The Goose Girl is a Threat to the Kingdom

Why refusing to become ourselves is a danger to us all...

The Goose Girl wouldn’t say Boo to a Goose and that’s a problem.

Despite her royal background, despite all the ways her mother prepared her to become a Queen, despite Falada, her talking horse and his constant reminders she refuses to speak out about the treachery that has been done to her. She has allowed her betrothed to marry a False Bride. She has endangered the Kingdom.

Can this even be a Fairy Tale?

We expect our fairy tale characters to be brave, to accept their struggle, to work very hard to become the best they can be. But the goose girl does none of those things. Instead she spends all her time out in the fields combing her hair and, of course, tending geese. Her only other act is to find ways to thwart the young lad she works with.

You would be tempted to think that she has no concern for what has happened, no understanding of what might be required of her. You might be utterly mystified as to why she remains steadfast in her silence.  A silence that is a complete reversal of the endurance and bravery required of most fairy tale heroes. You would be justified in asking: What is going on here? Or, as one of my students described it – what to do about the protracted feeling of AAARGGHHH!

Can’t this girl wake up? Does she have to be so weak and passive? What could possibly be the point of this story? The lead character is a nonentity, the villainess does her mean girl stuff and steps off the stage and the big reveal is done inside a cast iron stove. Furthermore, it only happens because the King is smart enough to know what’s at stake and to trick the foolish, obdurate and totally maddening princess into telling her story.

Who would want to read this? Not me! It was so irritating that I read it grudgingly, and only rarely reread it. This was at best a one-and-done for me. I finished it and moved on. Or at least I thought I did.

When fairy tales elicit that kind of reaction its only a matter of time before we return and try them again. They stick in our heads until one day we can see through the tedium and frustration and face what it had to say. It’s as if we each have a specific tale that calls to us, that’s uniquely suited to us whether we want it to or not.

I've found people who've built their entire lives around one particular childhood story without ever quite realizing it. That taught me that we hold onto things that contain certain questions, the ones we need to answer about ourselves and our own lives.

I thought, like many people, that I knew just which story was meant for me. But like many people, when I looked back at my favorite fairy tales, I was easily fooled. It seemed as if I always preferred the heroic stuff, like Gerda in The Snow Queen or Elise from The Wild Swans. Cinderella left me blank as did most of the other popular stories about romance and waiting for your prince to come. I was sure my questions were big ones, important ones - where I would sacrifice myself to save others - you can just hear my Irish Catholic upbringing here, can't you?

But with The Goose Girl I was missing something very personal.

Falada is a royal steed, a talking animal, and a magical creature. He is sent by the girl’s mother to keep watch over her daughter and to be her literal conveyance (carried by magic). He is the memory keeper for the princess's royal lineage and will only speak to her. He travels with her as he is meant to bear witness to her upcoming transformation - becoming a Queen in her own right.

Once their journey to the new kingdom has ended, after the false maid has forced the young princess to give up her clothes and dismount from Falada, he is butchered and nailed to the gate. There he has a new task: he keeps her company. He quite literally watches over her as she passes him daily.

He is a constant reminder of her identity. He speaks to her about what she is allowing to happen. He is the voice for the Queen Mother, trying to call the goose girl back to the enormous task she must face - that of becoming a Queen in her own right.

Each day she would drive the geese past him as he hung from the heavy gate. Each day he would call to her:

Alas, young queen, passing by,
If this your mother knew,
Her heart would break in two.

I didn’t know then, but he was calling to me too.

The story goes on until the King himself becomes involved. Despite being the most powerful man in the kingdom he cannot make her talk. She will not speak of what happened. Finally, he tricks her into telling her story from within the confines of a great iron stove. And the truth is out.

The rest of the story goes as you’d expect. The king has the goose girl enter the castle, now fully arrayed in proper royal clothing. He urges the False Bride to choose a punishment for someone who might do such treachery. And once the maid has been executed the prince happily marries his “true” bride.

Fairy tales are filled with hyperbole. They describe everything in superlatives. Hair shines like the Sun. Dresses are brighter than the moon. There are forests of gold or silver with diamond leaves. The extreme language keeps you entertained so that the small story at its heart can be told. In this case the message and the medium are mismatched.

The stories are rather simple. They describe one person who has one problem. The arc of the story is a description of the journey it takes for this one problem to be overcome. But because the genre traffics in fantasy and magic, the central character has to become a Queen or a King. They have to find their one and only true love. They have to defeat all the fearsome creatures in the land. Of course, as children we love it and as adults we disparage it.

The Goose Girl tells us that the young princess is not quite ready to become a Queen. The story itself is filled with many possible interpretations. She is too immature. The blood on the handkerchief signifies the onset of puberty. She leaves home for the first time and her journey through the forest is her passage to adulthood. She is weak and easily bullied. I could go on but you’d be better served reading it for yourself. You might find many different interpretations that better suit you as a reader.

I was impatient with her. I couldn’t see that the lessons in fairy tales are cast as big stuff – the safety of the realm in this case; but they need to be recast as small stuff. What The Goose Girl was telling the adult me is that becoming yourself is not a private enterprise. Our choices - and in her case, her choice to stay silent, have public ramifications. The King recognizes the danger but she doesn’t. It’s the people around us who bear the brunt of our refusals.

In fairy tales we walk a thin line between literal and figurative. When I talk about transformation in my classes, there is always someone who’ll speak up: We can’t all be Queens! The objection is both valid and nonsense. The call to become ourselves is multilayered. It encompasses the disparate parts of ourselves that make up a life. We wear many hats but some of them we keep in the closet or lose along the way. The key to this story is that there are a few of those hats that if not worn or cared for, if not treated as Crowns, will begin to affect us in negative ways.

If I earn a living but never give my creative side a chance; if I become a caregiver and forget that I loved to dance; if I put other things first and neglect something that is close to my heart - then the sadness and frustration will seep out. We might get sick, have accidents or maybe lash out at the people we love. We can become bitter or mean.

The people around us, the ones we love and need, are scorched by our choices. When we won’t own those parts essential to our being, we have endangered the little kingdom we share. We need someone to help us see the cost of not fulfilling ourselves, of not becoming a “queen.”

We need Falada.

Photo by Jan-Mallander