Kate Forsyth vividly recalls how childhood illness made books a kind of magical escape from present pain, and her lifelong fascination for Rapunzel - which culminated in her retelling the classic tale her own way.
I was only a child when I faced death for the first time.
Aged just two years and four months old, I was savaged by my father’s doberman pinscher in the back garden of our home in the Artarmon veterinary hospital. I was tossed like a rag doll, my ear was torn from my head and the dog’s fangs penetrated straight through the thin bone of my skull and into the brain. My left eye was missed by a fraction of a millimetre.
Somehow my mother managed to wrest me from the dog’s jaws. She wrapped me in towels and ran for help, my four-year-old sister Belinda running sobbing beside her. A young man driving down the Pacific Highway stopped and picked her up. At North Shore Hospital, when the nurse unwound the bloody towels from around my head, he fainted.
My mother was told to prepare herself. I was unlikely to live.
Somehow they patched me together again. My ear was sewn back on, albeit a little crooked. More than two hundred stitches covered my head and face. I must have looked like a tiny Frankenstein’s monster.
I did not wake up. My temperature climbed higher and higher, and still I lay unwaking, like a cursed princess. No amount of kisses roused me.
Ten days after the accident, I was gripped by relentless fever, uttering constant high cries, red and floppy as a skinned rabbit. Still no one could wake me. The doctors told my mother I had bacterial meningitis. Think of it as another savage dog, a crazed wolf, pinning me down with its heavy paw. No drugs could release me from its jaws. Prepare yourself, she was told. Few children survive meningitis.
I lay in ice like a glass coffin. I was white and red and black. I had gone away from this world, gone somewhere no one could reach me.
Days passed and still my fever climbed. My small body convulsed.
It’s worse than meningitis, the doctors said. It’s meningoencephalitis. A wild whirling word, full of holes and spikes. Other words came. Seizures. Toxic. Fatal. I heard none of them.
The doctors wanted to drill a hole in my skull to help drain away the infection sinking its claws into my brain. My mother would not let them. Come back, she said to me. Please come back.
The fever broke. Twenty days after the dog attack, I opened one eye (the other was lost inside a bruised mess of swelling and stitches.) I swallowed some milk. I spoke. A week later I was allowed to go home.
It was not the last time that I would outface death.
The dog’s fang had destroyed my tear duct. From the age of three years to the age of eleven, I was in and out of hospital with acute infections and dangerously high temperatures. I could hear the fever coming, a rattling roaring locomotion rushing upon me. I could feel it in my skin. Whitecaps of flame and frost. My body undulating, shrinking, stretching. Fingers like rainclouds. Whirling embers in my eyes. Mocking demonic faces.
I knew the hideous.
Flashes of memory are all that remain to me.
Sitting with my head under a towel, breathing in boiling steam.
A young doctor piercing the abscess with a needle. Screaming with pain.
The taste of pus.
Counting backwards from ten as I sink beneath the anaesthetic. Again. And again.
Proudly telling the nurse that I was very good at spelling, that I could spell anything! Her response: Spell diarrhoea.
My sister and brother coming to visit and telling me, in high excitement, that they were on their way to the Sydney Easter Show.
Lying in bed listening for the sound of the ding that meant the lift had arrived. It seemed as if the ding was hardly ever for me.
Some people came to visit me but their little girl had to be taken outside as she would not stop screaming at the sight of me.
Staring for hours out the one small dirty window. All I could see was a green hill crested with an immense old tree and what looked like a castle. I used to imagine galloping up that green hill on the back of a white horse that would fling out its great wings, leap into the air, and take me away.
Sometimes I would be well enough to get out of bed. I would walk around and around the corridors in my nightie, dragging my drip trolley with me. I’d look in all the doorways at the old, sick people with patches over their eyes. It was an old hospital. At one point the floor sloped downwards. I’d hop on my drip trolley and ride it down the slope. It was the most fun I could have – three seconds of wildness and freedom.
Stories, my only source of sunshine, my only solace. I would read all day and as late into the night as the nurses would let me. I dreaded the light being turned off, I dreaded the empty hours of the night. Once my book was taken away from me, all I could do was lie there in pain, trying to imagine myself back in its pages. Stories were escape. Stories were magic.
One day, when I was seven, my mother brought me a copy of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. The stories inside were full of wonder and peril and beauty and strangeness. Some made me laugh; others made me yearn to travel far, far away to lands of shadowy forests and towers hidden behind thorns; one or two made me shiver and creep into the sheltering tent of my white hospital blanket. All would come to haunt my imagination.
I read that book so many times the spine broke, pages falling out like white feathers. Of all the tales, it was Rapunzel that fascinated me the most. She too was locked away from the world against her will. She too was lonely and afraid. Her tears healed the eyes of the blinded prince, as I so desperately longed to be healed. The uncanny parallels between Rapunzel and my life seemed to have some kind of potent meaning. I told myself: One day I too shall escape. One day I too shall be healed.
In time, of course, I was.
At the age of eleven, I became the first Australian to have a successful implantation of an artificial tear duct. A small glass tube, called a Jones tube, was inserted beside my eye, draining fluids down the back of my throat. It needs to be cleared out twice a day and often gets blocked, meaning more steam baths and more antibiotics. Although it does need to be replaced, meaning another trip to hospital, this happens only every five to ten years, instead of every few months.
So I too escaped my tower, my tears healed.
My fascination with Rapunzel – and with its key motifs of the tower, the impossibly long hair, and the healing tears – began in that cold white hospital room. In my novels, the themes of imprisonment and escape, wounding and redemption, appear again and again. Towers are a common motif, as is hair as a symbol of life and renewal (also roses and thorns, blindness and healing, and winged people and creatures).
As I grew up, I used to wonder about the story. Why did the witch lock Rapunzel away? Why didn’t the prince bring Rapunzel a rope? Did she ever find her true parents again? I was troubled by the lacunae in the story, the gaps and holes and tatters. I began to cobble these holes together in my mind, weaving a new cloth of fancy.
At last I knew I had to write my own retelling of Rapunzel. Not as a children’s book, I thought. It is a story about sexual desire and obsession and cruelty. It had to be a novel for adults. I also did not want to write it as an otherworldly fantasy. I wanted to capture the charge of terror and despair that young girl must have felt. I wanted to remind readers that women have been locked up for centuries against their wills in this world.
Our world.
So I decided to set Bitter Greens (Random House Australia, 2012), my Rapunzel retelling, in a real place at a real time. This decision meant I could not use magic to explain all the mysteries in the story – the tower without a door or a stair, the golden fathoms of her hair, the tears that heal the prince’s eyes…my imagination caught fire.
But where and when would I set my story? I began to look at the historical roots of the tale, to find earlier versions of the story that might help me.
That was how I stumbled across the fascinating life story of Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force, the woman who wrote the tale as it is best known. She wrote her story, Persinette, while locked away in a convent by Louis XIV, the Sun King, after outraging the royal court with her antics, which included dressing up as a dancing bear to gain access to her young lover. I was enchanted by this story. She was my kind of woman. And the more I found out about her, the more I realised what a gift her life was for a novelist. Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force is one of the most fascinating women ever forgotten by history.
Initially I had planned to use her life as a framing device around the main body of the novel, the retelling of the fairy tale. Charlotte-Rose would have none of that, however. She insisted her tale be the primary narrative thread, and her voice would not let me be until I did as I was told.
La Force wrote Persinette while locked up within the high walls of the convent. It was published in a collection of other tales in 1697, the same year as Charles Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose and the Baroness d’Aulnoy’s Tales of Fairies. It sold so well (along with a series of scandalous ‘secret histories’ of famous people) that she was eventually able to buy her way free of the convent and live the life she had always wanted in Paris. The final line of Bitter Greens is: It was by telling stories that I would save myself.
This is an extract from ‘Stories as Salvation’ by Kate Forsyth, first published in Griffith Review 42: Once Upon a Time in Oz, a look at folk tales and fairytales in Australia.