Lorenzo: We’re doing a good thing.
Angelica: Yes.
Lorenzo: A noble thing.
Angelica: Yes.
Lorenzo: We’re putting our own feelings aside
for the good of our families.
Angelica: Yes. So we’ll get married and have lots
of children and everyone will be happy.
Lorenzo: Except us. Whoa, wait a minute,
children? Who said anything about having children?
Angelica: What did you expect? It’s what married
couples do.
Leonardo
S2 E11, ‘Hitched’
(2012)
It probably says something
about the kind of brain I have that an idea it recently chucked at me for a fun
twist on a fairytale was to explain the characters’ actions as having taken
place for extremely practical and mundane reasons chiefly relating to the politics of running a small kingdom.
This is the spirit in which the following monologue was written, which is intended
to represent the thoughts of the prince associated with Snow White. I hope you
derive some amusement from it, and if any possibilities for further filling out
of plot details along the same lines should occur to you – I’ve left the story
halfway through, after all – or, indeed, if any particularly fun possibilities
for the rendering of other fairytales in the same manner should occur to you,
then please do voice them, or rather, type them, I suppose.
 |
| Snow White, according to the digital paintbrush of the very talented xaolan at newgrounds.com. |
***
Heirs.
That’s what it’s about, at
the end of the day, this whole prince-charming gig. If you haven’t got an heir,
then it doesn’t matter how good you are at duelling and dragon-slaying and
diplomacy; it doesn’t matter how capable or virtuous or beloved by your people
you are; it doesn’t matter whether you’ve managed to defeat your enemies and secure
your borders and bring peace and prosperity to the territories over which you’re
responsible, because if you haven’t got an heir, then there’s nobody to hand
the peace and prosperity down to. No heir means that all those achievements die
with you and the kingdom descends into civil war as your former advisors and
even friends trample each other down in a vicious scramble to claim your vacant
throne. A lack of an heir has spelled the doom of some of the most impressive autocracies
in history; don’t think it won’t spell the doom of yours too.1
At least, that’s how my parents
seem to like to put it. And the thing is, parents, merely by virtue of their being
parents, rather annoyingly have every right to put the pressure on as far
as this point is concerned: they have, merely by virtue of their being parents,
already enjoyed some success in the business of producing heirs. In other
words, nothing less than my own very existence provides the basis for the
standard I’m expected to meet.
But in order to produce an
heir, of course, one needs a wife. And this, my friends, is why you’ve
ended up under the impression that princes like me have nothing better to do
with our time than pursuing potential brides, whether that involves something
strenuous like slaying a dragon who’s keeping a lady captive, or something less
strenuous like holding a lot of parties. It’s because we genuinely haven’t got
anything better to do with our time. Nothing is more important than providing a
secure future for the kingdom, and that means that nothing is more important
than finding someone to marry.
Though, just to make life
more complicated, it can’t just be any old someone. First off, she has to be a
woman of high status. A noblewoman from your own kingdom might sometimes do,
but really you want a princess from another kingdom, because then you can use
the marriage to make an alliance. In short, the better her position is, the better
your position and your heirs’ position will be. Second, she has to be in a promising
state for childbearing. Princesses tend to get married in their late teens, to
make maximum use of their fertile years. General good health matters as well;
if she looks sickly or weak, that raises the question of how well her body will
cope with pregnancy and childbirth. To a large extent, that’s the real issue at
hand when we’re talking about beauty (or lack of it). And third, and trickiest,
you have to be very, very sure that she is in fact – ah, how to put this
delicately … that she is in fact a maiden. Heirs are the whole point; if there
is any doubt about the parentage of the children she bears, any at all,
then we have a civil-war scenario brewing already. I wouldn’t be so crass as to
point fingers, but everyone knows of cases where a princess’ startling
eagerness to get married has been followed by a reasonably short pregnancy resulting
in a child whose resemblance to said princess’ husband is, shall we say, rather
limited. So if one’s potential bride has been confined to the house doing
domestic chores, or imprisoned alone in a secret tower in the woods, or trapped
in a castle whose every occupant including herself is under a sleep enchantment
behind an impenetrable hedge of thorns, or something, ever since she hit
puberty, that’s pretty ideal. If you’d been thinking it was just sheer noble
princely heroism that prompted us to rescue these kinds of damsels in distress,
then I hate to burst your bubble, but think again. It’s far more selfish than
that.
 |
| Thorns. Ouch. |
I hasten to add that a
rescued princess has every right to turn her rescuer down, but they hardly ever
do. A nice marriage alliance and a few high-status heirs probably look just as
desirable to her as to him. If her parents are still about, you can bet they’ve
been putting just as much pressure on her as his have on him. Plus, if you’ve
managed to climb the secret tower or hack your way through the hedge of thorns
or slay the dragon – whatever the nature of the confinement may be – you’ve
proved that you’ve got a bit about you, you know. You’ve got some guts and some
physical prowess and probably some brains as well, and that means you might
well do a halfway decent job of maintaining peace and security in your court
and kingdom, which means the oh-so-important heirs will hopefully end up with
something halfway decent to inherit, and Her Highness will be able to live in
comfort while she’s busy producing them. A prince who’s competent enough to rescue
her from her imprisonment is as good as she’s likely to get, basically.
I didn’t quite manage to properly
rescue my damsel in distress in time.
Her name is Snow White,2
and she is a princess, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it to look at
her right now. Her parents both died before she came of age, so her stepmother
starting acting as regent for her, and of course she made all the right noises
about handing the throne back to Snow White just as soon as she was old enough,
but come on, we’ve all seen that before. If the Queen Regent had been serious
about ever relinquishing her power, she wouldn’t have had Snow White locked up
in the bit of the palace where the scullery maids live, now would she?
Ah, you’ve spotted it. A
princess locked up with the scullery maids since she was a child, but now
teetering on the brink of adulthood – as potential brides go, she ticked all
the boxes. The fact that she’d been functionally stripped of her royal status
presented a slight snag, admittedly, but I didn’t imagine that would be too
difficult to deal with: the Queen Regent was unpopular, and restoring the
kingdom to Snow White would probably only take a small army, which is something
I happen to have. So I did my heroic breaking-into-the-palace bit, which I
figured should be enough to prove my worth, and had a bit of a chat with the
princess. She looked in pretty good shape to me – very pale, granted,
presumably from having spent so much time indoors, but the scullery maids had
clearly been making sure she was well fed and looked after (and her hips weren’t
a bad width either) – and she was keen to get her kingdom back, so when I
offered her that in exchange for her hand in marriage, she jumped at the chance.
It was all going swimmingly; all I had to do was nip back home to gather my
troops, depose the Queen Regent, and arrange for Snow White’s coronation, and
the deal would be done.
How the Queen Regent got
wind of my plan, I have no idea. But she’s a shrewd and decisive lady, I’ll
give her that: she immediately took measures to get rid of Snow White permanently.
She’d presumably been hoping that if she just kept the princess out of sight,
unmarried, and so heirless, she’d be able to establish her own line on the
throne – because even though Snow White was the rightful ruler, if she didn’t
have any heirs, then taking major risks in order to put her back on the throne
wouldn’t necessarily look like a great option as far as her subjects were
concerned. Again, it’s all about the heirs!
A huntsman was charged with
killing Snow White, but he was loyal to her family and wouldn’t dare lay a hand
on her, so she ended up fleeing into the woods, according to my sources –
though that’s the last they’ve heard of her. I’ve got my people scouring the
area for any sign of her, but I don’t doubt the Queen Regent will be doing the
same by now; she’ll have twigged soon enough that the huntsman didn’t really
kill Snow White. So it’s essentially a race. If I find her first, we’ll proceed
with the original plan. If the Queen Regent finds her first, she’ll kill her. But
I can’t make a move against the Queen Regent until I’ve found Snow White: if I’m
not restoring the rightful monarch to the throne, it’ll just be a
straightforward invasion, and I somehow think the people of that kingdom, not
to mention my own, might look rather less fondly on that.
My dear parents, as you can
probably imagine, are not exactly thrilled by these developments. I mean, I’m
obviously going to stick to what I promised Snow White whatever happens, or my
word will be worth nothing, and I’ll be very glad to find her safe and well
whatever the circumstances, but I dread to think what my parents might say if
it turns out she’s been spending time with other men since she, you know, fled
for her life and that. Oh, wait a moment, here’s a messenger; he’ll be bringing
the latest report from my scouts, I should think…
Oh, thank goodness, they’ve
found her! And she’s all right! And she’s … been living with seven men in a
remote cottage in the forest.
Oh dear. How on earth am I
going to explain that?
Footnotes
1 Notable example: Alexander
the Great. I once read a really interesting novel based on psychological
analysis of Henry VIII that made pretty much exactly the same point, so I
probably owe some credit there: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/H-M-Castor/VIII/10802882.
2 I wrote a bit about Disney’s
Snow White specifically – and touched very lightly on some of the ideas covered
in this post – in ‘In Defence of Snow White’ in October 2016. In the box on the
right if you happen to fancy a read. Also, here’s a fascinating video that also
makes a defence of Snow White as a great Disney princess, though on very
different grounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7FF8nL42qw.
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