Rumpelstiltskin Revisited

In June 2008, I gave my very first graduation address to the educational community of Malabar RC Primary School. I decided to tell a story—a simple fairy tale, “Rumpeltstiltskin.” I hoped, though, to challenge them to think more critically about what this story about a poor miller’s daughter, whose father boasted to the King that she could spin straw into gold, might really be about, and draw out some implications for how they might choose to live their lives.

As I told the audience, typically, this story is read to children as a warning against boasting, and was meant as a cautionary tale for young women. The little man, Rumpelstiltskin, is cast as a villain or demon for wanting a human child and for having what is seen as unnatural abilities—alchemy—the ability to turn base material (straw) into something of value (gold). But reading the story in this way is easy; it fits with the way many people see and construct the worlds in which they choose to live—worlds that often imprison their imaginations as well as their bodies and spirits. Our challenge in this century is to learn to read the stories that we have received in our childhood differently, to ask new and more challenging questions, and to seek answers that are not going to be found in textbooks. Another challenge is to write new stories—better, more hopeful stories. I sought to illustrate this in the remainder of the address.

Consider two questions about this story: 1) Who acts ethically? and 2) What are the values espoused? These are not questions about right or wrong, about rules, or about villains or demons. They are not about picking a character to follow but about learning about and from each character.

Let’s start with the miller, whose boastfulness and pride place his daughter in harm’s way. Does he act ethically? He is irresponsible with his daughter’s reputation and this irresponsibility places her at risk of being taken advantage of by the King, the symbol of nobility and justice. Does the King act ethically? Or does his greed drive him to the very brink of committing murder? And what of the miller’s daughter? She has the power to put a stop to the lie initiated by her father. However, she chooses to enter into an arrangement with the little man whose name she does not even know, but who promises and delivers what she is unable to do. She becomes indebted, reaps the rewards of her deceit, and places her future, and that of her child, at risk. Through her thoughtless and self-preserving actions, she promises away her future and that of the kingdom. She later reneges on this promise.

All three are complicit. All three have the power at every instant to transform the situation into one where their actions can create opportunities for others to acknowledge their responsibilities to each other and act more ethically. The miller can go to the King and admit his lie; the King can be satisfied with less gold and choose not to kill the miller’s daughter; the daughter can admit that she is unable to do what is asked of her. All of these require courage and strength of character. Sadly, in this story, and in those we hear, read, and enact most commonly today, these do not appear to be virtues that are widely practised. Instead, the values exhibited are boastfulness, deceit, greed, thoughtlessness, forgetfulness, and cowardice.

Rumpeltstiltskin seems less a villain now and more a victim. His skills have been used and he does not receive the agreed upon payment. He offers several opportunities for the daughter to take responsibility for what she can and cannot do, and to face any consequences. He offers her opportunities to act ethically and responsibly towards herself and the King. He pities her, but he cannot choose for her; it is she who chooses to keep silent and benefit from the lie, fraudulently taking credit for what is not her work.

The educable moment always presents a gift – the opportunity for the enactment of an ethical practice. It presents opportunities to choose and model how to be unconditionally responsible for another and so build an ethically responsible society. In education, politics, and the public service, we are blessed every day to be offered opportunities to come clean, to take up our responsibilities, and face the consequences courageously. Sadly, many, following the examples of the King, the miller, and his daughter, choose not to do so.

Apart from an allegory of moral virtue and the necessary conditions for building an ethical society, what else might Rumpelstiltskin be about? Consider the central metaphor of the story, alchemy, the spinning of straw into gold. A substance that has many domestic and indigenous uses, but which does not have high economic value, is converted, on a large scale, into one with a more limited set of uses. For a King, these uses would include ornamentation, commerce, and the financing of political powows, military or industrial campaigns. This transubstantiation can be read as a metaphor for our (mis)use of nature to create wealth. The King seems unconcerned with how his wealth is created and what has to be promised or must be traded in order to pay for the currency of development and measures of prosperity. This is in sharp contrast to Rumpeltstiltskin’s values, which have an ecological, biophilic, flavour as he proclaims to the Miller’s daughter who tries to buy her way out of her promise, that something alive is dearer to him than all the treasures in the world.

Economic prosperity can buy a certain type of life. However, there is no value that can be placed on life itself and we are fast running out of life-sustaining spaces. Do we care where our food, toys, and clothes come from and where they will go when we are finished with them? Do we care how they come to be available to us? Do we teach those for whom we are responsible how to care for that which gives life, or are we only concerned with possessing, like the King, more and more at any cost? In this area, too, we have opportunities to act more responsibly than we have been and to cease from creating more and more of what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman refers to as Wasted Lives – the inevitable and disastrous consequences of our modern appetites – marked by fear, anxiety, deprivation, un-belonging and homelessness.

There is also the leitmotif of the power of one’s name and the power that other people have in naming us. Words and labels can be cages placed around us, restricting physical and psychological mobility or they can be heralds that go before us proclaiming our virtues and guiding our vision. An exercise I use with teenagers is to ask them, If your life were to be summarized in one word, what would that one word be? From a group of Form 5 Holy Faith Convent students at a recent retreat, I got examples like, “Love,” “Friend,” “Compassionate,” and “Generous.” How truly wonderful if one’s entire life could be oriented by and towards words such as these. On another occasion, I placed it before a group of Form 3 students of Fatima College, in a context where their Principal had just labelled the entire class “a Shame.” As he buffed them, re-naming them as “shameful,” I could see the defiance in these young men’s eyes grow as the playful light of youth left to be replaced by a mature anger. After he left, I implored them to work so that some other word, not shame, would define their lives. I saw something change in their eyes and body language—it looked like the beginning of sorrow.

Through re-naming we sometimes position others as less than human or self, an action that continues to underlie our justifications for committing atrocities (slavery, genocide, terracide) against other living beings. We must be very careful whom and how we name, and who we allow to name us in this century. We must not forget the painful lessons of human history.

As I ended, I placed the following question before the students, which I now place before us all, What is the word, the name by which you wish to be called, the name that is a true reflection of the life and person that you are and want to be? On that day, I proudly joined with their families in welcoming those students as Graduates, and reminded them that in the years to come it would be they who would decide what they would be called by their actions/inactions. They alone would determine whether they would create a wasted life or a life of waste for themselves. “Remember,” I told them, “you have the power at every instant to change the direction and course of your life and that of others. You have the power to author a better world. Choose wisely and responsibly.”