I love fairy tales, and they generally make sense to me. I am in love with that liminal space between sleep and the waking world, where everything is possible. More importantly, everything is meaningful.

I read fairy tales with Michael before bed when he lets me. It’s harder to get him to be serious now, at twelve. He interrupts and says annoying Gen Alpha things with no relevant meaning at all, or middle-school boy “jokes.” It hurts my feelings, honestly. He can talk all day about basketball, including phrases like “ball handling,” and never crack a smile. But when the princess is “playing with her ball” by the well…you can imagine the hilarity. For him.

We read “The Frog Prince, or Iron Hans” again recently. The good thing now that he’s older is that he understands more. I expect a certain logic out of these stories, and if I don’t get it, we can talk it over. And I had to admit that “The Frog Prince” left me absolutely cold because it made no sense.

The Princess drops her ball and cries in distress, which moves the Frog in the well to offer to find it for her if she’ll promise to be his friend. She does, and he does, and she blows him off. Runs back to the castle, byeeee. But the next day, Frog shows up at the castle door. He tells the King what the Princess promised him, and he demands that his daughter keep her word. She does, but barely: lets Frog sit by her and eat from her plate, hardly hiding her disgust.

In any other story, this would play out with an obviosly moral bent: she would be punished for her ugliness and the Frog, who of course is actually a Prince, would spurn her. He might forgive her eventually if she’s truly sorry (as King Thrushbeard does with his haughty wife).

But she just gets worse and worse. When it’s time to put the slimy Frog in her pretty bed, she drops all pretension of obedience and throws poor Froggie against a wall. At that point, when she’s been as cruel as she can be, then he turns into a dazzling Prince. She is rewarded for her nasty behavior with a perfect marriage to a gorgeous Prince who, for some reason, does not run screaming from Her Royal Harpiness.

I’ve been listening to Lisa Marchiano’s book The Vital Spark. She discusses the conditioning that urges women to be nice at all costs. Then she brings up “The Frog Prince.” Suddenly, immediately, I got it (and hammered out this blog entry without even stopping to finish her chapter, so if I say something dumb here, don’t blame the brilliant Ms. Marchiano).

The Princess’s worst fault isn’t her unkindness or her breaking her word or her disdain for the nice Frog. That’s what I had wrong. Her sin is emotional dishonesty. She tells the Frog she’s fine with the deal (which, he is careful to stress, is not about her fancy things but about the sharing of her true life) when she is not. She only agrees because she thinks he can’t follow through and make it all the way to the castle. Her father makes her do The Right Thing, but she can’t put her heart into it. Finally, when she splats Frog against the bedroom wall, she shows real passion. That’s what breaks the spell. True fury is better than playing nice, at least with a true companion.

I am not sure whether that’s true. I’m thinking about it.

That emphasis also explains the appearance of Iron Hans/Heinrich at the end. I always thought it was a weird, irrelevant little coda. The Prince’s servant Hans was so traumatized when his master turned into a frog that he had to put iron bands around his heart to keep it from breaking. Now that all has ended well, Hans’s bands are breaking because his heart is so full and happy. Like the Princess, he was bound to the Frog but distraught about the situation (though his pain was from grief, not disgust). To survive, he had to stifle his heart. And now he’s free of that struggle to hide his feelings.

I could probably wedge the whole story into some Freudian thing where the Princess is the Id, the King is the Superego, and the frog is the Ego, transformed by allowing the Id a true range of feelings: acknowledging her Shadow, to get Jungian with it.  Something like that. That does work pretty well. Like the Frog.

In the well? Get it?

I don’t know where Michael gets it from.