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Issue Date: November 16, 2003
A new twist
Popular novelist Gregory Maguire on how he might reimagine two kids' classics for an adult audience.
Novelist Gregory Maguire has made a career of giving fairy tales new twists. His debut novel, "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West", just hit Broadway as a musical. His latest, "Mirror Mirror" (ReganBooks, $24.95), a retelling of the "Snow White" story, hit shelves last month. Now, Maguire shares how he might reinvent other classic tales.
RAPUNZEL
I've always loved this story. But I have never set one of my retellings in my own country. Hence:
Rapunzel in America. The heroine of this tale, set in the years just after the Civil War, might be slightly fey or "tetched." She'll be an immigrant child from someplace like Sudetenland or Prussia, the youngest member of a strict and devout religious sect in upstate New York. The Shakers didn't believe in connubial relations, so to populate their small communities they took in orphans and abandoned children. My fictional sect -- the Brethren -- will emulate the Shakers in that regard. And that's how Rapunzel comes to be with them.
The Brethren, unlike the Amish, are inefficient and unlucky at farming. Their dwindling community is impoverished, and thriving neighbors look on suspiciously and mutter.
The Brethren are torn with indecision about whether to move west, like the Mormons. They wait for a sign. And Rapunzel has a vision so startling they lock her up.
Rapunzel's tower? Maybe a disused grain silo. Maybe the prince who comes to climb Rapunzel's hair is really an angel savior. Or perhaps he's a charlatan, a traumatized veteran recoiling from the depredations of the Civil War. No one but Rapunzel knows if his interest is spiritual or scandalous.
How can the gullible and faithful farmers decide whether to take the advice he gives them through their daft and gullible orphan child with the sinfully long hair?
I've learned that works in progress often begin with a great "What if?" As writer Jane Langton puts it, the great inspiration has to be followed by the harder questions, "Then what?" and "So what?"
To get to the "Then what?" I don't outline -- exactly. I divide my book into no more than five sections. This is because I have only five kitchen cabinet doors at eye level. While I'm cooking or washing dishes, if a notion strikes me, I dash it on a Post-it note and slap the thing on the appropriate cabinet. Before long, the kitchen is thatched with remarks: "All the male Brethren are as bald as squashes." "When did the transfer from canal traffic to rail traffic hit upstate New York?" "Blizzard off the Great Lakes builds a snow hill for her escape."
When guests come and I'm mid-book, they know better than to ask nosy questions.
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OLIVER TWIST
It's been a while since I reread this favorite Dickens novel. I recall Fagin's band of ragamuffins is left rather less comfortable than Oliver, who gets to be reunited with his wealthy grandfather. So my working title might be ...
"Oliver Twisted." Does Fagin's company of beggars and thieves envy Oliver Twist his good fortune? Do they think he has sold out his urchin companions? Are there seeds of envy here? Do the poor boys conspire to take revenge on Oliver Twist for having abandoned them to their fates?
Is there a kidnapping -- by kids?
Fagin's band of boy thieves are true originals, whose grandchildren become the lost boys of Neverland in J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan." It's a compelling notion, the clan of parentless boys. They live in the interstices, in the gutters and sewers and canal cuttings. The Artful Dodger, who for all his cunning might have been the main character in the Dickens novel, can be given more to manage. ... The posse of gentlemen and police determined to rescue Oliver, the pests and vermin of the demimonde who would rather use him to their own advantage ...
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HANSEL & GRETEL
This surely has to be one of the darkest of the tales of Grimm. The story is grimly urgent: poverty, starvation, abandonment by one's own parents. And entrapment--what is the witch's gingerbread house but the most grotesque example of a treacherous stranger offering an innocent child some candy?
There's a good reason Walt Disney never did an adaptation of this most gruesome of nursery tales.
First thing I'd do is reverse the title. "Gretel & Hansel." Gretel should get top billing. She's the one with the wits to trick the witch into her own hot oven.
Secondly, I'd choose a setting that deviates from the Bavarian forests implied in the original. Since my accountants have explained that traveling to do research on a novel is tax deductible as a business expense, my novels have been set in exotic locales I wanted to visit anyway. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister takes place in Haarlem, the Netherlands; Lost in leafy Hampstead, north London; and Mirror Mirror in the sunniest hills of Tuscany and northern Umbria.
But while researching the latter, I made my first trip to Venice, and like Ruskin, Turner, Proust, Henry James, and Woody Allen before me, I have fallen in love with Venice.
So "Gretel & Hansel" might be a Venetian nightmare. Venice is close enough to German-speaking Switzerland to imagine children named Gretel and Hansel finding their way there...
The problem of abandoned children in the middle ages is well documented (John Boswell's "The Kindness of Strangers" will be a good research tool about this). Do I have a vague memory that there was a children's crusade, too? Maybe the witch is conscripting an entire army of unwilling child martyrs. In whose pay is she?
The gingerbread house won't be a real structure of candy. How unwieldy that would be, how unsanitary. Perhaps it's a theatrical set, something mounted on the bed of a cart. Or mounted on a gondola....with a ship anchored in the lagoon, to which the children are bundled, gorging on marzipan and... candy canes. Didn't the candy cane motif originate in the striped poles to which gondolas tied?
Maybe not "Gretel & Hansel". Maybe "The Gingerbread Gondola..."
Although my novels are often fantastic in concept, they always take into fact the "So what?" question. I loved "The Once and Future King" by T.H. White, not only because it was King Arthur and Guinevere, but because it was about topics worth considering: power and responsibility. (Might vs. right, as the book has it.) I've tried to organize my books around serious questions. "Wicked," far from being a camp novel, was an exploration into the nature of evil. "Oliver Twisted" might be concerned with the morality of retribution. After all, aren't our papers daily filled with retribution, and the fear thereof, and the endless violence it generates? Even a fantasy novel has to be topical.
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