Old Fairy Tale Spawns New Take on Royalty

“There are two kinds of women: those who marry princes and those who marry frogs. The frogs never become princes, but it is an acknowledged fact that a prince may very well, in the course of an ordinary marriage, gradually, at first almost imperceptibly, turn into a frog. Happy the woman who after 25 years still wakes up beside the prince she fell in love with.”

Thus opens the poet Stephen Mitchell’s retelling of the fairy tale “The Frog Prince.” Although the book is subtitled “A Parable of Love and Transformation,” the description is misleading. Parables don’t come with explanations, and Mitchell’s book is little but footnotes to the Condensed Version.

The Condensed Version, as Mitchell’s narrator calls the fairy tale we first heard as children, speaks very simply about a princess who drops her favorite golden ball down a well. A talking frog overhears her weeping and offers to retrieve the ball, on one condition: “You must agree to love me and take me as your best friend and let me eat from your plate and drink from your cup and sleep in your bed.” She agrees, and sets the frog by her plate, then by her cup and finally, at bedtime, places him on her pillow. But at the moment the frog’s clammy skin touches her cheek, visceral disgust quite overwhelms her. She picks up the frog and throws him against the wall. It is at that moment that the fairy-tale transformation occurs, and the frog turns into a prince.

The transformation of the Condensed Version into Mitchell’s entertainment is effected primarily by tossing the fairy tale against a 20th century wall. We get the history of princesses, knowing as we do that entropy has brought our late-millennial Carolines of Monaco and Dianas of Wales to the brink of royal disintegration. Mitchell’s timeline sets these intelligent and unhappy women as close evolutionary cousins to the princess. The frog is treated to a similarly rigorous historical placement, with an appreciation of his poetic and musical place going all the way back to Aristophanes.

In short sections, Mitchell wields these two weapons of historicity and philosophy to comment on many aspects of the Condensed Version of the Frog Prince, from the reasons for the frog’s altruistic love for the princess and his self-serving deal to the nature of promises, those essential mechanisms of all fairy tales. It is only a short step from the pact of the promise to the pact of the story, the trust that the reader puts in the storyteller. Or as Mitchell puts it: “The Frog was the only one who could retrieve the golden ball because he was the only one who could descend into the well. . . . The art of diving was still unknown because it had not yet been imported from India. Therefore the Frog was the only one who could retrieve the golden ball. Q.E.D.”

Although the Condensed Version suggests that it was the placing of the frog on the pillow that caused the metamorphosis into the Prince, an inquiring reader might wonder why the princess flung the peaceful amphibian against the wall. Mitchell interprets the violence as the cause of the change, offering a complicated quasi-mystical moral: “[If] our heroine had been a kinder, gentler princess, she would have wound up with nothing but a pet frog.” And indeed, Tao and Lao Tzu make more than an occasional appearance in Mitchell’s Decondensed Version.

At its least interesting, “The Frog Prince” hops along with a Richard Brautiganian folksiness. At its more compelling, Mitchell’s brew tastes of the cheek and tongue of Rocky and Bullwinkle’s Fractured Fairy Tales or the more recent Faerie Tale Theatre. One can imagine Shelley Duvall cast as the princess’ mother, at table with her future son-in-law, saying: “Of course, I would have wished for someone a bit larger, a bit less--green.” A similarly wistful wish might be made for Mitchell’s book, to transform our limpid chuckles into full-throated croaks of pleasure.