What if the man who found Rapunzel was scared of her singing instead of in love at first sight?
What if a man insisted on pursuing a fairy he fell in love with, despite the first answer he got?
These two haunting narrative songs, telling of fairy tale twists alongside beautiful art, have been on my mind for years and never left. I can’t even remember when I first discovered them. All I know is they’ve definitely made me think about confronting my own prejudices, including things I may have internalized.
Mademoiselle Noir:
In this beautiful, gothic, almost Tim-Burton-style twist on Rapunzel, a man comes across a mysterious maiden with the longest hair spilling out of a tower–and instead of falling in love, he is overcome with fear with what he cannot understand. He runs to a town raving about the evil spirit he saw, and this ultimately leads to her death.
There are two lines in particular that stand out to me from this song:
“It was straight like from a book he once read.”
The maiden he encountered was exactly like in the fairytales he knew, and he failed to recognize it.
Similarly, how many people in real life are lost princes and princesses like in the stories we know, and how have we failed to recognize them as such?
How many christians will memorize Bible verses by heart, yet fail to recognize their neighbor, the refugee, the outcast, the poor among them?
“Still waiting for her prince while her hair was on fire, the one last time she said…”
This line really got me. How many people in need are waiting for an embodied Christ to answer their prayers, how many people are waiting for help, only to be destroyed further by those who were meant to help?
It doesn’t have to be a girl waiting for a prince. It can be anyone waiting for help.
There’s also the fact that this kind of cruel judgment is so universal it can happen to almost anyone on the margins in any capacity. While studying abroad in Germany once, I learned that during the Holocaust, people could also be marked with a black triangle for being “asocial”, which was anything outside of social norms. This could mean anything from having a mental illness to being an unmarried woman.
Take also for instance historical accounts of women sent to the asylum or to prison with no way out because they spoke a different language.
This isn’t just burning witches at the stake long ago. This is still happening, every time we pass along prejudice or justify hate crimes. This is happening when we also make assumptions about someone’s intelligence or soundness of mind if someone doesn’t speak perfect English, regardless of the perfect intelligible sense they may make in their own language (or even dialect). This happens when we dismiss real pain and trauma as “hysteria.” This happens when we refuse accomodations to the disabled that may allow them to more fully partake in our community and allow us to learn from them in turn.
“Mademoiselle Noir” is a parable about what happens when we decide what is normal/to be kept normal is only what we can understand.
How many fairy tales are we ruining and cutting short because of what we don’t understand? How may we listen better?
“The Willow Maid”:
“The Willow Maid” also tells a mythical, ethereal story with a plot twist. A young man goes into the forest and falls in love with a young maiden in a tree. Call her what you will: fairy, dryad, nymph. He keeps asking for her hand in marriage and she keeps saying no, she cannot leave the tree.
Willfully, the young man decides to chop down the tree, thinking this will make her his. It’s open to interpretation whether he does this out of anger or out of genuine care, but the message is clear: she said no. And his entitlement only brings destruction, not love.
I’ll admit that when I first saw this, my instinctive reaction was “why wasn’t she more clear that she was literally connected to the tree?” Then I realized this instinct was wrong. She was very clearly saying no, and that should be all you need. And secondly, she did say she cannot leave, and it’s not her fault humans will try to find a way around it to interpret it differently.
That’s how ingrained the internalized sexism/objectification is.
“Now your willow’s fallen. Now you belong to me.”
This reminds me of real life events on both a macro- and micro- level.
On a macro level, this is what colonialism does to people of a different heritage. Sadly, I will say christians have a long and bloody history of this kind of destruction to indigenous cultures, from forced cutting of Native American hair to separatation of Latino refugees from their children, from stripping African descendents of their traditional stories to forcing Latino or Asian people to only speak English in public (there’s that fear of the other language again), etc.
Some christians have done this kind of destruction out of malice and disgust for what they don’t understand. And some christians have done this kind of destruction maybe out of genuine intentions of “saving” people they perceive to be trapped, inhibited from experiencing higher love. But either way, be the intention malicious or ignorant, the result is destruction, not love.
On a micro- level–well, does it really need saying? How many women have said no, and never had that “no” respected as the final answer? How many women have said no, only to be met with more persistant pursuit because “she doesn’t know what she’s missing”? This affects straight people and queer people alike (including asexual people, susceptible to “corrective rape”). It doesn’t matter if a man’s intentions are out of vengeance or attraction, it doesn’t matter if he’s convinced himself he’s “saving” her from singleness. His entitlement brings only destruction, not love.
So, what are you saying, Ell? I thought in the first story you expressed wanting to save people, and now you’re telling me a story saying we shouldn’t save people? Can you pick a point?
I think it’s important we see and hear people as they are, with the default being “that person is an Image of God.” And we must understand that there is no one right culture on how to experience God’s presence. The divine is a cultural kaleidoscope, not a place of dichotomies.
And we should hear what people in need, are in need of. In both stories, the maidens sing a song but aren’t heard. People jump to destructive conclusions on what needs to be done to rescue people from the devil, without taking a good look to realize that in their racism/sexism/xenophobia and murder, they are doing the devil’s work themselves.
The maiden in the tower didn’t need to be killed/exorcised. She needed to be freed while alive.
The maiden in the willow didn’t need to be cut off from the tree and given into marriage. She needed to be respected.
Real life example, at the risk of bringing up too many issues in a blog post at once: queer people don’t need to be saved from homosexuality. They need to be affirmed and protected from discrimination.
Imagine how differently the story could have went if Mademoiselle Noir, found in the abandoned tower, singing of her depression, was rescued from isolation, and reintroduced into society. Imagine if people stopped and tried to learn her language. Imagine if people realized they could learn from her.
Now imagine how differently the story could have gone if the young man did not chop down The Willow Maid’s ancient tree. Imagine he considered himself lucky to have existed alongside conscious magic. Imagine he let himself be inspired by her beauty, and after she says no, he carries on. Imagine if she were alive still.
Imagine if they were alive still.
Yesterday, there was a hate crime in Atlanta killing six working Asian American women. Already, we are getting cheaply spun narratives about the white murderer having a bad day. This is nothing new. As we see in stories here, that seem folkloric but are timely anytime, hate crimes can happen out of paranoid fear or outrageous spite. They happen when the murderer is attracted to the victim, and they happen when the murderer is turned off. (So, stating the attractiveness of minorities doesn’t really alleviate the problem at all).
So, what do we do now? We listen. There are many needs at once.
We affirm the humanity of the other. We lament, mourn, soothe, make consequences for the attacker, bring justice for the community. We don’t tell minorities they’re overreacting. We learn from them.
We listen.
We listen carefully.