Okay, I'm sorry, I'm still not over this. I can’t even remember which one of those “brave girl” books did this. And whichever one it was, I'm sure it’s a great book. However. The back cover. All I remember is the back cover. The back cover is talking about all these strong, brave, action-heroines, who are so much better than losers like Rapunzel, who just sat in her tower waiting to be rescued.
It did say the same kinds of things about some other well-known fairy tale heroines, but it's Rapunzel that's really bothering me. (The topic of Cinderella as survivor of abuse has been thoroughly discussed by other authors. Snow White doesn't do much, but Snow White is a small child. Sleeping Beauty doesn't do much, but, like—there's a lot to say about Sleeping Beauty, okay? Maybe we'll come back to that.)
But Rapunzel. Rapunzel rocks, guys. She is not at any point waiting around to be rescued.
This girl has been locked in a tower by her mother figure for a long time. At least since she was twelve, but depending on the version, possibly as long as her entire life. Since being put in the tower, she hasn't interacted with anyone but her witch mother. If she was living on the ground as a small child, it's likely that even then she had very limited exposure to any other people.
My point is, for Rapunzel, living in a tower is normal. She is not waiting around to be rescued; there is never any indication that she feels she needs rescuing. This is her home. Who knows what Mother Gothel—the only other person in her life—has told her about this. Maybe she thinks all young women live in towers. Maybe she thinks the ground is toxic, and Gothel can only safely walk it because of her magic powers.
We don't know how large this tower is. We don't know how much time Mother Gothel spends in the tower with her each day. We don't know what items Rapunzel has in the tower to entertain herself. Maybe she's bored and lonely, but maybe she's not. Or maybe she is, but doesn't recognize her general dissatisfaction with life as boredom or loneliness, because she's never known anything else, and boredom and loneliness are just a normal part of her life.
Could she benefit from a rescue? Yes. Is she aware of that? Not as far as we know.
The prince comes. The prince—I need this to be very, very clear—the prince does not, at any point, make any attempt to rescue Rapunzel. No rescue occurs. No one ever rescues Rapunzel.
The prince finds an isolated and naive young woman locked in a tower. And he takes advantage.
He doesn't offer to help her. He does get her pregnant.
This is, as far as we know, the first man Rapunzel has ever met. She clearly doesn't know what pregnancy is, so I think we can safely conclude that Mother Gothel was not providing comprehensive sex education. I'm not going to go into this aspect of the story too deeply; I have previously done an entire post about this in my Sexual Abuse in the Folk Tradition series. But the prince was not a savior. The prince was a selfish man taking advantage of a woman without the knowledge, resources, or experience to go against him. If she wasn't in the tower, she wouldn't be a convenient and consequence-free source of sex, so the prince is not motivated to get her out.
Rapunzel gets pregnant. Rapunzel doesn't know what this means beyond the fact that her size is changing. She asks her mother for larger clothes. Her mother deduces that she's pregnant, chops off her hair, and kicks her out of the tower.
She then tricks the prince into coming back, and throws him out the window into a bunch of brambles, which blind him. I feel he had this coming.
So. Rapunzel has exited the tower. No one has rescued her from the tower. She has been involuntarily expelled.
From there, a pregnant woman, who doesn't even know what pregnancy is, must learn for the first time, completely alone, how to navigate a world much larger and more complicated than her tower. She figures it out. She learns to interact with other people for the first time. She learns how to support herself, and then her two children. Money. Shelter. Food. All things she has to handle alone. She has to learn who she can and can't trust. What plants are and aren't safe to eat. Any local laws. Would a girl raised alone in a tower have any concept of something like theft? Or would she just pick up whatever she wanted, and get in trouble for it?
Rapunzel saves herself, not from the tower but from the aftermath. Mother Gothel abandons her to whatever fate might await her on the ground—starvation, being eaten by an animal, being taken and abused by another man like the prince or worse. And she survives, and she succeeds. By the end of the story she has a little house and two happy, healthy children.
Rapunzel saves the prince. And presumably lives happily ever after with him, which, frankly, I'm not a fan of. But the only time anything resembling a rescue occurs in this entire story is when she finds him, lost and alone and blind, and restores his eyesight with her magic tears, giving him the ability to find his way home again. (Which he does, taking her and the kids along.) No one saves Rapunzel. Rapunzel saves herself, and her children, and then saves her creepy ex, too. Rapunzel is absolutely the hero of this story, and she deserves better than to be remembered as a passive princess who sat around waiting for rescue.
