We hear this manifesto shouted from the rooftops a lot lately. We hear women announcing to the world in songs, movies, and every other venue where they have a public platform, “I don’t need a prince to save me!”
This statement refers to the common theme from a bunch of ancient myths and tales. These stories typically end with the young woman either falling into a deep sleep or some other kind of misfortune. She can’t break out of this state until she receives the kiss of a prince. The kiss wakes her up, leads to them falling in love, and he marries her and carries her off to his kingdom where they live happily ever after.
We have to ask yourselves the obvious question here. Why did these tales stand the test of time so well if they’re based on a bunch of irrelevant nonsense? Why are we still teaching our children these stories even today in modern times if the stories have no value?
So let’s unpack what these stories mean and figure out whether we as women need a prince to save us or not.
For the sake of this study, we’re going to concentrate on three common fairy tales: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella. The first two tales do involve the heroine falling into a deep sleep from which only the prince’s kiss can save her. All three end with the prince rescuing the heroine from a situation she can’t get herself out of on her own. The prince falls in love with her, marries her, takes her back to the palace, and she becomes his queen.
We can decipher what these stories mean by looking at the other common elements each of these stories uses to convey its message.
Snow White and Cinderella both have evil stepmothers who are the architects of their stepdaughters’ downfall. The older women interfered with and held their stepdaughters back from achieving their destined greatness.
All three of these stories were rewritten by Charles Perrault based on even older stories that had been in common culture for thousands of years. Many of these original stories were collected by the Brothers Grimm. In these original stories, the evil, ill-meaning older woman who attacks and even tries to destroy the younger woman isn’t a stepmother at all. It’s the girl’s mother. Charles Perrault and others sanitized the stories to try to gloss over the girl’s own mother being her enemy.
Combine this imagery with trope of the girl falling into a deep sleep, being rescued by the prince, and ending up married as queen of the country. This gives us our clearest insight into what these stories are really about.
The end-goal of the girl’s development is adulthood, motherhood, and her ascendency to being the matriarch of future generations. She can only accomplish this by breaking out of the sleep of childhood.
The mother figure is in fact the greatest enemy of this process. In the case of Snow White, the evil stepmother gives Snow White a poison apple symbolic of the forbidden fruit that tempts the individual away from the righteous path they’re supposed to follow.
The stepmother’s interference led Snow White into unproductive interactions with the seven dwarves. These were immature men who distracted her from the true path she would have with her real relationship partner—the man who would help her build a mature, adult, responsible life with her own family and future dynasty.
Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on a spinning wheel. The spinning wheel has historically represented the passage of time. The Fates spin threads that become people’s individual lives. The Fates weave these threads into tapestries that become the stories of unfolding history.
This is not to say that every woman’s mother wants to keep her trapped in a never-ending cycle of childhood and never grow up or become independent.
The point of this theme is that the young woman has to break from her mother in order to grow up and become the matriarch in her own storyline and her own family line. The younger woman’s position as her mother’s daughter becomes the trap she has to escape in order to grow up into adulthood and become the queen of her own life.
The prince represents maturity, parenthood, adulthood, responsibility, and independence. The prince wakes the young woman from the slumber of endless childhood to the bigger calling of maturity, parenthood, and being a responsible adult who is actively working to build the world for the next generation.
Waking up, seeing the prince, falling in love with him, and marrying him represent falling in love with this new, bigger, more expanded life of adulthood. It places more demands on us. It asks more of us. It’s a much harder, more stressful path.
It’s also much more rewarding. We’re all biologically programmed to want to reproduce ourselves and that means taking responsibility for our children’s safety, care, and wellbeing. It means providing for them. It means building a world where they and our future generations can grow up and live fruitful lives.
So the truth is that we all really do need a prince to save us. The alternative is the perpetual sleep of endless childhood where we don’t take responsibility for anything. We don’t contribute anything meaningful to the world or the people around us.
The alternative is living our lives only for our own selfish pleasure, gain, and gratification.
Curiously, this is exactly what we’re seeing with the current generation of young people who don’t think they need a prince to save them. These people live their entire lives as overgrown children. They’re selfish, materialistic, totally lacking in the ability to delay gratification in any way, and completely disconnected from what it means to care about others.
This is why we see an entire generation of narcissists growing up who don’t think they need a prince to save them. These people grow up believing they can spend their lives on some kind of permanent vacation from all responsibility. They don’t think about leaving a legacy or having a positive impact.
It takes a herculean effort to break out of this state of endless, self-centered childhood. This is why adolescence is such a harrowing, stressful process for so many people. They’re leaving behind the safe, insulated world of childhood so they can wake up to the demands and possibilities of adulthood.
This is why adolescents so often have conflicts with their parents. Teens and young people have to break from their parents, at least partially, to discover who these young people really are separate from their parents. The young people have to cut the apron strings and forge their own path, their own identity, and their own future. They can’t do this under the shadow of their parents’ wings. The younger generation has to learn to fly on its own.
Responsibility and delayed gratification are the hallmarks of maturity and true adulthood. Those who don’t take responsibility—for themselves and others—those who can’t delay gratification as an investment in building something greater—these people are not truly adults. They’re children who’ve stopped growing and are now in the process of decaying while they’re still alive.
None of us wants that. Waking up might be painful, but it beats the hell out of the alternative, which is a form of waking death and a recipe for self-destruction and regret.
I hope this helped someone. God bless you all.
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