Before continuing on with this analysis of the prince, however, it will be useful to briefly examine Rapunzel's reaction to him, because it complicates the story and provides some insight into the later scene of the prince's (possible) attempted suicide.
Rapunzel decides to marry the prince because she thinks "he will love me more than old Dame Gothel [the enchantress] does," somewhat unaware that the enchantress is incapable of love in any usual sense (Grimm & Grimm 1857). (The inclusion of the enchantress' name for the first time may be seen as the side-effect of eros' influence; with the arrival of the prince, even the enchantress is forced to lose some of her anonymity.) However, Rapunzel fails to realize this, and this failure is what causes her to stumble just before escaping, thus precluding the fulfillment of eros' goals in the story and prolonging her time spent entrapped by the influence of thanatos. As "her eyes had never yet beheld" a man, and mistakenly believing she has felt the influence of eros in her time with the enchantress, Rapunzel is unprepared for its effects, one of which is to precipitate such curiosity and overconfidence that she ends up revealing her secret trysts to the enchantress, asking "tell me, Dame Gothel, how it happens that you are so much heavier for me to draw up than the young king's son -- he is with me in a moment." In turn, the enchantress squirrels her away to desert and then remains to confront the prince. This may further be explained by what some post-Freudian theorists have called "the process of 'binding'," by which they mean that "binding is the central task of Thanatos" because it represents the reductive drive to bind and fix meaning and attention over the course of development (Kristiansen & Opdal 495). In this case, thanatos' effects have bound Rapunzel to the enchantress in opposition to her erotic drive to flee to be with the prince.
At this point in the text a kind of rupture occurs, because the story continues in its present location even though Rapunzel has been taken elsewhere. One may interpret this momentary lag as the ultimate confrontation between eros and thanatos, necessarily conducted at the site of their initial conflict but without the generative psyche (Rapunzel's) around which they have been circling throughout the story. Here the key difference between eros and thanatos is revealed, because the prince, without Rapunzel, is rendered impotent. Essentially, for its enactment, eros requires at least two people, not only for its most base realization in the act of sex but for any interpretation of the word.
Put another way, eros represents the relationship between two terms, whereas thanatos can be considered as both one term and no terms, because at least for human psychology and meaning-making, they might as well be the same. If meaning, or eros, is the relationship between two terms (for instance, the meaning of the sound "word" is actually the connection and interplay between the sound "word" and the idea it represents), then eros without the second term must necessarily succumb to thanatos; thus the prince without Rapunzel loses the vitality arisen in him by Rapunzel's song, and so "in his despair he leapt down from the tower," escaping "with his life, but the thorns into which he fell pierced his eyes" (Grimm & Grimm 1857).
One may suppose that the prince escapes with his life because as the representative of eros within the story he cannot never fully succumbs to thanatos, but his leap from the tower demonstrates how thanatos represents a lack of something rather than strictly a thing itself (thus, the enchantress' appearance at Rapunzel's birth brings with it a lack of a child for her parents as well as the lack of the parents in the rest of the story). Even the aftereffects of the prince's encounter with the enchantress represents a lack, as does the enchantress' actions against Rapunzel; his vision is taken away by the thorns, and Rapunzel's hair is cut off, so that it may be used in a cruel imitation of eros in order to ensnare the prince. Thus the enchantress is seen to embody another aspect of thanatos, as it has been described as "the drive to sever connection" (Cranwell 271).
Thus, the story continues on to the third segment by following the course of the prince, who "wandered quite blind about the forest, ate nothing but roots and berries, and did naught but lament and weep over the loss of his dearest wife," roaming "about in misery for some years," until he "came to the desert where Rapunzel, with the twins to...
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