WOUNDS: NEW OPENINGS INTO OLD STORIES
Hello and welcome to Fairy Tale Friday. Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then I’ll begin.
This week we look at an unusual tale in that the
gender roles are reversed. I found this story in the March 1996 issue of Cricket Magazine for Children. Like
many of its counterparts, our hero’s abusers are lazy, rude and selfish and it
is the opposite qualities which set our protagonist apart that make them
marriage material. This version is entitled The Most Obedient Servant retold by Anna Salyers Miller and illustrated by Deborah Nourse Lattimore.
Sadly, in so many of the female versions (basically
every other one) our heroine is admired by the prince for her beauty and her
grace and perhaps her quiet self-effacing attitude. We have seen heroines who
are passive and wait for a magical helper to solve their problems get chosen by
the prince. We have seen heroines who displayed some spunk and ingenuity to make
their dreams come true get chosen by the prince. But the prince never knew what
lengths she had gone to get there. He just saw her pretty face and her fancy
dress and her shy demeanour (so shy she won’t even tell him her name!) and that’s
why he wanted her. Which makes me really sad.
This version has a loyal servant who is everything his
two masters are not. He is kind and caring. He is studious and wise. He is
loyal. The two brothers and their mother are the male equivalent of the wicked
stepmother and ugly stepsisters, treating him badly after his father dies. In
some of our tales our heroine wants to go to the ball, in other tales she wants
to go to church. In every one of these tales, she needs new clothes to do it.
She has to look to good to catch the prince’s eye. In this tale, a decree goes
out that all unmarried men must come and take an examination to see who is best
suited to become a high ranking government official and marry the king’s only
daughter and someday rule the land. The spouse of the royal person is not
chosen by their looks but by their intellect. This also makes me sad that so
few of the female protagonist tales mention her intellect at all.
As you would expect, the two lazy masters don’t study
at all. They tell their stepbrother the servant to study for them and fill them
in later about what he has learned. Moonhi, being a very obedient servant,
obeys. When they all go to the palace for the exam (Moonhi is there to do the
cooking and the cleaning) they happen upon an old man. The man is hungry and so
Moonhi shares his rice. The man is injured so Moonhi makes a poultice for the
old man’s hand. The old man is so impressed that he encourages Moonhi to sit
the exam which, being an obedient servant, he does. And what do you know—the old
man was the king and he sees the true worth of our protagonist by his actions,
in spite of his social class. In the female versions, we nearly always see the
prince not care that her background was once humble or that she is dirty and
wears rags because she scrubs up well. But here it is Moonhi’s actions and not
his looks (although the story describes him as handsome) that make him a suitable
mate.
The story itself is so beautifully rendered in Cricket
magazine that I asked my husband the Amazing Spiderman to scan it for me. You will need to click on them to enlarge to read.
That’s all for this week. Stay tuned next week as we
start to look at the other variation of Cinderella with a more incestuous edge.
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