Opening Paragraph
The title of the book containing these two tales tells it all: they are fables. And the fable is a type of short fiction that wastes little time in getting right to the point. There is a moral to be conveyed, after all, and it makes little sense to gamble on losing the reader’s interest right from the start:
“When Princess Mammalia arose from her bed on the morning of her seventeenth birthday and examined her face in the looking-glass, she couldn’t believe what she saw. Up until then she had always been a rather plain and dumpy girl with a thick neck, but now she suddenly found herself staring at a young lady she had never set eyes on before. A magical transformation had taken place overnight and the dumpy little Princess had become a dazzling beauty.”
The Beast in the Beauty
The whole point of “Princess Mammalia” it would seem is a misogynistic beatdown of pretty women who use their physical attraction to first entice and then humiliate men. (That Dahl has issues with women is pretty well covered.) Thus, it makes perfect sense that a centerpiece of the use of imagery in this fable is focused upon the title character’s remarkably transformation from plain Jane to femme fatale and the powerful effect is has on the citizens:
“Late at night, before retiring to bed, she would divert herself by strolling out on to her balcony and showing herself to the lascivious polloi who were wont to gather in their thousands in the courtyard below, hoping for a glimpse of her. And why not indeed? She looked more dazzling and desirable than ever standing there in the moonlight. In truth, she outshone the moon itself, and the citizens would go berserk as soon as she appeared, crying out and tearing their hair and fracturing their bones by flinging themselves against the craggy walls of the Palace.”
The Opposite of Batman
How do you describe the opposite of Batman? That is a question that is answered—metaphorically, of course—in “The Princess and the Poacher.” Just two paragraphs in, imagery delineates for the reader the physicality of a character who is the opposite of Princess Mammalia. Indeed, the two descriptions could hardly be more oppositional to each other:
“In appearance, Hengist was an exceedingly unattractive youth. With his squat body, his short bandy legs, his extra-long arms and his crumpled face, he looked almost as though there might be a touch of the ape or the gorilla about him. He was certainly mighty strong. He could bend double a two-inch-thick iron bar with his hands alone, and once he had astonished an old carter whose horse had fallen into a ditch by lifting the animal out bodily in his arms and placing it back on the road.”
Holy Heroism, He is Batman!
Turns out that Hengist may be the opposite of the title character in that other fable, but in this one he is kind of is like Batman. A good old-fashioned act of chivalry—with the added spice of putting his life on the line—saves the princess from certain death. And in doing so, the king grants him a truly horrific reward which fortunately turns out to be merely a duplicitous machination by the king to get Hengist his true reward of the love of the princess. The imagery of that act of chivalry is right out of Sherwood Forest or Camelot:
“He took off like an arrow. He flew over the ground with his feet hardly touching the earth, and when he realized that the boar was going to reach the Princess before him, he made a last, despairing dive through the air and reached far out with his hands and just managed to grab hold of the boar’s tusks when they were within a fraction of the maiden’s midriff…Hengist gave a sudden twist with his hand…heard the boar’s cervical spine snap in two…then swung the massive beast back...over his head as easily as if it had been a stick of firewood.”
