[In the following essay, Stallman perceives Morris's “Rapunzel” as an archetypal Victorian treatment of the mythic quest and a “rite of passage” tale.]

Morris' youthful little drama challenges modern readers of poetry quite as much as it did his Victorian peers. They met the challenge by ignoring the poem, but it hardly seems admirable of us to dismiss it as “bewitching” or as having an inexplicable “dark weirdness” about it.¹ If the poem is effective, there must be some rationale to its effect on us as readers, perhaps an effect that can be illuminated rather than explained away. Certainly, as we read the poem, we have the uncomfortable feeling of walking over thin ice that hides a vast world beneath its surface glitter. This is somewhat the same feeling we have on reading the original tale in Grimm's Fairy Tales, but Morris' treatment seems more intense and dramatic.

In Grimm's tale the Prince overhears the Witch's magic words and climbs the tower secretly to spend time with Rapunzel. The witch catches him and casts him into the thorns below which blind him. He wanders about until by supernatural aid he recovers his sight, kills the Witch and wins Rapunzel for his love. Morris creates from this original a series of dramatic tableaux, a drama of moods not actions. Examining the four scene changes in the poem, we find that in each a shift in perception rather than action precipitates the change and so advances the plot. Perhaps the answer to the effectiveness of “Rapunzel” may be found by examining this dramatic structure and the psychological and mythical bases on which it rests.

The opening scene is dramatic and represents by the arrangement of the speeches the three characters, the Prince, the Witch, and the Maiden standing, let us say, left, center, and right on a stage. Each speech group consists of a stanza, quatrains for the Prince and Maiden, two short lines for the Witch, each speech being separated in the same order: Prince, Witch, Maiden; Prince, Witch, Maiden, suggesting the position of the Witch between the two lovers. In addition, each speaker breaks into the syntax of the one before, so that it appears they are all speaking simultaneously. The scene thus gains something of the effect of three separate soliloquies proceeding at once.

The Prince reminisces about his reasons for taking up the quest; the Maiden bewails her sad plight; and the Witch repeats the ritual, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, / Let down your hair!” While this scene serves to supply background, a skeleton story of sorts, and suggests the separation of the lovers, it also gives characteristic images and speech modes for each of the characters. The Prince moves in a dream of action:

I put my armor on,
          Thinking on what they said:
“Thou are a king's own son,
          'Tis fit that thou should'st wed.”

(ll. 21-24)

.....

I rode throughout the town,
          Men did not bow the head,
Though I was the king's own son;
          “He rides to dream,” they said.

(ll. 31-34)

The Maiden's speeches are characteristically sorrowful for the imprisonment she endures and are excessively concerned with her golden hair.

Is it not true that every day
She climbeth up the same strange way,
Her scarlet cloak spread broad and gay,
          Over my golden hair?

(ll. 7-10)

.....

See, on the marble parapet
The faint red stains with tears are wet;
The long years pass, no help comes yet
          To free my golden hair.

(ll. 37-40)

The Witch's speeches, on the other hand, have the repetitious effect of an evil rite:

Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let down your hair!

(ll. 25-26)

.....

Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Wind up your hair!

(ll. 35-36)

While the two young people seem nearer to being realistic characters, the Witch represents some timeless evil quality that hangs about their lives and separates them like a paralyzing mist. Her speeches are chants, repetitions of the refrain which dazzles the lovers and challenges them at the same time. Even in her defeat, the Witch seems powerful because she has no really human qualities, but only the steadfastness of evil itself which we know will endure though it be cast into hell.

The first scene, then, is this triple soliloquy. The second scene, told in retrospect, shows the Prince blind and wandering, Rapunzel praying in her tower, the Witch secure in her evil. Scene three, seemingly without transition, shows the Prince and Maiden united, the banner of the Witch being tossed down, and their descent from the tower into the real world of grass and flowers. The fourth and fifth scenes may be united as one, since they both concern the successful aftermath of the adventure with both Prince and Maiden assuming their proper names and the Witch vanquished. In none of these scenes is there the violent action we might expect. The fall of the Prince from the tower into the thorns, the fight with the Witch, the Prince's triumph: none of this is shown. The first two scenes are told in dreamy retrospect, the last three in present time, breaking the poem evenly into a dream-like bondage in the first half, and a realistic (with real names) victory and freedom in the last half. The effect so gained is not so much that of a real knight defeating a realistic power of evil, as of Everyman caught in a magic mist from which he seems powerless to escape; then, by some supernatural insight or sudden awakening, finding his love and victory. As in Browning's “Childe Roland” it seems to be a problem of perception rather than battle, and when the victory occurs, it is a simple emergence of the sun where before there was fog. The timelessness of the first half of the poem, especially of the Prince's speeches in scene two, where he mixes past and present in his blindness, makes victory impossible. The Prince is snared in time, and although he can hear the Witch and hear Rapunzel's song, and each morning whets his sword as if to do battle, still the golden mist blinds him and he cannot act. Then when the change comes, suddenly it is all over. There has been no real battle at all, it seems.

The story of Rapunzel is, of course, the tale of a quest, a pattern that in this case is also a “rite of passage.”² But this time the knight's quest seems impeded by dreams and blindness, and more importantly, by the poet's lack of emphasis on the heart of the quest, the battle. If this knight is to pass his “rite,” and bring back to his land the “glorious lady fair” that is his reward, he cannot in this case do actual battle with the Witch. He must undergo a change of perception, a much more difficult task than fighting visible and tangible dragons. In a later story written for inclusion in The Earthly Paradise, Morris again used this sort of moral rite of passage. In “The Lady of the Land,” his wanderer found the lovely lady of gold who warned him that not swords but moral courage would win her reward. The adventurer, secretly fearing for his life, girt his sword on for a battle that was purely a test of faith. And with this faulty preparation, he failed his rite and was cast into darkness forever. In “Rapunzel,” then, the secret of success for the hero is to achieve the proper state of mind. Battle is not the answer in this moral cause. For this reason there is no violent action in the poem, and for this reason too, the drama exhibits unusual scene shifts, depending on association of ideas and changes of mood rather than on physical action.

The shift from scene one to scene two illustrates Morris' manner of advancing the plot by association, as in a dream, rather than by dramatic action.

[SCENE ONE]

RAPUNZEL:
                              And yet—but I am growing old,
                              For want of love my heart is cold;
                              Years pass, the while I loose and fold
                                        The fathoms of my hair.

[SCENE TWO]

THE Prince (in the morning):
          I have heard tales of men, who in the night
                    Saw paths of stars let down to earth from heaven,
          Who followed them until they reached the light
          Wherein they dwell, whose sins are all forgiven.

(ll. 47-54)

The shift is accomplished by reference to the golden ladder of Rapunzel's hair, the paradoxical symbol of love that contains possibilities for both evil and good.

Such associative shifts help to create an atmosphere of dream appropriate to the rite of passage in the first half of the poem. We find that the Prince has had the unheroic boyhood usual to future heroes, that he was

                                                                                                    “patient of the scoff
That met [him] always there from day to day,
From any knave or coward of them all.”

(ll. 66-68)

And he has ridden out to look for love, feeling himself about to be born anew:

Not born as yet, but going to be born,
No naked baby as I was at first,
But an arméd knight, whom fire, hate and scorn
Could turn from nothing.

(ll. 95-98)

He knows that his quest is irreversible, like any rite of passage, and that he must not hesitate or turn back:

But who went backward when they saw the gate
Of diamond, nor dared to enter in;
All their life long they were content to wait,
Purging them patiently of every sin.

(ll. 55-58)

Then, at the moment of his victory, the Prince finds himself helpless. And his plight is not relieved by his knightly prowess, for the frightening power of the Witch has blinded him:

And every morning do I whet my sword,
          Yet Rapunzel still weeps within the tower,
And still God ties me down to the green sward,
          Because I cannot see the gold stair floating lower.

(ll. 152-155)

The sight he remembers as paralyzing him in his progress was that of the Witch's abusing Rapunzel's hair, swinging on its plaits like devil's bats. The tower in which Rapunzel is immured is a distinctly feminine counterpart of the usual Freudian tower with “No belfry for the swinging of great bells … amber and rose walls … flower-carven marble” and in all “a dwelling for a queen.”

Rapunzel's hair is, of course, symbolic in both the fairy tale and in Morris' retelling of it of the woman's sexual maturity. The accompanying menses are represented by the Witch's “scarlet cloak spread broad and gay, / Over my golden hair.” In such a mixture of sexual symbolism and romantically conceived myth as we have here, the hair represents both the romantic conception of love, which was probably what Morris had in mind, and the mystery of woman, which is capable of being both heaven and hell. The golden hair may be the delight and law of marriage, or the perversion and non-law of promiscuity (as in “The Defence of Guenevere”).³ Since the Witch's abuse centers on Rapunzel's hair, we presume it refers to some sexual perversion, possibly the simple fact of enforced virginity, which is a perversion, as well as the prevention of romantic love in its “proper” form. In Grimm's tale, it is the sad result of the mother's lust for the forbidden rampion root that leads to the daughter's imprisonment. In either case the symbolism smacks of sexual perversion or prevention. The poem is highly charged with sexual symbols, readily recognizable in our own post-Freudian day, but acting only in a subliminal manner for the Victorians. The whole point here, however, is that there is more to be gained from the poem than a simple job of symbol-picking will accomplish.

In the first two scenes of the poem, in addition to the picture of the Prince as the typical hero undergoing the rite of passage and the creation of a dream mood, there are images which seem to place the tower of Rapunzel in some inaccessible location beneath the sea. The hair is often said to “float,” and the word “fathoms” is used several times: “Fathoms below my hair grows wet / With the dew,” and “while I loose and fold / The fathoms of my hair.” The Prince uses the same word once, then speaks of Rapunzel “Bearing within her arms waves of her yellow hair.” And before his eyes “a film of gold / Floated, as now it floats,” and again he cannot act “Because [he] cannot see the gold stair floating lower.” In Rapunzel's song at the end of the second scene, there is explicit reference to her situation as beneath the sea: she “can see no more / The crayfish on the leaden floor, / That mock with feeler and grim claw” (ll. 197-199). And, of course, throughout the first half of the poem, the creation of a dream-like atmosphere adds to the unearthly setting. The whole reminds one of the old Danish fairy tale called “The Wizard's Daughter,” in which the daughter is trapped in a glass castle under the sea, from which the young man must rescue her by outwitting her father the Wizard.⁴ The symbolism of release from the bondage of childhood to the freedom of adult love is nearly the same, although the details are different.

At any rate, the image of the depths of the sea is appropriate to this particular quest since the sea has, for as long as our myths can remember, been associated with the undifferentiated life of childhood before the breaking away of the ego (by means of the rites of passage) into individual life and being. The poem would then be an enactment of the rite that takes the young man from the undifferentiated life of the child, scoffed at and mocked, through the difficult trial of attaining adult perception (surmounting the blindness, of which more in a moment), and attaining love and individuality, represented by the individual names given the Prince and the Maiden in the second half of the poem.

The trial which the Prince must undergo is explained partially in the first half of the poem, partially in the second. Blindness which Morris describes as only temporary, a sort of golden haze before the eyes, inhibits the Prince from his goal. Now we recognize, of course, Freud's interpretation of blindness as infantile castration fear, coupled with what Jung (or in this case Neumann) calls “loss of the conscious realization of the ego.”⁵ These two interpretations have similar results, namely the loss of power or confidence in oneself through a faulty perception, or more accurately, fear (usually thought of as fear of the parent). The fact that the blindness is a golden mist suggests his trouble might also be a faulty (lustful) perception of love, i.e., the sexual mystery, noted as inherent in the golden hair, which fills his sight to the exclusion of all else. He is blind to complete love. But the Prince is also inhibited from his goal by the usual fear which accompanies the passage from child to adult, the fear of the “Witch” or the parent, which holds the child in thrall. The sudden resolution of this thralldom is one of the startling shifts arising from Morris' dramatic method.

In terms of the dramatic method which was mentioned earlier, the shift from scene two to scene three, or symbolically the successful passing of the rite, is accomplished by the Maiden's invocation of Christ and Mary. But if we are aware of the sexual drama also going on here, we are not surprised to find that the maiden has added a few lines of her own to the ritual prayer. In this addition, she invokes the phallic power that will free her from the parental prison:

Yet besides I have made this
By myself: Give me a kiss
Dear God, dwelling up in heaven!
Also: Send me a true knight
Lord-Christ, with a steel sword, bright,
Broad and trenchant; yea, and seven
Spans from hilt to point, O Lord!
And let the handle of his sword
Be gold on silver, Lord in heaven!
Such a sword as I see gleam
Sometimes, when they let me dream.

(ll. 165-175)

Although Morris himself would never have dreamed (or perhaps it would be correct to say would only have dreamed) of such a meaning, it is the phallic power of the young knight that finally brings freedom and individuality to the young lovers, severing them from the bondage of the parent. It is clear also that this phallic power is a moral force that must be properly perceived before it can be used.

The rite of passage is psychologically sound in terms of our own understanding, read in this way as the freeing of the individual from the undifferentiated sea of the parental power, as well as the awakening, sexual and otherwise, of the sort of true love Morris approved of. It is this invocation to God and the phallic power that shifts the mood of the poem suddenly from dream-like stasis in the first two scenes to the real victory and real world of the second half of the poem. The shift is dramatically correct in terms of Morris' method of association also, for the last lines of scene two lead by association directly into scene three.

                                                                                                                        I behold a face,
                              Which sometime, if God give me grace,
                              May kiss me in this very place.

[SCENE THREE]

RAPUNZEL:
(Evening in the tower)
                    It grows half way between the dark and light;
                    Love, we have been six hours here alone.

(ll. 204-208)

The maiden has been dreaming of just such an event, and suddenly as if in dream-like fulfillment of her wishes, she and the Prince are together. Not only is such a wish fulfillment appropriate to the dream, but it fits the moral scheme of the poem, for the proper conjunction of moods has been reached in both characters. The scene changes; the rite is accomplished; a new perception has occurred.

As the Prince and the maiden speak together, apparently undisturbed any further by the Witch, a battle is spoken of which at first sight seems irrelevant to the poem as a whole. The Prince asks the maiden, “Now tell me, did you ever see a death, / Or ever see a man take mortal harm?” (ll. 213-214). Rapunzel thereupon tells of having seen two knights destroy each other below the tower once in an apparently causeless battle. The description of the knights is done in Morris' usual, accurate medieval vein, and the incident might be taken as simply added to the old fairy tale to give color and action. The Prince, upon hearing of the battle, remarks,

                                                                      Ah, they were brothers then,
And often rode together, doubtless where
The swords were thickest, and were loyal men,
Until they fell in these same evil dreams.

(ll. 244-247)

This is left to hang cryptically for some lines, while the lovers prepare to depart from the tower. The Prince tells the maiden how he came to find her, lured on by the dream of her golden hair. He says then that if he had not come to find her,

O child I should have slain my brother, too,
          My brother, Love, lain moaning in the grass,
Had I not ridden out to look for you,
          When I had watch'd the gilded courtiers pass
From the golden hall.

(ll. 271-275)

It is this speech which justifies the inclusion of the battle scene and also indicates the moral nature of the Prince's quest as opposed to the quest involving physical prowess. The “evil dreams” are exemplified in the first half of the poem in the Prince's blindness and in the story of the brothers battling each other. It is evidently an evil dream to imagine the maiden can be won by such battles, or to seek the results of a moral quest with force of arms. The brothers remind us of the many other avatars of this situation: Tennyson's Balin and Balan (from Malory, Book II), and the tale repeated in the Idylls (“Lancelot and Elaine”) of the brother kings who slew each other; these in turn possibly springing from the Celtic myth of Belinus and Bran, or Balyn and Bran, counterparts of this Prince Sebald who might have killed his brother if he had not been steadfast in the moral quest for love.⁶

The brother battle here is similar also to such tales of the “doppelganger” as Poe's “William Wilson” and Dostoievsky's The Double, which show a man divided against himself to his ultimate self-destruction when his energies are not directed outward toward the finding of his own individuality. Certainly Morris was familiar with the idea of the alter-ego or soul-double from De La Motte Fouque's tale, “Undine,” in which Undine and Bertalda are “two faces opening from a single stem,” even though one was a human child and one a fairy changeling.⁷ Otto Rank mentions this double image as the basic spiritual principle of the “gradual freeing of the individual from dependence,” and seeking rebirth as a whole individual that will unite his conflicting self-images instead of causing them to war against each other.⁸ In general, Rank goes too far afield in connecting art and the artist, but in this case he seems to have hit on a basic truth that Morris perhaps perceived intuitively: man wars against himself unless he succeeds in completing the rite of passage from undifferentiated union with the parent to successfully differentiated adult. He in effect destroys himself with the conflicting impulses of the urge toward freedom versus the urge toward regression into the parental power.⁹ There is also something of a sexual parallel here comparable to the perversion indicated by the Witch's misuse of Rapunzel's hair. The self-battle is a perversion of the natural energies that should be directed outward. In this sense too, the battle is quite appropriate to the poem.

It is immediately after the telling of this battle that the final symbol of the Witch's power falls. Rapunzel notes the sense “Of fluttering victory,” and a few lines later the Prince, now Prince Sebald, plucks the crimson banner of the Witch and tosses it down to the green grass below. In terms of the obvious color symbolism in the poem, the red (evil, perverted, static) banner lies “below, / Above it in the wind let grasses laugh.” The green (youthful, growing) grass conquers the red much as the two lovers emerge from their dream tower into a real world in scene four.

The shift from scene three to scene four is again accomplished by an associative leap that changes the mood and results in a change in perception. As the lovers leave the tower victorious, they symbolically leave the dream world in which the rite has taken place. It is fitting, therefore, that they emerge into a real outdoor world and possess real, worldly names.

[END OF SCENE THREE]

                                                                                But it is strange your name
Is not the same the minstrel sung of yore;
You called it Rapunzel, 'tis not the name.
          See love, the stems shine through the open door.

[SCENE FOUR]

(Morning in the woods)
RAPUNZEL:
O Love! me and my unknown name you have well won;
          The witch's name was Rapunzel; eh! not so sweet?
No!—but is this real grass, love, that I tread upon?
What call they these blue flowers that lean across my feet?

(ll. 275-282)

Not very surprisingly, her name is Guendolen, the same as the lass in the song that had inspired the Prince originally. The change of identity not only makes the song fit into the tale as the supernatural help requisite to the successful rite of passage, it confirms the maiden's reality in this real world. Even the alliteration of “golden Guendolen” as opposed to red Rapunzel, assists the change of mood that must occur in scenes four and five. The fact that the Witch's name was Rapunzel and that Guendolen was called only by her name makes the equation with parental power complete.¹⁰ And the name suggests the fleshly sins symbolized in the fairy tale by the rampion root, while the change indicates the maiden's purification from these sins. This connection also accounts for the ambiguity concerning the golden hair: that it seems yet to contain the potential for both good and evil, indicated in scene five when Guendolen sings:

I was unhappy once in dreams,
And even now a harsh voice seems
          To hang about my hair.

(ll. 336-338)

The golden hair is both talisman of love and possibility of evil, for the flesh is both the salvation and the everpresent danger of damnation if misused. The Witch is incredulous, screaming (in capitals) the final stanza of the poem.

WOE! THAT ANY MAN COULD DARE
TO CLIMB UP THE YELLOW STAIR,
GLORIOUS GUENDOLEN'S GOLDEN HAIR.

(ll. 339-341)

This last stanza, occupying as it does the final word in the poem, contains the essence of the quest for differentiated consciousness. It seems incredible that any man would dare to leave the safety of his parents' power for the quest, so dangerous and so uncertain. But this danger and ultimate uncertainty makes the victory all the more conclusive once the rite of passage is completed.

So, what we have here is the naive Victorian enactment of a primitive rite of passage from undifferentiated consciousness to adulthood, complete with new names and love. The fact that Sebald and Guendolen become king and queen reinforces the victory and gives them the parental status and power once possessed by their progenitors. Morris utilizes the fairy tale as a vehicle to recount the usual mythic form of the quest, and in so doing, gives a drama of moods and symbols which creates an opposite of dream-like stasis and frustration in the first half of the poem, and a release from bondage into the freedom of reality in the last half. Constructed in this dramatic way, a rite of passage or archetype of regeneration is transformed into an insightful psychological drama describing a youth's quest for manhood. The absence of action and the tale of the brother-battle underline and enforce the fact that his victory must be a moral one.

Such archetypal situations are common to poetry, of course, but in this case it seems the craftsman Morris has given us an exquisite example of the concentration and power possible in the retelling of even the oldest tales. In his own mind, Morris was probably placing the emphasis on the burgeoning love relationship, skirting around the battles as of secondary importance. Certainly the dramatic character of the poem is arrived at partially by its separation into tableaux which seem to arise like dreams from the ultimately happy state of the lovers. In the first half of the poem it is as if the lovers were remembering, or dreaming of the past, perhaps omitting the pain and struggle as our memories wipe out physical pain. “Rapunzel” owes its success to a combination in its form of the successful rite of passage and a dramatic framework using one of Morris' favorite moods, the dream reverie.

Notes

1. Alfred Noyes, William Morris (London, 1908), p. 29; and B. Ifor Evans, William Morris and his Poetry (London, 1925), p. 48 respectively. More recently than this, we seem to have ignored the poem altogether.

2. The classic work on this subject is Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Mokika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffer (Chicago, 1960), originally published in 1908.

3. Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language (New York, 1957), p. 240, gives a simple example of this sort of symbolism in the story of “Little Red Cap.”

4. This tale can be found in Danish Fairy Tales, trans. J. Grant Cramer (Boston, 1912), p. 89. It is of course cognate with many other legends of like import.

5. Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York, 1954), p. 311.

6. John Rhys, Studies in Arthurian Legend (Oxford, 1891), pp. 119-120, 285. Rhys traces Balyn to the Celtic divinity of the sun, called Apollo Belenus or Belinus in Latin. His brother-enemy was said to have a black face, and kept mostly concealed for purposes of destruction and death. Rhys makes the equation common to his time of Balyn with the sun and his opponent with darkness, so that the story of the struggle is a variant of the sun myth. At times the myth of the brothers doing battle does indeed fit this sort of light-dark structure. But the “sun-myth” theory does not plumb the depths of the myth's symbolic import.

7. De La Motte Fouque, Undine and Other Tales, trans. F. E. Burnett (New York, n. d. [circa 1905]), p. 57. Morris later considered a poem on Balin and Balan after completing The Earthly Paradise.

8. Art and Artist, trans. Francis Atkinson (New York, 1932), p. xxiii.

9. The image of the doppelganger was doubtless a topic of conversation among the Pre-Raphaelites since Rossetti painted a picture depicting a young couple meeting themselves in a garden as a prelude to their death. The painting itself was not completed until 1860, but designs were made for such a picture as early as 1851, and H. C. Marilliar (Dante Gabriel Rossetti [London, 1904], pp. 27-28) notes that the subject was one that fascinated Rossetti from boyhood.

10. As an interesting sidelight on this equation of witch with mother, I have had personal experience with a child of eight who related to me a dream, about which she said excitedly, “And then my mother turned into a witch and chased me over the bridge.” The dream was incomprehensible to the child who professed to love her mother although she resented her heavy handed educational regimen. Jung notes this phenomenon also in Contributions to Analytical Psychology, trans. H. G. and Cary F. Baynes (New York, 1928), pp. 122-124.