Puss in Boots: Acknowledging the Censorship of Violent, Sexual Language

While I am certainly familiar with the name Puss in Boots and Antonia Banderas's role in Shrek, the origins and history of this character and fairy tale of the same name are wholly foreign to me. In "The Poor Miller’s Boy and the Cat," the Brothers Grimm 1812 edition of this classic fairy tale, a miller's apprentice is sent out to find a valuable horse. While searching, this boy is enlisted to work for a tabby cat for seven years; the prize for this work is "a really fine-looking horse ... that is more beautiful than anything you have ever seen" (347-348). This young miller's assistant works tirelessly for seven years and is ultimately rewarded, not with the horse, but with the hand of the cat-turned- princess in marriage. As a break from the traditional narrative instituted by Giovanni Francesco Straparola in 1550, the Brothers Grimm present a story wherein the tabby cat is the princess by which the miller's assistant finds economic salvation. The more traditional interpretations follow a young miller's assistant who solicits aid from a conniving feline in boots in order to win the heart of a princess; the Brothers Grimm break from this more sexualized tradition. In her article "Sex and Violence: The Hard Core of Fairy Tales," Maria Tatar notes that "when it came to passages colored by sexual details or to plots based on Oedipal conflicts, Wilhelm Grimm exhibits extraordinary editorial zeal. Over the years, he systematically purged the collection of references to sexuality" (452).

Angela Carter, in keeping with the more traditional, complex and sexualized nature of the Puss in Boots fairy tale, reinvents this narrative in her own "Puss-in-Boots." In her reimagination of this classic tale, Carter injects that which Wilhelm censored: sexuality and violence. This violent and sexual language is most noticeable when Signor Furioso and Signora Panteleone are consummating their love and Puss in Boots is commanded to "'mimic the murder of rats, Puss! Mask the music of Venus [sex] with the clamour of Diana [the hunt]!'" (78). Here Carter, as a revisitation of the fairy tale's older elements, uses violent language as a mirror for sexual intercourse. Violence is, for Signor Furioso, the necessary action needed to deceitfully conceal the clamour of adulterous sex. Carter, in stark contrast to the Brothers Grimm, presents the tale in an unedited, truer form.

The question that one must raise following an analysis of edited and unedited folk tales is: which is more appropriate for a child? Bruno Bettelheim, in his article "The Struggle for Meaning," asserts that "nothing can be as enriching and satisfying to child and adult alike as the folk fairy tale" (270). He continues to acknowledge that "[the child's] life is often bewildering to him, [because of this] the child needs even more to be given the chance to understand himself in this complex world with which he must learn to cope" (270). Bettelheim seems to believe that the complex nature of fairy tales, in their unedited forms, serve as the best form of entertainment and learning for children and their parents. Following this logic, Angela Carter's more worldly and true-to-form version of Puss in Boots trumps Wilhelm's edition. I, however, remain hesitant to provide entertainment to my children that, like Carter's edition, promote deception, infidelity, and murder. When it comes to finding stories and lessons for my [future] children, I much prefer the moral given in Wilhelm's "The Poor Miller’s Boy and the Cat": "don't let people tell you that a simpleton will never amount to anything in life" (353).