Retelling of `Rapunzel' harks back to the ancient folk tales Writer-illustrator gives new account authentic beauty
RAPUNZEL, re-told and illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky, Dutton, $16.99 Winner of the 1998 Caldecott Award.
Marilou Sorensen teaches children's literature at Brigham Young University. Her e-mail address is (marilou.sorensen@worldnet.att.net). Various adaptions of folk tales have arisen over the years. The differences are usually dependent on the locale, the era in which they are retold and the language in which the tales were written. Zelinsky's retelling of the popular Rapunzel story reaches back beyond the story recorded by the Brothers Grimm to a late-17th-century version by Mlle. LaForce based on an Neapolitan tale called Petrosinella.
The basic tale is of a beautiful young woman who is imprisoned by a wicked witch in a tower. The exclusive visitor to the captive is the witch herself, and the only entrance to the tower is through a window from which the girl's hair becomes the means of climbing. After the witch's departure, the prince calls to the beauty to let down her hair, and he, too, ascends into the tower. The girl and the prince fall in love. When the witch discovers the visitor, she cuts off the hair of the girl and casts the young man to the ground, blinding him. When the two young people finally reunite, it is the tears from the girl that restore sight to her prince.
Says Zelinsky, "Although Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm included it in their famous collection of German folk tales, `Children's and Household Tales,' their Rapunzel was hardly the rustic story of `folk' origin that they implied it to be. It was actually their own adaptation of a rather elegant story of the same name . . . " Zelinsky found that their version was a translation of an older French tale whose source was a story published in Naples in the 1600s, "Il Penatmerone" or The Tale of Tales.
In the French tale, a pregnant mother craves parsley as she sees it in a neighbor's garden. Not realizing that the neighbor is a witch, she steals some. The witch takes as ransom the child when it is 7 years old and names her Petrosinella. She brags that the girl is held by a charm, but Petrosinella and her prince - who has learned of her captivity and visited her - elope using a rope with the witch's own amulets of magic.
Zelinsky worked with three original versions of the story that he considered to be most authentic from Germany, France and Italy. He chose to use rapunzel as the herb that the mother craved and thus the name for the child.
In the new version by Zelinsky, he has modified the theme from one of punishment and deprivation to one of confinement and separation. The sorcerer, because she is not a vindictive person, places Rapunzel in a majestic tower, not the barren isolation representation in most versions.
The world in which Zelinsky places the story is not one of ugliness where the girl is held captive by a demon-witch. This is an opulent world with a caring woman, who, according to the artist, is a mother figure who resists the child's inevitable growth. It is also the romantic world of "a young woman and man who must struggle in the wilderness for the self-reliance that is the true beginning of their adolescence."
All of those factors are the accurate elements of folk tales.
This is Zelinsky at his best. His effective use of light and dark on the two-page spreads is accented with shadows and sun-washed architecture. Reminiscent of Renaissance art and Italian landscapes, each of Zelinsky's paintings is exquisite in detail and depth of perception. The wilderness in which the couple has fled seems to go on forever. The characters are paint-ed in elegant posture and costumes. Two examples affirm Zelin-sky's adherence to accuracy and detail: "the very image of a tower evokes the Italian landscape, where the campanile, or bell tower, plays a prominent role in architectural tradition . . . the name of the bellflower genus to which rapunzel belongs helped me to believe I was setting out on the right track."
Zelinsky has been a Caldecott Honor medalist three times, for "Hansel and Gretel," retold Rika Lesser; "Rumplestiltskin" and "Swamp Angel" by Anne Isaacs.