The Fair Angiola (Fairy tale)

Author: Traditional

Time Period: 1851 CE–1900 CE

Country or Culture: Italy; Western Europe

Genre: Fairy tale

Overview

“The Fair Angiola” is a traditional Italian tale not clearly attributable to any specific author, but a translation of the story can be found in American folklorist Thomas Frederick Crane’s Italian Popular Tales (1885); Crane ascribes his translation to a story collected by Swiss folklorist Laura Gozenbach (Crane 24). There are versions of the story from all over the world, with Italy, France, Germany, and England providing the most popular variations, and with the Grimm brothers’ “Rapunzel” as the story most often repeated. In the Aarne-Thompson folktale classification system, the story is identified as tale type 310, the maiden in the tower.

There are a number of shared qualities between the versions. For example, many versions of the tale include a main character who is named after the delicacy her mother craves while pregnant. The protagonists of Italian writer Giambattista Basile’s “Petrosinella” (1634) and French writer Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force’s “Persinette” (1698) are both named for parsley. “Rapunzel,” in the German stories by Frederick Schultz and the Grimm brothers, refers to cabbage or a type of lettuce. In each story, a child is promised to a witch, a sorceress, or an ogress as the consequence of a trespass against that evil figure. Another well-known commonality is the refrain asking the girl to let down her long golden tresses so the witch and later the prince can climb up to the tower where she is imprisoned; the lines “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair” (Zipes, Great Fairy Tale Tradition 491) have been imprinted in the hearts of listeners from their first time hearing the tale. Other customary elements of the story include magical objects, a pet dog or bird, and a love that survives a variety of tests and trials.

Archetypal criticism considers the way a specific story uses shared constructs to create meaning. Based on Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious,” this type of criticism looks at the ways stories from around the world may have similar characters, conventional plotlines, or communally symbolic objects. One of the most familiar archetypes is the hero journey, but numerical motifs can also provide easily understood expectations for the elements of a story.

The constructs of “The Fair Angiola” particularly can be analyzed on the basis of an archetypal motif of numbers, with the number three as central. Three female characters are central to the story: a mother, a witch, and a girl. Each woman is tempted into three wrongdoings or other actions, and each woman experiences three negative consequences as a result of her actions. Each woman also fits a specific archetypal character: a pregnant woman, a witch, and an innocent child. The love story itself focuses on the number three as well.

Summary

As a “Rapunzel” variant, the basic plotline of “My Fair Angiola” is familiar. There are, however, a few differences in this traditional Italian version of the story.

The story begins with seven women who are all craving jujubes, an Asian fruit, but the only place to find the fruit is in the witch’s garden. The witch’s garden is guarded by a talking donkey, so the women distract the donkey and then take as much of the fruit as they can carry. They do this repeatedly. After three days of noticing that her supply is disappearing, the witch hides herself in a hole to discover the thieves. One of the witch’s ears sticks out of her hiding place, and one of the women grabs it because she thinks it is a mushroom. The witch emerges from her hiding place to capture the culprits, but they flee so quickly that only one is caught. The woman pleads for her life, and the witch relents, requiring only that the woman give up her child when that child turns seven years old.

A daughter is born to this woman some time later, and the child is named Angiola. A year before her seventh birthday, Angiola begins schooling in the domestic arts. She walks past the witch’s garden on her way to school every day. Seeing the child and offering her fruit, the witch orders Angiola to remind her mother of the promise she had made years before. Angiola’s frightened mother has the child tell the witch that she has forgotten to give her mother the message, and this works as a distraction for a few days. Finally, the witch’s impatience becomes too great, and she bites the child’s finger as a threat. Angiola’s mother sadly tells her to return to the witch and stay with her.

The witch takes the child away and locks her in a tower without a door, only a window. She climbs Angiola’s hair like a ladder when she comes to visit. This living arrangement continues until Angiola matures into a beautiful young woman and is discovered by a prince who is hunting in the forest that surrounds her tower. After observing the witch visit the girl, the prince convinces Angiola to lower her hair and pull him up into her room.

The prince persuades Angiola to run away with him, but she must find a way to escape without the witch’s notice. Since all of the furnishings in the tower are alive, she feeds them so they will not reveal her departure, but she misses a broom. On the way out of her prison, the girl steals three magic balls of yarn. The witch’s dog also goes with the couple out of loyalty to Angiola.

The witch discovers Angiola’s absence and learns from the broom where her ward has gone. When the witch chases the couple, her own magic is used against her. Angiola drops one ball of yarn, and it becomes a mound of soap the witch must climb over; the second becomes a mountain of nails; and the third becomes a raging river. Though the witch conquers the first two obstacles, the torrent is too much for her. Angiola thus escapes, but the witch issues a curse giving Angiola a dog’s face.

Angiola’s prince ensconces her in a cottage in the woods near his parents and visits her there until the curse can be broken. The girl is crushed because the prince cannot marry her for fear of his parents’ reaction to her dog’s face. Finally, the dog that had fled with Angiola and the prince is so moved to pity that he returns to the witch to beg her for mercy. The dog’s begging and caressing eventually have their intended effect, and the witch forgives the girl, giving the dog the antidote to the curse. The enchantment lifts, leaving Angiola even more lovely than before. The king and queen consent to the marriage and all live “happy and contented” (Crane 30).

So the witch took the fair Angiola with her and led her away to a tower which had no door and but one small window. There Angiola lived with the witch, who treated her very kindly, for she loved her as her own child. When the witch came home after her excursions, she stood under the window and cried: “Angiola, fair Angiola, let down your pretty tresses and pull me up!”

“The Fair Angiola”

Bibliography

Ashliman, D. L. Folk and Fairy Tales: A Handbook. Westport: Greenwood, 2004. Print.

Crane, Thomas Frederick. Italian Popular Tales. London: Macmillan, 1885. Print.

Koertge, Ron. Lies, Knives and Girls in Red Dresses. Somerville: Candlewick, 2012. Print.

Leeming, David Adams, and Marion Sader, eds. Storytelling Encyclopedia: Historical, Cultural, and Multiethnic Approaches to Oral Traditions around the World. Phoenix: Oryz, 1997. Print.

Pitrè, Guiseppe. “The Old Woman in the Garden.” The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè. Vol. 1. New York: Routledge, 2009. 123–27. Print.

“Rapunzel.” Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre. Prod. Shelley Duvall. Perf. Shelley Duvall, Jeff Bridges, and Gena Rowlands. Koch Vision, 2008. DVD.

Tangled. Dir. Nathan Greno and Byron Howard. Perf. Mandy Moore and Zachary Levi. Disney, 2010. DVD.

Zipes, Jack, ed. The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. New York: Norton, 2001. Print.

---. The Irresistable Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. Print.