Chapter 38

1. Chapter 38 Using Multiple Analyses to Highlight Different Aspects of the Same Tale

2. Recap: Victor Turner on the Different Perspectives on Ritual • Exegetic – The explanations of the meaning and significance of a ritual given by insiders, those who participate in it. • Operational – The anthropologist, who is outside the society, records what is done in the ritual, and how the participants behave and feel. • Positional – The anthropologist, who is outside the society, relates the symbols found in a ritual to other symbols found in the society and the culture.

3. Rationale Multiple analyses of a story can highlight aspects of its meaning that occur inside or outside the culture, depending on • how we have framed our inquiry • how much information we have about the people who told the stories and the intellectual and political history of their culture.

4. “The Goose Girl” and Mother Goose Historical bases for Mother Goose: • Marina Warner, in her study of fairy tales, says, “A figure like Mother Goose turns out to have a recorded, empirical history, [and] to be compacted of many beliefs.” • Marie-Jeanne L’Heritier de Villandon wrote fairy tales that may have influenced Charles Perrault, who subtitled his 1697 book Tales of My Mother Goose. • Dorothea Viehmann was the Grimm brothers’ source of many of their Mother Goose stories, including “The Goose Girl.”

5. The Queen of Shebaand Mother Goose • The Queen of Sheba visited Solomon in the Bible and was impressed by his wisdom. In medieval stories and portraits, the Queen of Sheba is represented as having the foot of a goose and refusing to step on a bridge made of the wood on which Christ will be crucified. • Warner argues that the goose foot marks a storyteller whose stories portray a bawdy, vulgar, and subversive world in which the differences between human beings are defined according to morality and not gender or social status. In this world, society’s limits on women’s sphere of action and its criticism of women’s wisdom are routinely violated and challenged.

6. “The Goose Girl” and Big Bertha • There is a connection between the Grimm brothers’ “The Goose Girl” and the historical Bertha, the mother of the great French leader Charlemagne. She was reputed to have “a foot much larger than any other woman of her day,” and she was portrayed with a single webbed foot like that of a goose. • In a mid-thirteenth-century poem called “Big-Footed Bertha,” the minstrel Adenet describes how Aliste, Bertha’s maid, takes the queen’s rightful place as Pepin’s bride and queen, and makes up horrendous charges against her, but eventually the queen is reinstated and the maid is punished. • The association with geese is a charge that “proper” society makes against women who refuse to be limited by the roles set out for them. However, the ability to tell stories is what frees women from the shameful charge of deformity, which is an “attempt to contain and subdue the heterodox” (Warner).

7. “The Goose Girl” –Multiple Analyses • Psychologically, the story expresses the reluctance of the heroine to assume the role society set out for her. In this view, she spends time as a goose girl, halfway between being a child and becoming a wife. • Sociologically, the girl moves from the end of the scale Levi-Strauss designated as incest (staying home) to the one called exogamy (going to a foreign land to marry), and thus, with some reluctance, she satisfies her society’s requirements for marriage. • From a historical perspective, we can see the girl’s resistance to her social role as itself contributing to the formation of society. This is most easily seen in the links between the Goose Girl and Bertha, the mother of Charlemagne, and by the suggestion that an entire genre of stories arose to communicate the woman’s point of view represented by the Mother Goose stories.

8. “The Goose Girl” –“Value Added” Multiple Analyses • The Goose Girl as a Reluctant Wife • Psychological analysis gives us insight into the personal growth of the heroine. • Sociological analysis allows us to view the marriage customs of the time as an external barrier the heroine had to deal with to make space for her internal development. • Thus, because the princess was not ready to assume the place of a grown-up bride, she unwittingly made it easy for the servant girl to overpower and replace her. • One of the meanings of the story thus becomes the description of an ongoing struggle between the needs of the individual and the customs of the society.

9. “The Goose Girl” –“Value Added” Multiple Analyses, 2 • The Goose Girl as a Trickster Figure • If we add the historical perspective of Marina Warner’s analysis to the previously mentioned two levels (psychological and sociological analyses), we are able to see the trickster aspect of the Goose Girl. • In undergoing a rite of passage from young girl to young woman, she exhibits a kind of resistance to her society’s values, and uses her “goose-footed” ways, which the society finds shameful, to circumvent the demands she is not ready to meet. • In this perspective, the Goose Girl is no longer alone in her resistance to the marriage customs of her society. She joins an ongoing tradition of women who get their own way and who stealthily undermine the structures of society to express their individuality and make space for their own concerns and values. • In this light, the outrage of Conrad at the Goose Girl’s behavior is seen as the reluctance of society to subvert its male-oriented values.

10. A Taxonomy of Meanings for Myths

11. “The Raven” – Proppian Analysis agq (she becomes a raven) ABC ­ DDD a (new lack) aBC ­ DEF G (giant transports) DEFG o MN Q TW

12. “The Raven” – Puzzling Aspects • As sometimes happens with fairy tales, the parts of “The Raven” are not well integrated. • The section of the story dealing with the old woman donor seems to represent a separate segment that seems incompletely related to the other events in the story. • The fairy tale provides no personality for the queen: her reaction to the transformation is not included. • We are not told why the old woman has power over the Raven. It would be easy enough to link the old woman with the queen, or with the Raven’s wandering in the woods after her transformation, but the story does not provide any such connection. • Nor is there any explanation of why the hero’s failure with the old woman results in the removal of the Raven to the distant castle. Because of these missing connections, the events of the story seem arbitrary and illogical.

13. “The Raven” – Jungian Analysis • If we consider the hero as the main character, we see that the hero first encounters the Raven, an anima figure for him who is intended to bring him to his true Self. However, the Raven cannot stay with the hero, as she has been enchanted. • The hero is left first to deal with the old woman, who is also an anima figure. The hero is unsuccessful at the tests given him by the old woman, and the Raven is taken farther away from him. • Then he encounters the giant and the robbers, who help him and enable him to perform the task of freeing the Raven from her enchantment.

14. “The Raven” – Jungian Analysis, 2 • In his encounter with the old woman, the hero shows that he does not as yet know how to restrain his desire to eat and drink. • The giant seems to act the same way: when he first meets the hero, he declares that he wants to eat him. First the man must negotiate with the greedy giant, and then he has to trick the quarrelsome robbers, also shadow figures, who are arguing about how to share their magical possessions when he meets them. • It is when the hero figures out ways of dealing with his shadow figures that he is at last ready to be united with his anima.

15. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? • In the movie, the detective Eddie Valiant is duped into framing a cartoon character named Roger Rabbit. • Eddie has agreed to help Roger only because his detective agency is down on its luck, but his help backfires, resulting in a murder charge for Roger. • Eddie vowed not to have anything to do with Toons years ago, when an unidentified Toon got away with killing his brother. Before this incident, Eddie and his brother used to have a reputation for helping Toons. • Toons are represented as a minority that suffers discrimination and whose members are forced into jobs with inferior working conditions and consigned to the community of Toontown. • As Eddie Valiant tries to help Roger Rabbit, he comes up against Judge Doom, a sinister figure who wants to destroy all of Toontown.

16. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? –Jungian Analysis • Judge Doom is Eddie’s first shadow figure. When we first meet Eddie, he is full of self-loathing and is drinking himself into an early grave. • In many respects, Eddie is like Judge Doom himself, who (we learn at the end of the movie) is actually a Toon in disguise who is bent on destroying his own kind. • To defeat Judge Doom, Eddie eventually has to let go of his own angry and morose attitude and adopt the silly and slap-happy style of his other shadow figure, Roger Rabbit.

17. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? –Levi-Straussian Analysis • This story contains, in fable form, a discussion of American race relations and racial prejudice. • The Toons can be compared to any oppressed minority that is discriminated against because they are “different.” • Levi-Straussian analysis would note that the communities of Los Angeles represent extremes of a scale with nature at one end and culture at the other. Los Angeles is seen as the height of culture, while Toontown represents nature. • Doom embodies the most extreme vision of technological LA. His dream is to destroy Toontown to build the entrance to a freeway. • By the end of the movie, a balance is achieved between the two worlds. Toontown saves LA from Judge Doom’s freeway, and Eddie Valiant saves Toontown from destruction.

18. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? – Aetiological Analysis • Judge Doom’s plans for another freeway are defeated, but this climax occurs after he has already destroyed the “vast system of electric trolleys which once criss-crossed the LA Basin.” • Thus the movie provides an explanation for why a major city like Los Angeles does not have a viable system of public transportation. • This fictitious aetiology makes the story seem more myth-like. • It also points out a “real” historical fact that many people probably do not know: namely, that Los Angeles once actually had a public transportation system.

19. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? –“Value Added” Multiple Analyses • The psychological analysis shows Eddie Valiant coming to terms with Roger Rabbit as a shadow figure. • In exactly the same way, according to Levi-Straussian analysis, Los Angeles comes to terms with Toontown. • The private detective, like his hometown, achieves a kind of equilibrium by accepting his natural instincts and using them to temper his “hard-headed” or scientific nature. • The contribution of the aetiological analysis to our understanding of the movie is, however, an ironic one. In the real world, as we know, Los Angeles was not saved from freeways. The movie’s meaning also includes an aspect of wistfulness over what has been lost.