Penta With Maimed Hands

Just because you wear this, doesn't mean you're wise.

 
This week's fairy tale comes to us from Italy. Penta With Maimed Hands is a story about one woman's determination not to marry her brother.

I'm not sure who advised the king to marry his sister, but clearly that person and the king needed to be relieved from their duties for awhile. Penta, who was not crazy, refused her brother's advances. While it is incredible that she had her hands cut off to try to get her brother to stop wooing her, I always get stuck on that. Why did her brother think her hands were her best feature? I don't think I've ever heard a guy say that about a woman. Maybe I'm just not talking to the right guys.

Whatever the reason for the king's fixation, once Penta had her hands cut off, her brother threw her out to sea. Can you imagine how much it must have hurt when salt water got in the wounds on her wrists? This poor woman goes through all kinds of suffering because her brother wants to commit incest.

This story, like many other fairy tales, can be seen as two women pitted against each other. Nuccia is convinced that her husband is going to cheat on her with this beautiful, handless woman. Because of this initial distrust, Nuccia goes on to try to get Penta killed, even after Penta is married to someone else far away from the fisherman. Penta, of course, doesn't know that she got a false message from her husband, or that Nuccia was the one who sent it, so it's not a very fair contest. Fortunately for Penta, she is good and pretty so she wins out in the end.

Throughout this story, the only good woman is dead or maimed. Penta, obviously, is good. The king's first wife, who ordered her husband to marry this strange woman without hands, was good. All the better for the story because she died, I suppose. Otherwise, Penta couldn't have been a queen. Nuccia is the only woman we see who is physically whole and she is unnecessarily vicious.

The moral of this story would have to be either to be able to learn to do everything with your feet after you've had to order your own hands cut off, or to have your brother's mental health checked regularly.