Riquet with the Tuft, Perrault's Version

 So first off, a quick overview of French fairy tales. There were a whole bunch of really cool ladies writing really cool stories. The Salon Writers. And one guy, who wrote a few cool stories but occasionally just straight up ripped off their stories. So, of course, a couple hundred years later everyone knows the dude, and all the ladies and all their cool stories have been pretty much forgotten. (Except Beauty and the Beast. Go Beauty and the Beast.)

The reason for that little overview is that today we're going to talk about one of those stories the dude ripped off. It's called Riquet with the Tuft, and there are two wildly different versions. The first is by the lady, Catherine Bernard, and the second is by the dude, Charles Perrault.

Honestly, I prefer Perrault's version. But, like, I sort of feel bad about it? They have the same title, but they're basically completely different stories. And I read his first. And it's not that I actually like it, really, so much as that I feel it has potential? Which honestly is the case with a lot of my favorite fairy tales.

Anyway. We're gonna start with Perrault's version. And depending on how long that takes we might have a part two for Bernard's.

A prince is born. His name is Riquet, and they call him Riquet with the Tuft because he has one little tuft of hair. He's super ugly, but his fairy godmother says that he's going to be super smart, and gives him the ability to grant an equal amount of smartness to one other person in his life.

A princess is born in another kingdom. She's super pretty, but her fairy godmother says she's going to be super dumb. She gets the ability to make one other person in her life as hot as she is. 

A second princess is born - the first princess' younger sister. And she also grows up smart and ugly, but not as smart or as ugly as Riquet. Don't know what the fairy godmother gave her. This story's not really about her.

Riquet does pretty well for himself, except for one thing. He's so ugly, no one wants to marry him.

Our first princess, on the other hand - she's struggling. She's so stupid that it doesn't even matter how pretty she is. Her younger sister is much better liked despite being really ugly, because at least she has a brain. Our princess is too stupid not to drop fine china on the floor. She's too stupid not to spill a glass of water all down her front. She's too stupid to remember her suitors' names. She's too stupid to maintain a simple conversation about the weather. It's...not great. She's just smart enough to be aware that she's astoundingly stupid.

Eventually she ands Riquet meet. Riquet has seen her portrait and fallen madly in love with her, which, like, shouldn't he maybe be smart enough not to randomly fall head over heels for total strangers just because they're hot?

Whatever. They meet. Princess is sad because no one likes her because she's stupid. Riquet offers her his fairy gift - offers to make her as smart as him. In exchange they'll get married, in one year.

So princess goes home, newly intelligent. Her poor little sister suffers for this; she isn't the hot one or the smart one now, and no one pays her any attention. Our girl's new smarts have changed her so much that she barely remembers her life before. She has dozens of suitors, one of whom she's particularly fond of, and seriously considering marrying. She's not totally sure, though, so she goes out into the woods to think about it. The same woods where she first met Riquet, a year ago now, which by this point she's almost totally forgotten about.

Riquet's excited that she's gotten there right on time for their wedding. At which point she has to tell him that she hasn't; she forgot all about that and it's just a coincidence that she's here today. And she's not sure about marrying him after all, because she was still stupid when she agreed to that - so stupid she didn't even realize how ugly he was. And surely he's smart enough to realize that he's far too ugly to marry, right?

(I'm totally not loving how her new brains for some reason made her shallow? Like, how is it smart to be judging people by their appearances? She and Riquet have both done it now.)

Riquet asks if she has any concerns other than his physical appearance, and she says no, she thinks he's a great guy overall. So he reminds her of her ability to share beauty, she makes him hot, and they live happily ever after.

The part of the story that's always really stood out to me, despite the fact that it doesn't really fit in with the overall tone, is the little section right after they get married, where Perrault basically says that maybe she didn't actually make him hot, maybe it was just her love for him that made him seem hot to her. Which is a really sweet thought. It just doesn't make a ton of sense with the general shallowness displayed earlier in the story.

Since this is Perrault, we end the story with a moral. Two morals, in this case. First: What we love is always fair. Second: Love comes from unseen things, not just brains and beauty. These are actually both better than his usual morals, but, like, I'm still annoyed by the existence of the morals at all. Just seems, I don't know, self righteous or something. And again, not really consistent with the bulk of the story.

This is pretty long, so I think we'll wait until next time to go over the second version; see you then!

The Frog Princess

 So today we're going to talk about "The Frog Princess." This is a completely different story from "The Frog Prince"; literally all they have in common is an enchanted frog. The Frog Princess is found in a lot of different cultures, but I first encountered it as a Russian fairy tale, so that's the version we're going with today. Also, like. I just finished my post about "King Thrushbeard", and I feel like I've learned my lesson about the disappointments of actually rereading fairy tales instead of just going off my memory.  Today we are going to tell fairy tales the way they were meant to be told, the way they were told in the days of oral tradition: however the teller happens to remember them. (So don't anybody be coming in here and telling me I'm wrong, don't tell me I botched the details, don't tell me I just left out the entire second half; dude, I know. That's the point.)

We open with a scene sort of like the end of Robin Hood, where he shoots an arrow from his deathbed and tells the Merry Men to bury him wherever it lands? The king has his three sons shoot arrows, and they're supposed to find their brides wherever the arrow lands.

Now, how could that possibly go wrong?

Miraculously, no one is killed in this fun little bride search, and two of the three arrows actually happen to land somewhere in the general vicinity of an unmarried young woman.

Unfortunately for our third prince, the only living thing anywhere near where his arrow lands is a frog. So he goes home and explains the situation to his dad, probably hoping for a reasonable response, like, "Oh, that sucks, try again," or maybe even, "You know what? Bridal acquisition via a literal shot in the dark was a stupid and dangerous idea. Forget it. Go meet a nice girl the normal way."

But our king is not a reasonable man, so what he tells the prince is "Well, I guess you're marrying a frog."

And then he says that whichever son has the most impressive wife gets to be the next king. Like, dude. Just come right out and say you hate prince number three.

First task to impress the king: make him a shirt.

The first two girls work hard to sew nice shirts. And prince number three, he goes home and tells the frog what's up, but he's not really expecting anything, because she's, you know, a frog. In the morning he has to go and not present his dad with a shirt, and before he leaves the frog gives him an acorn, and she's all like, "Look, I made you a shirt," and he just sort of says "Thanks, honey," and pats her slimy little head, because, I mean, what are you gonna do? She's a frog. They don't even wear shirts. Why should she know the difference between a shirt and an acorn?

"You have to open it," she says as he leaves.

"Sure, honey," he says, humoring her.

So he gets home. His dad looks over the other two shirts, makes his judgement, and then it's our dude's turn. He takes the little acorn cap off, and--there's fabric in there? Okay, weird. He pulls it out and it's a beautiful shirt made of the finest linen. Round one goes to our now very baffled third prince. Round two: bake some bread.

Now our prince isn't super quick on the uptake here. I'd think that the combination of talking frog and beautiful human-sized shirt folded into an acorn without even wrinkling would naturally lead to the conclusion that something magical is going on. But instead, he decides that the shirt must have been a fluke and, woe is him, there's no way his frog wife is ever gonna produce a loaf of bread. Frogs don't even eat bread. And how will she operate an oven?

The prince's new sisters-in-law are a little smarter, and have worked out the magic angle by now, so they go to spy on the frog. They watch her just sort of pour the dough into the oven through a hole on top, and go home to do the same thing. But, like, they don't have magic. So that backfires.

Frog presents prince with a second acorn. He pats her slimy little head and says "Thanks, honey," because he's sure she did her best. You can't fit a lot of bread in an acorn; bread isn't nearly as foldable as linen. But it's the thought that counts. And if he had to marry a frog, well, out of all the frogs in the world, he figures he's pretty lucky to have wound up with this one.

The first two princes show the king their very, very sad loaves of bread, and our prince is thinking, okay, maybe I have a shot. My loaf of bread might be incredibly tiny, but the shirt was good, and this other bread is pretty crappy. So he takes the cap off the acorn, and a beautiful, full-sized loaf of bread. They cut it up, and it tastes great. Round two goes to our prince. Third round: impress the king at a banquet.

Now our prince is thinking there's really no way his wife is going to perform well at a fancy party, because, again, she is literally a frog. She tells him to go ahead to the banquet, and she'll catch up later. He goes, thinking he's probably going to be stood up, because how is a frog going to get herself across town?

His brothers tease him about his frog wife and how she stood him up, and he just sits there and takes it because he knows his frog wife does her best, and at least she produced an edible loaf of bread. There's a commotion outside; a frog is riding up the driveway in a cardboard box pulled by mice. Which is, okay, all kinds of embarrassing. But the prince loves his frog wife, he's sure she's doing her best. And as she reaches the palace, she transforms into a beautiful woman. At which point the king declares our boy the winner of this bizarre little contest and the heir to the throne, and he and his frog wife, now de-frogged, live happily ever after.

-

Okay, fine, I can't just not read the original story. So just to let you know where I got it wrong: can't find evidence of that acorn detail, don't know where I got it. Possibly from a German variant called "Puddocky," in which the second task is to find a dog that can fit inside a walnut shell. And the entire last scene with the frog arriving is from the German version, not the Russian one, as well. Having jest reread them both, I can see the story that exists in my memory is a very jumbled combination of the two. 

Also, like, the frog doesn't do anything for herself in the Russian version? She has attendants the prince can't see who sew the shirt and bake the bread and everything, which is totally lame, and also cheating; the king said he'd leave the kingdom to the prince whose wife did the best job, not the one whose wife had the best servants. And there is a second half, in the Russian version, though the German version ends with the banquet. After that scene, in the Russian version, when the prince realizes his wife doesn't have to be a frog, he burns the skin, which in his defense, seems like the thing to do, based on folkloric precedence. But it doesn't pan out this time. Ends up being a more "East of the Sun West of the Moon" style screw-up, and he has to go on a quest to get her back. Which is actually kind of fun; you don't see a lot of gender reversal on the "I screwed up my SO's transformation spell and now I gotta fix it" quest. Anyway, he does that thing where he spares the lives of a bunch of animals and in return they help him out later. (I think the only time I've talked about that before is in "The Sea Hare".) Baba Yaga tells him our frog girl is now with Kaschey the Deathless, and how to kill him; it's one of those "you have to stab him in his heart, but instead of being in his body it's in an egg in a chest in a tower underwater or whatever" situations, like in "The Troll With No Heart In His Body". The animals help out with that, and then we live happily ever after, for real this time.

King Thrushbeard

King Thrushbeard has always been one of my favorite fairy tales. Top five, easily. (The top five, in no particular order: King Thrushbeard, Prince Lindworm, Donkey Cabbages, East of the Sun West of the Moon, and Beauty and the Beast.) This is partly because (spoiler) I'm a total sucker for secret identities (I blame this on early exposure to Robin Hood and The Princess Bride), and I think partly because of a blog post I read years and years and years ago, which analyzed King Thrushbeard as a Christian allegory. It was a really fascinating post, and I wish I could link it for you, but I first encountered it over a decade ago, and I wouldn't know where to even begin looking for it now.

So recently I reread King Thrushbeard for the first time in at least five years. Which. Kind of a mistake. Some things are just better in memory. (Which is why I no longer read favorite books from my childhood. Some things you just can't bear to have ruined by, like, good taste.) 

Anyway. Let's get into it.

Our story starts with a princess who doesn't want to get married, which. Fair. But we're in a setting, where,  like, you kinda gotta anyway. Princesses in this culture are not doing a lot of marrying for love, even in fairy tales. And our girl, she's being pretty much as difficult as possible about it. Her father keeps on bringing in suitors, and she keeps on rejecting them in the rudest ways possible. Mostly stuff about their physical appearances. "I can't marry this guy; he's so fat he looks like a wine barrel." "He's so red he looks like a rooster." "His chin is so crooked it looks like a thrush's beak." Etc., etc. Except that the thrush beak one - I'm glancing through the pitt.edu version as I write this post and that's what it says, but in other translations I know they've said his beard looks like a thrush's nest, which makes much more sense to me because facial hair is much more easily changed than chin shape.

Now, okay, I get that marrying a total stranger to strengthen your father's political alliances isn't fun. But insulting powerful men as you reject them is just not the best idea, hon. You're gonna cause problems there. People are gonna blame your dad for your rudeness and not want to be in treaties with him anymore. Which you should know.

So. Dad gets fed up with this whole thing after princess rejects the latest batch of suitors, and swears to marry her to the next beggar that comes to the door. Minstrel beggar comes by shortly afterwards, and beggar and princess are married despite strenuous objections by both. King kicks princess out, because it's "not proper for a beggar's wife to live in the palace."

Princess and beggar walk a ways. They pass through a number of beautiful places owned by King Thrushbeard (which is what we're calling chin/beard dude now), and princess bemoans her foolishness in refusing to marry him. Out loud, which her new husband points out is pretty rude, as she's married to him now. 

Eventually they reach the tiny hut where they're going to live. Princess is shocked and horrified by lack of servants. Beggar immediately sets her to cooking and housework, neither of which she has any idea how to do. And then he decides she needs to get a job.

(Once he gets married we never see him beg again, or do any other kind of work; he just expects his brand new wife with no marketable skills to provide for him and contributes absolutely nothing to the relationship. Fantastic. Real stand-up guy.)

Princess is set to weaving baskets, but the materials cut her delicate princess hands. She's set to spinning thread, but those materials also cut her delicate princess hands, and, like, what? Exactly how delicate do your hands have to be to be cut by thread? Apparently we just have a full-on Princess and the Pea situation here. Okay.

Beggar sets her to selling pottery in the marketplace. That goes really well; people buy her pots because she's pretty and sad and they feel sorry for her. This is apparently pottery that the beggar bought from someone else, making the princess sort of the middleman here. Which is where the trouble comes in; some drunk dude on a horse comes through the market and smashes all her pots. Which she and the beggar then have to pay for.

And of course, according to the beggar, this is all her fault, because of the part of the market she chose to work in? If she'd set up somewhere else the pots wouldn't have been trampled. And, like, I'm not liking the beggar. Not an appealing character. Kind of a jerk.

He gets the princess a job as a kitchen maid at King Thrushbeard's palace. She starts smuggling food home in her pockets, which will become relevant in a minute here, because she and her husband are very poor, and food is hard to come by.

All goes well until the king's wedding day. She's got her pockets full of food, and the king - King Thrushbeard, who she so rudely rejected - demands that she, a random kitchen maid, dance with him. While they're dancing, all her pockets burst, spilling the stolen food, and she's in filthy rags in a ballroom in front of a suitor she rejected, so she makes the only logical choice and runs right out of there.

The king follows her. He says, "Surprise! I'm your beggar husband and somehow you didn't recognize me just now? I orchestrated this whole big thing - the marriage, the broken pots, that fun little wardrobe malfunction you just had - to teach you a lesson. And now that you've learned it we can live happily ever after!"

To which the princess replies, "I suck and I'm not worthy to be your wife," which. Just. Oh, honey, no. You were really rude to him once, so he made the next several months of your life a living hell. You are not the unworthy one. Why do you think you're unworthy? Is this Stockholm Syndrome? Do you have Stockholm Syndrome? Is that even how Stockholm Syndrome works? Probably not, but I am Concerned.

(One of these days I'd like to make it through a whole fairy tale summary without being Concerned. Hasn't happened yet.)

So. The wedding that's happening is her surprise wedding, she changes clothes quick before the ceremony, and they live happily ever after. Good times. Our beggar/Thrushbeard was a lot more likeable in my memory before this reread.

(This post was available early on my Patreon.)

Beauty and the Beast: Dream Prince

I’m going to take some time today to talk about one of my (many) favorite aspects of the original Beauty and the Beast, which I’ve somehow managed to go all these years without covering.

The Superman love triangle.

Is there some sort of official name for this phenomenon that I haven’t bothered to look up? Probably.

But you know what I’m talking about. Lois likes Clark, but she’s really hung up on Superman. So this poor guy is in competition with himself for her affections.

In “The Beauty and the Beast,” the beauty is living with a beast who proposes to her every night, and every night she says no. But she’s growing increasingly fond of him, and one of the main things preventing her from saying yes is her Dream Guy.

Now. A brief explanation of the beast’s situation here. Part of his curse is that he seems as dumb as the beast he looks like. So he’s sort of trapped inside his own head, and it’s not possible for the beauty to really get to know him.

But he’s visiting her in her dreams, as a prince - as his real self. And she’s fallen in love with the dream prince, who she hasn’t connected with the beast.

So she’s refusing to marry him because she’s in love with the person he’ll become as soon as she says yes.

Basically, it’s a mess.

And ultimately she does agree to marry the beast, when it seems he’ll die if she doesn’t. At which point we have two options.

She agreed to marry him because she does care for him deeply, even if she’s not in love with him, and has decided that she’d rather keep him alive than keep waiting on a man who might be only a figment of her imagination. In which case everything is gonna be great when he changes; she saved the beast she’s fond of, and now gets to marry the man she loves.

The beast’s near death has made her realize that it’s him she truly loves, not a man who may only be a figment of her imagination. And as soon as she realizes she loves the beast more than the man, the beast ceases to exist forever and is replaced by the man. Which is a major bummer, and much awkwardness is bound to ensue.

It’s a worse situation than Superman’s; once he comes clean to Lois, it’s all good, because Clark and Superman are the same person in different clothes. But while the beast may be fundamentally the same person he always was, the terms of his curse prevent him from acting like himself while he’s a beast. Which means that the two people the beauty is torn between are, in a way, simultaneously the same person and two different people.

And it’s just - honestly I’m not sure I see this working out well. If you’ve fallen for this big, kinda ugly guy who’s a little slow, a little dumb, are you going to be happy with a whip-smart hottie? And if the girl you like was always nice to you when you were slow and ugly, but is suddenly all over you when the spell breaks, if she agreed to marry you, but is clearly delighted when this causes you to become a radically different person from the one she agreed to marry, how are you going to feel about that?

Overall, it’s this “seem like a beast” clause that continues to be problematic. Because if you love someone, it shouldn’t really matter what he looks like, right? But if the spell changes how you act, that’s...it’s just difficult. That fairy who cursed him knew what she was doing; he is thoroughly screwed over.

 

 

Write What You Know

I frequently write what I know. I write about fairy tales, which I’ve been studying since I was a child. I write about high school and college, which I attended. I write about church, about characters with mental illness, about camping and cats and families that love each other. And I write about things I don’t know—princesses and romantic relationships and living in tiny cottages without modern amenities. But there are some things that I don’t write specifically *because* I know them. Some things, I’m just too close to.

I’ve never written a character that’s specifically bipolar. I’ve never written a character that deals with the specific romantic issues and experiences I’ve dealt with. I can’t.

Often, authors will say “I want to read a book like this,” and the responses they get are usually along the lines of “Well, write it, then.”

The books I want most, the characters I could relate to in the most meaningful ways—I can’t write those. It would be too difficult, too painful, and even too dangerous.

At this point, you may be wondering, how can writing something be dangerous?

When you are mentally ill, at least, writing something very personal can be extremely risky.

When I was 21, I wrote a novel featuring a protagonist who dealt with a lot of the same mental health issues I had dealt with, by that point in my life. I wrote this during the year I spent in one of the lowest spots I’ve ever been in. Now, there’s a discussion to be had there about correlation and causation. Writing this story didn’t necessarily trigger a breakdown—it’s entirely possible that already being in a bad spot is what inspired me to write about a character in similar circumstances.

But I am absolutely certain that writing that story worsened my mental health in that year. Because this was what I was writing about, writing ceased to be an escape—I went to hide from my real life, and found myself deep in the headspace of a fictional character who was even worse off than me. I always get very entangled with my protagonists when I’m writing, especially if I’m writing in first person, as I was at the time.

My protagonist started the book with an eating disorder. I ended the book with an eating disorder. And, to be clear, I’m not accusing a figment of my imagination, or the process of writing about her, of making me anorexic. But I’d been dancing around the edges of disordered eating for at least five years at that point. I’d known that I was the kind of person who was at risk for developing one. And I do believe that sharing headspace with an anorexic character is a large part of what finally pushed me over the edge. I do still write about mentally ill characters, but I never let their problems come quite that close to me. They’re on good meds when I start writing them. They have problems similar to mine, but not quite the same. I certainly will never again write a self-harm scene pulled directly, exactly, from my own experience.

That was….that was bad.

A very real danger of being a writer with OCD is that you become obsessed, very easily, with whatever you’re writing. My stories consume me. And when I was already in a bad place, continuing to work on that story made everything worse.

I’m still really proud of that book, but none of you are ever going to read it, because I’m scared that thorough revisions would pull me back into that bad place.

I want to read stories about characters who deal with the same really serious, intense stuff I deal with. Reading those stories gives me a few hours of relief, which is the exact opposite of what writing them does. I need to see myself in fiction—I think we all do. But there are parts of myself that I, myself, can’t put into fiction.

I spend a lot of time writing what I know, but I can’t write what I know best.

How To Buy My Books

So occasionally someone will ask me where to buy my books from/what format to buy so that I will profit the most from the sale. Which is such a sweet thing to ask! But the answer is sort of complicated. And I thought I’d just take some time today to go over why. 

The way I make the most money per book is definitely from sales of an ebook directly from waxheartpress.com. I actually make 100% profit on those books - every cent of the sale price comes directly to me.

I’m not actually sure how it breaks down from there, because frankly deals with retailers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble kind of confuse me. But I’d guess that next best is buying a hard copy of the book from Wax Heart Press.

The thing is, that’s only about money. And it’s not all about money. Because if you buy a hard copy, maybe someday when you don’t want it anymore it’ll wind up in a thrift store, and go home with someone who otherwise would never have heard of me. And there is just something sort of thrilling about seeing your very own book sitting on someone’s shelf, which you don’t really get from seeing it on their Kindle.

So that’s the two ways you can buy my books directly from Wax Heart; let’s talk about buying them from retailers like Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

I probably make slightly less money on a retailer-purchased physical book; I definitely make a fair amount less on a retailer-purchased ebook. But again, it’s not all about the money.

If enough people order my ebook from Amazon (especially if they leave positive reviews), Amazon will start recommending my book to people who’ve purchased something similar.

If enough people go into Barnes and Noble  (especially if it’s the same Barnes and Noble, or a few pretty close to each other) and ask the story to order in a copy of my book for them to buy, the store might start ordering a few copies to keep on shelves in case more people want it. And that means that a bunch of people who otherwise wouldn’t have heard of me will see it.

Different ways of buying my book are going to benefit me in different ways. But they’re all going to benefit me. And ultimately I’m just really happy that you want to read my book at all, however you buy it! (Just, you know, do buy it; don’t download it illegally or anything.)

The book is here! The book is here!

https://www.waxheartpress.com/books