Confined to a hospital bed due to a critical medical condition in her childhood, Kate Forsyth’s comfort and means of escape became fantasy literature and fairy tales. Forsyth, a fiction author celebrated for her children’s books and fairy tale reinterpretations, carefully sidesteps the reductive and mostly critically abandoned idea of fairy-tale-as-escapism. Having keenly felt and developed a lifelong fascination with the symbolic resonance of “Rapunzel” (a story which mirrored her own feelings of imprisonment and isolation), Forsyth’s study re-weaves the threads of folklore, history, and fairy tale scholarship to reveal the power of stories of self-rescue.
As a contribution to original scholarship on the origin or structure of fairy tales, The Rebirth of Rapunzel work is not revolutionary—the Dundesian structural analysis presented in this volume is cursory, and Forsyth’s analysis of Rapunzel tale’s variations suffers from the lack of a cogently articulated theoretical framework. Yet, as a synthesis of chronological overview it is an affecting, highly personal account of the meaning-making that has driven the Rapunzel tale’s survival, this is a unique work. In particular, Forsyth’s exegesis of several contemporary retellings makes this “mythic biography” worth consulting for those launching their own investigations in the area of fairy tale reinterpretations and reimaginings.
Forsyth’s early reading experiences provided her with an intuitive understanding of the way in which potent symbols and motifs are transmitted through (formerly) critically neglected genres such as children’s literature; reading The Stone Cage (1963) by Nicholas Stuart Grey apparently inspired Forsyth to start thinking of her own Rapunzel retelling even before she had finished the book. Her ruminations and research over the years resulted in a doctorate in fairy tale retellings from the University of Technology, Sydney, and a bestselling novel, Bitter Green, published in 2012. Bitter Greens pairs a Rapunzel narrative set in Renaissance Venice with a frame story of seventeenth-century French conte de fée writer Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force’s life and discovery of the tale. In Forsyth’s words, Rapunzel is a story about escape from imprisonment, a vehicle for transformation through the plight of its central figure: “This makes it a story that reverberates very strongly with any individual—male or female, child or adult—who has found themselves trapped by their circumstances, whether this is caused by the will of another, or their own inability to change and grow” (7).
I would argue that The Rebirth of Rapunzel is more compelling and critically useful as an explication of Bitter Greens than as an independent work. This is a compact volume, organized into three main sections: Rebirth of Rapunzel, which provides an overview of the versions and biographical data on Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force that primarily informed Forsyth’s research; a re-printing of Jack Zipes’s translation of de La Force’s 1697 tale “Persinette”; and Books Are Dangerous, a collection of the author’s previously published articles on fairy tales and Rapunzel retellings. Through an examination of Zipes’s Dawkins-inspired concept of the memeplex (interconnected scenes and symbols that assist a tale’s survival), Forsyth’s leading question becomes evident: why did the combined elements of bitter greens, entrapped maiden, golden hair, and healing tears become the most psychologically affecting memeplex over the centuries of the Rapunzel story’s transmission? We know that tales are only retold if there is still a package of meaning that can be unwrapped by the culture in which it is shared. Because this is mythic biography rather than historicist analysis, Forsyth is content to apply one symbolic interpretation to multiple versions of the tale arising in different historical eras and cultural paradigms. She is especially focused on the healing tears motif since her childhood condition resulted from a damaged tear duct, and she argues that the memeplex found in de La Force’s “Persinette” is the most psychologically powerful because it includes this motif along with the other familiar tropes of wounding, healing, and redemption.
Forsyth’s argument that this particular motifeme is primarily responsible for the Rapunzel tale’s survival is more subjective and culturally specific than she admits. Rather than engaging in a reciprocal conversation with scholars such as the frequently cited Heide Göttner-Abendroth, Forsyth is content to mine their ideas as they allow her to privilege the importance of her selected motifeme. Nonetheless, readers pursuing their own research on contemporary reinterpretations of fairy tales will still find much to admire here. One of the more striking images in Bitter Greens is a golden-red braid of eight dead girls’ hair bound by magic to Petrosinella’s own locks—eight stories that preceded and mirrored her own provide her the inspiration to take control of the narrative in which she finds herself. The success of both Bitter Greens and The Rebirth of Rapunzel relies upon Forsyth’s perceptive commentary on how the symbols of ancient forms of knowledge (plantlore, magic, goddess worship) can inspire creative action in the present.
The most unique contribution of the volume is the final section titled Rapunzel in the Antipodes, which provides an overview of reimaginings of the story by Australian authors. Forsyth acknowledges that one could interpret the island nation’s penal-colony past as inspiration for Australian reflections on the struggle to break free from imposed will and prisons, but she refrains from concluding on this point. Instead, Forsyth reaffirms that the internal symbols and structures of the Rapunzel tale are the primary appeal for new tellers and audiences. Forsyth may alienate fairy tale scholars expecting a more rigorous application of theory, but she is consistent in her approach with a passion for her study that is always apparent: “I wrote my Rapunzel retelling not fully aware of what I was trying to do, yet constantly aware of what I saw as the inner truth of the tale, heard only with the inner ear” (32). In crafting a mythic biography rather than a more traditional folkloristic text, Forsyth’s work makes an intriguing addition to an emerging genre of writing that encourages us to make further strides in being reflexive about our personal responses to folklore and how they are translated into scholarship.
--------
[Review length: 997 words • Review posted on November 8, 2016]