Review Assignment: Who Knows Best? (prompt 2: happily ever after?)

Mother Gothel may have become more attached to Rapunzel than she initially was, but she never grew to love her, at least not in the sense of the word "love" described by the saying: "If you love something, let it go.  If it comes back to you, it is yours.  If it doesn't come back to you, it never was yours."  Yes, she tries to make Rapunzel a happy prisoner by providing her with books and paints, but when her desire to make Rapunzel happy conflicted with her desire to keep her a prisoner, it was the latter that won out: she belittles Rapunzel in order to make her scared to leave the tower.  This was certainly not conducive to Rapunzel's happiness, and not the sort of thing one does to show one's love for someone.

Would Rapunzel and Gothel have lived happily ever after if Flynn had never appeared on the scene?  Well, Rapunzel wasn't happy to be locked up in a tower at the age of 18.  She sings that she wants her life to begin, indicating that she hasn't started living yet despite all the things with which Mother Gothel supplies her.  And she tries to convince Mother Gothel that she is strong enough to survive on the outside by showing her what she was able to do to Flynn.  As she looked out the window of the tower, she would eventually have seen other things besides the lanterns that would have fed her desire to escape, and she would have realized that she could have procured books and paints on the outside.  Sooner or later she would have tried to escape using her own hair as a rope, as she did in the movie.  To stop her, Mother Gothel would have had to cut off Rapunzel's hair, destroying the magic and driving herself to suicide, and then Rapunzel would have died inside the tower; so either Rapunzel would have escaped or else she would have died trying, and either way she and Mother Gothel would never have lived happily ever after.

Review Assignment: Sure There's Room Somewhere! (prompt 2, the story)

Growing old is a crock.  You lose your beauty, you lose your strength, you lose you health and all too soon you lose your life.  For a long time I was able to preserve my youth thanks to a magical flower I found.  I activated its magic by singing an enchantment to it.  And of course I kept it to myself!  Its magic is only strong enough for one person, and I certainly didn't want to share it with anyone else.  After all, it's either me or them.

But then it got stolen from me and carried to the King's castle by some of the King's soldiers!  I sneaked into the castle, hoping to retrieve the flower.  The flower was nowhere to be found, but its magic had been transferred to the hair of a newborn baby by the name of Rapunzel.  I cut off a lock of her hair, but the lock turned brown and whatever magic was in it disappeared.  To retain my youth, I was going to have to steal the baby!  Out of desperation, I did so.  I locked her in a tower to prevent her from escaping, but I wanted to make her a happy prisoner; so I raised her as if she were my own child: I fed her, clothed her and provided her with things to amuse herself with like books and paints.

I must admit that I wasn't always nice to her.  When she expressed her desire to leave the tower, I tried to make her fear the outside world by making her think that she was too weak to survive out there.  But hey, it was either me or her: if she had escaped, I would have turned into an old crone instantly.

One day I saw a guy in the tower, whom she had knocked out.  She told me that if she could do that, she was strong enough to survive outside the tower.  Of course, I was on to her; so I got mad at her.  To soften me up, she asked me for a special kind of paint, and like a fool I went to get it for her.  It took me three days to find it, and when I returned, she was gone!  In the tower I found a satchel with a crown in it and a wanted flyer with Flynn Rider's name on it.  Evidently Flynn was the guy I had seen in the tower before, and he was the guy who was accompanying her.  I was going to have to find them!  I grabbed the satchel and started searching.

I found two other guys who were also searching for this Flynn guy, and I joined forces with them. Eventually I found Rapunzel alone.  I couldn't exactly drag her back by force; so instead I gave her the satchel with the crown, hoping that Flynn would value the crown over her, and then she'd return to me voluntarily.  Well, my two allies double-crossed me!  They tried to seize Rapunzel, but I rescued her and took her back to the tower.  She then remembered that she was in fact the lost princess and challenged me!  At that point, Flynn appeared and tried to take Rapunzel away from me; so I stabbed him.  All right, that was mean of me, but, as I said, it was either me or him.

By then, Rapunzel had fallen in love with him.  She offered to stay in the tower if I let her heal his stab wound.  But Flynn wouldn't let her sacrifice herself for him.  He cut off her hair so that she would be useless to me, and I suddenly turned into an old crone!  I can't stand it!  I'm going to jump off the tower to my death!  Aaarrrgh!

Review Assignment: I've Got a Dream!

I have a talent for composing music.  At the age of 11 I won first prize in a contest for child composers, beating out a 13-year-old who later became one of Canada's leading composers.  I dreamed about becoming a good enough composer to make a living at it, and although as a young man I twice won a scholarship for composition at the Royal Conservatory of Toronto, my dream was never realized.

There were two reasons for my failure to realize my dream.  For one thing, I write tonal music, and I was told that only atonal music would be accepted by the musical community.  I now realize that I might have been able to compose music for movies, in particular because I compose program music, but at the time I thought that I would be reduced to composing music for advertising jingles, which didn't appeal to me.  Secondly, the only music program at the University of Toronto that I knew about was the one in the Faculty of Arts.  Most of the courses in that program were about languages and history, including the history of music.  There was only one course in music theory, and I already knew most of that material.  The Faculty of Music offered a much more specialized program, but I didn't know about that program until much later.  The Faculty of Science offered a much more specialized program in mathematics and physics, in which I was also interested; so I enrolled in that program, got my Ph.D. in mathematics and eventually became a mathematics professor.

I'm not sorry that I made that choice.  I like doing mathematics as much as I like composing music.  I managed to make a living as a mathematician, and there's no guarantee that I could have made a living as a composer.  I still compose music as a hobby, although I never got any better at it than I was when I first entered university.  One of my compositions – for recorder quintet – was published in the American Recorder Society's magazine, and the recorder ensemble I belong to has played a few of them in concerts.  One of my compositions is available in the HiH library in Chapter 2 of Karelin's book http://www.hogwartsishere.com/library/book/3099/read/.  It's a song called "Healer, Healer."  Karelin wrote the lyrics, Lucy Baeytorin sang one of the vocal parts and I composed the music and sang the other vocal part.  The chapter gives all the credits and I'm not supposed to identify myself in an assignment, but once you've graded this assignment, you may want to listen to it.

Review Assignment: Fragile as a Flower

This film represents a valiant and partially successful attempt by Disney Studios to add pro-feminist content to an essentially anti-feminist fairy tale.  In the original fairy tale, Rapunzel is a traditional damsel in distress and a victim of an evil woman, like Aurora, Snow White and, to a lesser extent, Cinderella.  She is rescued by a prince who is strong enough to climb up 70 feet using her hair as a rope and who eventually marries her.  Of course, she does heal his blindness with her tears (like Phoenix tears?) but only because she cries and not because she is a Healer.

Disney Studios make Rapunzel into a stronger female character, as is the fashion these days.  She's a princess instead of a peasant girl. While in the tower, after performing her traditionally female household duties, she amuses herself with creative activities: reading, painting and astronomy.  Her desire is NOT to meet a man but to escape from her prison – to have her life begin, as she puts it.  When Flynn, who is NOT a prince, climbs the tower, she doesn't fall in love with him.  Instead, she uses him as a means to escape.  She bops him over the head with a frying pan, ties him to a chair, hides his satchel containing "his" crown (which is really hers, although she doesn't know that yet), escapes from the tower using her own hair and tells him that if he wants his crown back he'll have to take her to the place where the lights come from.  It is her hair that enables her and Flynn (that is, Eugene) to escape from the cave.  She first heals his hand, and then revives him after Mother Gothel stabs him.  AND she marries him AFTER she finds out that she is a princess even though he is not a prince, a turnabout from Cinderella who becomes a princess by marrying a prince.  In addition, on her birthday, it is her father who cries and her mother who consoles him rather than the other way around.

On the other side of the ledger, she agrees to sacrifice herself for him by agreeing to return to Mother Gothel's tower in return for being allowed by her to heal him after Mother Gothel stabs him, but then Eugene rescues her from her own folly by cutting off her hair, driving Mother Gothel to suicide.  On balance, though, this film does more to champion modern day feminism than to undermine it.  It isn't as successful as some of Disney's other films, in particular Mulan, but it was the best they could do with the material they had to work with.  To make a totally pro-feminist film, they would have had to write most of their own material, as they did with Frozen, instead of reworking an old-fashioned fairy tale.