How the Brothers Grimm Ruined the Female Character

She slipped in
Before I could notice it
In my own war
Blood in the cherry zone
When they
Pit woman against feminist

Tori Amos, "Girl Disappearing"

The binary composition of female characters in the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales antagonizes the discussion of feminism in the essay "Decapitation or Castration" by Helene Cixous. She discusses the Freudian concept of an innate knowledge of what women lack and men's desire to fill the lack, as well as discussing a feminism countering that psychologically driven desire with the theory that sees no female lack. With the female character, the alleged lack that Freud discusses exists both within and outside. This also brings into question the psychological motives of the older female (as portrayed by evil queens and wicked step-mothers) within the fairy tales. Are they trying to diminish opposing females in a Darwinian survival of the fittest female contest? I pose this question upon reading many of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales which best exemplify Cixous' decapitation. As I pondered most of these, I found a startling pattern emerging: within a majority of the tales by the brothers, the female characters demonstrate a hermaphroditic combination of the Freudian and the Cixoulian psychological thought. Through this essay, I will attempt to demonstrate both the social and sexual mores that are covertly woven into the fairy tales as a means of educating boys and girls to their proper placement within society.

Castration: The prince didn't see it coming

Everyone wanted something from him
I did too but I shut my mouth
He just gave me a smile
Past the mission
Behind the prison tower
Past the mission
I once knew a hot girl
Past the mission
They're closing every hour
Past the mission
I smell the roses

Tori Amos, "Past the Mission"

Within the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, the common narrative consists of an evil step-mother or queen pitted against an innocent, younger female. In Rapunzel, she is stolen from her mother, in a deal set by her father, and is eventually locked in a tower high above the ground by an evil enchantress. This imprisonment keeps Rapunzel away from world, until she is eventually rescued by the handsome Prince, where she can spend her days in splendor, instead of the squalor in which the enchantress will cast her. However, this discovery lends itself to the notion that the female is incapable of managing herself; that to be saved, she must unleash her hair to a man. "A woman's loose hair communicates to men her impure state and the danger involved should they wish to approach her sexually" (Lang 41). The mere act of Rapunzel letting down her hair to the awaiting prince suggests that the female is nothing more than a mere sexual object. Notice how easily Rapunzel drops her hair to the prince; she is the whore that men were warned about. She is the loose woman. She is the downfall of man; yet the dichotomy speaks volume, as it is the perception of man which has created the sexual objectification of women, particularly of the female face. As Howard Eilberg-Schwartz writes:

Eroticization of the head is thus a form of beheading, since it depicts women as nothing more than a sexual and erotic body...Speaking to a woman is a form of sex, seeing her hair a violation of modesty. This sort of erotic symbolism is one of the motivations behind the practices of veiling a woman's face and/or hair and avoiding the sound of her voice. Ironically, of course, the eroticism of the female hair or face is intensified and partially created by the very acts of veiling that are intended to keep female sexuality under wraps.

The attempt the evil queen makes to stow away the coming of age virgin in the tower strengthens the curiosity of the sexual object being hidden away. She strives to denounce the impending blossoming of sexuality, all while she exacerbates the imagination of the man. Even though the evil queen is seemingly the antagonist of the story, she is also the moral center, as she represents the social mores of the time. "Children and victorious generals especially needed protection; but young marriageable girls were particularly vulnerable to erotic enchantment. Thus Tertullian manages to insinuate a warning that that virgin's supposed sign of honor and sanctity, her free and unveiled head, actually puts her in danger of sexual slavery and degradation" (D'Angelo 148). Her motivation for locking Rapunzel in the tower could be argued as a means of protecting the purity and sanctity of her virginity. She is locked in a phallic chastity belt.

Yet the tower, with its phallic shaft and barbed thicket pubic hair, is much more than a chastity belt for Rapunzel. It symbolizes her impending sexualization, as she is situated at the top of the tall tower, implying her eventual sexual encounter with the prince. Rapunzel is imprisoned within a penis, a station that women are affixed to: the female is and will forever be locked to the penile form. Her life will continuously circle and focus on her lack of a penis and her desire to be filled by such. She will in fact be chained to the penis until her death bed, as Rapunzel escapes one penis (the tower) to be fulfilled by another (the prince). However, the sexual encounter comes at a price: the prince falls from the tower, landing in the thick barbed vines at the bottom, and losing his eyesight to the thorns.

The Brothers Grimm set the stage for this dialectic juxtaposition, creating an atmosphere that is at once sexual and cautionary. They not only remove the humanity from Rapunzel, by reducing her to the most basic sexual objectification, but they caution at the ills that befall men who are tempted by such women. "The myths argue that blindness is both the cause of sexual sin and a result of sexual sin (the punishment for excessive sexual voyeurism, or incorrect visual sexual discrimination, judging by appearances or being taken in by a visual trick); the punishment fits the crime" (Doniger 27). While the Ancient Greeks believed the eyes were phallic symbols (reverse sexualization of a man's face, in which he uses his eyes as a penile extension to view the sexualized face of a woman, in which the eyes represent the breast and the mouth, vagina), the loss of the prince's eyesight legitimizes the criminal nature of sex and warns men of the consequences of encounters with women. In essence, the prince is castrated for his inappropriate behavior.

The argument can be made that Rapunzel at once enticed the prince with her singing and her face, perched high above him; yet it is not entirely fair to Rapunzel. Her imprisonment, her loose hair, and the consequences of her actions are all concepts created and promoted by men. Since she is female, and without a penis (though conveniently set atop one), it is up to man to restore her; to free her of her sexual chains and therefore becoming, at once, her savior and her master.

Decapitation: Silence of the womb

ran into the henchman
who severed anne boleyn
he did it right quickly
a merciful man
she said 1+1 is 2
but henry said that it was 3
so it was
here i am

Tori Amos, "Talula"

More importantly, it is the female relationships within the fairy tales that are striking. How often are the younger women besieged by anti-feminine behavior at the hands of another female? This perverse turn of events spills onto the page of almost every Brothers Grimm fairy tale. So what does this say about the social and emotional context of the female relationship? The motivation of the enchantress to lock up her more youthful and more beautiful counterpart can be interpreted in multiple ways. As mentioned before, the enchantress represents the social mores of the time, locking Rapunzel up during her introduction into the menstruation cycle of her life. She is not imprisoned before the onset of puberty; her passage from girl to woman brings about the eclipse of her virginity. She is now able to receive a man and reproduce. "They are allied with what is regular, according to the rules, since they are wives and mothers, and allied as well with those natural disturbances, their regular periods, which are the epitome of paradox, order and disorder" (Cixous and Clément 8). She is at once harmony and dissonance. She is binary: female (innocent and virginal) and male (sexual); and it this binary progression of life which creates the greatest chasm between the two females. However, the relationship between the enchantress and Rapunzel does not end there; it is multi-faceted and more complex.

The fairy tales tend to follow the Freudian belief that there is a psychologically-driven lack within females. Rapunzel begins with the line: "A man and a woman long wished in vain for a child" (Grimm 116). According to Freud's sexual theories, the man senses the lack within the female and longs to fill that void with a child, while the female senses her own lack, and longs to have the void filled by the man in the form of a pregnancy. Pregnancy is the only way for females to exist: they are nothing more than sexual productions. "'Ah,' she replied, 'if I can't eat some of the rampion that is in the garden behind our house, I shall die'" (Grimm 116). To Rapunzel's mother, to be childless, to be devoid of such reproductive ability, equals death. With the mouth and the vagina being symbolically interchangeable, the lack of childbirth represents the sexual silencing of the female. Her identity is equated with her sexuality; without reproduction, she is defunct, experiencing the extremity of lack. No amount of sexual contact will be able to fulfill her. She is again reduced to animalistic behaviors. She is only capable of the sexual act, and not able to fulfill her duty of reproduction.

Yet once the need is fulfilled, through a wicked deal struck by the enchantress and Rapunzel's father, all the characters seem to cease in their need to fill their lack. They see no value, no anxiety about lack or loss. Cixous explains that the feminine does not seek to value the lack or loss Freud supposes on the female form, and discusses that there is no void to be filled in the feminine. Once the enchantress has effectively kidnapped the child, she raises it without any sense of lack or loss.

The fascinating aspect of the fairy tales is the dichotomy the enchantress exhibits when it found that Rapunzel has betrayed her. "'Ah! You wicked child,' cried the enchantress. 'What do I see before me! I thought I had separated you from the entire world, and yet you have deceived me!'" (Grimm 119). This betrayal reiterates the lack of history and the prescribed alignment women have with males, not with each other. "Woman is disgusted by woman and fears her. They have committed the greatest crime against women: insidiously and violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense power against themselves, to do the male's dirty work" (Cixous and Clément 68). Almost innately, women choose to align themselves with a male, as a way of satisfying a biological need. They are supported and protected by men in exchange for their sexual degradation. The woman is loyal to the man who can fulfill her lack with his penis, instead of another woman, who is, by all accounts, just another sexual animal. In a very real sense, woman turns on woman in a sexual Darwinian vie for the best producer. It is more important to have the penis; the value is greater. Woman is not complete without it.

The enchantress goes on to cut Rapunzel's hair off (a metaphoric genital castration, as it was the method the Prince used to mount the great tower and then the girl), and casts Rapunzel off into waste. This removal of hair symbolizes the (step)mother's need to bind the younger female, hindering sexual relations. With the face and hair of a girl exposed, she is welcoming the advancements of a man, and consequently the sexual advances as well. By the enchantress shucking the man's route to his desired, she is setting up sexual boundaries, in a vain attempt to maintain the purity of the home. By contrast, the cutting of Rapunzel's hair can represent the social boundaries the enchantress is constructing. "Hair does not so much represent desire as symbolize social control and deviance. Shorn hair signifies a person who is constrained by social rules (a monk, a soldier, a prisoner in jail). Long hair signifies a person who stands outside the rules (certain kinds of ascetics, hippies, women). Wearing long hair also symbolizes being more like animals and hence closer to nature" (Eilberg-Schwartz 5). Rapunzel's long hair socially catapults her, and by vicinity the enchantress, into a social rank of disorder. They are outsiders, but once the boundary is compromised, the enchantress is forced to relocate Rapunzel in an attempt to regain the distance between her and the rest of the world. Yet the enchantress uses trickery to maintain her place in the world, forcing the outside world to discover its mistake and plummet into the darkness of its illicit sexual perversion.

Each of the women in the tale, at some point, experiences a silencing of their womb. With the first decapitation of the biological mother of Rapunzel, the women of the fairy tale continue to be decapitated by not only men, but by the women within the frame of the tale. Rapunzel's father effectively decapitates his wife when he bargains for the rampion for the child. The mother has no say in the matter; again, she is nothing more than a sexual production. His decision to trade the child silences the mother, filling the mouth with rampion and the vagina with his penis. She is reduced, decapitated. When Rapunzel comes of age, her imprisonment effectively silences her, removing not only lower regions from the view of men, but distancing her enough that she lacks identity; she is but a face in a window. "Ironically, then, the display of the female face can be another form of decapitation, turning the female head into a symbol of desire, rather than a symbol of identity and of the capacity for speech and language" (Eilberg-Schwartz 2).

The second decapitation comes when Rapunzel is imprisoned and again when the enchantress removes her hair. The third decapitation occurs when the enchantress is betrayed by Rapunzel. The replacement of mother with lover removes the mother's voice from the child's life, quieting the enchantress, forcing her into hysterics and thereby, taking the enchantress' voice away.

The girl chooses the Prince over the enchantress, a moment where the enchantress feels what a birthing mother feels: the loss of a child; the child being ripped away from her by the child's lover as it is ripped from her body by a doctor. The pregnancy supposed (when Rapunzel asks the enchantress why her clothes keep getting tighter) completes the biological cycle. Rapunzel is held captive by the jealousy of an aging woman who refuses to release her daughter to the world, forcing her out in a bitter, resentful gesture of motherly love. The labor intensive move mirrors the birthing process: the child is forced from the mother in a cruel manner, as Rapunzel is forced from the birthing canal of her tower into the dark and treacherous forest. Rapunzel's entrance into the world is as shocking and frightening as a newborn's.

Beyond the PrisonTower: The girl has come undone

man's got his woman
to take his seed
he's got the power
she got the need
spends her life through
pleasing up her man

Tori Amos, "Only Women Bleed"

When examined closely, it is striking the damage being impressed upon children, particularly little girls, at such a young age. Not only does she have to be young and beautiful to get the guy, but she has to be wary of other (in this case, older) females. These wicked females silence younger females, thus decapitating them, by stowing them from society, particularly from male attention, either by forcing them into coma-like states of silence, such as the other princesses of the fairy tales, or locking them away hoping no one will discover their whereabouts.

Yet, the true intent of the enchantress remains unclear. It could be a loss of youth that causes the older female to decapitate her younger counterpart. There could be a primal, animalistic behavior which prods the female to compete within her own sex to gain the attention and affection of the male. Jealousy over the loss of beauty could be the culprit. And it may very well be anti-feminist propaganda arranged by male writers, in an attempt to devalue and animalize the female. However, the use of such figures in childhood stories is destructive in its imprinting of young children and the relationship between men and women and between females. What exactly are we teaching our children when we read such innocent bedtime stories to such impressionable minds: that women, as young girls, are naïve and helpless without men, and that old, decrepit maids are bitter, jealous, and still helpless, without men? Or that women are generally evil and lesser than their male counterparts, and no matter how the man tries, she will always end up being the evil queen or enchantress next door? According to the Brothers Grimm and Freud, women are only salvageable if there is a man involved to rescue her from her lack; otherwise, their existence is one of misery and anxiety.

Fairy tales leave a lasting impression on the young minds that read them. Even the cartoon images of the princesses teach little girls that to be anything she must be rescued by a man. This principle reinforces the notion that the female is not equal to male, and never shall be. Though there is a female empowerment movement within film, fiction and music, it is seen more as a novelty than an actual movement. Self-confident and aggressive girls, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, are seen as visual stimulation for men, not for the female empowerment they may intend.

While the tales were written as a means to make the Brothers Grimm money (they changed the overt adult nature of their tales to more child friendly version as a business ploy to sell more books), their anti-feministic voice speaks volume within their writing. Women are no better than the animalistic drive that men have placed upon them and the brothers exploited that irrationality. This is a manual which warns all men of the evils that shall come from indiscriminate sex: man has but one weakness: his desire for sex. Ultimately, man's downfall will be at the mouth, or vagina, of a woman.

WORKS CITED

Amos, Tori. "Girl Disappearing." American Doll Posse. Cornwall, England: Martian Engineering, 2007.

Amos, Tori. "Talula". Boys for Pele. Ireland, 1995. Released January 23, 1996.

Amos, Tori. "Past the Mission". Under the Pink. New Mexico: The Fishbone, 1994.

Cixous, Hélène. "Castration or Decapitation?" Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1981. Vol. 7, no. 1. Trans. Annette Kuhn. Chicago: University of Chicago. 36- 55.

Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, 1975.

Cooper, Alice. "Only Women Bleed." Tori Amos. Strange Little Girls (B Sides). Cornwall, England: Martian Engineering, September 18, 2001.

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Grimm, Jacob and Wilheim. "Rapunzel." Grimm's Grimmest. Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 1^st ed., 1812.

Lang, Karen. "Shaven Head and Loose Hair." Off with Her Head! The Denial of Women's Identity in Myth, Religion and Culture. Ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz and Wendy Doniger. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995