In the gloom of evening, therefore, he let himself down again; but when he had clambered down the wall he was terribly afraid, for he saw the enchantress standing before him.
“How can you dare,” said she with an angry look, “to descend into my garden and steal my rampion like a thief? You shall suffer for it!”
…Then the enchantress allowed her anger to be softened
~The Brothers Grimm
Three pages… the story of Rapunzel is literally three pages in my complete copy of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Also, it is a little darker than the original; mostly because the enchantress isn’t the bad lady. Yeah, she isn’t the greatest when she locks away Rapunzel (a thing she does without any reason from The Brothers Grimm – it could be a valid reason or something kooky), or when she casts Rapunzel into a desert with twins (that’s right, when the prince is visiting her at night, they are boning), and then blinds the prince when he comes to visit and she [the enchantress] surprises him. Basically the plot of Rapunzel is this: her parents robbed an enchantress of rampion (which coincidentally means Rapunzel) and is a herb, the enchantress catches the husband, doesn’t punishes him but asks for his first kid, he willing gives her up (Rapunzel once she is born) to avoid punishment, Rapunzel goes to live in the tower, prince sneaks in, they bone, she gets pregnant (but you don’t learn that till later), then she is banished to a desert, the prince is blinded when he falls form the tower into some thorns, he wanders around a lot, finds the desert, her tears fix his eyes, they go live in a castle happily ever after.
My big take away: every story of you’ve ever read or seen of Rapunzel is a lie. Shiiiiiiiiiiit, Rapunzel is the product of a weak willed father who robbed a known enchantress. When he is caught, the fucker turns tail and sells out his unborn child – over a god damn herb. Also, since the narrator tells us that the enchantress softened in the above quote, we know that the punishment that was dolled out (Rapunzel becoming the enchantress’s child) was the more lenient option. Who knows what would have happened if she had kept her ire. [Give that ol’ “Read More” link a click to really understand the moral]
So let’s just get through the format so I can move into a weirder analysis that normal. First: moral if you are a good person: none – basically your parents will sell your ass out and you will have to wait for a dude to save you. Second: moral if you are a bad person: it all works out, just have no moral compass and you can do whatever you want without any ramifications to your selfishness. Bonus moral: if you are rich, everything works out – you may get blinded, but that will all be solved once you walk around a bunch… then you can go back to being rich.
This whole rich people have everything work out is getting old. What wasn’t old this time was the weird sub text about the offspring paying for the sins of their parents. Rapunzel is our main characters name, but she is named specifically after rampion, the herb her father stole for her mother. As such, she is named after the crime which placed her in the current circumstances. Which means, the child is paying for the sins of the parents. At this time, it is wholly possible that often kids were indebted because of things their parents did – your parent had a gambling debt, now you had a gambling debt. As such, were The Brothers Grimm basically setting up a story to explain why a woman could be sold off to another person without her permission? Were they trying to add a justification for many people’s outcomes? Was this story to provide hope, that even though you are paying for the choices of your parents, you too could meet a rich prince and get that posh lifestyle.
Right now, this is all conjecture. But with the weak morals for good/bad/rich folks in the story, it seems like the actual moral is: to tough it out. Life gives you a rough hand, and sometimes it isn’t even the hand you played that screws you, but it will all work out (if you meet a rich ass prince and you eyes can cure his blindness). In the end, perhaps The Brothers Grimm were trying to make sense of the crazy world of their time and provide a light at the end of the tunnel… even if that meant justifying the fact that baby girls got sold into slavery for stealing a herb.