you ask? Well, let's start off with some early childhood trauma. The girl was swallowed whole and alive by her father at the moment of her birth. And stayed alive, in his stomach, until her littlest brother was ballsy enough to fight back. That right there should win our sympathy.

Oh, and that littlest brother? With a woman already on his arm (Metis, mother of Athena and all-around badass herself), Zeus decided to sleep with his older sisters. Demeter said yes, which is how we get Persephone; Hestia just snorted and went back to her fire; Hera flat-out

Hera and Zeus, Jun-Pierre Shiozawa

refused him. Zeus, selfish even then, would not let this stand. His solution? He made a thunderstorm, turned himself into a bird, and flew to Hera for shelter. Moved by pity, she cuddled the bird close, when all of a sudden - whoops! It's Zeus, and it looks like he just moved you both into Rapetown-on-Incest.

Who else thinks that the subsequent wedding of Zeus and Hera must have been the most awkward event ever?

Right now, we've got a plucky young goddess who survived life inside Dad's belly, only to be claimed as spoils by her liberator. At this point, Hera does one of two things. Either she decides that she might as well make good on what she's got, or she decides to spend her whole life avenging herself on the bastard brother who dealt her this crappy hand. It depends on your interpretation, really, but it's understandable either way. She can be admirable for doing her best, or she can be tragic in the same way as Macbeth. Whichever you prefer, it makes her a far more interesting character than a cardboard villainess.

Hera Imprisons Io, Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire

I can never make up my mind about her choice there. When you consider the outright torture she perpetrates on Zeus's other conquests - keeping Io a cow, inciting Semele to arrange her own death, screwing up Heracles's entire life with vindictive abandon - it's easy to think that this is a woman consumed by vengeance, with no pity or sympathy left in her. But then you run into her relationship with her son Hephaestus, who backed her in a fight with Zeus at incredible bodily cost to himself. And her patronage of Jason is downright tender during the quest for the Golden Fleece, and lasts all the way until he throws Medea over. (And come on, Jason - did you really think Hera, of all goddesses, would support a cheater?)

And then there's the hilarious, but also touching, scene in the Iliad where Hera seduces Zeus to distract him from the fighting so Poseidon can help the Greeks. His opening gambit is to recite a list of women he's slept with, something usually guaranteed to send Hera into a rage. But

Jupiter and Juno on Mount Ida,
James Barry

then he tells her that of all of those women, none of them - not even Hera herself, way back when he pulled the wet-bird trick - was as beautiful and enticing as she is now. And then he makes a move that even I get a little swoony over: he takes her to Mount Ida and wraps them both in a golden cloud through which no one can see their lovemaking. Granted, Hera's motivated here by resentment at Zeus for not allowing the gods to interfere with Troy; granted, Zeus does not start out as the smoothest of operators. But it's bizarrely sweet, after all these tales where you assume it's a hellish marriage of a philanderer and a shrew, to see that Zeus at least has strong feelings for his wife, and that she is well aware of them. Later, when Zeus wakes up and sees Poseidon running rampant, he blames Hera; she swears her innocence by their marriage bed, a vow she says she would never make falsely. Despite their horrible beginning, there's something there that's important to them both.

Juno Ludovisi, artist unknown

And if Hera does care for Zeus, in spite of it all, it explains why she pursues his mistresses with such rabid hatred. She might not like the fact that she cares about her lousy husband, which means she might find it difficult to admit to his face. For a woman whose adult life was inexorably shaped by trauma, the kind of abuse Hera inflicts on her "rivals" might be the psychologically safest way for her to express love.

It doesn't make it right, and I still feel awful for poor innocents like Semele. But it does make more of Hera than she usually gets. And she gets so little that there's got to be some parts of the story missing.

Not Like It's Important

Why does everyone ignore the prophet?

The Sabine Women, Jacques-Louis David

Plenty of legends come equipped with a voice of either doom or reason, laying out the future in five easy steps, free of charge. Soothsayers, hedge witches, fortune tellers: if you're living in a legend, there's almost always a prophet of some sort lurking around the next corner. What's better, their prophecy will come true.

But if you're living in a legend, it's all but required that you ignore it.

Cassandra wailed of doom for Troy for ten years, to no avail. Moses pulled off an astounding number of miracles while Pharaoh just scoffed. Merlin, taking it perhaps farther than any other prophet, foresaw the exact manner of his own death and still fell into Nimue's trap. Once, okay, you ignore portents of ruin and hope for the best. But when they come true, it would make sense to listen next time.

Moses and Aaron Before Pharaoh, Robert Leinweber

And these prophets in particular had excellent track records. Arthur has no excuse for ignoring Merlin's warning; when the brain behind your throne tells you something, you'd better pay attention. Moses turned the only source of water in a desert kingdom to blood on, essentially, a dare. That alone should have made Pharaoh sit up and take notice. Cassandra had been foreseeing all manner of unpleasant things for years, although her case is particularly cruel. Because she refused a randy god's booty call, no one was ever going to be able to believe her.

Ignoring the prophet creates not only a crushing loss in-story, but a particularly frustrating read. While characters blunder on down the plot road, the readers are left scowling and upset with their heroes, who just can't seem to clean the wax out of their ears long enough to hear the crucial tidbit. "Why didn't you just not marry Guinevere?" I've wanted to yell. "Why can't they just give Helen back? Why don't you let his freaking people go?" Like the prophets, we see it coming a mile away. Watching doom draw closer and closer is agonizing, especially when it's coming for people we've grown to care about.

King Arthur and Merlin at the Lake, W. Otway Cannell

And that's exactly the point of including a prophet. It's a fantastic writer's tool for creating narrative tension. We want to assume that Camelot would always stand; once Merlin tells us that it will fall through the illicit passion of the Queen and her champion, we're on the lookout for every hint the story lets fall. Lancelot's arrival is doubly portentous because we already know what he brings to Camelot. The ten plagues would be completely anticlimactic without Pharaoh ignoring the prophet; Moses would never truly prove his strength as an individual rather than a mouthpiece for God, and God wouldn't be able to demonstrate his complete dominance over the gods and people of Egypt. (Not to mention that if the story ran on common sense rather than escalating tension, there'd probably be only one plague and no Red Sea miracle.) Cassandra's prophecies of doom add even more poignancy to the fact that most of the major characters in the Iliad are vividly aware of what will happen when they die. Hector's speech to Andromache about how he most fears her falling into enemy hands as a slave is extra heartbreaking because we know, even if he doesn't, that his worst fear will come horribly true.

No one listens to the prophet because he's not in the story for the characters. He's there for us. The prophet exists to make us nervous, to remind us that happiness is transitory, to let us know what to watch out for. A prophet can't teach his or her fellow characters anything; it's too late for them, their story's already set in stone. The people who can learn from a prophet are the readers for whom he or she is the surrogate within the story, the more detached observer who can tell how things will play out.

Shh, It's a Baby

Your classic fairy tale ends with marriage. The villain's defeated, and nothing stands in the way of conjugal bliss for our hero and heroine. What Disney doesn't let on is that sometimes, the bliss happens before the wedding. There's a small but notable section of fairy tales whose heroines are pregnant well before the prince puts a ring on it.

Heroic, 2013

The most famous of these stories is the one you don't actually hear told that way. Rapunzel and the prince were not just making a rope ladder all that time. Dressing this story up for kids does enormous damage to Rapunzel's image; the version I heard growing up required her to ask, idiotically, why the witch is harder to pull up than the prince. What she originally asked (of her surrogate mother, let's not forget) was why she feels so tired and why her belly's getting bigger. All of a sudden Rapunzel's no longer a loose-tongued bimbo; she's a pregnant teen with important questions. (For extra points, the whole story started with the pregnancy of Rapunzel's mother. Pregnancy is the single greatest plot mover in this fairy tale.)

It also makes the witch's reaction doubly cruel. Instead of deserting her stolen daughter because she feels betrayed, the witch sends a frightened girl with literally nowhere to turn out into the world to deal with an unexpected pregnancy and the death of her beloved. She doesn't even answer Rapunzel's question, apparently thinking that if Rapunzel doesn't know she's pregnant, the baby might just go away. She just dumps the girl in the desert and wreaks blinding vengeance on the prince. This is serious evil here, all the more so because it's so determinedly one-sided. It doesn't matter to the witch whether Rapunzel is safe or scared; all that matters is getting what she wants.

The scariest part? It could be worse.

For all the horror she goes through, at least Rapunzel fell in love and gave her consent. The pre-Disney Sleeping Beauty (who is fifteen, not sixteen), wakes up not when the prince kisses her, but when her newborn infant mistakes her finger for a nipple and sucks the splinter out. "Infant?" you say. "But she wasn't pregnant when she went to sleep..."

Sleeping Beauty, Gustaf Tenggren

No. No, she wasn't. The prince was so moved by her beauty when he found her that he just couldn't resist raping an unconscious girl. That doesn't wake her up. Pregnancy doesn't wake her up. Delivering her twins doesn't wake her up. The thirteenth fairy really knew how to make a curse stick.

Let's recap. Sleeping Beauty is a fifteen-year-old girl who, the last she knew, just learned about this nifty thing called spinning. When she next opens her eyes, it's a century later and she's the sex slave of a necrophiliac. It's not even a surprise to learn that the prince's mother is an ogress who wants to eat Sleeping Beauty and her kids; at least Mom's up front about her evil. This is one that I'm grateful to Disney for bowdlerizing. True Love's Kiss is a much nicer thing to grow up with than date rape.

Janet and the Transformation, Dan Dutton

Both Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty are rather passive about all this. Rapunzel has her child and wanders around looking for her prince; Sleeping Beauty doesn't even get the luxury of consent. Luckily, pregnant heroines aren't all noncombatants. Janet, the spunky Scottish heroine of "Tam Lin," is in every way active and involved in her own fate. Aware of the rules of civilization (unlike Rapunzel), she still chooses to sleep with Tam Lin; even better, when her father and his knights try to shame her into marrying to cover up her pregnancy, she loudly declares that they're all wusses and she'd never deny her child its true father and heritage. Upon finding out that Tam Lin's due to be sacrificed to hell, Janet performs one of the most impressive physical displays of devotion and guts in any story ever: she faces down the enraged Fairy Queen and grimly hangs on to Tam Lin in whatever form he's magicked into taking. This includes a lion, a snake, and fire. The girl wrestles a lion and holds fire still. While pregnant enough to show. She goes the Greeks one better: Thetis put Peleus through the same mess, but he didn't have to deal with an outside foe trying to kill him.

But Janet's the exception. Pregnant heroines are rare as it is. For the most part, that pregnancy renders them instantly passive. There's a Cinderella variant where the two older sisters try to kill their youngest sister as she recovers from giving birth; it's extra easy because the poor girl can't physically fight back. Sometimes the heroine of "The Seven Swans" is pregnant at the climax, but her story is a strange combination of agency and passivity: if she defends herself, she dooms her brothers.

And there's a level of discomfort with acknowledging premarital sex in fairy tales. How old were you when you first heard Rapunzel? And how old were you when you heard the pregnancy variant? Those aren't the versions we tell to children. Fairy tales in their oldest form are meant to scare people into good behavior, in which context a disastrous premarital pregnancy makes perfect narrative sense. But nowadays they're supposed to be light and fluffy stories for kids, with some common sense nestled at the heart of the happily-ever-after. "Mother, why is my belly so large?" was practically a punch line for adult audiences who already knew the answer; if you tell a five-year-old that Rapunzel was pregnant, you're jump-starting "the talk." Even "Tam Lin" gets censored on occasion; the first time I read the story was in a folklore anthology that had Janet visiting Tam Lin to hang out and chat. I'm certainly not averse to fairy tales that prioritize the intellectual and personal bond, but Janet is far more powerful when she takes complete control of a potentially disastrous scenario like out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

Disney Princesses as Mothers, sheerisan

I'm not advocating putting children to bed with tales of rape and abandonment. The purpose of fairy tales has changed drastically from Grimm to Disney; you can't make the train run backward now. But it's important to remember where things started. It tells us something about life then, and the changes tell us something about life now. And once in a while, we get a trend-bucker like Janet who makes it all worthwhile.