42
Woman Haling
The Beauteous Lump of Ultimate Good
What can it do? It grows,
It bleeds. It sleeps.
It walks. It talks,
Singing, “love’s got me, got me. ”
Kathleen Norris
For a woman to be good, she must be dead, or as
close to it as possible. Catatonia is the good woman’s
most winning quality.
Sleeping Beauty slept for 100 years, after pricking
her finger on a spindle. The kiss of the heroic prince
woke her. He fell in love with her while she was asleep,
or was it because she was asleep?
Snow-white was already dead when the heroic prince
fell in love with her. “I beseech you, ” he pleaded with
the 7 dwarfs, “to give it to me, for I cannot live without
looking upon Snow-white. ” 17 It awake was not readily
distinguishable from it asleep.
Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow-white, Rapunzel
—all are characterized by passivity, beauty, innocence,
and
victims by definition. They never think, act, initiate,
confront, resist, challenge, feel, care, or question. Sometimes they are forced to do housework.
They have one scenario of passage. They are moved,
as if inert, from the house of the mother to the house
o f the prince. First they are objects of malice, then they
are objects o f romantic adoration. They do nothing to
warrant either.
That one other figure of female good, the good
fairy, appears from time to time, dispensing clothes
Onceuponatime: The Roles
43
or virtue. H er power cannot match, only occasionally
moderate, the power o f the wicked witch. She does have
one physical activity at which she excels — she waves her
wand. She is beautiful, good, and unearthly. Mostly,
she disappears.
These figures o f female good are the heroic models
available to women. And the end o f the story is, it would
seem, the goal o f any female life. T o sleep, perchance
to dream?
The Prince, the Real Brother
The man of flesh and bone; the man who
is bom, suffers, and dies—above all, who
dies; the man who eats and drinks and
plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the
