Sleeping Beauty (According to Cassie)
So, basically, as happens so often in these things, we have a king and a queen who really want a baby, but aren’t having one for some reason until they do. It’s a girl, and what happens next depends on whose version you read.
A christening is planned, and the girl is given three or seven or twenty-one fairy godparents, who are each to bestow a gift upon the child, but the thing is, there’s another fairy in the kingdom who doesn’t get invited. The reason varies from story to story. You’ve got the pretty bad reason – the royals just forgot she existed – and then the really dumb reason – they left someone off the guest list because they didn’t have enough golden plates. I mean, seriously? You couldn’t just go buy another golden plate? Like, for reals?
Anyway, the Left Out Fairy is understandably pissed, so she shows up anyway, in the middle of the christening, after every fairy godparent but one has given their silly gifts of beauty and grace and musicianship and what have you, to show her displeasure. And rather than focus it on the parents who did the actual insulting, this fairy decides to curse the helpless infant princess who has pretty much done nothing except be born at this point.
The Petty and Petulant Fairy (I’m not calling her Evil because in the originals, anyway, she’s usually not) announces that the princess will live for fifteen years, but on her sixteenth (or eighteenth or twenty-first) birthday, she will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die.
Everyone is horrified, because geez, over-reacting much? But then the last fairy steps forward to give her gift, and her gift is to change the nature of the Ego-Bruised Fairy’s curse – the princess won’t die. She’ll just sleep for a hundred years! Because, yeah, that’s totally better. . .
I mean, seriously, if you have the power to change the gift, couldn’t you shorten the time frame a bit? Like, she sleeps for a year? But anyway, the fairy changes the death to a hundred year sleep, saying that the curse will be broken when the princess’s True Love comes to kiss her awake.
And then the king goes, “I have a better idea. Let’s just destroy all the spinning wheels ever and forget this ever happened because that will totally take care of the problem!” I hope whatever clothes exist in the kingdom currently will serve everyone for the next couple decades, because your king just told you that you won’t be making any more thread anytime soon.
And apparently, this is a king who is really confident in his decreeing power, because not only do he and the queen not tell their daughter about this curse, they’re out of town on the day when the curse is supposed to be enacted.
. . . Okay, so, let me get this straight. Your daughter is cursed to prick her finger on a spinning wheel and either die or fall into a century-long sleep, depending on whose magic was stronger, and you happen to have the exact day this will all happen, your course of action is to 1) destroy all the spinning wheels (supposedly) so that your daughter will never know what one looks like, 2) leave her completely ignorant of the fact that the curse exists and there are things she should avoid touching, and 3) leave her completely alone on the day you know the curse is supposed to come to pass?
. . . Keep up the parenting, dude, you’re doing a stellar job.
Anyway, not surprising to me in the slightest, the princess stumbles across an old woman in the palace with a spinning wheel, who apparently has moved in since the king’s decree. To be clear, this is not the Grudge-Holding Fairy in disguise, it’s just an innocent old lady going about her business. The princess, never having seen a spinning wheel before because her father is somehow simultaneously the most over-protective and negligent father of all time ever, is intrigued, and asks if she can try. And she pricks her finger and falls down as if dead because she was never given the necessary knowledge to avoid this fate.
So the unconscious princess is taken up to the highest room of the tallest tower and laid out on the bed, and then the fairy shows up and puts everyone in the castle to sleep alongside her – usually. Not always, though. Sometimes the princess alone sleeps and everyone else just goes about her business, which has to kinda suck.
The fairy also encloses the castle in thick briars, presumably for protection, though we’re never told.
And then we sit and wait and nothing happens for a hundred years.
Now, see, if this was me, I would have handled what goes down next a little differently. The characters in this fairy tale are in the unique position of knowing exactly dates and time frames. The curse will happen on the princess’s sixteenth birthday. The princess will sleep for 100 years. It’s hard to miscalculate, is what I’m saying.
So, me, I’d have posted a sign or something: Hey. There’s a cursed princess sleeping in this castle. On this date, somebody should go wake her up or something.
Or, you know, at least passed the story down so people knew. I can sort of understand the parents not doing this; there may not have been time. But this good fairy? Yeah, she puts everybody to sleep and then disappears. Far be it from me to tell a godparent how to look after their godchild, but, uh . . . seems to me you could maybe be a little more involved? Nope? Okay.
Anyway, with the briars growing up around the castle and everyone being put to sleep and the fairies disappearing, the result 100 years later is that no one really knows anything about the castle and the princess and the curse. There’s tons of stories flying around, but they’re all rumors and hearsay, and honestly, the prince who finally makes it through to the palace is just trying to solve that mystery as much as anything else.
And again, how grim this part of the story gets depends on who’s telling it. In some versions, lots of princes have tried to get to the castle, but have been killed by the briars, until this One True Love prince comes by at the right time. In other stories, he’s the only one who ever really gets curious about a castle buried by roses bushes.
Either way, he sets out to get to the castle, and the briars . . . part for him. Evidence of his suitability, some might say. Me, I’m more cynically inclined to read this as yet another moment of inactive passivity, but we’ll get to that.
And then it’s the iconic scene, where he finds the princess on the bed, is overcome by her beauty, and kisses her – not because he knows it will wake her or break the curse mind you, just kisses the for-all-he-knows-dead girl – or, if you’re Perrault, just walks into the room and his presence is enough to break the curse and wake her up.
And so, with no one really having done anything at all, we reach happily ever after in possibly the most anti-climactic fairy tale climax ever.
Unless you’re Charles Perrault, in which case, you tack a whole other fairy tale onto the end of this one involving a stepmother who’s part ogress trying to eat the prince and Sleeping Beauty’s babies. Because why not?
Thoughts on this story?
I took a seminar on this fairy tale in college, so I’m pretty intimately familiar with it, and I actually have written a full length novel adaptation of it, addressing my issues with the story. And the biggest one is this:
Nothing happens in this story. Seriously. Nothing happens. Girl is cursed, she falls asleep, a prince walks in, she wakes up. That’s it. This story is boring. And stupid as Perrault’s tacked-on ending is, at least someone does something in it. There’s a villain and conflict and action. But the bulk of what happens in the tale of Sleeping Beauty we all know? There’s none of that.
Checklist? Checklist.
Make the characters more active in their own story. Seriously, this is the fairy tale of People Who Had Things Happen to Them. The most active anyone gets is the evil fairy responding to something that didn’t happen, and the good fairy, who reacts with a solution that is possibly more passive than dying. I would like someone, anyone, to do something. Anything. Please.
Introduce more conflict. I’d like something to be at stake, beyond the evil fairy going, “YOU DIDN’T HAVE A GOLDEN PLATE FOR ME?? CURSED!” and then just kind of losing interest. This is a plot that desperately needs a driving force behind it. Give me one.
Explain the actions of the parents. Seriously. Parents of the Year, these guys. I desperately need an explanation – why didn’t they tell Sleeping Beauty about her curse? Why would they leave her alone on the day the curse is supposed to be enacted? And why would a man who lives in a place inundated with magic and fairies really think he could dispel the curse by going, “Burn ALL the spinning wheels!”
Flesh the story out. We get very few details here, on what is not a very long story, unless you’re Perrault and really need to add a wicked stepmother somewhere. Give me background and detail, and you’re golden. Find a way to work Perrault’s ending in and get me to commit to it? You’re super-human.
Like Cinderella, there are a lot of novels to choose from, but the line-up for the month after careful deliberation is:
Week 1: Beauty Sleep by Cameron Dokey
Week 2: Sleeping Beauty: The One Who Took a Really Long Nap by Wendy Mass
Week 3: A Kiss in Time by Alex Flinn
Week 4: A Long, Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan
Week 5: Spindle's End by Robin McKinley
Feel free to read along!
Showing posts with label according to cassie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label according to cassie. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Monday, April 1, 2013
Little Red Riding Hood (According to Cassie)
Little Red Riding Hood (According to Cassie)
So basically, there's this girl, and she's named after a piece of clothing because that makes perfect sense. She lives with her mother on the edge of the woods; if there's a father, we never hear about him.
There's a grandmother, though, and she lives in the middle of the woods, and she's also been feeling a bit under the weather, so Mother asks young Little Red to take a basket of bread and wine into the forest for Granny, to make her feel better. Why we're sending wine and not soup or something isn't made clear, but hey. Alcohol's medicinal, right? Though it should be noted that not everyone includes the wine. Perrault just had them send a cake and some butter because that'll heal a body right up!
Anyway, the mother packs the basket and sends Little Red out into the woods. In some versions, she gives instructions: don't talk to strangers and don't stray from the path; but in Perrault's, the little girl just goes skipping off into the woods with alcohol and sugar for the invalid.
And as she skips along the path into the woods, who should she encounter but a wolf! And not just any sort of wolf -- a talking wolf! Why a little girl has been sent alone into a forest containing a talking wolf is not addressed. Nor is it addressed why an invalided old lady is living alone in a forest containing a talking wolf.
Anyway, Little Red meets this wolf and does not immediately turn and run in the opposite direction. Nor does she express any sort of surprise at the fact that this wolf strikes up a conversation with her, so maybe in this world, talking animals are fairly commonplace.
Or maybe Little Red is just an idiot. I mean, that's certainly not out of the realm of possibility, given what happens next.
Because the wolf starts chatting up Little Red, asking where she's going and what's in her basket and why she's in the woods. And Little Red doesn't say "none of your business" or "I'm not supposed to talk to strangers," or "why do you care?" No, instead she flat out tells him that her grandmother lives alone and is sick, and then, she practically draws him a map with GPS coordinates for how to find said sick old woman who can't possibly defend herself.
Seriously, it's not, "I'm visiting my grandma who lives in the forest." That would be not too smart, but the forest is a big place, and hey, maybe grandma's a lumberjack or something. But, no. No, Little Red tells this wolf exactly where to find her sick grandma, which house in which part of the woods and all. And then, the wolf proposes that they race to grandma's and see who can get there first.
No, none of this strikes Little Red as suspect at all. Which means she's either young enough that she shouldn't be wandering around a forest on her own or dumb enough that she shouldn't be wandering around a forest on her own. Either way, this girl really ought to be supervised, is what I'm saying.
So, Little Red finds nothing creepy or suspicious at all about the wolf’s suggestion, and in fact, seems to entirely forget about it once the wolf follows her incredibly specific directions and heads away. In some versions, he specifically distracts her by suggesting she go further into the woods to gather flowers for her grandmother, but in Perrault's, he doesn't have to! The child wanders away of her own accord, and honestly, I'm surprised it took this long.
So, yeah, the wolf gets to Granny's way ahead of Little Red, and in a move that provides decent evidence that Little Red's idiocy might just be hereditary, this obviously male wolf tells Granny that he is her granddaughter, and she gives him instructions on how to unlock the door from the outside and invites him right in. Having very easily gained entrance to the house, the wolf eats Granny.
Then he dresses himself in her nightgown and climbs into bed to wait for Little Red. And soon enough, Little Red shows up. She knocks on the door, and when the wolf answers, claiming to be her grandmother, Little Red is slightly alarmed by the sound of his voice, but decides that her grandma must just be hoarse because of her cold, and so she goes right in. This, to me, is slightly excusable.
But what happens next is not. Little Red heads for Granny's room, and sees the wolf in Granny's nightdress. And despite the fact that a) she met this same wolf earlier, b) he told her he was going to be heading to Granny's, c) she's already suspicious because of the unfamiliar voice, and d) it's a freakin' wolf in a nightdress!!!, Little Red does not immediately recognize that it is not her grandmother in the room with her.
Now, I’m no expert, nor did I grow up in this fantasy land, but it seems to me that if you have difficulty distinguishing between your grandmother and a wolf in a nightdress, then you either need to have your eyes checked, your head examined, or offer some sort of explanation as to why your grandmother is regularly covered in fur.
And what gets me about this is how Little Red knows that something’s wrong . . . she just can’t quite put her finger on what. Is it the fur-covered arms and legs that end in paws and claws? No . . . Is it the pointed, furry ears on top of the head? No. . . Is it the glowing yellow eyes? No . . . Is it the fangs in the snout-like mouth? Oh. Yup. That was it. The teeth. Being eaten now. Shucks. Wish I could have seen that coming.
That’s the end of the story, by the way. Little Red gets eaten, along with Granny, the wolf enjoys a nice full meal and heads off, presumably in search of other idiotic little girls to eat. No huntsman, no rescue, no survival. This is the end of the tale, as far as Perrault is concerned.
Honestly, if it weren’t for Perrault’s heavy-handed moral, I’d really be okay with that. Seriously. Act like an idiot, get eaten by a wolf. Works for me. Unfortunately, though, Perrault’s moral is not ‘Learn to tell the difference between your family members and hungry wild animals, you idiot child.’ No, his moral is this:
“Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf. I say "wolf," but there are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all.”
Thanks, Charlie. Your concern for the well being of children, particularly “attractive, well-bred young ladies,” is really quite sexist and condescending. But what else is new? And point of interest: morals become slightly less effective when they’re longer than the story you were telling in the first place. Also, if you have to explain the metaphor.
And, yeah, I know the story has been continued in many other versions. The wolf curls up to sleep after eating Little Red, and a huntsman, the smartest human in the forest, apparently, passes by and realizes that wolves don’t normally curl up in nightdresses, so he figures out that something strange is afoot. He cuts open the wolf’s stomach (which somehow doesn’t kill said wolf) and out climb Little Red and Granny, somehow not dead despite having been eaten.
Then Granny fills the wolf’s stomach with rocks to kill him in a slow, torturous, agonizing death that I really don’t feel he deserved, skins him once he’s dead, and makes Little Red a cloak from the skin.
Guess she’ll have to have her name legally changed now.
Thoughts on this story?
It should be noted that I am entirely ignoring the incredibly rape-y original oral versions of this story, and focusing on when it got written down for kids.
As you might be able to glean from the heightened levels of snark in this synopsis, this fairy tale kinda rubs me the wrong way, at least with the common ending. I can get behind it as Perrault’s morality tale, even if I think the moral he identified is stupid and sexist. If the purpose of this story is to say, “hey, this is what happens when you’re an unobservant idiot, try thinking before you act next time,” then I’m totally down with it.
The problem is, that’s not what this story is, usually. When you add the huntsman and the rescue and the wolf’s death . . . what are you left with? No one learns anything, no one grows as a character, and there’s no point to this story. It’s Rumpelstiltskin all over again. I disobeyed my mother, I got eaten by a wolf, I was rescued by a huntsman, and then I found five dollars.
So. What am I looking for in an adaptation?
Make Little Red less of an idiot. Make her innocent and naive and overly trusting, by all means. But make her less of an idiot, and let’s see some growth by the end of the story, hmm?
Develop the world. I want background and exposition and explanation. There are questions we don’t ask in a morality tale, but when it’s novel length, I need answers. Why do the wolves talk? Why is that not cause for concern? Why does the wolf want to eat the humans? Why is the wolf so easily mistaken for Granny? I need this world to be more developed and more defined, offering answers to some of those questions.
Give me a point. For the love of God, give me a point. Just like with Rumpelstiltskin, why are you telling this story? What’s your message? What’s your ending? Why should I care about your story?
The line-up:
Week 1: Cloaked in Red by Vivian Vande Velde
Week 2: Scarlet by Marissa Meyer
Week 3: Scarlet Moon by Debbie Vigue
Week 4: Princess of the Silver Wood by Jessica Day George
Feel free to read along!
So basically, there's this girl, and she's named after a piece of clothing because that makes perfect sense. She lives with her mother on the edge of the woods; if there's a father, we never hear about him.
There's a grandmother, though, and she lives in the middle of the woods, and she's also been feeling a bit under the weather, so Mother asks young Little Red to take a basket of bread and wine into the forest for Granny, to make her feel better. Why we're sending wine and not soup or something isn't made clear, but hey. Alcohol's medicinal, right? Though it should be noted that not everyone includes the wine. Perrault just had them send a cake and some butter because that'll heal a body right up!
Anyway, the mother packs the basket and sends Little Red out into the woods. In some versions, she gives instructions: don't talk to strangers and don't stray from the path; but in Perrault's, the little girl just goes skipping off into the woods with alcohol and sugar for the invalid.
And as she skips along the path into the woods, who should she encounter but a wolf! And not just any sort of wolf -- a talking wolf! Why a little girl has been sent alone into a forest containing a talking wolf is not addressed. Nor is it addressed why an invalided old lady is living alone in a forest containing a talking wolf.
Anyway, Little Red meets this wolf and does not immediately turn and run in the opposite direction. Nor does she express any sort of surprise at the fact that this wolf strikes up a conversation with her, so maybe in this world, talking animals are fairly commonplace.
Or maybe Little Red is just an idiot. I mean, that's certainly not out of the realm of possibility, given what happens next.
Because the wolf starts chatting up Little Red, asking where she's going and what's in her basket and why she's in the woods. And Little Red doesn't say "none of your business" or "I'm not supposed to talk to strangers," or "why do you care?" No, instead she flat out tells him that her grandmother lives alone and is sick, and then, she practically draws him a map with GPS coordinates for how to find said sick old woman who can't possibly defend herself.
Seriously, it's not, "I'm visiting my grandma who lives in the forest." That would be not too smart, but the forest is a big place, and hey, maybe grandma's a lumberjack or something. But, no. No, Little Red tells this wolf exactly where to find her sick grandma, which house in which part of the woods and all. And then, the wolf proposes that they race to grandma's and see who can get there first.
No, none of this strikes Little Red as suspect at all. Which means she's either young enough that she shouldn't be wandering around a forest on her own or dumb enough that she shouldn't be wandering around a forest on her own. Either way, this girl really ought to be supervised, is what I'm saying.
So, Little Red finds nothing creepy or suspicious at all about the wolf’s suggestion, and in fact, seems to entirely forget about it once the wolf follows her incredibly specific directions and heads away. In some versions, he specifically distracts her by suggesting she go further into the woods to gather flowers for her grandmother, but in Perrault's, he doesn't have to! The child wanders away of her own accord, and honestly, I'm surprised it took this long.
So, yeah, the wolf gets to Granny's way ahead of Little Red, and in a move that provides decent evidence that Little Red's idiocy might just be hereditary, this obviously male wolf tells Granny that he is her granddaughter, and she gives him instructions on how to unlock the door from the outside and invites him right in. Having very easily gained entrance to the house, the wolf eats Granny.
Then he dresses himself in her nightgown and climbs into bed to wait for Little Red. And soon enough, Little Red shows up. She knocks on the door, and when the wolf answers, claiming to be her grandmother, Little Red is slightly alarmed by the sound of his voice, but decides that her grandma must just be hoarse because of her cold, and so she goes right in. This, to me, is slightly excusable.
But what happens next is not. Little Red heads for Granny's room, and sees the wolf in Granny's nightdress. And despite the fact that a) she met this same wolf earlier, b) he told her he was going to be heading to Granny's, c) she's already suspicious because of the unfamiliar voice, and d) it's a freakin' wolf in a nightdress!!!, Little Red does not immediately recognize that it is not her grandmother in the room with her.
Now, I’m no expert, nor did I grow up in this fantasy land, but it seems to me that if you have difficulty distinguishing between your grandmother and a wolf in a nightdress, then you either need to have your eyes checked, your head examined, or offer some sort of explanation as to why your grandmother is regularly covered in fur.
And what gets me about this is how Little Red knows that something’s wrong . . . she just can’t quite put her finger on what. Is it the fur-covered arms and legs that end in paws and claws? No . . . Is it the pointed, furry ears on top of the head? No. . . Is it the glowing yellow eyes? No . . . Is it the fangs in the snout-like mouth? Oh. Yup. That was it. The teeth. Being eaten now. Shucks. Wish I could have seen that coming.
That’s the end of the story, by the way. Little Red gets eaten, along with Granny, the wolf enjoys a nice full meal and heads off, presumably in search of other idiotic little girls to eat. No huntsman, no rescue, no survival. This is the end of the tale, as far as Perrault is concerned.
Honestly, if it weren’t for Perrault’s heavy-handed moral, I’d really be okay with that. Seriously. Act like an idiot, get eaten by a wolf. Works for me. Unfortunately, though, Perrault’s moral is not ‘Learn to tell the difference between your family members and hungry wild animals, you idiot child.’ No, his moral is this:
“Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf. I say "wolf," but there are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all.”
Thanks, Charlie. Your concern for the well being of children, particularly “attractive, well-bred young ladies,” is really quite sexist and condescending. But what else is new? And point of interest: morals become slightly less effective when they’re longer than the story you were telling in the first place. Also, if you have to explain the metaphor.
And, yeah, I know the story has been continued in many other versions. The wolf curls up to sleep after eating Little Red, and a huntsman, the smartest human in the forest, apparently, passes by and realizes that wolves don’t normally curl up in nightdresses, so he figures out that something strange is afoot. He cuts open the wolf’s stomach (which somehow doesn’t kill said wolf) and out climb Little Red and Granny, somehow not dead despite having been eaten.
Then Granny fills the wolf’s stomach with rocks to kill him in a slow, torturous, agonizing death that I really don’t feel he deserved, skins him once he’s dead, and makes Little Red a cloak from the skin.
Guess she’ll have to have her name legally changed now.
Thoughts on this story?
It should be noted that I am entirely ignoring the incredibly rape-y original oral versions of this story, and focusing on when it got written down for kids.
As you might be able to glean from the heightened levels of snark in this synopsis, this fairy tale kinda rubs me the wrong way, at least with the common ending. I can get behind it as Perrault’s morality tale, even if I think the moral he identified is stupid and sexist. If the purpose of this story is to say, “hey, this is what happens when you’re an unobservant idiot, try thinking before you act next time,” then I’m totally down with it.
The problem is, that’s not what this story is, usually. When you add the huntsman and the rescue and the wolf’s death . . . what are you left with? No one learns anything, no one grows as a character, and there’s no point to this story. It’s Rumpelstiltskin all over again. I disobeyed my mother, I got eaten by a wolf, I was rescued by a huntsman, and then I found five dollars.
So. What am I looking for in an adaptation?
Make Little Red less of an idiot. Make her innocent and naive and overly trusting, by all means. But make her less of an idiot, and let’s see some growth by the end of the story, hmm?
Develop the world. I want background and exposition and explanation. There are questions we don’t ask in a morality tale, but when it’s novel length, I need answers. Why do the wolves talk? Why is that not cause for concern? Why does the wolf want to eat the humans? Why is the wolf so easily mistaken for Granny? I need this world to be more developed and more defined, offering answers to some of those questions.
Give me a point. For the love of God, give me a point. Just like with Rumpelstiltskin, why are you telling this story? What’s your message? What’s your ending? Why should I care about your story?
The line-up:
Week 1: Cloaked in Red by Vivian Vande Velde
Week 2: Scarlet by Marissa Meyer
Week 3: Scarlet Moon by Debbie Vigue
Week 4: Princess of the Silver Wood by Jessica Day George
Feel free to read along!
Monday, March 4, 2013
Cinderella (According to Cassie)
Cinderella (According to Cassie)
So, basically, there’s this girl, and who am I kidding? Unless you’ve lived under a rock for most of your life or are secretly a wizard (in which case, nicely done accessing the Internet. I’m flattered it’s my blog you’ve turned to. Let’s talk about Hogwarts, as I’ve got some important questions), then you know the story of Cinderella. It’s only the most ubiquitous fairy tale in the entire world. Seriously, you can’t swing a dead cat through the cultures of the world without hitting a Cinderella variant (...sorry, that metaphor got away from me).
But honestly, this story is everywhere. Everybody’s got a tale of a young orphaned girl forced into servitude by a stepmother, who goes to a party, falls in love with a prince, loses something of value, and gets the guy in the end. It’s the typical rags-to-riches deal we all want to happen to us.
But it makes reading adaptations a slightly sticky endeavor. Because there are just so many! So where do you focus?
Well, the most well known is Perrault, with his glass slipper and pumpkin turning into a coach and fairy godmother. I’m not sure why this is the most well known, but we’ll get to that. Because I know this to be the version that will immediately pop to mind for most, it’s the one I’ll focus on in the ‘According to Cassie’ vein, but I’m also going to address some others in there as well.
So despite the fact that you all know it, here we go.
Basically, there’s this girl and it used to be she had a normal happy life with her mother and father, but then the mother died and the father grew despondent. The time frame is ambiguous, as is the father’s relationship with his daughter after her mother’s death.
But after a few years have gone by, the father remarries to an absolutely awful woman with two awful daughters (occasionally, one daughter is less awful, but never less awful enough to actually stand up for her new stepsister). It’s never made clear just why the father marries this woman, but that’s not even the most problematic thing about Dad in this story. Oftentimes, after the marriage, the father dies, which is unfortunate for his daughter, but miles better than the other versions of the story where he doesn’t die and is somehow completely okay with what happens next.
And what happens next is that the stepmother, threatened by Ella’s beauty (because she’s not actually named Cinderella, guys, that would be a nickname. You know. Cinder. As in ashes. From a fireplace? Nickname), forces her to become a servant in her own home, waiting on her and her daughters hand and foot, doing all the household work on her own. She’s basically a slave.
Now, okay. I know that young girls in fairy tale land don’t typically have a lot of power. But one of the questions I have always had at this point is why doesn’t she fight back? Stepmother says, “You’re a servant now,” what is it that keeps Cinderella from saying, “bitch, I don’t think so.”? There are many possible answers to this question, but the original Perrault doesn’t offer any of them. She just accepts her servitude, no fight given. It’s even worse when her father is still alive because how is that something he allows?
Anyway, her work in the household earns her the name of Cinderella, given to her by the nicer stepsister, since it’s kinder than what the other calls her – Cinderwench. Thank God for small blessings, I guess? And this is how life continues for many years.
And then the King announces a ball, to be given in honor of the prince’s twenty-first birthday, and all the eligible maidens in the kingdom are invited. I’m going to say that again, in case you missed the implications. The King is so desperate to marry off his son that he is inviting every single solitary female in his kingdom, be she noble, farmgirl, or servant, to come and be considered as the kingdom’s future queen. Yeah, that’s not something that usually happens when looking to marry off a prince, and in the tonnage of issues this fairy tale has going against it, I feel like this one gets lost a bit.
Well, the stepsisters are all excited to go to a royal ball, but Cinderella knows she can’t because they’d never let her and she doesn’t have anything to wear. So, on the day of the ball, she gets them ready and out the door, and then she falls down sobbing at the unfairness of it all.
And just when she’s at her lowest point, who should appear but her fairy godmother! And why Cinderella’s first question isn’t “Why the hell haven’t you shown up before now???” isn’t addressed. Rather, Cinderella is sobbing too hard to even answer the FG’s question as to what the matter is. All she gets out is “I wish, oh I wish—” to which the FG replies, “You wish you could go to the ball?” And Cindy nods an affirmative.
Again, I’m gonna highlight this just in case you missed it: Perrault’s Cinderella has so little agency that she cannot even speak what she wants for her life for herself. She is so helpless that she honestly cannot even get the words out; they have to be supplied for her, just like everything else that’s about to happen. The FG waves her wand and produces a ball gown, glass slippers, a coach to the palace, and people to drive it. Cinderella does nothing. I mean, she suggests using rats as coachmen, but that’s about it. The rest? Just handed to her, presenting us with the message: if you’re sweet and docile and helpless enough, someone will eventually come along and fix your problems for you. But then, it’s Perrault, so we shouldn’t really be surprised.
Anyway, she has to promise to be home by midnight, because that’s when the magic will fade, and she does, and she goes to the ball, and every is struck by her loveliness, and the prince (of course) falls in love with her immediately and they dance all night together. So transformed is she by a bath and fancy clothes that she can sit next to her stepsisters and chat with them, and they have no idea who she is!
And then the clock strikes quarter to midnight, and off Cindy goes, making it home just as the magic fades. We are told that she has a good time when her stepfamily gets home, making them recount the mysterious maiden in all possible detail, along with telling how much the prince admired her, which, I dunno, doesn’t exactly sound to me like Cinderella is as sweet as she’s supposed to be.
Well, this scenario plays out twice more at the last two nights of the ball, but on the final night, Cindy stays so late that she has to run right at midnight, and she loses one of her glass slippers on the steps as she flees. The prince finds it and declares that he will marry the maiden whose foot fits the slipper!
. . . Okay. Lets talk about this for a minute. First of all, you’ve danced with this girl all night for three nights in a row and are head over heels in love with her, and yet it’s her foot and not her face or her voice or a series of questions about what you talked of in three nights that you’re going to use to identify her? Really?
And secondly, did it never cross your mind, princey boy, that there might be some girl in your entire, massive kingdom, who might just have the same size feet as the mysterious girl you danced with? If this is your grand plan to find the love of your life, I can easily see why your father was having such a hard time finding a bride for you. Because you’re an idiot.
See, here’s how this should have gone down. You announce that you’re going to marry the girl you danced with, not the girl who fits the slipper, first off. Then you conduct your house to house search and use the memory of what she looks like and sounds like and what you talked about to find her. And then if you still have doubts that she is who you fell in love with, you say, “Hey, you left something behind on that last night. What was it?” And you will have not announced to the world that you found this glass slipper.
Seriously.
But our prince is not that sensible, and so this is how the story goes. Somehow, no other girl in the entire kingdom has the same size feet as Cinderella, and so when the steward (yes, steward; no, the prince doesn’t even go out and find his own damn girlfriend) puts it on her foot and it fits, they know that, gasp! They’ve found their mysterious maiden! And no one seems to have a problem with the fact that she’s a servant and a commoner!
She also happens to have the second glass slipper on her, which helps.
Except, wait a gosh-darn second here. Didn’t the FG tell Cindy that she had to be home by midnight because the magic would fade and her dress and coach and everything would disappear? So how is it that these shoes are still around?
You know what? I don’t even care anymore. Shoe fits, Cindy marries Prince, happily ever after, yada yada yada.
Thoughts on the original? Whoo boy, I hope you have some time.
Perrault’s Cinderella is ridiculous. Hands down, plain and simple, straight up nonsensically ridiculous. I mean, it’s relatively common knowledge that the reason Cindy gets a glass slipper in this version is because of a mistranslation. It was a fur slipper, but the two words in old German got confused, and she ended up with one made of glass instead, and nobody thought that was strange.
And in looking at this story, and I mean really looking at it, I’m forced to wonder if that was the only thing that got mistranslated. Because there is so much of this story that just plain does not make sense. But I think what bothers me most is that, out of all the available Cinderella stories in the world, this is the one that we know. This is the one that has stuck.
Personally, I prefer the Grimm version, because in that one, Cindy actually does something! She plants a tree at her mother’s grave, and when the ball is announced, she goes to that tree and asks her mothers spirit for a miracle. It’s a small change, maybe, but a substantial one. A magical guardian doesn’t just appear and offer her an out; Cinderella goes and gets it for herself. She decides that this is something she wants, and she acts on it.
And she doesn’t just lose her shoe; the prince knows she’s going to run, so he tries to stop her by smearing the steps with pitch, not imagining that she’ll just step out of the stuck shoes and keep running. And Grimm also addresses the issue of other feet fitting the slipper – Stepmama is willing to cut off pieces of her daughters’ feet to make the shoe fit and make them a princess, and it’s the spirit of Cindy’s mother that lets the prince know he’s got the wrong girl.
But that’s not the version most people know. That’s not the one we cling to. We fixate on the story of the helpless maiden, who can’t even bring herself to ask for what she wants, and the prince who apparently cares so little about her that he sends a servant to find her rather than go himself. Yeah, that’s a love story for the ages . . .
Checklist.
Give Cinderella some control of her own destiny. This is a big one for me because I hate damsels in distress. And I hate the message that if you cry about something long enough, someone will come and fix it for you. So, I’d like to see Cinderella have some measure of control, some way in which she is active in her own ending.
Enhance the role of the prince. In this original story, he doesn’t honestly do much either. He dances, he falls in love, he finds a shoe, he sends a servant out to get the girl. I’d like to see more from this character. I’d like to know why his father is so desperate to marry him off, I’d like to see him display some manner of intelligence, and I’d like some evidence that he’s actually in love with Cinderella.
Address the plot transgressions. Seriously, this story is full of holes, and there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. In fact, there are enough of them that I’m going to list them:
Anyway, here’s the lineup, and it was difficult narrowing this list down to five. As you can see, I still haven’t quite managed it.
Week 1: Just Ella by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Week 2: Princess of Glass by Jessica Day George
Week 3: Cinder by Marissa Meyer
Week 4: TBA (Down to two, depends on if my first choice will actually work for review)
Week 5: Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
I appreciate your patience with the wait this month, and I hope to have the first review up by tomorrow.
So, basically, there’s this girl, and who am I kidding? Unless you’ve lived under a rock for most of your life or are secretly a wizard (in which case, nicely done accessing the Internet. I’m flattered it’s my blog you’ve turned to. Let’s talk about Hogwarts, as I’ve got some important questions), then you know the story of Cinderella. It’s only the most ubiquitous fairy tale in the entire world. Seriously, you can’t swing a dead cat through the cultures of the world without hitting a Cinderella variant (...sorry, that metaphor got away from me).
But honestly, this story is everywhere. Everybody’s got a tale of a young orphaned girl forced into servitude by a stepmother, who goes to a party, falls in love with a prince, loses something of value, and gets the guy in the end. It’s the typical rags-to-riches deal we all want to happen to us.
But it makes reading adaptations a slightly sticky endeavor. Because there are just so many! So where do you focus?
Well, the most well known is Perrault, with his glass slipper and pumpkin turning into a coach and fairy godmother. I’m not sure why this is the most well known, but we’ll get to that. Because I know this to be the version that will immediately pop to mind for most, it’s the one I’ll focus on in the ‘According to Cassie’ vein, but I’m also going to address some others in there as well.
So despite the fact that you all know it, here we go.
Basically, there’s this girl and it used to be she had a normal happy life with her mother and father, but then the mother died and the father grew despondent. The time frame is ambiguous, as is the father’s relationship with his daughter after her mother’s death.
But after a few years have gone by, the father remarries to an absolutely awful woman with two awful daughters (occasionally, one daughter is less awful, but never less awful enough to actually stand up for her new stepsister). It’s never made clear just why the father marries this woman, but that’s not even the most problematic thing about Dad in this story. Oftentimes, after the marriage, the father dies, which is unfortunate for his daughter, but miles better than the other versions of the story where he doesn’t die and is somehow completely okay with what happens next.
And what happens next is that the stepmother, threatened by Ella’s beauty (because she’s not actually named Cinderella, guys, that would be a nickname. You know. Cinder. As in ashes. From a fireplace? Nickname), forces her to become a servant in her own home, waiting on her and her daughters hand and foot, doing all the household work on her own. She’s basically a slave.
Now, okay. I know that young girls in fairy tale land don’t typically have a lot of power. But one of the questions I have always had at this point is why doesn’t she fight back? Stepmother says, “You’re a servant now,” what is it that keeps Cinderella from saying, “bitch, I don’t think so.”? There are many possible answers to this question, but the original Perrault doesn’t offer any of them. She just accepts her servitude, no fight given. It’s even worse when her father is still alive because how is that something he allows?
Anyway, her work in the household earns her the name of Cinderella, given to her by the nicer stepsister, since it’s kinder than what the other calls her – Cinderwench. Thank God for small blessings, I guess? And this is how life continues for many years.
And then the King announces a ball, to be given in honor of the prince’s twenty-first birthday, and all the eligible maidens in the kingdom are invited. I’m going to say that again, in case you missed the implications. The King is so desperate to marry off his son that he is inviting every single solitary female in his kingdom, be she noble, farmgirl, or servant, to come and be considered as the kingdom’s future queen. Yeah, that’s not something that usually happens when looking to marry off a prince, and in the tonnage of issues this fairy tale has going against it, I feel like this one gets lost a bit.
Well, the stepsisters are all excited to go to a royal ball, but Cinderella knows she can’t because they’d never let her and she doesn’t have anything to wear. So, on the day of the ball, she gets them ready and out the door, and then she falls down sobbing at the unfairness of it all.
And just when she’s at her lowest point, who should appear but her fairy godmother! And why Cinderella’s first question isn’t “Why the hell haven’t you shown up before now???” isn’t addressed. Rather, Cinderella is sobbing too hard to even answer the FG’s question as to what the matter is. All she gets out is “I wish, oh I wish—” to which the FG replies, “You wish you could go to the ball?” And Cindy nods an affirmative.
Again, I’m gonna highlight this just in case you missed it: Perrault’s Cinderella has so little agency that she cannot even speak what she wants for her life for herself. She is so helpless that she honestly cannot even get the words out; they have to be supplied for her, just like everything else that’s about to happen. The FG waves her wand and produces a ball gown, glass slippers, a coach to the palace, and people to drive it. Cinderella does nothing. I mean, she suggests using rats as coachmen, but that’s about it. The rest? Just handed to her, presenting us with the message: if you’re sweet and docile and helpless enough, someone will eventually come along and fix your problems for you. But then, it’s Perrault, so we shouldn’t really be surprised.
Anyway, she has to promise to be home by midnight, because that’s when the magic will fade, and she does, and she goes to the ball, and every is struck by her loveliness, and the prince (of course) falls in love with her immediately and they dance all night together. So transformed is she by a bath and fancy clothes that she can sit next to her stepsisters and chat with them, and they have no idea who she is!
And then the clock strikes quarter to midnight, and off Cindy goes, making it home just as the magic fades. We are told that she has a good time when her stepfamily gets home, making them recount the mysterious maiden in all possible detail, along with telling how much the prince admired her, which, I dunno, doesn’t exactly sound to me like Cinderella is as sweet as she’s supposed to be.
Well, this scenario plays out twice more at the last two nights of the ball, but on the final night, Cindy stays so late that she has to run right at midnight, and she loses one of her glass slippers on the steps as she flees. The prince finds it and declares that he will marry the maiden whose foot fits the slipper!
. . . Okay. Lets talk about this for a minute. First of all, you’ve danced with this girl all night for three nights in a row and are head over heels in love with her, and yet it’s her foot and not her face or her voice or a series of questions about what you talked of in three nights that you’re going to use to identify her? Really?
And secondly, did it never cross your mind, princey boy, that there might be some girl in your entire, massive kingdom, who might just have the same size feet as the mysterious girl you danced with? If this is your grand plan to find the love of your life, I can easily see why your father was having such a hard time finding a bride for you. Because you’re an idiot.
See, here’s how this should have gone down. You announce that you’re going to marry the girl you danced with, not the girl who fits the slipper, first off. Then you conduct your house to house search and use the memory of what she looks like and sounds like and what you talked about to find her. And then if you still have doubts that she is who you fell in love with, you say, “Hey, you left something behind on that last night. What was it?” And you will have not announced to the world that you found this glass slipper.
Seriously.
But our prince is not that sensible, and so this is how the story goes. Somehow, no other girl in the entire kingdom has the same size feet as Cinderella, and so when the steward (yes, steward; no, the prince doesn’t even go out and find his own damn girlfriend) puts it on her foot and it fits, they know that, gasp! They’ve found their mysterious maiden! And no one seems to have a problem with the fact that she’s a servant and a commoner!
She also happens to have the second glass slipper on her, which helps.
Except, wait a gosh-darn second here. Didn’t the FG tell Cindy that she had to be home by midnight because the magic would fade and her dress and coach and everything would disappear? So how is it that these shoes are still around?
You know what? I don’t even care anymore. Shoe fits, Cindy marries Prince, happily ever after, yada yada yada.
Thoughts on the original? Whoo boy, I hope you have some time.
Perrault’s Cinderella is ridiculous. Hands down, plain and simple, straight up nonsensically ridiculous. I mean, it’s relatively common knowledge that the reason Cindy gets a glass slipper in this version is because of a mistranslation. It was a fur slipper, but the two words in old German got confused, and she ended up with one made of glass instead, and nobody thought that was strange.
And in looking at this story, and I mean really looking at it, I’m forced to wonder if that was the only thing that got mistranslated. Because there is so much of this story that just plain does not make sense. But I think what bothers me most is that, out of all the available Cinderella stories in the world, this is the one that we know. This is the one that has stuck.
Personally, I prefer the Grimm version, because in that one, Cindy actually does something! She plants a tree at her mother’s grave, and when the ball is announced, she goes to that tree and asks her mothers spirit for a miracle. It’s a small change, maybe, but a substantial one. A magical guardian doesn’t just appear and offer her an out; Cinderella goes and gets it for herself. She decides that this is something she wants, and she acts on it.
And she doesn’t just lose her shoe; the prince knows she’s going to run, so he tries to stop her by smearing the steps with pitch, not imagining that she’ll just step out of the stuck shoes and keep running. And Grimm also addresses the issue of other feet fitting the slipper – Stepmama is willing to cut off pieces of her daughters’ feet to make the shoe fit and make them a princess, and it’s the spirit of Cindy’s mother that lets the prince know he’s got the wrong girl.
But that’s not the version most people know. That’s not the one we cling to. We fixate on the story of the helpless maiden, who can’t even bring herself to ask for what she wants, and the prince who apparently cares so little about her that he sends a servant to find her rather than go himself. Yeah, that’s a love story for the ages . . .
Checklist.
Give Cinderella some control of her own destiny. This is a big one for me because I hate damsels in distress. And I hate the message that if you cry about something long enough, someone will come and fix it for you. So, I’d like to see Cinderella have some measure of control, some way in which she is active in her own ending.
Enhance the role of the prince. In this original story, he doesn’t honestly do much either. He dances, he falls in love, he finds a shoe, he sends a servant out to get the girl. I’d like to see more from this character. I’d like to know why his father is so desperate to marry him off, I’d like to see him display some manner of intelligence, and I’d like some evidence that he’s actually in love with Cinderella.
Address the plot transgressions. Seriously, this story is full of holes, and there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. In fact, there are enough of them that I’m going to list them:
- Why does Cindy’s dad allow her to be treated so horribly?
- Why doesn’t Cindy fight her servitude or leave if she’s being treated so badly?
- Why hasn’t the fairy godmother made an appearance before this point, if she’s charged with Cinderella’s happiness and well being?
- Anybody going to question glass slippers? Don’t know if you know this, but shoes are designed to move with your feet as you walk and run and dance, etc. Also don’t know if you know this, but glass? Doesn’t do those things. It’s actually pretty rigid and unyielding. So, can we talk about the glass slippers?
- Why don’t the slippers disappear along with the rest of the FG’s gifts?
- Why does the prince need the shoe to identify Cinderella, and is it really reasonable to assume that it will?
Anyway, here’s the lineup, and it was difficult narrowing this list down to five. As you can see, I still haven’t quite managed it.
Week 1: Just Ella by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Week 2: Princess of Glass by Jessica Day George
Week 3: Cinder by Marissa Meyer
Week 4: TBA (Down to two, depends on if my first choice will actually work for review)
Week 5: Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
I appreciate your patience with the wait this month, and I hope to have the first review up by tomorrow.
Friday, February 1, 2013
Jack and the Beanstalk (According to Cassie)
Jack and the Beanstalk (According to Cassie)
So, basically, there’s this kid, and he lives with his mother, and they’re incredibly poor. They’ve got a cow and a hut, and that’s pretty much it, and while the cow gives milk, they can get by. They drink the milk and sell the rest of it, and while it’s not great, they manage.
But then the cow stops giving milk, as I assume cows are wont to do at some point, and the mother starts freaking out over how they’re going to live.
Jack says, “Don’t worry! I’ll go get a job!” Which, while a responsible response to the situation, kinda makes me ask why he didn’t have one before now.
Mom jumps in with, “We tried that before, and no one will take you.” Which, while might be true for whatever reason . . . c’mon, Mom. The job market shifts and changes every six months, and opportunities that might not have been open before might need someone with Jack’s skill set, so shouldn’t he at least submit some applications?
...sorry. Facing the prospect of job hunting soon. Neither here nor there. Moving on.
So, the Mother’s superior plan is to take this dried-up who is now of no use to you, and go sell her at market and use the money to start up a shop.
Now, no doubt you’ve heard the version where Jack doesn’t want to sell the cow because she’s his best friend, and yes, that’s a version that exist. But there’s also the version where Jack obeys his mother without comment, taking the cow to market to sell. Mom wants five pounds for the animal, and while I’m not an expert in converting fairy tale money sums into today’s currency, if that’s the money required to start up a small business, I’m really thinking the cow’s not gonna be worth that much.
I’m also thinking that this mother is sadly out of touch with reality, and setting up her son for failure. I mean, come on. This cow is either so old, so ill-fed, or so sick that she won’t produce milk – who exactly are you thinking is going to buy her at all, let alone for five pounds?
Now, in some stories, Jack gets lost on the way to market (which really paints him as a simpleton, given that he supposedly went every week to sell milk), and in others, he meets his mysterious gentleman on the road. And because Jack has never been warned of the dangers of talking to mysterious strangers he meets in the woods, he tells the man who he is and where he’s going and what he’s trying to do.
Well, the man won’t pay five pounds for a cow, but he does have five beans, which he claims are magic, and would Jack accept that as payment? And Jack, further painting himself as a simpleton, agrees.
I mean, okay. I want to be charitable. I want to give Jack the benefit of the doubt. But dude. In what world do you accept five beans as equal payment for a cow, even an old, dried-up one?? There’s ways to make that believable, absolutely. But this fairy tale? Doesn’t do it. Jack just comes off as an absolute ninny. And that might be the point, to be honest.
Anyway, Jack makes the trade and takes the beans home to his mother, all proud and excited, and his mother, predictably, is furious. She takes the beans and throws them out the window and sends Jack to bed without supper, though whether that’s a punishment or just because there’s no supper to be had isn’t clearly defined.
But it turns out the beans were magic after all, because overnight, a giant beanstalk grows from the place where Jack’s mother threw them. Upon discovering this, Jack decides that the best option is to climb it, beanstalks being known for their sturdiness, after all.
But this beanstalk is, and upon climbing all morning, Jack finds himself in a magical kingdom high in the sky, full of giants. Terribly hungry, he goes up to the nearest giant door and knocks on it and begs food from the giantess who answers. Which . . . yeah, not what I would have chosen to do first, I don’t think. Of course, it should be noted that I would also never climb a beanstalk stretching into the sky, either.
Luckily for Jack, the giantess is a decent sort of woman. She tries to warn him away, stating that her husband enjoys snacking on human boys like carrot sticks, but Jack really wants some food, so she takes him to the kitchen to feed him.
And then, who should return home, but the giant husband who likes to eat human boys! The giantess, a quick thinker, bundles Jack into the oven (which, had this been any other fairy tale, could have ended much differently) to hide him, and the giant appears with his classic “Fee Fi Fo Fum” line, and his wife tells him he’s crazy! There are no human boys here! Certainly not hiding in the oven! Here, have some food.
Once the giant has eaten and fallen asleep, Jack is able to slip out of the house, but not before showing his thanks to the giantess for feeding him, hiding him, and saving his life, by stealing a sack of gold on his way out.
Seriously, Jack? I mean, I suppose with that mother, it’s no wonder, but man!
Anyway, this repeats twice more, and you’d think the giantess would wise up, but not so much, and Jack walks away with a goose that lays golden eggs and a magic harp before he’s caught because he doesn’t stop to think that a magic harp might also be sentient and wake the giant he’s trying to escape from.
So the giant wakes, and is pissed at hell that this little human boy has been stealing from him, so he chases after him, down the beanstalk. Jack reaches the bottom first, chops down the stalk with his axe, and sends the giant crashing to his death. And Jack and his mother live happily ever after, rich off of stolen goods! Yay!
Thoughts on this story? Okay. So often we think of this tale as the story of a brave and plucky lad who won riches and killed a monster! But, is it really? Honestly, Jack’s . . . kind of a tool. He’s dumb as a box of rocks, sells his cow for beans, steals, lies, and repays the kindness of the giantess by robbing her and killing her husband. And are there any repercussions? Nope. None. Whatsoever. In fact, the story ends with Jack marrying a rich princess and living happily ever after.
Guys, this one’s a problem. Let’s see who can fix it.
What am I looking for in an adaptation?
Define Jack. Jack is a very strange dichotomy in this story. On the one hand, he seems just staggeringly dumb, but on the other, he’s a conniving thief. So what it is? Is he purposefully taking revenge on the giants for some wrong done? Is he just dumb as a box of rocks and not thinking about anything really? Is he inherently lazy and will do anything for money he doesn’t have to work for? Is he a good kid whose story has been mistold? What? I would like a firm characterization.
Tie in this mysterious man. His sole purpose in the story is to get the magic beans to Jack. But why? If he knew of their magic, why trade them for an old, dried-up cow? Were they given to Jack specifically? Did he just take pity on this kid? Is he a con man? Did he know the beans were magic? What’s his story, and why was he carrying around magic beans, and does he have more to do with things than we think?
Explore the implications of the giants’ world. There’s an entire civilization up in the clouds and nobody knows about it? How does that work, exactly? Are there any legends of the magical world? How did it come to be there? Why is it only accessible by beanstalk? Are they aware that another world exists beneath their feet? What’s going on in this hidden world?
Make the ending matter. The ending of this story is so problematic. Jack gets away with murder, literally, and with stealing, and there are no repercussions? How do people react to this? How do they deal with the massive dead giant rotting away in the middle of the forest or town or fields or wherever he lands? I’m not saying they should change the way this ends, I just want these things to be addressed.
The line-up for the month:
Week 1: Calamity Jack by Shannon and Dean Hal
Week 2: Crazy Jack by Donna Jo Napoli
Week 3: The Thief and the Beanstalk by P.T. Catanese
Week 4: The World Above by Cameron Dokey
See you later today with Calamity Jack!
So, basically, there’s this kid, and he lives with his mother, and they’re incredibly poor. They’ve got a cow and a hut, and that’s pretty much it, and while the cow gives milk, they can get by. They drink the milk and sell the rest of it, and while it’s not great, they manage.
But then the cow stops giving milk, as I assume cows are wont to do at some point, and the mother starts freaking out over how they’re going to live.
Jack says, “Don’t worry! I’ll go get a job!” Which, while a responsible response to the situation, kinda makes me ask why he didn’t have one before now.
Mom jumps in with, “We tried that before, and no one will take you.” Which, while might be true for whatever reason . . . c’mon, Mom. The job market shifts and changes every six months, and opportunities that might not have been open before might need someone with Jack’s skill set, so shouldn’t he at least submit some applications?
...sorry. Facing the prospect of job hunting soon. Neither here nor there. Moving on.
So, the Mother’s superior plan is to take this dried-up who is now of no use to you, and go sell her at market and use the money to start up a shop.
Now, no doubt you’ve heard the version where Jack doesn’t want to sell the cow because she’s his best friend, and yes, that’s a version that exist. But there’s also the version where Jack obeys his mother without comment, taking the cow to market to sell. Mom wants five pounds for the animal, and while I’m not an expert in converting fairy tale money sums into today’s currency, if that’s the money required to start up a small business, I’m really thinking the cow’s not gonna be worth that much.
I’m also thinking that this mother is sadly out of touch with reality, and setting up her son for failure. I mean, come on. This cow is either so old, so ill-fed, or so sick that she won’t produce milk – who exactly are you thinking is going to buy her at all, let alone for five pounds?
Now, in some stories, Jack gets lost on the way to market (which really paints him as a simpleton, given that he supposedly went every week to sell milk), and in others, he meets his mysterious gentleman on the road. And because Jack has never been warned of the dangers of talking to mysterious strangers he meets in the woods, he tells the man who he is and where he’s going and what he’s trying to do.
Well, the man won’t pay five pounds for a cow, but he does have five beans, which he claims are magic, and would Jack accept that as payment? And Jack, further painting himself as a simpleton, agrees.
I mean, okay. I want to be charitable. I want to give Jack the benefit of the doubt. But dude. In what world do you accept five beans as equal payment for a cow, even an old, dried-up one?? There’s ways to make that believable, absolutely. But this fairy tale? Doesn’t do it. Jack just comes off as an absolute ninny. And that might be the point, to be honest.
Anyway, Jack makes the trade and takes the beans home to his mother, all proud and excited, and his mother, predictably, is furious. She takes the beans and throws them out the window and sends Jack to bed without supper, though whether that’s a punishment or just because there’s no supper to be had isn’t clearly defined.
But it turns out the beans were magic after all, because overnight, a giant beanstalk grows from the place where Jack’s mother threw them. Upon discovering this, Jack decides that the best option is to climb it, beanstalks being known for their sturdiness, after all.
But this beanstalk is, and upon climbing all morning, Jack finds himself in a magical kingdom high in the sky, full of giants. Terribly hungry, he goes up to the nearest giant door and knocks on it and begs food from the giantess who answers. Which . . . yeah, not what I would have chosen to do first, I don’t think. Of course, it should be noted that I would also never climb a beanstalk stretching into the sky, either.
Luckily for Jack, the giantess is a decent sort of woman. She tries to warn him away, stating that her husband enjoys snacking on human boys like carrot sticks, but Jack really wants some food, so she takes him to the kitchen to feed him.
And then, who should return home, but the giant husband who likes to eat human boys! The giantess, a quick thinker, bundles Jack into the oven (which, had this been any other fairy tale, could have ended much differently) to hide him, and the giant appears with his classic “Fee Fi Fo Fum” line, and his wife tells him he’s crazy! There are no human boys here! Certainly not hiding in the oven! Here, have some food.
Once the giant has eaten and fallen asleep, Jack is able to slip out of the house, but not before showing his thanks to the giantess for feeding him, hiding him, and saving his life, by stealing a sack of gold on his way out.
Seriously, Jack? I mean, I suppose with that mother, it’s no wonder, but man!
Anyway, this repeats twice more, and you’d think the giantess would wise up, but not so much, and Jack walks away with a goose that lays golden eggs and a magic harp before he’s caught because he doesn’t stop to think that a magic harp might also be sentient and wake the giant he’s trying to escape from.
So the giant wakes, and is pissed at hell that this little human boy has been stealing from him, so he chases after him, down the beanstalk. Jack reaches the bottom first, chops down the stalk with his axe, and sends the giant crashing to his death. And Jack and his mother live happily ever after, rich off of stolen goods! Yay!
Thoughts on this story? Okay. So often we think of this tale as the story of a brave and plucky lad who won riches and killed a monster! But, is it really? Honestly, Jack’s . . . kind of a tool. He’s dumb as a box of rocks, sells his cow for beans, steals, lies, and repays the kindness of the giantess by robbing her and killing her husband. And are there any repercussions? Nope. None. Whatsoever. In fact, the story ends with Jack marrying a rich princess and living happily ever after.
Guys, this one’s a problem. Let’s see who can fix it.
What am I looking for in an adaptation?
Define Jack. Jack is a very strange dichotomy in this story. On the one hand, he seems just staggeringly dumb, but on the other, he’s a conniving thief. So what it is? Is he purposefully taking revenge on the giants for some wrong done? Is he just dumb as a box of rocks and not thinking about anything really? Is he inherently lazy and will do anything for money he doesn’t have to work for? Is he a good kid whose story has been mistold? What? I would like a firm characterization.
Tie in this mysterious man. His sole purpose in the story is to get the magic beans to Jack. But why? If he knew of their magic, why trade them for an old, dried-up cow? Were they given to Jack specifically? Did he just take pity on this kid? Is he a con man? Did he know the beans were magic? What’s his story, and why was he carrying around magic beans, and does he have more to do with things than we think?
Explore the implications of the giants’ world. There’s an entire civilization up in the clouds and nobody knows about it? How does that work, exactly? Are there any legends of the magical world? How did it come to be there? Why is it only accessible by beanstalk? Are they aware that another world exists beneath their feet? What’s going on in this hidden world?
Make the ending matter. The ending of this story is so problematic. Jack gets away with murder, literally, and with stealing, and there are no repercussions? How do people react to this? How do they deal with the massive dead giant rotting away in the middle of the forest or town or fields or wherever he lands? I’m not saying they should change the way this ends, I just want these things to be addressed.
The line-up for the month:
Week 1: Calamity Jack by Shannon and Dean Hal
Week 2: Crazy Jack by Donna Jo Napoli
Week 3: The Thief and the Beanstalk by P.T. Catanese
Week 4: The World Above by Cameron Dokey
See you later today with Calamity Jack!
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (According to Cassie)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (According to Cassie)
So, basically, there’s a queen who can’t have a kid, which is the start of about twelve dozen fairy tales, and half of them continue like this: the queen in question then pricks her finger on a needle and wishes on the drops of blood that she’ll have a child. Because that’s totally how infertility and conception work. Anyway, in this case, the queen specifically wants a child with hair as black as the wood of the window, skin as white as the snow around her, and lips as red as the blood from her finger. Clearly a queen with a high amount of creativity. Evidence: when her daughter is born to these specifications, the girl is named ‘Snow White.’ Personally, I feel we should all start naming our children according to their complexion types: Slightly Ivory, Deep Chocolate, Vaguely Cinnamon. Seems like a solid choice.
Anyway, because this is a fairy tale, the queen gives birth to little Snow White and promptly dies.
A year later, the king marries again, and, once more, because this is a fairy tale, the woman he marries is cold, cruel, vain, and vindictive woman with absolutely no affection for her stepdaughter. Her biggest thing is that she has to be the most beautiful – she can’t stand the idea of anyone else being prettier than she is. She even has this mirror specifically for the purpose of keeping tabs on all the people in the world and reassuring her that she’s still number one in looks. Clearly, she wasn’t married for political reasons.
But Snow White was born from a wish-granting drop of blood, therefore, she will one day be more beautiful than her Queen. And that day comes when Snow White is seven years old, which doesn’t have any sort of creepy implications of all. I mean, seriously. Seven, and the most beautiful woman in the entire land? Really??
The Queen’s hatred toward Snow White from that day forward, and she keeps asking the mirror, just to see, just to check. You know, because maybe she’ll hit puberty early and turn totally ugly overnight, it’s possible.
So, finally, the Queen goes, “I can’t take it anymore!” and summons her huntsman to take the child into the forest, kill her, and bring the Queen back her heart. Now, depending on the version you read, she either wants to keep it as a trophy or eat it. Personally, I can’t decide which of these is more disturbing.
The huntsman obeys and has his knife in the air ready to strike this seven-year-old down, but she says, “Hey, could you not kill me please?” I like to imagine puppy eyes were involved, especially since we hear that her beauty was involved in stilling his axe. The huntsman says, “Yeah, okay,” and lets her go free. Though he doesn’t have a lot of faith in her survival time; after all, she’s seven and he’s leaving her on her own in the wilderness, but as long as her death’s not directly on his hands, it’s fine.
Well, she stumbles away, and he goes and kills some other animal and cuts out its heart to bring back to the Queen, and because she has no idea what a human child’s heart looks like compared to a doe’s or a boar’s or what have you, his plan works!
Meanwhile, Snow White manages not to get herself killed in the forest, and stumbles upon a cottage in the middle of the woods. Because she was raised on the same system of manners as Goldilocks, she goes on in and makes herself at home. Seriously, this part echoes Goldilocks pretty closely – she eats their food, sits at their table, and tries all their beds until she finds one that suits her. Then she falls asleep, and when the dwarfs who own the cottage come home and discover that their dishes have been used and their food eaten, they’re understandably upset (and spend a long time waiting for each of their number to point out something that is out of place) – until they see how beautiful Snow White is.
Seriously. I mean, I know a lot of cute seven-year-olds, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve never met one that elicits this response in everyone she encounters, you know?
Anyway, when she wakes, she tells the dwarfs her story, and they offer her safe haven. She’ll cook and clean for them while they’re in the mines, and they’ll do all they can to keep her safe and hidden from the Queen, because they’re pretty smart and they know the Queen’s gonna figure it out soon.
And yeah, she goes to her mirror, expecting to hear that she’s the loveliest again, but no dice. Snow White’s still alive, it seems, and the Queen learns the valuable lesson of not farming out the really important jobs. She uses her mirror to locate Snow White and decides to go take care of the child herself, because apparently she doesn’t have anything else like ruling to do. Can I ask where the King is through all this? Or am I not supposed to worry about it, given that this is a fairy tale?
Anyway, the Queen disguises herself and goes to the dwarfs’ house. Despite the fact that the dwarfs warned Snow White to beware strangers lest they visit on her stepmother’s instructions, Snow White can’t resist the peddler who comes with ribbons. It’s the Queen, obviously, and she uses her ribbons to lace Snow White so tightly she can’t breathe, and falls down as if dead. And the Queen, not thinking this through, assumes the girl is dead and runs away in victory.
I mean, come on Queenie. This really should be something you think through a bit more. Tying some ribbons around her chest really tight? Not the best murder plan, hon. And you really ought to make sure she’s really dead before you start crowing.
The dwarfs come back, find Snow White, cut the laces, and revive her because she wasn’t very dead. And they warn her again, don’t open the door to strangers. But because Snow White is seven, dumb, and easily distracted by shiny things, she forgets these simple instructions when the Queen returns, having learned that her super amazing murder plan somehow failed.
A titch more intelligent this time around, the Queen has a poisoned hair comb that she pricks Snow White’s scalp with, and she falls down as if dead. Not smart enough, though, to finish the job for sure or take the body away with her, the dwarfs are able to revive Snow White again by removing the comb because that’s totally how poison works.
Again, the dwarfs say, “Seriously, Snow White, stop letting in beggar women who clearly want to kill you, you stupid little girl!” Okay, they were probably gentler than that, but seriously, kid. This is not a difficult concept. The people who find you in the forest want to kill you. Pretend you aren’t home. Stay alive.
Well, the Queen learns yet again that Snow White is still alive and goes into a towering rage. With her magic, she crafts an apple poisoned on one side, begging the question of why she hasn’t used magic before this point to end her stepdaughter, but whatever.
She takes the apple to the dwarfs’ and because Snow White is still stupid, she says she can’t let the Queen in, but she can still talk to her through the window and eat an offered apple. The poison takes effect and she falls down dead, almost for realsies this time.
It seems to work this time – the mirror says Snow White is dead, and when the dwarfs return home, they cannot revive her. But they also can’t bear to shut her beauty away in the ground, so they build her a glass coffin and keep her on a hillside instead. You’d think the fact that she doesn’t start rotting might be a giveaway that she might not be totally dead yet, but again, whatever.
Well, one day, an unspecified length of time later, a prince riding by happens to see Snow White in her coffin guarded by dwarfs and this is where things get really creepy, even beyond the wanting to eat young children’s hearts. The prince says, and I quote: “Let me have [the coffin] as a gift, for I cannot live without seeing Snow-white. I will honour and prize her as my dearest possession.”
. . . Um, what? You realize this is a dead girl in a box, right? You want to put that in a lounge somewhere? You want a dead girl to be your dearest treasure? Creepy, dude. Super creepy.
And forget that waking with a kiss bit you think you know; that’s not how it happens here. As they somehow carry the solid gold and glass coffin down a mountain, they hit a tree root, which jostles Snow White, and out pops the bit of apple! Surprise! She’s alive! Again, because that’s totally how poison works!
The prince confesses love and proposes on the spot, and good lord, I hope several years passed in that coffin because otherwise . . . but Snow White agrees to marry him.
But it’s not happily ever after yet, folks. The Queen is still around, after all, and Snow White and her prince invite her to the wedding, because that’s what you do to the woman who tried to kill you on four separate occasions. I mean, it’s not like she crashed the party, guys. She was invited. Repeatedly. For justice! Because she showed up, was strapped into red-hot iron shoes, and forced to dance until she died! Yay . . .
My thoughts? Man, this one’s grim (no pun intended). I mean, seriously people. This fairy tale has never done all that much for me, to be honest. It’s super problematic and gory and a little on the creepy side, and if Disney hadn’t been fascinated with it, I don’t think it would be one that we still really talked about.
So what am I looking for in an adaptation?
Some brains for Snow White. Yeah, I know she’s seven, but could she not be a mindless ninny, please? Give her some grit, some dimension, some intelligence. Something. I beg you.
Strengthen the Queen’s motivation. She’s pissy because a talking mirror thinks a seven-year-old is prettier than she is? It’d be lovely if there was a bit more to it than that.
Understand how poison and murdering works. Please?
Fill in the background. I have so many questions surrounding this story – where is Snow White’s father and why isn’t he stopping this? Where did this prince come from and why doesn’t he find the dead girl in the box a little creepy? What was Snow White doing all day long while the dwarfs were off mining? Who was doing the governing in Snow White’s kingdom? Things like that.
The line-up:
Week 1: Snow by Tracy Lynn
Week 2: Snow in Summer by Jane Yolen
Week 3: Fairest by Gail Carson Levine
Week 4: Fairest of All by Serena Valentino
Feel free to read along, and I’ll see you on Friday! I swear!
So, basically, there’s a queen who can’t have a kid, which is the start of about twelve dozen fairy tales, and half of them continue like this: the queen in question then pricks her finger on a needle and wishes on the drops of blood that she’ll have a child. Because that’s totally how infertility and conception work. Anyway, in this case, the queen specifically wants a child with hair as black as the wood of the window, skin as white as the snow around her, and lips as red as the blood from her finger. Clearly a queen with a high amount of creativity. Evidence: when her daughter is born to these specifications, the girl is named ‘Snow White.’ Personally, I feel we should all start naming our children according to their complexion types: Slightly Ivory, Deep Chocolate, Vaguely Cinnamon. Seems like a solid choice.
Anyway, because this is a fairy tale, the queen gives birth to little Snow White and promptly dies.
A year later, the king marries again, and, once more, because this is a fairy tale, the woman he marries is cold, cruel, vain, and vindictive woman with absolutely no affection for her stepdaughter. Her biggest thing is that she has to be the most beautiful – she can’t stand the idea of anyone else being prettier than she is. She even has this mirror specifically for the purpose of keeping tabs on all the people in the world and reassuring her that she’s still number one in looks. Clearly, she wasn’t married for political reasons.
But Snow White was born from a wish-granting drop of blood, therefore, she will one day be more beautiful than her Queen. And that day comes when Snow White is seven years old, which doesn’t have any sort of creepy implications of all. I mean, seriously. Seven, and the most beautiful woman in the entire land? Really??
The Queen’s hatred toward Snow White from that day forward, and she keeps asking the mirror, just to see, just to check. You know, because maybe she’ll hit puberty early and turn totally ugly overnight, it’s possible.
So, finally, the Queen goes, “I can’t take it anymore!” and summons her huntsman to take the child into the forest, kill her, and bring the Queen back her heart. Now, depending on the version you read, she either wants to keep it as a trophy or eat it. Personally, I can’t decide which of these is more disturbing.
The huntsman obeys and has his knife in the air ready to strike this seven-year-old down, but she says, “Hey, could you not kill me please?” I like to imagine puppy eyes were involved, especially since we hear that her beauty was involved in stilling his axe. The huntsman says, “Yeah, okay,” and lets her go free. Though he doesn’t have a lot of faith in her survival time; after all, she’s seven and he’s leaving her on her own in the wilderness, but as long as her death’s not directly on his hands, it’s fine.
Well, she stumbles away, and he goes and kills some other animal and cuts out its heart to bring back to the Queen, and because she has no idea what a human child’s heart looks like compared to a doe’s or a boar’s or what have you, his plan works!
Meanwhile, Snow White manages not to get herself killed in the forest, and stumbles upon a cottage in the middle of the woods. Because she was raised on the same system of manners as Goldilocks, she goes on in and makes herself at home. Seriously, this part echoes Goldilocks pretty closely – she eats their food, sits at their table, and tries all their beds until she finds one that suits her. Then she falls asleep, and when the dwarfs who own the cottage come home and discover that their dishes have been used and their food eaten, they’re understandably upset (and spend a long time waiting for each of their number to point out something that is out of place) – until they see how beautiful Snow White is.
Seriously. I mean, I know a lot of cute seven-year-olds, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve never met one that elicits this response in everyone she encounters, you know?
Anyway, when she wakes, she tells the dwarfs her story, and they offer her safe haven. She’ll cook and clean for them while they’re in the mines, and they’ll do all they can to keep her safe and hidden from the Queen, because they’re pretty smart and they know the Queen’s gonna figure it out soon.
And yeah, she goes to her mirror, expecting to hear that she’s the loveliest again, but no dice. Snow White’s still alive, it seems, and the Queen learns the valuable lesson of not farming out the really important jobs. She uses her mirror to locate Snow White and decides to go take care of the child herself, because apparently she doesn’t have anything else like ruling to do. Can I ask where the King is through all this? Or am I not supposed to worry about it, given that this is a fairy tale?
Anyway, the Queen disguises herself and goes to the dwarfs’ house. Despite the fact that the dwarfs warned Snow White to beware strangers lest they visit on her stepmother’s instructions, Snow White can’t resist the peddler who comes with ribbons. It’s the Queen, obviously, and she uses her ribbons to lace Snow White so tightly she can’t breathe, and falls down as if dead. And the Queen, not thinking this through, assumes the girl is dead and runs away in victory.
I mean, come on Queenie. This really should be something you think through a bit more. Tying some ribbons around her chest really tight? Not the best murder plan, hon. And you really ought to make sure she’s really dead before you start crowing.
The dwarfs come back, find Snow White, cut the laces, and revive her because she wasn’t very dead. And they warn her again, don’t open the door to strangers. But because Snow White is seven, dumb, and easily distracted by shiny things, she forgets these simple instructions when the Queen returns, having learned that her super amazing murder plan somehow failed.
A titch more intelligent this time around, the Queen has a poisoned hair comb that she pricks Snow White’s scalp with, and she falls down as if dead. Not smart enough, though, to finish the job for sure or take the body away with her, the dwarfs are able to revive Snow White again by removing the comb because that’s totally how poison works.
Again, the dwarfs say, “Seriously, Snow White, stop letting in beggar women who clearly want to kill you, you stupid little girl!” Okay, they were probably gentler than that, but seriously, kid. This is not a difficult concept. The people who find you in the forest want to kill you. Pretend you aren’t home. Stay alive.
Well, the Queen learns yet again that Snow White is still alive and goes into a towering rage. With her magic, she crafts an apple poisoned on one side, begging the question of why she hasn’t used magic before this point to end her stepdaughter, but whatever.
She takes the apple to the dwarfs’ and because Snow White is still stupid, she says she can’t let the Queen in, but she can still talk to her through the window and eat an offered apple. The poison takes effect and she falls down dead, almost for realsies this time.
It seems to work this time – the mirror says Snow White is dead, and when the dwarfs return home, they cannot revive her. But they also can’t bear to shut her beauty away in the ground, so they build her a glass coffin and keep her on a hillside instead. You’d think the fact that she doesn’t start rotting might be a giveaway that she might not be totally dead yet, but again, whatever.
Well, one day, an unspecified length of time later, a prince riding by happens to see Snow White in her coffin guarded by dwarfs and this is where things get really creepy, even beyond the wanting to eat young children’s hearts. The prince says, and I quote: “Let me have [the coffin] as a gift, for I cannot live without seeing Snow-white. I will honour and prize her as my dearest possession.”
. . . Um, what? You realize this is a dead girl in a box, right? You want to put that in a lounge somewhere? You want a dead girl to be your dearest treasure? Creepy, dude. Super creepy.
And forget that waking with a kiss bit you think you know; that’s not how it happens here. As they somehow carry the solid gold and glass coffin down a mountain, they hit a tree root, which jostles Snow White, and out pops the bit of apple! Surprise! She’s alive! Again, because that’s totally how poison works!
The prince confesses love and proposes on the spot, and good lord, I hope several years passed in that coffin because otherwise . . . but Snow White agrees to marry him.
But it’s not happily ever after yet, folks. The Queen is still around, after all, and Snow White and her prince invite her to the wedding, because that’s what you do to the woman who tried to kill you on four separate occasions. I mean, it’s not like she crashed the party, guys. She was invited. Repeatedly. For justice! Because she showed up, was strapped into red-hot iron shoes, and forced to dance until she died! Yay . . .
My thoughts? Man, this one’s grim (no pun intended). I mean, seriously people. This fairy tale has never done all that much for me, to be honest. It’s super problematic and gory and a little on the creepy side, and if Disney hadn’t been fascinated with it, I don’t think it would be one that we still really talked about.
So what am I looking for in an adaptation?
Some brains for Snow White. Yeah, I know she’s seven, but could she not be a mindless ninny, please? Give her some grit, some dimension, some intelligence. Something. I beg you.
Strengthen the Queen’s motivation. She’s pissy because a talking mirror thinks a seven-year-old is prettier than she is? It’d be lovely if there was a bit more to it than that.
Understand how poison and murdering works. Please?
Fill in the background. I have so many questions surrounding this story – where is Snow White’s father and why isn’t he stopping this? Where did this prince come from and why doesn’t he find the dead girl in the box a little creepy? What was Snow White doing all day long while the dwarfs were off mining? Who was doing the governing in Snow White’s kingdom? Things like that.
The line-up:
Week 1: Snow by Tracy Lynn
Week 2: Snow in Summer by Jane Yolen
Week 3: Fairest by Gail Carson Levine
Week 4: Fairest of All by Serena Valentino
Feel free to read along, and I’ll see you on Friday! I swear!
Saturday, December 1, 2012
The Snow Queen (According to Cassie)
The Snow Queen (According to Cassie)
Hello again! Enjoy your month off? I know I did. But NaNo is done, my 50,000 words are written, and I am ready to dive back into another fairy tale, so without further ado, let’s look at Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen!
So, basically, there was this demon who had this mirror he’d made that distorted the world when you looked in it. Kinda like a fun-house mirror except for the part where it turned you into a horrible human being. Because looking into the mirror made the bad things seem bigger and more serious and the good things all disappear, and this demon got quite a kick out of watching people look into the mirror.
One day, some of the other demons decided that they wanted the angels of heaven to look into the mirror, just to see what would happen, but it turned out that the power of heaven was too much for the mirror, and as the demons flew up with it, it shattered into a million pieces and rained down on the world below.
This caused problems. Specifically, it caused major problems when a shard of the glass struck a person in the eye, causing him or her to see the world through this distorted view, or even worse, when the glass got into a person’s heart, and turned it cold and useless. And this, sadly, is what happens to Kay.
Who is Kay? Well, he’s a young boy who lives in a small village and is best friends with a girl named Gerda. Kay and Gerda do everything together; they are inseparable. They live next door, they have adventures, they listen to Kay’s grandmother tell stories, and they love to hear the tale of the Snow Queen, a horrible women of ice and cold. And everything is fine and lovely until a piece of this mirror falls into Kay’s eye and through to his heart.
Overnight, he changes. He calls Gerda names and becomes mean and cruel to her and his grandmother and all his other friends. He abandons them to play with the older boys, but one night, a mysterious driver hitches his sled to the back of her automobile and drives away with Kay, who, it should be noted, doesn’t really put up much of a fight to this.
But after some time riding on a sled being pulled by a car, Kay decides this isn’t really something he enjoys (no shit, Sherlock), and so he asks to come up with the driver. She consents, and so he climbs into the car with none other than the Snow Queen. She asks if he is cold, and when he says yes, she kisses him twice, the result being that he quite forgets his grandmother and Gerda and his home and everything except the beautiful Snow Queen beside him.
And the next morning, when Kay is discovered missing, the town turns out to search for him. What they find, however, is a hole in the ice of the river and Kay’s sled half-submerged. The boys tell anyone who will listen that they saw Kay hitch his sled to the back of an automobile the night before for a joyride, and well, they all fill in the rest. Everyone believes that Kay got reckless and died as a result. Gerda, too, believes this, until the sun and the sparrows tell her otherwise. Desperate to get Kay back, Gerda goes down to the river, and offers it her new red shoes if it will just give her Kay back. This, as you might imagine, doesn’t work. So Gerda takes the logical next step – she jumps in the river, hoping it will take her to Kay.
For some reason (magic), Gerda doesn’t drown, but is instead carried down the river until she washes up by the home of an old woman, who fetches her out and dries her off and takes her into the home to take care of her. And by take care of her, I mean that in the most absolute sense of the phrase – Old Woman is looking for a pseudo-daughter, and as she combs Gerda’s hair and sends her off to sleep, she steals away Gerda’s memories, to keep Gerda there forever as her very own.
And this works, for a while. But eventually, Gerda starts to notice that something is up, and the lack of roses in the gardens triggers her memories of Kay. She asks the roses where he can be found, and here Anderson takes us through every frickin’ flower in the damn garden as each one speaks in riddles and poems and nonsense that doesn’t tell Gerda a damn thing, until she gets fed up and leaves the Old Woman’s home, which is . . . surprisingly easy. Seriously. For all the trouble this lady went to keep Gerda there, when Gerda walks out the gate, she’s nowhere to be found. Eh, whatever.
Gerda continues her wandering, trying to track down Kay, and eventually she meets a crow who tells her that Kay has been taken by a princess, though, like the flowers, he goes on for pages and pages before offering any useful information. But he tells Gerda that Kay is the betrothed of this princess, having won her hand in a great contest. Gerda insists on being taken to him, and the crow obliges.
But when Gerda reaches the palace and meets the prince, she discovers that the crow had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, because Kay isn’t there. But the prince and the princess take pity on her, and agree to take her further in their coach, to a new land where she might be able to find Kay.
Unfortunately, as Gerda rides in this coach, it is set upon by robbers, and Gerda is kidnaped by a little robber girl, who basically wants to keep Gerda as a pet, much like the Old Woman from before. Gerda wins the robber girl over, though, with the story of how she is following Kay, trying to get him back, and when the wood-pigeons tell her that they saw Kay going away to Lapland with the Snow Queen, the robber girl gives Gerda a reindeer and sends her off to find her friend.
So Gerda and the reindeer travel north, and along the way, they meet another woman, who tells Gerda that Kay is with the Snow Queen, and more, she tells them where the Snow Queen can be found, and that Kay has got a piece of glass in his heart that makes him want the Snow Queen’s home more than the home he left behind. And she tells Gerda that she has all the tools she needs to defeat the Snow Queen, but that she has to discover what they are for herself. Also, apparently, Gerda has been traveling this whole time without shoes, which seems like a tremendous oversight to me.
Meanwhile, Kay has been in the palace of the Snow Queen, basically existing as her plaything, solving puzzle after puzzle. But there is one he can’t solve. The Queen promises him that once he can, she’ll give him the world and a pair of skates. Personally, it seems to me that the gift of the whole world would include the skates, but whatever.
The Snow Queen leaves, and once she’s gone, Gerda arrives and throws open the doors to the ice palace, and true to Anderson’s form, the Snow Queen’s magical super protective winds turned on Gerda as soon as she enters, are quieted as she prays and angels come down to protect her.
Anyway, the winds taken care of, she runs to Kay, who doesn’t recognize her. She starts to cry, and her warm tears fall on his chest and melt his frozen heart. Then, when he looks at her, she sings their childhood song, and it wakes him up, and his own tears wash out the sliver of glass in his eye, and he’s freed. With the distorting glass out of his eye, he can solve the final puzzle that he couldn’t before, and so he is his own master, and gets the world (and a pair of skates), and Gerda kisses his face and eyes and hands, melting the Snow Queen’s influence wherever it is.
And hand in hand, they head home, meeting in reverse all of Gerda’s friends, and when they finally return home, they realize that they have been gone so long that they’ve grown up, though they remain children at heart.
And . . . the end.
Thoughts on the original:
I’ll be honest, I was remember this story to have a lot more in common with the Hallmark movie adaptation that was my first introduction to it. So seeing that a lot of my favorite elements weren’t actually in Anderson’s original was a bit disappointing. However, I do still think there’s the seed of a good story in here, mainly in the relationship between Gerda and Kay. I love that this is a story where the girl goes and rescues the boy. Other than that, though, there’s a lot of room for improvement.
So what will I look for in an adaptation?
Reign it in! Seriously, this story? It’s kinda all over the place. Everyone that Gerda meets has some story to tell her, and it is very rarely relevant. I would like it if the story could relate back to itself every once in a while, cut what is superfluous, and just generally become tighter and more manageable.
Explore and define the relationship between Gerda and Kay. One of the things that I really do like about this story is that this relationship is really open-ended. It’s described as a very close friendship, but never clearly defined as a romance, which means that there are lots of different ways to take this. You could make Gerda and Kay actually brother and sister, leave them just as close platonic friends, or make them lovers. Their ages are also not firmly set, so there’s some potential there as well. Explore it.
Define the Snow Queen. Here, in the titular character, we have this super scary villain, supposedly, and yet . . . I dunno. I never really knew what her game was. Why did she kidnap Kay? Had she kidnaped others? What was she trying to achieve, exactly? And what was it that made her a villain? Just being winter?
Give meaning to the journey. This is perhaps one of my biggest things – Gerda goes off on this huge quest, but it doesn’t seem to change her at all. What’s the purpose? Why are you including these scenes and these people? How do they challenge or help? Give the quest some impact.
So! That all being said, here’s our lineup! And for the first time this year, the majority of these novels are ones I haven’t read before!
Week 1: Winter's Child by Cameron Dokey
Week 2: Frost by Wendy Delsol
Week 3: A True Princess by Diane Zahler
Week 4: Breadcrumbs by Ann Ursu
Feel free to read along, and I’ll see you on Friday!
Hello again! Enjoy your month off? I know I did. But NaNo is done, my 50,000 words are written, and I am ready to dive back into another fairy tale, so without further ado, let’s look at Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen!
So, basically, there was this demon who had this mirror he’d made that distorted the world when you looked in it. Kinda like a fun-house mirror except for the part where it turned you into a horrible human being. Because looking into the mirror made the bad things seem bigger and more serious and the good things all disappear, and this demon got quite a kick out of watching people look into the mirror.
One day, some of the other demons decided that they wanted the angels of heaven to look into the mirror, just to see what would happen, but it turned out that the power of heaven was too much for the mirror, and as the demons flew up with it, it shattered into a million pieces and rained down on the world below.
This caused problems. Specifically, it caused major problems when a shard of the glass struck a person in the eye, causing him or her to see the world through this distorted view, or even worse, when the glass got into a person’s heart, and turned it cold and useless. And this, sadly, is what happens to Kay.
Who is Kay? Well, he’s a young boy who lives in a small village and is best friends with a girl named Gerda. Kay and Gerda do everything together; they are inseparable. They live next door, they have adventures, they listen to Kay’s grandmother tell stories, and they love to hear the tale of the Snow Queen, a horrible women of ice and cold. And everything is fine and lovely until a piece of this mirror falls into Kay’s eye and through to his heart.
Overnight, he changes. He calls Gerda names and becomes mean and cruel to her and his grandmother and all his other friends. He abandons them to play with the older boys, but one night, a mysterious driver hitches his sled to the back of her automobile and drives away with Kay, who, it should be noted, doesn’t really put up much of a fight to this.
But after some time riding on a sled being pulled by a car, Kay decides this isn’t really something he enjoys (no shit, Sherlock), and so he asks to come up with the driver. She consents, and so he climbs into the car with none other than the Snow Queen. She asks if he is cold, and when he says yes, she kisses him twice, the result being that he quite forgets his grandmother and Gerda and his home and everything except the beautiful Snow Queen beside him.
And the next morning, when Kay is discovered missing, the town turns out to search for him. What they find, however, is a hole in the ice of the river and Kay’s sled half-submerged. The boys tell anyone who will listen that they saw Kay hitch his sled to the back of an automobile the night before for a joyride, and well, they all fill in the rest. Everyone believes that Kay got reckless and died as a result. Gerda, too, believes this, until the sun and the sparrows tell her otherwise. Desperate to get Kay back, Gerda goes down to the river, and offers it her new red shoes if it will just give her Kay back. This, as you might imagine, doesn’t work. So Gerda takes the logical next step – she jumps in the river, hoping it will take her to Kay.
For some reason (magic), Gerda doesn’t drown, but is instead carried down the river until she washes up by the home of an old woman, who fetches her out and dries her off and takes her into the home to take care of her. And by take care of her, I mean that in the most absolute sense of the phrase – Old Woman is looking for a pseudo-daughter, and as she combs Gerda’s hair and sends her off to sleep, she steals away Gerda’s memories, to keep Gerda there forever as her very own.
And this works, for a while. But eventually, Gerda starts to notice that something is up, and the lack of roses in the gardens triggers her memories of Kay. She asks the roses where he can be found, and here Anderson takes us through every frickin’ flower in the damn garden as each one speaks in riddles and poems and nonsense that doesn’t tell Gerda a damn thing, until she gets fed up and leaves the Old Woman’s home, which is . . . surprisingly easy. Seriously. For all the trouble this lady went to keep Gerda there, when Gerda walks out the gate, she’s nowhere to be found. Eh, whatever.
Gerda continues her wandering, trying to track down Kay, and eventually she meets a crow who tells her that Kay has been taken by a princess, though, like the flowers, he goes on for pages and pages before offering any useful information. But he tells Gerda that Kay is the betrothed of this princess, having won her hand in a great contest. Gerda insists on being taken to him, and the crow obliges.
But when Gerda reaches the palace and meets the prince, she discovers that the crow had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, because Kay isn’t there. But the prince and the princess take pity on her, and agree to take her further in their coach, to a new land where she might be able to find Kay.
Unfortunately, as Gerda rides in this coach, it is set upon by robbers, and Gerda is kidnaped by a little robber girl, who basically wants to keep Gerda as a pet, much like the Old Woman from before. Gerda wins the robber girl over, though, with the story of how she is following Kay, trying to get him back, and when the wood-pigeons tell her that they saw Kay going away to Lapland with the Snow Queen, the robber girl gives Gerda a reindeer and sends her off to find her friend.
So Gerda and the reindeer travel north, and along the way, they meet another woman, who tells Gerda that Kay is with the Snow Queen, and more, she tells them where the Snow Queen can be found, and that Kay has got a piece of glass in his heart that makes him want the Snow Queen’s home more than the home he left behind. And she tells Gerda that she has all the tools she needs to defeat the Snow Queen, but that she has to discover what they are for herself. Also, apparently, Gerda has been traveling this whole time without shoes, which seems like a tremendous oversight to me.
Meanwhile, Kay has been in the palace of the Snow Queen, basically existing as her plaything, solving puzzle after puzzle. But there is one he can’t solve. The Queen promises him that once he can, she’ll give him the world and a pair of skates. Personally, it seems to me that the gift of the whole world would include the skates, but whatever.
The Snow Queen leaves, and once she’s gone, Gerda arrives and throws open the doors to the ice palace, and true to Anderson’s form, the Snow Queen’s magical super protective winds turned on Gerda as soon as she enters, are quieted as she prays and angels come down to protect her.
Anyway, the winds taken care of, she runs to Kay, who doesn’t recognize her. She starts to cry, and her warm tears fall on his chest and melt his frozen heart. Then, when he looks at her, she sings their childhood song, and it wakes him up, and his own tears wash out the sliver of glass in his eye, and he’s freed. With the distorting glass out of his eye, he can solve the final puzzle that he couldn’t before, and so he is his own master, and gets the world (and a pair of skates), and Gerda kisses his face and eyes and hands, melting the Snow Queen’s influence wherever it is.
And hand in hand, they head home, meeting in reverse all of Gerda’s friends, and when they finally return home, they realize that they have been gone so long that they’ve grown up, though they remain children at heart.
And . . . the end.
Thoughts on the original:
I’ll be honest, I was remember this story to have a lot more in common with the Hallmark movie adaptation that was my first introduction to it. So seeing that a lot of my favorite elements weren’t actually in Anderson’s original was a bit disappointing. However, I do still think there’s the seed of a good story in here, mainly in the relationship between Gerda and Kay. I love that this is a story where the girl goes and rescues the boy. Other than that, though, there’s a lot of room for improvement.
So what will I look for in an adaptation?
Reign it in! Seriously, this story? It’s kinda all over the place. Everyone that Gerda meets has some story to tell her, and it is very rarely relevant. I would like it if the story could relate back to itself every once in a while, cut what is superfluous, and just generally become tighter and more manageable.
Explore and define the relationship between Gerda and Kay. One of the things that I really do like about this story is that this relationship is really open-ended. It’s described as a very close friendship, but never clearly defined as a romance, which means that there are lots of different ways to take this. You could make Gerda and Kay actually brother and sister, leave them just as close platonic friends, or make them lovers. Their ages are also not firmly set, so there’s some potential there as well. Explore it.
Define the Snow Queen. Here, in the titular character, we have this super scary villain, supposedly, and yet . . . I dunno. I never really knew what her game was. Why did she kidnap Kay? Had she kidnaped others? What was she trying to achieve, exactly? And what was it that made her a villain? Just being winter?
Give meaning to the journey. This is perhaps one of my biggest things – Gerda goes off on this huge quest, but it doesn’t seem to change her at all. What’s the purpose? Why are you including these scenes and these people? How do they challenge or help? Give the quest some impact.
So! That all being said, here’s our lineup! And for the first time this year, the majority of these novels are ones I haven’t read before!
Week 1: Winter's Child by Cameron Dokey
Week 2: Frost by Wendy Delsol
Week 3: A True Princess by Diane Zahler
Week 4: Breadcrumbs by Ann Ursu
Feel free to read along, and I’ll see you on Friday!
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