Prince Ali, Yes, It Is He, But Not As You Know Him

My sister spent four years majoring in religious studies, with a concentration on Islam. As a side effect, she now cannot watch the Disney Aladdin without wincing at the rampant orientalism and the stuff it just gets wrong. I have no such handicap - in fact, Aladdin was my first fictional crush, so I'll always see that movie through rose-tinted lenses - but I also know she's got a point. And it goes all the way back to Scheherazade herself.

Why is the story of Aladdin always the story of the exotic Other?

Weird as it is for Westerners to think about (or at least for me), most of the stories of the mysterious and exotic Arabian Nights are in fact set in a milieu that would have been intimately familiar to contemporary readers and/or listeners: their own world. We don't blink at TV shows about doctors or high schoolers; even though they use tools and language that would seem miraculous to someone from another time or culture, they're a part of our world that we take completely for granted. How different is your garden-variety fairy godmother from your average djinn, anyway? Same in-story function, different trappings. And to people hearing the stories of the Arabian Nights, viziers and bazaars and multi-colored fish would have sounded as familiar to us as presidents and supermarkets and... multi-colored fish.

But while the majority of the Thousand and One Tales are set in a familiar world (albeit one with fairy tale rules added in), the story of the poor boy and his magic lamp moves across the continent to China. No, you didn't read that wrong. The names don't change ethnicity - for instance, our hero, Ala ad-Din, falls head over heels in love with Princess Badr al-Budur - and the princess's father is a sheik. There's nothing specifically Chinese about the story, the characters, or the world it's set in. The only reason for it to take place in China is to rope in the mystique of the Other.

Fast-forward to America in 1992. Is China as exotic and mysterious as it was centuries ago, at the height of the silk trade? Of course not! It's a Communist country with restrictions on childbirth, a lousy human rights track record, and potential nukes. You bet your sweet patootie Disney's not setting their next blockbuster in China barely two years after the Berlin Wall came down.

So they move it back to the setting of the rest of Scheherazade's stories - again, easy to do because it's built around the same cultural framework - and create the exact same transformation that the original story did: not just moving it, but removing it from our familiar world, into the realm of the Other. The masculine threat of the original's sorcerer (who enters the tale masquerading as Aladdin's uncle and thus head of the family in Aladdin's place) is transformed into the rather effeminate Jafar, which in the late twentieth century was its own kind of threat. (Jafar also prefers to use others as his intermediaries rather than get his hands directly dirty, a holdover from the days when feminine meant powerless.) And lest the exoticism goes too overboard, the Genie is a delightful and deliberate anachronism, who provides both comic relief and temporal grounding for an American audience. Put bluntly, Aladdin bears about as much resemblance to Sassanid Persia as the original story does to imperial China.

So why this story? There are literally over a thousand in the complete base text - why the tale of a peasant and his djinn buddy? What about Aladdin says Other, not just to us, but to the original tellers?

The Arabian Nights, Edmund Dulac

It can't be the magic - or rather, it can't be just the magic. We'd scarcely recognize the Arabian Nights without the dazzling overflow of magic carpets, magic rings, magic horses, and djinn of every stripe, from benevolent to enslaved to murderous. The genie of the lamp is probably the best known example of that kind of power, but he performs fairly traditional djinn magic as the stories go. It can't be the cross-social romance - not only are there a few of those in the Arabian Nights, the West can't get enough of Cinderella stories. The cynic in me wonders if it's the fact that the story continues past the "happily ever after," which hardly any Western fairy tale seems to do, but the simple fact of married life and misunderstandings blowing out of proportion don't really telegraph "mystical Other." And if it's the characters' relationships, then why do most adaptations ignore the far nicer and gentler genie of the ring, who actually seems to like helping Aladdin out, in favor of the haughtier and more remote genie of the lamp?

Scheherazade and the Sultan, Sani ol Molk

Maybe, at bottom, it's got nothing to do with the plot. Maybe it's a meta-interference by reality in the way we see this particular story. Like the tale of Sinbad, Aladdin was a late addition to the Thousand and One Nights, a tale set in China, told by a fictional Persian woman, and crammed in by an 18th-century Frenchman. So really, the entire history of the story of Aladdin is one of Otherness, of foreign perceptions overlaid onto an inoffensive plot that never asked to be the focus of cultural misinterpretation. Maybe that's what makes it so easy to transpose from one setting to another; it's been moved around so much, it just takes to it better (and the extravagant magical displays provide a convenient excuse for setting it in a world more exotic than ours). Like its hero's own aspirations, the story never stops changing. Maybe it never will.

Or maybe there's something super simple and coherent going on that I've completely overlooked. Leave a comment and let me know!

The Handmaiden's Tale

Are there people out there who get bored by the ordinariness of their lives? Anyone feel like escaping into a less-than-ordinary world full of magic and danger and royalty? Who's up for shucking the burdens of the daily grind and diving into adventure in another world?

Athenian Women at Home, artist unknown

Well, have fun with that. Today I'm hanging out with a bunch of handmaidens, and hoo boy, are their lives unenviable.

It makes total sense that most stories focus on extraordinary people as well as extraordinary places and events. No one wants to read a fairy tale about the sad-sack assembly-line worker who never gets a fairy godmother. Everyone would pick the princess or the wizard or the talking fox. But just because stories are full of privileged royalty doesn't mean that nobody works in Fairytale Land. And just because they live in a world of physical gods and tangible magic doesn't mean that things don't get depressingly realistic.

Odysseus and Nausicaa, William McGregor Paxton

Take, for instance, the handmaidens of Europa. "The who?" you ask. Oh, you know, just the bevy of young noblewomen dancing attendance upon a Greek princess. Not an individual character among the lot. They stand en helpless masse as bull-Zeus kidnaps Europa. A minute ago they were all having fun on the beach; now they're a collective unit of ineffectual shock. So why are they there? Well, Europa's a princess. Princesses don't get to romp alone in the sand. The handmaidens are there to underscore Europa's privileged status. (And also because without them, Europa would have become the Bronze Age equivalent of a face on a milk carton; it's only because they bring back the story that Europa's family knows Zeus snatched her.) Their entire function in-story is to inform us, the audience, that Europa is important. But we already know she's important; one, she's a princess, and two, Zeus has the hots for her, which means she'll probably pop out a demigod king or a few heroes. The handmaidens do nothing for us that isn't already being done in the story.

Well. Actually. There is that bit in the middle, in case you forgot that Greek myths rival zombie movies for bloodshed. The bit where the handmaidens, despite being the only witnesses to a princess's abduction, get tortured and executed by said princess's totally rational dad. As colenso points out in the comment, princesses can survive the occasional reckless stunt. Their attendants, not so much. One slip-up - which was neither their fault nor within their power to prevent - and you're a goner.

The Penelopiad, Nightwood Theatre

A similar school of thought holds true in the Odyssey, when Telemachus hangs the twelve traitorous handmaidens who slept with the suitors and spied on Penelope. Theirs is, in the important details, a very different case from Europa's handmaidens; Penelope's maids chose to betray their mistress and to disrespect her to her face. But even knowing that, it still seems uncomfortably excessive to force them to dispose of the mangled bodies of their butchered lovers, wash the suitors' blood from the room where they were killed, and then be hanged themselves from a ship's cable. Again, not an individual - no names, no differentiating characteristics. Whether you "bring it on yourself" or not (and Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad is a horrifying and brilliant argument that they actually didn't deserve their fate), a handmaiden's life is no cakewalk.

The Goose Girl, Cindy Salens Rosenheim

Which goes a long way toward explaining the outright villainous behavior of some handmaidens. The unnamed heroine of "The Goosegirl" does nothing to deserve the vicious treatment she gets from her upstart lady-in-waiting; apparently asking for a drink of water is a step too far for this handmaiden. She's an exceptionally cruel villain, too: she bides her time, forcing the heroine into subservience the moment she loses her mother's protection; she marries the heroine's intended husband;
she orders the heroine's talking horse, the witness to her takeover, slaughtered; and ultimately gets herself killed in a manner she'd explicitly intended for the heroine. It's as impossible to condone this handmaiden's actions as it is to accept the deaths of Europa's unfortunate attendants. But it's not hard to see why a simple, forgettable handmaiden would want to better her lot. It's much less dangerous to be royal than to attend royalty; after all, even in her degradation, the heroine survives.

Luckily, not everyone takes social climbing to such an extreme. But there are plenty of handmaidens out there who read their myths and know exactly who takes the fall for royal mistakes. Pwyll, the prince of Dyfed, falls head-over-heels for the mysterious and beautiful Rhiannon. When they finally marry, she's a perfect queen in every way but one: she gives Pwyll no children. So the eventual birth of a son is nothing short of miraculous. Parties are thrown, ale is quaffed, and everyone in Dyfed heaves a sigh of relief.

And then a monster breaks into the palace, steals the baby prince, and slips out again with no one the wiser.

Rhiannon, Margaret Jones

Rhiannon's handmaidens, as usual, are up long before their mistress to light her fire, set out her clothes, and generally make her life easier. So they're the first ones to notice, whoops, the miracle baby's missing. And they're no fools; regardless of who's actually to blame, they'll get in trouble for not watching more closely. Their solution? Redirect the blame! Onto... the bereaved mother? Yes, obviously the only way to ensure that they're not flogged or worse is to kill a puppy, smear its blood on the sleeping Rhiannon's hands and face, and swear to high heaven that this unnatural woman totally killed and ate her own child.

Horror of horrors, it works. Pwyll can't bring himself to execute the woman he loves, so he makes her carry visitors into the palace on her back. Wouldn't you know, sixteen or so years down the line, along comes an old farmer and his strapping son to petition Pwyll. Adopted son, that is, since a cattle-stealing monster abandoned a baby at the farmer's house about sixteen years ago. Rhiannon carries her son into the palace, all the pieces of the story are fitted together, the royal family is reunited... and no one ever does anything to the seriously sketchy handmaidens who condemned the queen to a decade and a half of menial labor on oaths that they knew were false.

Don't mistake me - I'm never going to be on the side of people who kill puppies and frame mothers for infant cannibalism. But if Pwyll's literally backbreaking punishment of Rhiannon was lenient, it's easy to see why the handmaidens would have been so terrified of his vengeance that even the most grotesque lies seemed like a better option.

Birthing chair, Roman era (artist unknown)

So, between the blandness of the job, the occupational hazards, and the psychological stress of knowing you'll pay with your life for the first thing to go wrong, are there any good handmaidens out there? Well, sort of. Maid Maleen has a devoted handmaiden who gets walled up in a tower with her, protects her on her journey to another kingdom, and basically acts as her much-needed mother. Cinderella is perhaps the quintessential good handmaiden, even though she's also the heroine of her own story. And Zilpah and Bilhah obediently let themselves become weapons in Rachel and Leah's war over Jacob, each bearing two sons and surrendering them to their respective mistresses to raise as their own. But even this good

Seducer, Nasreddine Dinet

behavior has its limits; Bilhah and Reuben's fling gets Reuben disinherited. And Cinderella's social climbing is acceptable because it's less of a climb than a restoration; she was born to privilege, and the perversion of the natural order is not in her ascent from handmaiden to princess, but in her earlier enforced descent from wealth to poverty. Compare her fate with the Goosegirl's handmaiden. Ouch. Fairy tales love them some status quo.

Maid Maleen, Louisa Roy

Ultimately, that's the moral of whatever fate the handmaidens of legend meet. It's not about character development, rewards, or even, really, punishment. If a story features a handmaiden, she is there to reinforce the status quo. She may get to move the plot, but if so she's a villain; the lower classes are supposed to wait for their betters to order them, not take matters into their own hands. Only by obedience and devotion can a handmaiden end the story alive and on the side of the good guys.

But if that's too much of a downer ending for the rest of us real-world peons, just remember: handmaidens also know how to frame someone and get away with it. Not quite glass slipper material, but agency and survival aren't bad consolation prizes.

A Love Letter to Bigamists

Right off the bat, you need to know that the Snow White story has never done much for me. This may have something to do with being traumatized before age 6 by the re-release of the Disney version (the transformation scene, oh my god), but it's also deeply rooted in my disdain for heroines who don't do anything, and distrust of stories that hold them up as role models. By now you should know that I'll take Kate Crackernuts over the fairest of them all any day of the week.

Which makes it odd that a Snow White variant is among my favorite fairy tales of all time.

Silver-tree, John Batten

"Gold-tree and Silver-tree" is different from the classic version, though, in all the ways that matter. The Scots felt no need to whitewash the mother's murderous designs on her biological daughter; Silver-tree, the evil queen, even couches her single successful plot in a false solicitude for Gold-tree's well-being. Gold-tree has a modicum of sense; when she sees Silver-tree's ship coming for her, she knows perfectly well that her mother wants to kill her, and that she needs to hide. But the biggest difference, and the reason why I love this version, lies in the actions of the prince.

In the Grimms' Snow White, the prince is at best a moron and at worst a necrophiliac. Either way, he is primarily a plot device. And in "Gold-tree and Silver-tree," that's exactly how he starts out. Right after Silver-tree finds out that Gold-tree is more beautiful than she is, up rides the prince, seeking Gold-tree's hand in marriage. Problem solved: Gold-tree marries the prince, her father slips Silver-tree a goat's heart, and for bonus points, Gold-tree and the prince actually fall in love. Everything's perfect until Silver-tree realizes that Gold-tree's alive, sticks a poisoned dart in her finger, and sails back home, presumably cackling all the way.

Death of Gold-tree, Michelle Hunt

Point one in the prince's favor: He doesn't try to kiss, sleep with, or otherwise perform acts of dubious consensuality on the seemingly-dead body of his wife. (He does keep her unblemished corpse in a locked room, but he can't really be blamed for that, since it's plot-relevant and he's grieving for his lost love. At least, I cut him some slack on that. And I bet poor Talia would, too.)

And then things get really interesting. The prince remarries.

So. It's a fairy tale. We already know that Gold-tree's not really dead. But no one in the story does. This may be the one and only time where I'm glad to see characters not operating in full awareness of fairy tale logic. I'll pull out my hair and scream at clueless third brothers and innocent girls victimized by their stepsisters, wondering why the hell they don't wise up. But here, I'm completely on board, because what's happening is that real-life logic is superseding fairy tale logic. Of course the prince would remarry. He's a prince, and he didn't have any kids with Gold-tree. It's his job, regardless of the fact that he still mourns the woman he loved.

Gold-tree, Morris Meredith Williams

And then, he wins my undying love, because his second wife is a complete and total badass. When he forgets to take the key to Gold-tree's locked room, she Bluebeards in there and finds the body of her predecessor. Does she go all "other woman" on poor defenseless Gold-tree? Does she cook her in a stew? Does she confront her husband about the near-literal skeleton in his closet?

Nope. She just takes out the poisoned dart. And when the prince gets home, she tells him right away, "Hey, I woke up your first wife, and you obviously still love her, so I'll just peace out and let you two lovebirds get back together." Is there anyone else in fairy tales who freely walks away from a love conflict with sincere goodwill? Is there anyone in the real world who can do that? The second wife basically thumbs her nose at fairy tale convention, while at the same time making us desperate to keep her around. I love her for it.

Two Princesses, One Prince, V-Eclipse

Point two in the prince's favor: He made a very intelligent second marriage.

Point three in the prince's favor: As soon as the second wife offers to step out, he refuses to let her. She says she'll go away. His exact words in reply? "Oh! indeed you shall not go away, but I shall have both of you."

This guy is so cool. Maybe not smart enough to just take the dart out of his first wife's finger, but totally smart enough to marry a woman with brains, to value her for her intelligence, and to let his first and second loves know that he cherishes them both equally.

It's hardly conventional, either in fairy tales or in the world we live in. But I have to think that this is one awesome three-way marriage. No one is superior: Gold-tree owes her life to the second wife, who owes her continued place to the prince, who owes his happiness to both of them. It's impossible to feel like anyone's an interloper here, because they all play integral parts in the relationship. Plus we get to keep the smart girl on the heroes' team. This is a total win for everyone involved.

The clincher of it all, vindicating the prince's unconventional decision, is that the second wife is solely responsible for the death of Silver-tree (remember her?). Once again, Silver-tree hears that Gold-tree's alive and comes back for more murder. Gold-tree's initial instinct - to flee, again - is firmly countermanded by the second wife, who gets them both down on the beach to say hello. Silver-tree offers Gold-tree a cup laced with poison, pulling the caring-mother card yet again in front of witnesses. Cool as a cucumber, the second wife retorts that she doesn't know where you come from, honey, but in this country the person offering a drink takes a sip first, I mean really, where are your manners. And when Silver-tree pretends to drink, the second wife just smacks the bottom of the cup so that the poison goes straight into the would-be murderess's mouth. Call me crazy, but I think that's even more karmic than Snow White's stepmother dancing to death in red-hot iron shoes. It's quick, it's elegant, and it's not nearly as grotesque.

The Two Princesses of Bamarre, eala-nedea

This is a fairy tale where real-world rules also apply. Sure, there's a talking trout and some confusion over the actual fact of death. There's also unvarnished mother-daughter darkness, the irreplaceable value of second love, and perhaps the most unconventional marriage fairy tales have to offer, portrayed in unambiguously glowing terms. I've never read a fairy tale quite like this one. With the exception of the Beauty and the Beast variants, I've never seen more interesting romantic dynamics. It's a lot more complicated and compelling than "someday my prince will come."

And it's subversive as hell. It pokes fun at the passive heroine. It giggles at the genre's conventions. A secondary character steals center stage halfway through, and the reader never looks back. It never punishes its heroes for their atypical choices, and in fact rewards the unexpected over the standard. Fairy tales exist to reinforce the status quo. But by the end of this one, you're cheering for the triumph of true love expressed through bigamy. That is gutsy like nobody's business. And more than anything else, I love this story for that very fact: that it stakes out its territory, takes a stand, and refuses to back down.

If only we could get Snow White to read it...

Love Potion Number Nine

Ah, young love. You burn, you pine, you perish. A smile sends you soaring; a glare tumbles mountains around your head. You just have to feel for those two crazy kids, thrown together by their unruly hearts. Sometimes. After all, if the object of your affection doesn't return your

The Love Potion, Evelyn De Morgan

feelings, you can always brainwash them with a handy love spell! Those never backfire!

For all their ubiquity in myths, it is a rare story where the love spell actually works out all right. There's Cupid and Psyche, sort of; he scratches himself with the arrow of love, falls head over heels, and... abducts her, woos her while invisible, and has to abandon her to a torturous set of quests before they can be reunited. And that's the happy one.

It's much easier to find a love spell gone wrong. Sometimes it's played for laughs, as Shakespeare does in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Frequently it's the province of a villainous woman, a "false bride" seeking to blot out a man's memories of his beloved and claim him for herself. (There's a splendid Grimm story, Sweetheart Roland, in which the heroine's loss of her beloved is just one of the many trials she faces.) More often, however, a love spell leads to total disaster. And I'm not talking about Our Hero and Our Heroine not ending up together. I'm talking about the breaking of the world.

Aphrodite Leading Helen to Paris, Jack Pane

The most famous of these is, of course, Helen of Troy. The jury will probably always be out on whether or not Helen went with Paris willingly, but in the Iliad she has no doubt of the answer: she demands to know if she is to be sent hither and yon, crazed with desire, whenever Aphrodite has a new mortal favorite. Obviously this was a flawed love spell, since Helen's own wishes can still make themselves felt, but it's still highly potent. Helen does in the end sleep with Paris, and the direct outcome of Aphrodite's love spell is the destruction, not just of a city, but of an entire generation.

Helen is a particularly sad case because not only has she been brainwashed, she knows it. The gods can force mortals to do their bidding; Helen knows all too well that no matter how much she might want to go home to Sparta, she will never be able to fight off Aphrodite's mind control. The best she can do is complain about it, and even that arouses the wrath of a goddess who's notoriously vindictive when thwarted. There are plenty of love-spelled bridegrooms unaware that they're about to marry the wrong girl; Helen is fully conscious all the time of just how much she doesn't want what Aphrodite's love spell is forcing on her. Hell with brainwashing - this is torture.

Tristan and Isolde, Yoshitaka Amano

Later stories shift the blame away from the lovers. Tristan and Isolde drink a love potion unknowingly (again, the jury is still out on whether it really was an honest mistake, or whether Isolde's mother or maidservant thought that Isolde would be better paired with Tristan than with King Mark). It's just as unfair for them as it is for Helen; while their love is deeply felt, it's also created without their consent, and locks them into a fate as destructive as Troy's. For a long time they choose to deny their love, unlike Helen and Paris, for the sake of preserving the political alliance that Isolde's marriage creates. But all that that does is drive them to distraction and inflame Mark's suspicions. When they run away together, their guilty consciences send Isolde back to Mark and Tristan across the sea to Brittany, and ultimately into a marriage of convenience with a girl he never touches, who rightly becomes as suspicious as Mark. Conscience proves their undoing, since out of decency Tristan waits to seek Isolde's healing help until it's too late to save his life, and she dies of a broken heart when she arrives to find him dead. Their story is a tragedy where Helen and Paris's is not, primarily because they fight as hard as they can against a love that they know will doom them. But that knowledge gives them precisely zero help. The best you can do, apparently, is to live a tortured life of denial and hope that posterity thinks well of you.

Siegfried Meets Gutrune, Arthur Rackham

And that's only if your family is inclined to let it rest. Siegfried's wife Kriemhild enticed him away from Brunhilde with a love spell, but the ensuing love dodecahedron creates a situation where murder and mayhem are the only outcomes. Siegfried's friendship with Gunther, Kriemhild's brother, leads him to betray his initial (and real) love for Brunhilde by posing as Gunther in order to win her for his new brother-in-law; Brunhilde's outraged pride and rejected love make her arrange for Gunther to kill Siegfried, and then to throw herself on his funeral pyre; and Kriemhild, furious at her brother's treachery, has him slaughtered at the feast celebrating her second marriage and burns the great hall down around them all.

Brunnhilde on the Pyre, Arthur Rackham

The characters of the Nibelungenlied (or the Volsunga saga, whichever version you prefer) are neither heroic nor villainous. They do horrible things, but for reasons well within the code of their society. Kriemhild's terrible vengeance is something that her honor requires her to do; in the Volsunga saga, the gods decide that she did exactly the right thing and bring about a third (and apparently happy) marriage, this time to a Swedish king. Siegfried deserves more pity than condemnation; for most of the story, he operates under the brainwashing influence of the love spell, and can't even remember being in love with Brunhilde. As far as he knows, he's doing some iffy things in the service of his best friend and the woman he loves. Brunhilde, although vindictive as hell, also recognizes that she's gone too far (although arguably she's operating under the exact same rules as Kriemhild will later); her suicide reclaims for her a moment of true tragic dignity. Only Gunther comes off as a real lowlife, literally stabbing his best friend and brother-in-law in the back. The whole mess could have been avoided if the love spell had never entered the picture. Once it does, everyone involved is doomed. The rules of honor require them all to make the moves that will lead to their deaths.

Death of Tristan, Robert Engels

Which makes sense. Clearly we're uncomfortable with the idea that we can be brainwashed and never regain our true minds. But the horrific endings to so many love spell stories place the brunt of the fallout on the shoulders of the victims. Siegfried gets murdered; Tristan and Isolde both die; Helen sees herself become the byword for a faithless whore. Aphrodite never suffers for enchanting Helen. The queen of Ireland, who sends the love potion with Isolde, is punished not at all; nor is Kriemhild's mother, who puts the spell on Siegfried. In some "false bride" fairy tales, the villainous woman who tried to steal the bridegroom gets torn limb from limb by horses, or rolled down a hill in a barrel full of knives, or even just exiled or humiliated in front of the whole court. But in some (like Sweetheart Roland), there's again no punishment for the instigator of the mess.

The Death of Siegfried, Hermann Hendrich

It's incredibly unsatisfying to see relative innocents pay with their lives for the crime of another. But it reveals a realistic attitude towards life that legends and fairy tales (often unjustly) aren't seen as having. People escape justice all the time. Innocents suffer all the time. The punishment for making a mistake is often out of proportion to the mistake itself. These aren't giddy Disneyfied tales of happily-ever-after; these are tragedies of epic scope, designed to reveal dark truths about humanity and about life. Instead of spoon-feeding you a happy ending, the love spell stories and their awful endings force you to think about human nature: about love, about hate, about injustice.

It's heavy stuff. But it's what we have legends for. We tell those stories to remember what happens when we impose our will on someone else. And in telling them, hopefully we remember that that path rarely leads to dignity, or happiness, or anything we'd want for ourselves.

She's Got a Great Personality

Beautiful princesses are one of the classic staples of great fairy tales, right up there with fire-breathing dragons and evil magicians. The landscape of legend would be unrecognizable without Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Helen of Troy, to name just a few. But after a while you start to roll your eyes and wonder if any female in all of myth who's not a stepsister is anything less than a stunning beauty. Worse - a stunning beauty whose entire value rests on her looks, not on anything she says or does or thinks or is.

Luckily, there's another kind of heroine. She's much more obscure than her good-looking cousins, but she's there. She goes by names like Tatterhood, Lady Ragnell, or Penelope. In her stories, it's made explicit that she has nowhere near the beauty that's expected of a heroine. Tatterhood's twin sister is everything a princess should be; Tatterhood takes hilarious joy in subverting all those expectations, smacking goblins over the head, riding around on a goat, and negotiating her marriage by her own damn self. Penelope is Odysseus' consolation prize for ending his courtship of Helen of Troy and concocting the Oath of the Horse, sworn by all of Helen's remaining suitors. "Sorry you won't get the hottie of the century. But hey, she's got a cousin who's obviously not getting fawned over by scads of suitors. How about you marry her instead and take her off our hands?"

The Loathly Lady, Juan Wijngaard

Lady Ragnell, of course, is hideous beyond description. (Not that that's ever stopped writers from describing how physically painful it is to look at her, or artists from showing us in stomach-churning detail.)

So what gives? Why are these oddballs heroines? Why match an unattractive or even downright hideous woman with some poor dope who has little to no choice in the matter? What are these women's redeeming qualities?

Well, they tend to be far more self-sufficient than your average swooning princess. Penelope is a perfect match for wily Odysseus: when suitors finally flock to her (although drawn more by the lure of marrying a crown than by her beauty),

Penelope and the Suitors, John William Waterhouse

she holds them off for ten years without ever offering the deadly insult that would turn them and their military force against herself, her son, and her throne. She even outwits her husband, forcing him to reveal himself with a well-timed lie about their bed. Lady Ragnell, cursed into ugliness, doesn't lock herself in some tower and wait for a brave knight to save her; she masterminds her own rescue, tricking her way into marriage with the one knight whose sense and goodwill can break her curse. (Not to mention that she saves King Arthur's life while she's at it.) Tatterhood is just a badass. I can't do justice to her in a sentence or two. Read for yourself. (But see also, above, re: goblins and goat.)

There's a very obvious, and very uncomfortable, lesson here. Beautiful girls don't need brains; plain girls, who can't coast on their looks, are the only ones who need to be able to think. But in multiple cases, that lesson is subverted by the twist ending to these stories of unlovely

"My Lord?", Juan Wijngaard

heroines. Both Tatterhood and Lady Ragnell transform into beauties at the moment of the happy ending, to the shocked delight of their respective husbands. Lady Ragnell's comes as a relief on many counts: for her, since her spell is broken; for Gawain, since he's now married to a beautiful as well as intelligent woman; and for the audience, since we really didn't want to see Gawain the awesome shackled to a hag. Tatterhood's transformation is especially noteworthy. She's not under any curse. She herself wields the magic that changes her into a beauty. She looks the way she does because she chooses to. Whatever face she wears, it's one that she creates for herself. The message is subtler than "plain girls need brains," but it's actually much more interesting to deal with a heroine who shapes her own notion of beauty and worthiness.

Odysseus and Penelope Reunited, N.C. Wyeth

And Penelope's marked lack of a transformation is nothing short of heartwarming. Odysseus gets a magical face-lift thanks to Athena, who restores to him all the beauty of his youth when he arrives at last in Ithaca. But Penelope, who's now twenty years older than when Odysseus went to Troy, gets no such divine gift. She's as careworn as she was five minutes before he came back. She doesn't get to erase those years from her body. And Odysseus, who has slept with nymphs and flirted with a princess, returns to her arms with joy. For him, physical beauty is irrelevant; it's Penelope herself that he loves, her cleverness, her personality, her determination. Their reunion is both physical (as in, old as she is, he still desires her) and intellectual (they use the afterglow to catch each other up on their lives and plan for the future). Theirs is the most satisfyingly depicted marriage in all of Greek mythology, precisely because it's based on a connection deeper than that of a young prince and a beautiful princess. Penelope doesn't need to pretend to a beauty she never had in order to entrance her husband.

So why aren't there more of these heroines? Mostly because they're too complex. Fairy tales run on archetypes. Everyone already knows what you mean when you say "the beautiful princess." If you're telling the story of Tatterhood, you have to take time out to explain about her weirdness. If you create a marriage like that of Odysseus and Penelope, the characters have to be real enough to support its complications; you have to tell an epic, not a five-minute

Tatterhood, Lisa Hunt

bedtime story. But the comparative lack of non-beauties does emphasize the trend-buckers. Among all the Andromedas, Ledas, and Semeles, Penelope stands out. The Round Table seats one hundred and fifty knights; Lady Ragnell is among the few knight's wives who gets named. (Another one, Linette, is equally famous for her lack of conformity to the expectations of a damsel in distress.) Tatterhood, alas, is obscure in comparison to other fairy tales, but she's not easily forgotten.

And maybe the scarcity of non-beauties lets the chosen few shine a bit brighter. After all, the independent non-beauty too can become an archetype: the shrewish unpleasant scold who lives to plague the poor hero's life, a la Kate in "The Taming of the Shrew" or the greedy fisherman's wife who makes him use up all of the wish fish's goodwill. But this kind of heroine never got so popular that she became ubiquitous and boring. Her low level of exposure let her stay stubborn, strong and awesome. She's always there, if we know where to look.

Dancing with the Stars

I talk about the Twelve Dancing Princesses quite a bit on this blog. What I haven't yet confessed is that I have a real soft spot for the story, quite beyond the wish-fulfillment fantasy of being a princess who gets to wear spiffy new shoes and dance with a prince every night.

The Soldier, Clive Hicks Jenkins

The unnamed soldier who drives the story is my favorite fairy tale hero. Only the Beast rivals him in my affections. Prince Charming and all his ilk can scram. Give me a tricksy thinker any day of the week.

Why the soldier? Why a nameless late-arrival in a lesser-known fairy tale? Why a guy Disney hasn't supplied with a swoony animated face? Partly for the same reason that Beauty and the Beast is my favorite fairy tale: the complexity of his character, hinted at subtly but in every version I've ever heard. And partly because he's just awesome.

The fairy tale canon is stuffed to overflowing with heroes who are heroic because it's what they're supposed to do. Why does Cinderella's prince scour the kingdom for the girl with the tiny feet? Why does Sleeping Beauty's prince brave a gruesome death to save a girl he's never even seen? Why does Aladdin do anything? Because they're heroes. They know what's expected of them just like we do. They read their script, and they're going to perform the hell out of it, and no one needs to ask any questions.

The soldier is different. He's got motivation. He's a commoner who sees a chance to rise in the world - a near-impossible thing, given his position in a society hierarchical enough for the Princesses' father to permit only princes to investigate his daughters. Sometimes I've seen him played or written as wounded, which means his only form of income is gone. In the more draconian versions, where failed candidates get executed, the soldier is literally on his last chance. Solving the Princesses' mystery is the only path to survival open to him.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses, Anne Anderson

Be honest: in his situation, you'd allow yourself some time to panic, hyperventilate, engage in self-doubt, etc., yes? (I would, too. It's okay.) But this is where the soldier earns his stripes as a hero. He doesn't do any of that. He gets to the palace, persuades the king to let him have a go, and becomes goal-oriented like you wouldn't believe. He's three steps ahead of everyone, including the clever Eldest Princess who's been running circles around the rest of the palace chumps. After successfully tracking the Princesses on the very first night, instead of spilling the beans in a fit of glee, he has the sense to take all his allotted time to gather a whole mess of irrefutable proof. And during the day, he deploys his champion poker face to keep the Princesses from being suspicious, while probably courting them into the bargain (now that he knows he's going to win).

I don't care what you say. He is the textbook definition of cool.

Granted, if all we ever saw him do was track a bunch of girls through the woods at night, I'd be more concerned. But the very first time we meet him, we receive ample proof of his awesomeness. Remember, he's extremely down on his luck. No profession, no money, no prospect of long life and happiness. And yet he shares his lunch with a poor woman who has even less than he does. Was anyone surprised when she turned out to be one of those good witches who crisscrosses Fairy Tale Land rewarding good guys? Those characters exist for people like the soldier: unassuming decent people who just need one push in the right direction to turn their lives around.

Plus, there's that hilarious ending to one of the variants where, given his choice of bride among the Princesses, the soldier picks the Eldest Princess because neither of them are spring chickens and will suit each other best. Clever, pragmatic, and snarky? Sign me up! (Confession: I always think he marries the Eldest Princess anyway, regardless of their ages. The Youngest Princess - who, let's face it, is the only other real option - does nothing but squeal when he steps on her dress. The Eldest Princess is almost as smart and cunning as the soldier himself. They would suit each other best.)

There's just no one quite like him. For wit, quick thinking, sense, and goodness, no hero rivals the soldier. He's a self-made man in a universe that thrives on the status quo. He relies on his own talents and ambition - and of course, the charm that makes people like me fall head over heels for him. He is the complete package, and part of the fun of reading his story is learning just how much he deserves the good fortune that he earns.

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.

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.