Fairy Tales: The Frog Prince
Oct. 23rd, 2010 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwThe Frog Prince
Summary: Girl loses ball. Frog retrieves ball. Frog asks for reward, Girl promises reward. Girl breaks promise. Frog stalks Girl to her house, uses threats and extortion to work his way into her bedroom. Girl throws Frog against wall, killing Frog. Frog is reborn as Prince. The two marry and, presumably, live happily ever after. There is no scene in the Grimm fairy tale version I have (edited by Jack Zipes) where Princess kisses Frog.
This is a creepy story, full of extortion, sadism, and violence.
Granted, Princess is no prize, going into a toxic meltdown over the loss of a golden ball.
But Frog isn’t very charming either. He’s been waiting around there by that pond/well for a princess he can help, to break the spell he’s under – no altruism here. Sure, Princess is selfish and unthinking, but it’s clear that Frog plays on her unhinged state to extract a promise she would be unlikely to make in her right mind. And the supposed moral (that you should keep your promises?) is deeply undermined if you stop to think that the Frog was waiting there to find a girl whose promise he could extort.
She rudely runs off once she’s gotten what she wants – he follows her home, the creep. Does the dad protect her from her creepy green stalker? He does not, instead he sees this as an opportunity to give her a charming lesson in keeping promises – even ones made under duress.
Princess is grudging and rude and we’re on Frog’s side for a while – after all, why not let him share her plate? But when it comes to crawling into bed with her, all cold and green and not at all like Kermit the Frog, my sympathy is for Princess – not her squamous would-be rapist.
Princess loses us again when she picks up Frog and hurls him into the wall hard enough to kill him (well, loses our sympathy if we haven’t stopped to acknowledge that Frog is trying to coerce and rape her – in which case the more vigilante among us may feel that Frog really had it coming).
There is no girl kisses frog scene. That’s a later addition. Post being flung into a wall, Frog stands up as a man, now transformed into Prince! He’s freed! He explains that he was under the spell of an evil witch and Princess has freed him.
His faithful servant shows up on the scene to drive the two off to their wedding. (Another stalker! Optional drinking game: take a drink for every stalker in a collection of fairy tales. Try to avoid alcohol poisoning by not reading more than one or two tales from the Grimm collection at a time.) On the way to the wedding, snapping noises cause Prince to think the wheels of his carriage are breaking. Each time, the loyal, loving servant assures Prince that it is just the iron bands around his heart breaking – he had them put there to stop his heart from breaking for sorrow while Prince was trapped in his Frog shape. (Slash fic, ahoy!)
Prince and Princess marry, presumably to live happily ever after.
A few versions:
These ones have no kiss, and do have wall-flinging.
1)The Frog Prince, re-told by Kathy Jo-Wargin, illustrated by Anne Yvonne Gilbert. 2007
This is pretty much the straight out of Grimm version, more or less as summarized above. The art is very well-rendered and realistic, but in a way added realism only heightens the creep factor. The faithful servant looks PARTICULARLY faithful in this version (read: wildly in love with Prince). The wicked witch, who is shown in a side panel, is extremely attractive and seems to have also had the hots for Prince. Maybe he spurned her (or attacked or stalked her, given his later personality) and that’s why she turned him in to a frog.
2) A Frog Prince, written and illustrated by Alix Berenzy. 1989.
This was one of my favorite versions when I sold children’s books, mostly for the luminous art and the overall shape of the story. This one starts out more or less with the first bit of the Grimm story, except the frog is a frog (not, as far as I can tell, any kind of disguised human, though possibly a prince). When the revolted princess tosses him in the corner of the room, he goes, “Wait a minute, what am I doing here with someone who doesn’t want me” and takes off. He has some very nicely illustrated standard-fairy-tale adventures, and then meets a beautiful frog princess to live happily ever after with. Did I mention the art is phenomenal?
From this point on, we’ve left “transformed by murderous wall-flinging” territory, and entered the enduringly popular “transformed by kiss” territory.
3) The Horned Toad Prince, by Jackie Mims Hopkins, illustrated by Michael Austin. 2000.
This is one of those “take a European fairy tale and translate it element for element to another place/culture” versions – in this case some kind of American Old West, with desert plants/animals and some Spanish vocabulary. I’m not usually crazy about that type of setup, but this has a few elements I do like- notably that the creepy extortionate promise-extraction is replaced by deal making! Also, they don’t marry.
4) The Prince of the Pond, Donna Jo Napoli, illustrated by Judith Byrn Schachner. 1992
This one is backstory – it ends where the version above begins, with Frog meeting Princess. It’s also the only one of these that’s a chapter book rather than an picture book. This book is more focused on pond biology than it is on fairy tale logic. Prince is transformed into Frog by a local witch because he trampled her thistles and because she enjoys consuming frog legs. He escapes to the pond and is tutored in his new frog-nature by a female frog. They form a couple, complete with progeny. Their happy life together is threatened by snakes and birds and so forth, but they survive against the odds until a Princess accidentally kisses the Frog Prince when he is nobly trying to rescue his frog son.
This is entertaining enough as long as you try not to think too hard about the Prince’s future as a bi-species bigamist.
The whole “kiss” element takes center stage in a number of versions that focus primarily on the transformative powers or continuing allure of the kiss.
5) Pondlarker, written and illustrated by Fred Gwynne. 1990.
A frog with aspirations leaves his happy pond-frog focused life because he thinks being a prince sounds lovely and romantic. He finds an embittered Princess who lures legions of frogs to her castle, where she kisses them (with no intention of marrying them) because she thinks frogs are gross gross gross and wants to rid the world of them, one kiss at a time. He escapes the terrifying old bitter princess untransformed and returns happily to pond life.
This is funny if you think of it firmly in terms of the frog. But in a way the whole set up is just as creepy as the original version. The art is lighthearted, which is good, as it gives us a clue that the story is meant to be too. The text alone wouldn’t quite manage this for me.
6) Snog the Frog, written by Tony Bonning, illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw. 2004.
A frog wants to feel like a prince, so he gets a whole succession of farmyard residents to kiss him (this book is aimed much younger and the whole sequence is clearly designed for kids of the particular age where animal recognition is a fascinating game – I rather like that sort of book so this was fine for me). At the end, Frog is untransformed, but all that attention makes him feel “like a prince.”
Side note 1: Like Berenzy’s Frog Prince, but humorous rather than luminous, Jon Scieszka has a great story The Frog Prince Continued. The copy at my library was checked out, so I can’t remember the plot as a whole – but I do know that I liked it a lot.
Side note 2: Fairy tales that are variants on “The Frog Princess” are animal bride stories where the frog princess is magically talented and fabulous. Human prince marries animal princess. Animal princess is put to a series of wifely tests, all of which she aces. Then she transforms herself or is transformed into a human princess and the two live happily ever after. My library has at least two versions – one retold by J. Patrick Lewis with pics by Gennady Spirin, another retold by Elizabeth Isele, with pics by Michael Hague. I personally prefer the Gennady Spirin illustrations. The story versions are close enough to each other to make no never mind which you pick.
[edited because I misread the name of one author in my notes and had to correct spelling.]
