Corpse Bride remains, I believe, Tim Burton’s finest work. I’ve found that even friends who do not normally consider themselves spooky fans have a heart for Corpse Bride and its sweetness in depicting a universal longing to be loved. But did you know the story has its roots in Jewish folklore?
In the original Jewish folktale “The Finger,” the Dead Bride was the victim of an antisemitic attack on her wedding day. (Sadly, this element of the story reflects a larger tragic normalcy in the time it was told: it was not unheard of for Jewish brides to suffer the same fate in real life and be buried in their wedding gowns.) Much like in the movie, the Dead Bride initially terrifies the young groom who accidentally finds himself bound to her. In one version of the tale, rabbis debate the logistics of marriage and death, and then come to the conclusion that the corpse’s marriage is null and void.
In another version, one that particularly warms my heart, the story is resolved by the unconditional love and transcendent empathy between women. The Dead Bride laments that if she does not get to marry and have children, who would do it for her? The Living Bride greets her with grace and empathy, grieving for her, and promises, “I will marry for you, I will have children for you.” The Dead Bride then is satisfied and rests in peace.
In the beloved stop-motion film as well, the Brides both have agency, but it is ultimately the Corpse Bride who chooses empathy and lets the living newlyweds go. Emily (the dead bride) addresses, “I was a bride. My dreams were stolen from me. But now I’ve stolen them from someone else.” She acknowledges the undeserved cruelty done to her, but also decides to end the cycle.
Corpse Bride is one of those stories from which I gain a new takeaway every time I watch it, and it’s given me a lot to think about in my current life stage as well, as a single queer adult whose life deviates from the path I thought I’d be on by now in my late 20s. The tale emphasizes living in honor of the dead, especially victims of tragedy and hatred (I can only imagine how much heavier the story hits for those of Jewish heritage). The film adaptation, on the other hand, seems to speak to this mixed grief and joy that comes from an outcast persepective, when one is thrown from normalcy.
Here are some of my reflections on the story, some of them spiritual and some of them queer-coded:
1. Things are not always as they appear. Especially in amatonormative society.
I don’t blame the marketing team behind this one, but merchandise for this film always seems to depict Victor and Emily as a couple. One of the appeals of the story is the love triangle and grave misunderstanding, so of course fandoms are gonna ship where they can. However, in the context of the movie, Victor and Emily’s relationship is shown to be more platonic and out of sympathy than out of attraction. (Granted also that in their setting, marriage for love is not the norm). Victor feels sorry for Emily, and decides out of the goodness of his heart to marry her since they have both want a second chance at love. Emily genuinely seems to love Victor, but also would have married anyone who put a ring on it, as she did not even know or see Victor before accepting—in short, her marital relationship to Victor is only based on filling a role. She set the terms of what it would take for her to move on (“she made a vow lying under that tree, that she’d wait for true love to come set her free“). She desperately wants to fill a role, and needs someone else—anyone!—to fill a role for her.
Take with a grain of salt that I know marrying only for love is actually a fairly young concept, but these days with most of our freedoms it seems we still do the same thing: even without needing marriage to survive or create ties anymore (but living more hyper-individualized and overwhelmed than ever before), we still desperately want someone—anyone!—to fill in the role of soulmate. Some of us may be so starved or desperate for love that we jump at the chance without knowing more first. We care more to be loved than to know we love the Other.
Things are not always as they appear: trauma survivors are not always malicious in their grief (the Corpse Bride is actually very sweet and genuine!); kindness does not always mean interest; loneliness/FOMO/role-filling anxieties do not always mean therefore the next person you see is the answer; and people of different genders are not always a couple.
2. Simultaneously living in joy and grief—there is beauty here.
One of the wonderful joys of the film is the way its atmosphere brightens up after Victor sees the land of the dead for the first time. His entire world up to that point had been in black and white, in strict rules and restrained life. But once he’s underground, there’s bright colors and big laughter, lively jazz music and dancing skeletons. Characters are very open (even literally so!) and expressive as they give him a warm welcome. There is an oddly hopeful note to this to the audience (even if Victor flees in terror and doesn’t quite appreciate it): that there are far better things ahead than what we leave behind. All the dead people seem so much happier now, freed from the restraints and social norms of normal living, able to be so much louder, faster, wilder, more expressive, and more creative now that the systems of the world they left behind no longer matter.
The song “Remains of the Day” is strangely comforting to me as someone who deep down truly hopes for an afterlife. There is something oddly comforting about a song that is upfront that “die, die, we all pass away, but don’t wear a frown cuz it’s really okay.” Memento mori: remember that we must die. But it’s not bad to die. We are all on that journey together, and there is something even more comforting about remembering those who have already died are people too—and maybe even having a great time! Reminiscent of festivals like the Mexican Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), the change in scenery to the mirth of skeletons emphasizes seeing our common mortality in beautiful, jubilant, celebratory light. We’re going to be dead longer than we’re going to be alive. So there’s something nice about seeing the longer part be freer and more fun.
But literal afterlife-hopes aside, the lively underworld also symbolizes, for me, living “underground” in resistance, finding joy even now as marginalized identities. Their jazz music comes as a culture shock to Victor because they are literally of another culture. Jazz music is an African American/Black invention that electrified the world’s music forever, and most modern genres of music owe their very existence to them. Jazz is also known not only for its upbeat liveliness but its improvisation—things do not always go “according to plan.” It’s an unpredictable style, that comes in quite literally as Victor is thrown into an unpredictable plot twist.
Everyone in the land of the dead loves their freedom of art, music, culture, community. They’re buried, resistant, and thriving. Even while we still live in our real world and fight for rights, there is freedom like that. For every person who finds themself “dead to the world,” on the outside of the norm, normalcy and normality lost, there is liberation and so much more life on the other side. And honestly, art is better from the outsiders.
3. Vows can change.
Our word is sacred and should not be given lightly. I’m not going to pretend words mean nothing and we never owe anyone anything ever. There is something to be said for commitment, dedication, faithfulness to relationship or to a spiritual path one chooses. One cannot simply abandon commitments that affect other people.
However, we as a human society are constantly learning and changing. In the case of religions like christianity and judaism, we have each constantly been in conversation within our own religions for centuries, because we don’t take concepts like covenant lightly, but we want to be where our Creator is leading.
In the case of Corpse Bride, Victor keeping his vows would mean marrying someone he actually deep down does not want to marry. And it would quite literally mean death.
A real life application of this would be when people prioritze the label/promise of marriage so much that nothing else about the relationship seems to matter. “We promised God to stay together” is prioritized above all else—even if a relationship turns out unhealthy, destructive, or harmful.
Emily is a far cry from an abusive character. Staying with her would not have been a cruel marriage with an imbalance of power. However, Emily recognizes that harping on a promise that was made in mistake, keeping someone bound from leaving, and withholding information of his true bride’s situation would not be love.
I want to tread very carefully with this subject. I believe promises matter, we have responsibility to one another, and things can be sacred when you intend them as sacred. However, there is something to be said for the grace we lack when we find we’ve made life-altering promises by mistake, when we didn’t know what it means. I think of pressures I saw myself and others endure growing up: to get baptized young, to pledge allegiance to a flag, to remain “pure” until marriage to a good christian man, or to commit to a future as a nun. Spirituality aside, we even make promises to ourselves when we’re young, and fear betraying ourselves when life takes a different turn that our younger selves could not have foreseen.
In Corpse Bride, Victor makes a promise uninformed. Emily made vow to herself amidst anger and desperation, deep down just a desperation to be loved. I don’t blame her. But something about seeing her change her mind spoke to me.
In the original folktale, rabbis debate over this because it is even a spiritual matter, and come to the conclusion that a promise made in innocent mistake (or even manipulation) is not binding.
Long story short for this point: there are times vows can change, and old promises can adapt to new empathy and new knowledge. There is no condemnation for maturing and changing minds—the powers that be would understand. Separation or divorce is not bad—it can even save lives. Changing your path is not bad—it can even save your life.
I do not believe God holds us literally to promises we made in naïveté, to try to trap us or make us fear promising ever again. I believe some things, we are allowed to express and grieve for as long as we need, before we make peace and come back to the light.
4. Love, even when there is no reward.
This is the heart of the story. And it’s not about romantic love. Romantic attraction, interest, and hope happen, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s simply one of many human emotions that express this vulnerable, fragile hope of finding other humans to feel at home with. It is not bad to love and romanticize. However, romantic love is never truly the moral of these fairy tales, as most old fairy tales are borne from a time when marrying for love was less the widespread cultural norm than it is today, and it was more of an ideal or a bonus if you fell in love.
This is about love as an action. In both the original folklore and the reimagined film, one bride humanizes and empathizes with the other. In the folktale, the Living Bride promises to live for the Dead Bride, who is afraid her life cut short would have been meaningless without being able to start a family. In the context of Jewish culture, I’ve learned from conversations with Jewish ace Michele Kirichanskaya1 that there is hope (albeit pressure, two sides of the same coin) in the start of new families after the Holocaust, to live for those lost. But beyond repopulation, we ruminated together, there are various, ever-expanding ways to hold life as a precious gift and then give such life—make life worth living—for others.
In the movie, the Dead Bride is the one who ultimately empathizes with the Living, and ends the cycle for her sake. She lets Victor go, for his sake. She actively saves their lives, too, even when there is no return for her. Because she knows what it’s like to lose a full life of happiness ahead of her, she could have chosen to ensure no one else gets it, but instead she chooses to not allow it to happen to anyone else.
This leads us to one of the more heartbreaking aspects of the story. She loves without reward. She is not rewarded with resurrection nor sudden confessions of love. She is not converted to status of living or married. She does not get what she wants.
Instead, she does get to see righteous anger turned to justice: her murderer foolishly causes his own death after bragging in front of all the dead (the worst move you can make, honestly), and all of her community wastes no time in avenging her. And she does get to move on into a light so peaceful and gentle, when her time in purgatory on her own terms has run its course. She gets what she needs.
We are free to interpret her peace in different ways. The moonlight alights her body and she breathes out, transforming into an array of blue butterflies. The butterflies fly up to a full moon, as Victor and Victoria hold each other and watch in awe.
One could view her life as being reincarnated, which could give hope she’ll get to live a full life as a new person hopefully in a kinder world in the future. Or a new creature, like a butterfly, symbolizing transformation. One could also see it as her ascending to heaven, and the butterflies a spiritual vehicle/visual representation of her spirit traveling upwards to a new world where more transcendant Love awaits—the kind of Love that remains even when all other kinds fade away. One could also see it as her giving her borrowed life force back, being at full peace with her life force going on to other things, the circle of nature.
Learning the Jewish roots of this story, too, gave me a new additional, essential perspective.
I have much to learn from the Jewish community, who believe in a good God without the guaranteed reward of an afterlife. While I myself believe in and hope for an afterlife, I’ll confess it was an entirely new, almost shocking concept for me. Much of how I was taught in my christian upbringing emphasizes God’s love through this spiritual immortality, and instantaeous fill in heaven for whatever we lack on earth. I imagine “good news, new life” meant a lot to the first early christians trying to survive an empire’s persecution. Even with all the comforts of today, we just want time, we want more time with those we loved and lost, we want a world without racism/sexism/homophobia where we have opportunity to do better because these fears don’t threaten/traumatize us anymore; we want to enjoy life longer because turns out life can be good.
But in the Jewish perspective, you don’t live for the afterlife. If there is one, the Creator will brief us when we get there, but the present life is the gift. Being able to live on in being remembered in loved ones’ heart is a gift. Love is alive, without needing to be eternal conscious reward. Love is important, without promise of tomorrow. Love is known, even when shrouded in tragedy and suffering. I have much to learn from a perspective outside of my christian reward-of-heaven mentality.
In Corpse Bride, while I do personally headcanon that Emily has either reincarnated because she died so young or transcended to heaven where a spiritual Love outlasts our mortal, marital love—it feels important to note that in the OG Jewish tale, she likely rests at last, honored and remembered. For my christian readers, we may be quick to resist such an idea and insist on there being more hope of life beyond that. If you’re like me, you’re terrified of the finality of death, and we don’t want unjust death especially to have the last word. And we want reunion. I know I want reunion. And that’s okay. However, for now, I am learning to humbly appreciate life now as the only certainty, and a precious gift. Letting tomorrow take care of itself, as it were. Letting God have the answers as we rest. And somehow, that Love is known and felt, despite suffering, despite deviances from the norm—and that Love source we return to has the last word. And in being remembered in others’ hearts, if there is a good God that makes all things well, Love does endure, bring us together, and remain.
Corpse Bride is a lovely, spooky yearly favorite for its whimsical gothic exploration of love and longing. It also speaks to anyone who finds themself deviating and cast out from the narrative they knew—it’s scary. It’s sad. But come join the party—there’s color, music, laughter, community—joy even here on the other side, joy long forgotten, back from the dead.
- Read Ace Notes by Michele Kirichanskaya! It’s got multiple ace insights and interviews (including an interfaith conversation with me!)
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