Robin Redbreast

Robin Redbreast
Birds can represent the fluttering, darting thoughts of intuition. This is why little birds helped Cinderella help herself.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Cinderella #321 Gor!The Tale of Miggery Sow (Di Camillo,K.)


Cinderella #321 Gor!The Tale of Miggery Sow
 (Di Camillo, K.)
Illustration by
Ering, T.B.
Once upon a time, there lived an unfortunate girl named Miggery Sow. She had been "born into this world many years before the mouse Despereaux and the rat Chiaroscuro, a girl born far from the castle, a girl named for her father's prize-winning pig."  The poor little thing was only six when "her mother, holding tightly onto Mig's hand and staring directly into Mig's eyes, died." Though the girl cried and begged her mother not to die, saying, "But I want you to stay here."her mother used her last breath to answer,"You want. Ah, child. What does it matter what you are wanting?" Then she died. On the very next market day, Mig's father took her town and "sold his daughter into service for a handful of ciggarettes, a red tablecloth, and a hen." So Mig had to go and live with a mean man and clean and cook for him, and call him Uncle. When she screamed and clutched at him, he simply "untangled her fingers from the cloth and turned her in the direction of the man who had bought her. As for what happens next, and how her story intersects with that of the Princess Pea (whose mother has died abruptly as well, from the shock of finding the rat, Chiarscuro, in her soup. That  story intersects with Mig's.)  An unexpected consequence of the Queen's death by soup was that the King outlawed broth, consommé and cream of anything. When soldier's went door to door confiscating soup spoons and tureens, they came to find Uncle and Mig. His foolish protest, that next, the King would be "wanting his sheep and his girl, seeing as those are the only possessions" which remained to him, set Mig free. Sort of, anyway. For the soldier brought her along to the palace kitchen, where she went to work as a drudge. Thus, she became acquainted with the princess, and her dream of transforming into one born.  Unbeknownst to her, there was someone else very close to her in the palace as well, deep in the dungeons. This was her father. Fortune would have it that the rat, named "Roscuro, reader, told the princess about the prisoner who had once owned a red tablecloth, and the princess" let him out. There he found his daughter, Miggery. She did not, "as you might have guessed, get to be a princess. But her father, to atone for what he had done, treated her like one for the rest of his days."
From: Di Camillo, K. (2003) The Tale of Despereaux being the story of a mouse, a pincess, some soup, and a spool of thread. MA: Candlewick Press. Winner of the John Newbery Medal