Just How Evil Was Mother Gothel?

How many times have we heard about evil fam­ily mem­bers in fairy­tales? For there’s the Evil Queen, Malef­i­cent, Scar, Lady Tremaine, and many more. And the way they spit dis­taste among mem­bers of their fam­ily, their evil­ness is quite vis­i­ble to the au­di­ence. But what about Gothel from Tan­gled? Un­like many sto­ries where vil­lains be­come jeal­ous of the pro­tag­o­nist, Gothel em­braces Ra­pun­zel. And for the longest time, as a child, I thought she was a won­der­ful mother be­cause of that (ex­cept for the kid­nap­ping and iso­lat­ing Ra­pun­zel parts). 

But of course, Gothel does­n’t em­brace Ra­pun­zel for her char­ac­ter, rather it’s her mag­i­cal hair that Gothel cher­ishes. De­sir­ing eter­nal youth, Gothel does what­ever she can to keep Ra­pun­zel to her­self. When I first watched Gothel singing “Mother Knows Best” to Ra­pun­zel, I re­mem­ber par­tially agree­ing with the song be­cause aren’t moth­er’s al­ways right? 

How­ever, Tan­gled slightly switched my per­spec­tive, as a child, be­cause, to me, it il­lus­trated a kind mother, but in dis­guise. Yet by look­ing back, Gothel has clearly emo­tion­ally abused Ra­pun­zel all her life. There was no healthy love be­tween Gothel and Ra­pun­zel. Gothel had con­trolled Ra­pun­zel since birth, feed­ing Ra­pun­zel lies about the world. In fact, the song she sings to Ra­pun­zel proves how much power she’s placed over her:

You want to go outside? Why, Rapunzel

Look at you, as fragile as a flower

Still a little sapling, just a sprout

You know why we stay up in this tower

That’s right, to keep you safe and sound, dear.

“Mother knows best” by Dona Murphy

As Gothel sings how Ra­pun­zel is ‘frag­ile as a flower,’ she tries to make Ra­pun­zel be­lieve she’s not ca­pa­ble of han­dling her­self in the out­side world. Gothel does this to make Ra­pun­zel not trust her­self and to in­stead be­lieve in Gothel’s words. The seeds of doubt Gothel con­stantly plants in Ra­pun­zel’s mind is is re­ferred to as gaslight­ing. 

Ad­di­tion­ally, the fragility Gothel de­scribes is­n’t Ra­pun­zel she’s re­fer­ring to, rather Gothel’s own in­se­cu­rity for hav­ing Ra­pun­zel leave her af­ter find­ing free­dom. For the ben­e­fits Ra­pun­zel has been pro­vid­ing Gothel all her life, will be taken away. In fact, the ti­tle of the song, “Mother Knows Best” that Gothel re­peats through­out the song fur­ther proves how Gothel as­serts dom­i­nance over Ra­pun­zel’s life. 

De­priv­ing Ra­pun­zel from the real world and be­ing forced to be­lieve Gothel is some­one who loves her, is all ma­nip­u­la­tion at its finest. And when Ra­pun­zel se­cretly de­cides to dis­obey her ‘moth­er’ by leav­ing the tower, she’s filled with a whole ar­ray of emo­tions. Which may all seem funny as she dances with joy and then sud­denly switches to de­spair, the re­al­ity of it is ac­tu­ally quite up­set­ting. 

From scream­ing ‘This is sooo fun!’ to ‘I’m a hor­ri­ble daugh­ter…I’m go­ing back’ re­ally goes to show how every de­ci­sion in Ra­pun­zel’s life was made by Gothel. So much con­trol­ling was done that it haunts Ra­pun­zel to fol­low her own free will.

Luck­ily, the more time Ra­pun­zel stays away from her abuser, the more time Ra­pun­zel is able to ex­plore and re­flect her life in a beau­ti­ful way. She learns what it means to be true to her­self. And by do­ing so, she’s able to pur­sue her dreams that were, oth­er­wise, locked up from her con­trol­ling ‘mother.’ 

And this truly show­cases how prob­lem­atic Gothel was. The scary part is Gothel could be our fam­ily mem­bers, friends, lover, etc. Be­cause com­plete dom­i­na­tion starts from steal­ing the mind, which Gothel was clearly able to do with Ra­pun­zel.