The king puts the daughter in a room full of straw with a spinning wheel and more or less says, "If this straw isn't gold in the morning, I'm gonna kill you." Of course, she just starts weeping inside the room. Since he's the king, he basically gets an infinite power of eminent domain, and invokes it on the daughter. The miller runs across the king in town, and to impress him, he blatantly lies to him: "I have a daughter who knows the art of spinning straw into gold." Well, to his bad luck, the king is insanely greedy.
And if they mean sympathetic in the sense of someone that the reader should sympathize with, that's just clearly false.įor those few who are unfamiliar with the Rumpelstiltskin story (or perhaps so familiar that they aren't sure which version this is), this book begins with a miller and his daughter. It's more like he's pridefully taunting her than anything else. The inner flap of the book bafflingly describes the character of Rumpelstiltskin as "an impudent, sympathetic, infuriating creature." Sympathetic? What is possibly sympathetic about this character? In this book, he just barely gives her an out, after she sobs piteously over losing her child, and it's extremely clear that he doesn't expect her to ever guess his name.
There's no possible character development for the story as written. She is first forced to sacrifice everything she owns, then barely avoids sacrificing everything she holds dear by sheer luck.
Rumpelstiltskin is one of those stories where a woman ends up in trouble through the fault of some man who owns her like property. I don't think it's a coincidence that Disney has never made a feature film out of it, although they've picked a lot of Grimm's fairy tales like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and even Rapunzel. I've never really cared for the story of Rumpelstiltskin.
0 kommentar(er)
