Essay About Rapunzel

There was once a woman who stood beneath a tower, which lay in a thick forest, and had neither stair nor door, but a small window at the tower’s peak. This elderly, brittle woman visited this mighty tower daily; upon her arrival, the old woman would at all times shout the following: ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair to me.’ Upon the recitation of these words, a young woman would wrap her unusually long, fair hair around a hook beside the window, dropping it twenty ells down so the elderly woman may climb it like a rope to Rapunzel’s tower room. As the elderly woman climbed up the tower, she always thought back to the time from when she received Rapunzel, ‘twas from a cowardly man who took advantage of this ‘frail, old woman’, and stole

However, Rapunzel was terribly frightened when a man, such as her eyes had never yet beheld came to her; but the man began to speak to her quite like a friend, and told her that his heart had been so stirred that it had let him have no rest, and that he had been forced to see her. As the conversation between the two progressed, they became the fastest, and best of friends; Rapunzel had lost all her fear. It wasn’t long before the man whom she had learned to be a prince asked for her hand in marriage. Rapunzel was shocked, she had lived in a tower for years and had not thought of marriage; the prince was the first man she’d seen since her twelfth birthday. Within her inner ear, Rapunzel heard her own thoughts: ‘He will love me more than old Dame Gothel does,’ and so she spoke, ‘I will willingly go away with you, but I do not know how to get down. Bring with you a skein of silk every time that you come, and I will weave a ladder with it, and when that is ready I will descend, and you will take me on your horse.

She had not known of the prince’s visits to the tower or of Rapunzel’s affection for the man. It wasn’t until Rapunzel said to her: 'Tell me, Dame Gothel, how it happens that you are so much heavier for me to draw up than the young king 's son—he is with me in a moment. ' Dame Gothel was infuriated. ‘Ah! You wretched child,’ she cried. ‘What do I hear you say? I thought I had separated you from all the world, and yet you have deceived me! I swindled your fool of a father only to be tricked myself?’ Dame Gothel looked down at Rapunzel’s large, sad eyes. ‘What do you mean “swindled?” Have you been lying to me about my parents?’ In her anger, Dame clutched Rapunzel 's beautiful tresses, wrapped them twice round her left hand, and seized a pair of scissors. ‘Yes, I lied! That shrewd, fat young fool stole food from me eighteen years ago for his ghastly wife! My beautiful rampions, turned into a salad!’ And with a snip and a snap, Gothel cut off the lovely braids that once flowed from Rapunzel’s hair. So pitiless was Dame Gothel that she took the unfortunate Rapunzel to a desert where she was forced to live in great grief and misery. On the same day that she cast out Rapunzel, however, the enchantress, Dame Gothel fastened the braids of hair, which she had cut off, to the hook of the window, and when the king 's son came and cried: ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your