The Demonization of Authority

My dear Wumpick,

So. The patient is questioning her attitude towards authority, and you are not sure what to do with it? I can almost hear your tremulous stutters as you pour out your concern. Never fear, Wumpick. Change is always dangerous for us—we prefer the slow, steady, stable road to the depths of Our Father Below. But changes present opportunities for us as well as for the Enemy, and with a little finesse you can make good use of this one.

The first thing is to get your facts straight. You must remember that authority, like so many other things, is neither here nor there for us demons: it is what the human beings make of it. This great rule, dubbed by its discoverer Screwtape the “Principle of Relativity,” is simply a practical extension of one of the first doctrines promulgated by Our Father Below, that all things are subjective, meaning subject to him (or else they soon will be).

You, it appears, have forgotten this fact, being misled by the human beings’ endless debates on the topic of authority, and how much of it is good for them, especially in the political arena. Monarchy, democracy, republic, anarchy—can you not see, Wumpick, it is none of our business? The point is to get the patient to make it her business. See if you cannot drive her into some extreme on the matter. Extremes are always to be desired.

Past ages had a tendency to valorize authority. The current age by and large decries it. Only in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would anyone dare, as the anarcho-libertarians have done, to commend the absence of all authority! (Of course, even while the Left and the Right are in various ways demonizing “authority,” there is plenty of good old authoritarianism going around, in the Church and in government and the universities. But don’t allow them to notice that.)

One of the most useful things about this demonization of authority is that we can get people to blame all sorts of sins on it. Where past ages might have recognized lust or greed or pride at work, this age looks rather at the station of the lusty, greedy, and proud man and concludes that everything would be solved if only there were enough oversight to prevent “that kind of person” from doing any harm. Of course, the real answer would be to make sure that no child grows up to be “that kind of person” in the first place. But by having Authority to blame rather than the vices really at fault, we evade ever having to face such a surplus of virtuous people.

Read the rest at the Register.

Ten Rules for Writers, or, We're All a Little Mad Here

Jonathan Franzen (whom, true confession, I had never heard of before a few days ago) apparently just got himself in trouble for producing a list of ten rules for aspiring novelists.  Without having the foggiest whether Franzen’s work is any good, much less anything I’d enjoy, the furor strikes me as amusing.  One expects writers to be a bit pretentious about their writing (who, me, what? moving right along here …), and Franzen’s list is that.  One expects writers to be quirky, and his list is that too.  And as for his anti-internet rule(s) (two by my count), I suspect he is hyperbolically stating what all writers know deep in their souls to be true: that the internet is a foe of productivity, even as it is a friend of research.  This is not new information.

The truly funny thing about the resentment Franzen has sparked is that the internet is ALIVE with people offering advice on writing, and not infrequently in the “ten rules” format.  It is ubiquitous.  I don’t have time to read them all, but I suspect that between Marion Harmon, Sarah Waters, Elmore Leonard, Denis Lehane, Neil Gaiman, Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood, Monica Ali, Janet Fitch, various and sundry asked by the Guardian, and LifeHack, … someone has produced a list that is even more offensive than Franzen’s.

Just for fun (and maybe it will help you write better) here are two sterling prose compositors speaking from their podia (that’s on their feet, which is probably Greek for “off the cuff”), offering their take on how to produce a bestseller.

Mark Twain:
1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.
2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it.
3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.
5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.
6. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it.
8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.
9. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.
10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.
11. The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.
12. An author should say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple, straightforward style.

P.S.  You will notice that these are actually eighteen rules, not ten.  Despite the fact that some on the internet have deigned to abridge Mark Twain, I see no particular reason to fit so sprawling and ingenious a writer into a box.

Nietzche (source):
1. Of prime necessity is life: a style should live.
2. Style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate. (The law of mutual relation.)
3. First, one must determine precisely “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writing must be mimicry.
4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker’s means, he must in general have for his model a very expressive kind of presentation of necessity, the written copy will appear much paler.
5. The richness of life reveals itself through a richness of gestures. One must learn to feel everything — the length and retarding of sentences, interpunctuations, the choice of words, the pausing, the sequence of arguments — like gestures.
6. Be careful with periods! Only those people who also have long duration of breath while speaking are entitled to periods. With most people, the period is a matter of affectation.
7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.
8. The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.
9. Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose consists of choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.
10. It is not good manners or clever to deprive one’s reader of the most obvious objections. It is very good manners and very clever to leave it to one’s reader alone to pronounce the ultimate quintessence of our wisdom.

For a bonus, here’s a digest of a Rex Stout interview in which he explains the difference between himself and Dostoyevsky (which, as an admirer of both, I found fascinating).

I can’t really top that, and maybe I shouldn’t try, but reading Franzen’s list did make me think about my top rules.  And maybe that’s the good thing about the proliferation of pseudo-advice on the internet: it has the potential to produce some self-examination that may lead to the development of best practices.

Now excuse me while I go wash my mouth out of contemporary jargon.  Here, without further ado, is The Girl Who Is Saturday’s Ten Rules for Writers, which comes with no guarantees whatsoever attached.

1. When you sit down to write, set a double timer to ring once in three minutes, and once in thirty-three.  The first bell ensures that you actually start writing, and the second that you have written a good deal before you stop.
2. Spend your good ideas; do not hoard them.  The best way to have more good ideas is to let the ones you have get out and play.
3. Outline down to the scene.  Be pleased rather than chagrinned when your scene turns out to have a good deal more occurring in it than your outline let on.
4. Read what you enjoy, and then forget about it.  Your subconscious will remember the bits worth stealing.
5. Write what makes you happy, whether that’s “what will sell,” or “what I like to read,” or “what I think is important and worthy.”  Writing is hard enough without making yourself miserable with the produce.
6. Don’t be afraid to sound pretentious.  Make sure to ask truthful and wise people if you actually do sound pretentious.
7. Give all your characters arcs.
8. Don’t forget the trail mix.
9. Keep it to one swig every half page.
10. Unless you’re drinking cocoa, in which case the sky is the limit.

And finally, because I don’t like boxes either, but also lastly, because I’m not Mark Twain …

11. Pick up the phone when it cries and the baby when it rings.  Real people are always more important (and you’ll write better for acting on that fact).

The Death Penalty and the Nature of Human Government

As the Register has reported, Pope Francis’s recent request for a reformulation of the catechism’s language on the death penalty (as relayed in the official CDF letter, which can be read here) has met with both cheers and concern among faithful Catholics.  While theologians and philosophers debate the proposed change and its implications for understanding the Church’s development of doctrine, a certain amount of confusion has arisen among ordinary lay Catholics due to the language used in the letter.  The key paragraph (#2) gives three reasons for revising the Church’s standard language on the death penalty.

If, in fact, the political and social situation of the past made the death penalty an acceptable means for the protection of the common good, today [1] the increasing understanding that the dignity of a person is not lost even after committing the most serious crimes, [2] the deepened understanding of the significance of penal sanctions applied by the State, and [3] the development of more efficacious detention systems that guarantee the due protection of citizens have given rise to a new awareness that recognizes the inadmissibility of the death penalty and, therefore, calling for its abolition.

The third reason is one that applies to modern states (if not, perhaps, to some third world countries), and constitutes a simple reiteration of an argument made by many Catholics, including notably Pope John Paul II — namely, that modern prisons being more or less break-proof and humane, the common good is equally protected by the incarceration of criminals as by their execution.  This is a prudential judgment—a claim that the death penalty is not necessary, rather than that it is absolutely wrong—and as such is readily aligned with previous generations of Catholic teaching.

The first reason is more complicated.  The wording—“the dignity of a person is not lost even after committing the most serious crimes”—presumes (a) that the death penalty necessarily is more contrary to human dignity than life imprisonment and (b) that there is only one sense of human dignity.  It is largely on these two points that theologians and philosophers have their debates; and as I am only an amateur on this topic, I will not venture into that minefield.

The second reason, however, is a matter of history; and here I have something to suggest.  The CDF letter says that today we have gained a “deepened understanding of the significance of penal sanctions applied by the State.”  The words are vague.  One plausible reading is that we now realize (based on new psychological studies, etc.) that penalties such as life in prison are in fact appropriate and sufficient responses to crimes such as murder, while the penalty of execution is excessively cruel.  (Of course, what constitutes the appropriateness of a punishment is another question—one to which, again, the professional philosophers and theologians are welcome.)

There is, however, another sense in which the modern mind has gained a new notion of the state’s penal sanctions; and it has to do with our understanding of the nature of the state.

Read the rest at the Register.

Jesus Is Disappointed

Among the many time-tested ways of motivating one’s children to behave well is to tell them, when they fail to do so, that Jesus (or God, or Our Lady) is disappointed with their behavior.  “Time-tested,” I say; how well this strategy passes the test is, like so many things, a matter of debate.  Much of that debate seems to result from different understandings of what the statement implies—to the adults who use it, and to the children who hear it.

On the one hand, the idea of disappointing Jesus echoes the old Baltimore Catechism definition of sin (once memorized by all children preparing for first Confession and Communion) as “an offense against God.”  God is offended; God is disappointed—the second idea is easily derived from the first.

On the other hand, telling some children (and some adults) that “God is offended by what you did” is bad strategy.  Broadly speaking, the remark could provoke three possible reactions: (a) contrition, involving an appropriate degree of guilt and a resolution to offend no more; (b) guilt in an excessive or unhealthy degree, perhaps leading the culprit to despair of being good; and (c) anger or resentment at the messenger or (worse) at God himself.

If all these reactions are possible—and experience testifies as much—why is that?  And how do we know when to expect result (a) versus (b) or (c)?  In other words—how do we know when it is good to bring the idea of divine dissatisfaction to bear?

Read the rest at the Register.

Sherwood Forest and Other Endangered Regions

Part five in a series.  Read the first four parts here, here, here, and here, and the final part here.

It should be evident, from my previous posts in this series, that I consider our modern cultural obsession with consent to be problematic.  The problem is not insistence on consent: that is, or should be, a no-brainer.  The problem is that consent has become an obsession while other important things fall by the wayside.  In obsessing over what I’ve called consent (which might also be termed “choice,” were that term not already appropriated), the modern mind marginalizes decent stories (Passengers) while lauding silly ones (LaLa Land).  More seriously, the modern mind marginalizes decent people’s decent behavior, reacting to it with the same sort of furor which truly outrageous behavior deserves (see the previous post in this series).  And all of these mini-furors tire the public mind, to the detriment of real people who suffer real things.

Less seriously but closer to home: as a literary scholar I suspect that the modern obsession with consent makes it nearly impossible for many critics to read old works with anything like a sympathetic eye.  I’m not even speaking of the distant past—heaven help Shakespeare—I’m thinking of Olivia de Haviland’s poor Maid Marion in The Adventures of Robin Hood, and how her eventual capitulation to the eponymous hero’s wooing would be deconstructed; or (to give an example which has already availed the internet of many a field-day) of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”  That latter is admittedly a fuzzier case; but we are fast approaching a place where people will no longer be able to tell the difference between Persuasion and a certain trilogy whose protagonist operates under the ironic name “Christian”—simply because the former involves a military man who once upon a time tried to persuade the (obviously shell-shocked!) heroine to marry him.  I haven’t read this particular instance of critical fantasy yet, but I am certain the day when I shall encounter it approaches apace.

[source]

Probably right after someone describes Dean Martin’s

“Let Me Tell You ’Bout the Birds and the Bees”

as an instance of mansplaining.

But I’ve wasted far and enough ire on instances of the problems inherent in putting all our eggs in the consent basket.  How do we (culturally) dig ourselves out of the hole?

The only real answer is that the entire cultural mindset would have to shift towards a fuller understanding of love and interpersonal relations in general.

[source]

I gotta dream … I gotta dream …

Like everybody else I gotta dream!

Baring that, an intellectual understanding of what truly diminished consent entails is the most powerful (and perhaps the only) defensive tool that comes to mind.

What would diminished consent actually look like?  I think it is helpful here to consider Aquinas.

[source]

Yep, it’s almost always helpful to consider Aquinas.

Specifically, Aquinas’s intellectualist account of how human beings act sheds some light on the problem.  In the Summa (II.I.6.4, “Whether violence can be done to the will?”), Aquinas explains that

As regards the commanded acts of the will, then, the will can suffer violence, in so far as violence can prevent the exterior members from executing the will's command. But as to the will's own proper act, violence cannot be done to the will.

The reason of this is that the act of the will is nothing else than an inclination proceeding from the interior principle of knowledge: just as the natural appetite is an inclination proceeding from an interior principle without knowledge. Now what is compelled or violent is from an exterior principle. Consequently it is contrary to the nature of the will's own act, that it should be subject to compulsion and violence: just as it is also contrary to the nature of a natural inclination or movement. For a stone may have an upward movement from violence, but that this violent movement be from its natural inclination is impossible. In like manner a man may be dragged by force: but it is contrary to the very notion of violence, that he be dragged of his own will.

Two principles can be taken from Aquinas’s account of the will as suggested in this passage.  First and most obviously, Aquinas calls involuntary those cases where a person is physically prevented from doing what they want to do, or physically forced into doing what they do not want to do (e.g., to use an innocuous example, being tickled while not wanting to laugh).  Second, and more to the present purpose, Aquinas sees all acts of will proceeding from knowledge.

This sounds commonsensical: we can only act on the information that we have.  We can only decide to drink or not drink the glass of water if we know that the glass is there, that it has water in it, that water is drinkable, that our throat is unblocked, etc.—a great many things that we might not actively think about, but which we nonetheless know at least in the background of our consciousness, and which (upon reflection) we discover are essential to our choice to drink this glass of water here and now.

Returning principle in hand to the problem of consent, we can further apply Aquinas’s insight to the problem in the form of a new principle, as follows:

Setting aside situations where physical force is used, one consents to a proposal or action only if one has sufficiently full knowledge of what the proposal or action entails.

Taking this back to the cases with which we began, of “Beauty and the Beast” and Passengers, it seems fairly clear that Belle and Aurora do know what they’re getting into: they’re quite aware of the flaws of the gentlemen involved—indeed, hyper-aware.

But what about things like addiction? (I hear a reader say).  And what about Stockholm Syndrome, anyway?

I’m not going to deny that people make some really bad personal choices even in cases where physical force is not immediately (sometimes not at all) present.  But I think we can parse those cases—and I think it’s helpful to parse them—as cases where the intellect is not fully operating; cases where, while the relevant information may be in some sense “available,” it is not regarded by the victim, who sees or pays attention to only the “favorable” parts of the story in front of them.  (Cf. Aquinas’s account of how all choices, including mistakes and sins, occur via apprehension of some good.)  This is not to blame every person who fails for a con artist (“You should have thought harder!”): after all, one does not blame a child for failing to take seriously concepts which they cannot understand.  But it is to say that, when one examines whether a literary character like Belle or Aurora is a victim of their circumstances, one has to start by asking not “What bad stuff did the romantic interest do?” but rather “Did she know—really know—his whole story, good and bad both?”

But I suspect that for a diehard consentivist (if I may coin a term), even ensuring intellectual thoroughgoingness would not prove sufficient.  For the idolatry of consent is really at bottom an idolatry of the will that cannot suffer the will to be moved by anything but itself, acting purely and simply in the cold white light of utterly unbiased—and thus free—choice.

[source]

Probably all consentivists are part of an evil voluntarist conspiracy,

that one first detected by Richard Weaver

and most lately denounced by Rod Dreher.

For the (rare and extreme) cases of thinkers who put an absolute premium upon consent, the intrusion of any emotion appears to be tantamount to insanity.  As soon as the will moves towards a good contemplated by the intellect, so soon do they call foul.  And then “Love is merely a madness”; for in it one is drawn by another.  In this Kantianesque landscape emotionless acts in which the body moves but the mind remains aloof, acts formerly on the periphery of love, have become the most valued and the least critiqued, because everything else is a little mad, and nothing mad is free.  For the truth of this, I submit to you the latest revelations from any modern American college campus; let us tremble for civilization, and thank goodness for the knowledge that in truth, being human …

[source]

We’re all a little mad here.

Why People Don’t Like C.S. Lewis

I was reminded, in listening to the WSIRN podcast (the guests of which skew decidedly more center-left than I, and therefore provide interesting fodder for thought), of how many people dislike CSL.  The guest who brought him up said she found his Space Trilogy “boring”; that is a non-obvious critique in terms of a taste that I understand without sharing.  But it put me back to thinking about the more obvious reason that many people dislike Lewis’s fiction: because they read it as proselytizing.

Now if you’re a certain type of literary purist (whose Christian initials might be J.R.R.) you may, though sharing Lewis’s Christianity, nevertheless regard his fictionalizing as insufficiently … fictional.  Again, a taste that I understand without sharing.    And certainly I understand (again: understand) that if you’re Phillip Pullman, or of his mindset, you will take it ill to discover that a beloved childhood chapter book should turn out to be about Jesus in disguise.

But I think that any critique of Lewis for being a ham-handed proselytizer misses the point.  Lewis was no psychological dummy.  Even if his Narnia books are simplistically Christian, his Space Trilogy contains penetrating (sometimes devastating) psychological insights; if his Space Trilogy is unconvincing or unappetizing or “boring,” I would point still-dubious readers to The Screwtape Letters and Till We Have Faces.  Non-Christians (or Christians with different philosophical commitments) might still disagree with Lewis’s presentation of human psychology; but I think any fair reader would have to admit that (1) Lewis is trying to be realistic and (2) he does a remarkably good (if imperfect) job.  It’s a bit like reading Tolstoy: one can sit back at the end of the day and say “Yes, but people don’t really/always/exactly work like that,” while still holding that Tolstoy is an amazing portrait painter.

(Mind you, I mostly agree with Lewis’s psychology.  But I’m trying to wear the other man’s hat today.)

If, then (or as Mrs. Bennet likes to say: “But, however”), we admit that Lewis is no psychological dummy, can we suppose him to be the ham-handed proselytizer that he is sometimes portrayed as being?  Perhaps; but the portrait becomes less plausible.

This brings me to my unanswered question: What if, instead of reading Narnia (and to a lesser extent the Space Trilogy) as books to convert readers, we read them as books to give pleasure to readers?  What if the whole thing really is a game in which Lewis knew his readers knew exactly what he was doing, and believed pretty much as he believed, and the fun was in seeing him do it, and how he would do it?  What if they’re not persuasion, but entertainment?

What if Lewis had just said to Tolkien one fine day: “Tollers, there isn’t enough of our sort of fiction floating about.  We just have to write some ourselves.”

To put it as a statement (as my dogmatism struggles to escape this quaestio genre): I suspect that a lot of the Lewis hatred I’ve seen over the years is based on the supposition that he was trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes.  And I suspect—indeed, I am almost certain—that that supposition is mistaken.

Actually, Fairy Tales Aren’t Meant to Be Creepy

Part 1 of a series.  Part 2 is here and the latter four parts are here, here, here, and here.

There is, reportedly, a new “moment” in the new Disney Beauty and the Beast.  Some are calling for boycotts; some are calling the boycotters names.

This is not a post about that moment.  There will be no post on that moment—not on TGWWS.  For one thing, this blog has generally focused on things I care about that other people don’t, or at minimum on offering a different angle on things everyone else is already discussing.

One reason I’ve said little about the election is that I’m not sure

there’s anything to say, true or false,

that hasn’t been said.

But trust me, I’ll think of something eventually.

No, I want to talk about something brought up in a thread I was reading about B&B, something which I’ve seen raised a few times now, which was there phrased as a critique of the previous Disney movie.  Roughly, it goes like this: Why are we seeing, and taking our children to see, a film which glorifies Stockholm Syndrome and perhaps worse?

If this critique is puzzling to you, you probably

haven’t seen the first Disney B&B, which is fine..

If you have seen the first Disney B&B,

just think about it for a few moments.

Bothered yet?

Good!

One potential reaction to this sort of question—which is but a particular version of the general query, Why take our children to a film that glorifies bad behavior?—is best expressed in a response which I’ve seen time and again when fairy tale adaptations are discussed (e.g., Once Upon a Time).  It reads more or less as follows:

Well, but of course fairy tales are creepy!  Or maybe we could call them “dark” or “edgy” if you prefer.  We only think fairy tales are innocent and sweet and tailor-made for children [alt.: “We only think children and their tales are innocent and sweet”].  If you read the original Brothers Grimm stories, you’ll see that they’re actually quite violent and nasty and disturbing.  Good doesn’t even always win!  And of course Perrault was writing for grownups at the court of Louis-the-Somethinth.  So really, we shouldn’t be surprised if the films we make of fairy tales are sometimes improper.  We can’t help it; the originals were improper too!

Oh, mon frères.  Up to a point, I grok this.  Fairy tales can, by a certain definition of “creepy” or “dark”, be … well, creepy and dark.  They contain dragons, after all.  They are even potentially improper—at least, considering them too carefully can involve the overthinker in impropriety.  I remember being a much younger age, and mentally trying to frame an adaptation of “Rapunzel,” and coming hard up against the undeniable fact that Rapunzel and the prince managed to have two babies without a church wedding, and being scandalized.

In this case, you will note that Disney’s version actually removed

the impropriety, proving that they CAN when they want to.

There are, however, ways around the “Rapunzel” problem that even a touchy religious person like myself could work, if we wanted to.  Introduce a chaplain in the desert (the cast of the story is rather thin for a two-hour movie anyway!), make Rapunzel and her prince pagans (of the ancient or modern variety), make them St. Augustines (i.e., sinners who repent).

I can already hear some crying “foul!”; for of course, such additions may appear to be inexcusable intrusions of morality into what was an innocently improper genre (see description of Grimm et al. above).  Perhaps; but I am not convinced.  The fairy tale is an innocently improper genre, much like Greek or Norse myths; but it does not follow that a full-length feature film or novel can proceed as the original fairy tale did.  For one thing, the mere representation of dialogue in a novel, or of a real actor in a film, awakes questions in the ordinary adult mind which have no room to rise in the confined paragraphs of a fairy tale: What is this person’s backstory?  What is their family like?  What sort of world do they live in?  What are their secret motivations and unrealized goals?  In other words, the film and the novel are inherently psychological; the fairy tale is not (unless perhaps one wishes to discuss psychology of the Jungian sort).  And the novelistic psychological inevitably touches on history and culture as well; for those same questions which tell the particular story of a given person, when asked of an entire society, generate accounts of the doings of nations.

This is where things like ethics, morality, and even religion enter in.  One can, of course, construct a fantasy world with a different religion, or without much religion at all, or with no religion beyond whatever vague spirituality is contained in the magic.  The fact remains, however, that—religious or not—a fantasy world will have its own manners and mores just as the real world does, and it will be necessary to portray the protagonists of the now-grownup fairy tale as either in conformity with or in violation of their universe’s norms.  And if these norms differ significantly from those of the majority of readers or viewers, it will be necessary for the author to communicate the differences (however subtly) to his audience, so that they are cognizant of them as a frame for understanding the characters’ behavior.  This need not imply endorsement of the cultural norms portrayed—an author may present protagonists who are rightly rebels.  The fact remains, however, that if the characters are rebels, with or without a cause, it is important to the viewers to grasp this fact; otherwise, they have not grasped a part of the character.

All of this leads me to say, regarding my adolescent instinct to give Rapunzel a wedding, that although it may have been clumsy in the realization, it was not misdirected in substance.  In a novel or film some elaboration of Rapunzel’s behavior was necessary; at minimum, the audience needed to know whether this was par for the course or the sort of thing upon which her parents would frown.  It affects the happy ending just a bit, if you know what I mean.

To generalize: Fairy tale adaptations must be …

And that is a nonmoral must, a technical must:

If they are to be good as literature or entertainment …

... fairy tale adaptations must be responsive to the expectations of normal literary works; must not leave us with psychological or cultural loose ends—unless, of course, the loose ends themselves are left dangling by design, as part of the story, part of the artistry, to make us question this or that type of character or situation.  But even then, it is important to realize that these loose ends are an overlay of the original story: the fairy tale does not, by its very nature cannot raise the sorts of question that makes us say in reply: Creepy (modern sense).  It is only our adaptation of the fairy tale that may, if we choose to so construct it.  If the old Disney Beauty and the Beast is “creepy,” or if Ever After is “edgy,” or if Maleficent is “dark,” we are the ones who made them so; and we might as well be honest and own up to it.  Ultimately, fairy tales are a magic mirror that reflect who we are, depending on how we interpret them.

This brings me back to the topic with which I opened, to the particular problems posed by Disney’s (now two versions of) Beauty and the Beast.  Does the Disney take on the story in fact glorify Stockholm Syndrome, or otherwise present an unhealthy image of love?

I’m so glad you asked.  But that, at this point, is matter for another post.