50 pages • 1 hour read
Shea ErnshawLong Live the Pumpkin Queen: Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Fairy Tale Princess as a Coming-of-Age Story
The archetypal Maiden’s story arc is a version of the coming-of-age narrative most commonly seen in fairy tales featuring girls and young women. It has several distinct features, most of which are present in Long Live the Pumpkin Queen:
1. A girl or young woman has outgrown childhood and needs to leave her family and become her own person. Her father is either weak or absent. She is confronted by a devouring mother—either an overprotective mother who tries to prevent her from becoming an adult or a wicked stepmother who confines the girl to a prescribed role. Both kinds of devouring mothers force the maiden to subvert her own will to others, preventing her from becoming her own person.
In Sally’s case, the devouring mother is represented by Doctor Finkelstein, who claims to have created her. In actuality, he kidnapped her at the age of 12—just when she was beginning to become a woman—and confined her to the role of servant/child. Later, Sally encounters the too-good mother in the form of Greta, who wants Sally to abandon her husband and kingdom and remain in her childhood home, in the very room that was hers in her childhood.
2. The maiden is menaced by a predator (representing fear) that attempts to prevent her from reaching her full potential. Sally fears she will be unable to fulfill her role as queen of Halloween Town. Later, her fear is made manifest in the form of the Sandman. Initially, the Sandman seems to offer a world free of the demands of other people, but Sally soon realizes that the world is intolerable.
3. The maiden escapes or is forced out of her childhood role and encounters challenges that she must overcome to assume an adult role in which she commands herself and her environment. Sally wanders in the “wilderness” of the holiday worlds, seeking help or guidance.
4. The maiden seizes her power and assumes her new role. Sally realizes she has the power to defeat the Sandman. She rejects the stifling protection of her parents. She declares herself Queen of Halloween Town and insists on returning home to confront her fear, personified by the Sandman.
5. The maiden, now a queen, renews the kingdom and banishes the forces that constrain her. Sally wakes her husband and her subjects, and Doctor Finkelstein is banished from Halloween Town.
Sally's story is compelling because it meets the criteria of an archetypal maiden coming-of-age tale. Thus, it satisfies the reader’s sense of completeness while still having the range to explore Sally as an individual in her unique situation.
Into the Woods as a Metaphor for Chaos, Change, and Transformation
Woods play a pivotal role in the story. Woods in fairy tales represent chaos, the unknown, and transformation. Protagonists enter the woods when they want to (or are forced to) change their circumstances. Through danger, adventure, and self-reflection, protagonists confront their innermost fears and anxieties, as Sally does when she confronts her fear that she cannot be the queen the people of Halloween Town expect her to be. Sally must pass through the woods to reach the doors to the other holiday towns. She must go deeper into those woods, into the wilder, darker parts, to find the door to the world she came from and discover who she is.
Change has the potential to disrupt the stability of a community. When children leave home and become independent adults, they develop the potential to change the status quo. Consequently, parents in fairy tales often discourage children from entering the woods, warning them of dangers and advising them to stay on the path if they must go in.
However, if young people never leave the path, they never get past the limiting expectations of community and family to become their own people. Sally encounters this problem in St. Patrick’s Town, where every path she tries brings her back to her starting point. She must leave the path to reach her destination just as she had to go deeper into the trackless woods to find the door leading back to her origin.
Despite the risks to stability, communities need young people to step outside boundaries. Without change and chaos, there is no progress and innovation. It is only through challenging the status quo that society can evolve and develop new ideas and solutions. Dream Town, for example, has been cut off from the woods for so long that they have stagnated. When confronted with an outside threat, they can see only one potential response: isolating themselves more aggressively, further cutting themselves off from the potential for change or transformation.
It takes Sally and her outside perspective to see alternate solutions, and unlike her parents’ solution, hers genuinely solves the problem for everyone in all the worlds rather than merely walling it off from Dream Town. In fact, by walling themselves off, the residents of Dream Town have robbed themselves of their entire meaning and purpose. They can study sleep for the rest of eternity, but their knowledge will never be useful to the human world.
Change is essential for the individual to grow and the community to adapt to changes in the outer world. It is only by periodically entering the woods that the individual can reach their full potential, and only through challenging established norms can society evolve and develop new ideas and solutions.
Combining The Maiden’s Coming-Of-Age with the Hero’s Quest
Although unmistakably a coming-of-age story, Sally’s adventure also takes the form of the archetypal hero’s quest. Traditionally, in female-focused fairy tales, the task of the female protagonist represents an internal psychological transition. As such, the protagonist usually takes an outwardly passive role, being thrust into perilous situations that she is unready to deal with until she incorporates the more active traits of adulthood. Those traits are usually represented by a “rescuing” prince who represents the maiden’s own incorporation of action and agency.
However, that apparently passive role of the maiden is objectionable to a modern sensibility, which sees women as inherently more active participants in life and society. Consequently, in Long Live the Pumpkin Queen, the author mingles the elements of the hero’s quest and the maiden’s coming-of-age. While the maiden’s task is to establish her identity, the hero’s goal is to secure the kingdom against threats.
The quest narrative contains several essential elements: a call to adventure, a refusal of the call, an acceptance of the call and crossing of a threshold, tests, trials, and allies, an approach to the inmost cave, and seizing the prize that will enable the hero to conquer the threats to the kingdom.
Sally’s discovery of her kingdom asleep and threatened by an outside force represents the call to adventure, which she refuses by closing and blocking the door to the world from which the Sandman came. Sally, however, still needs (or believes she needs) help from someone wiser and more powerful than herself. She decides to turn first to Queen Ruby, who is the only other queen she knows. Her decision to step across the threshold into Valentine Town symbolizes her acceptance of the call.
Sally proceeds through several tests and trials, trying and repeatedly failing to find an ally to help her. In the process, she learns that she must leave the known path to fulfill her quest, and only then does she learn the nature of the threat to her kingdom; armed with that knowledge, she recognizes that she has no choice but to enter the cave if she wants to find a weapon against the Sandman. Entering the inmost cave, she overcomes the forces that would keep her there and seizes the weapons that will enable her to secure her kingdom. She returns home with her new knowledge and overcomes the threat.
In some scenes, the stages of Sally’s coming-of-age overlap with those of the quest; in others, they occur separately, but the story arcs are not synonymous and have different structures, goals, and outcomes.
