must be given to me. It shall go well with the child, and
I will care for it like a mother. 13
Mama didn’t think twice —she traded Rapunzel for a
vegetable. Rapunzel’s surrogate mother, the witch, did
not do much better by her:
When she was twelve years old the witch shut her up
in a tower in the midst of a wood, and it had neither
steps nor door, only a small window above. When the
witch wished to be let in, she would stand below and
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel! let down your hair!” 14
The heroic prince, having finished with Snow-white
and Cinderella, now happened upon Rapunzel. When
the witch discovered the liaison, she beat up Rapunzel,
cut off her hair, and cloistered her “in a waste and
desert place, where she lived in great woe and misery. ” 15
The witch then confronted the prince, who fell from the
tower and blinded himself on thorns. (He recovered
when he found Rapunzel, and they then lived happily
ever after. )
Onceuponatime: The Roles
41
Hansel and Grethel had a mother too. She simply
abandoned them:
I will tell you what, husband.. . . We will take the
children early in the morning into the forest, where
it is thickest; we will make them a fire, and we will give
each of them a piece of bread, then we will go to our
work and leave them alone; they will never find the
way home again, and we shall be quit of them. 16
Hungry, lost, frightened, the children find a candy
house which belongs to an old lady who is kind to them,
feeds them, houses them. She greets them as her children, and proves her maternal commitment by preparing to cannibalize them.
These fairy-tale mothers are mythological female
figures. T hey define for us the female character and
delineate its existential possibilities. When she is good,
she is soon dead. In fact, when she is good, she is so passive in life that death must be only more o f the same.
Here we discover the cardinal principle o f sexist ontology—the only good woman is a dead woman. When she is bad she lives, or when she lives she is bad. She
has one real function, motherhood. In that function,
because it is active, she is characterized by overwhelming malice, devouring greed, uncontainable avarice.
She is ruthless, brutal, ambitious, a danger to children
and other living things. W hether called mother, queen,
stepmother, or wicked witch, she is the wicked witch,
the content o f nightmare, the source o f terror.
