Once Upon A Time as a Neomedieval Experience: The Purity and Abjection of Birth and Heroes

Warning: Spoilers Beyond This Point. Do Not Proceed If You Care About That Sort Of Thing. I'm Not Marking Them.

This is a look at the relationship between the abject acts of menstruation and birth in relation to purity and heroes in the show -- primarily Snow White and Emma Swan.

"Look, 28 years from now I'll be exactly the same age as my baby!"

Let's start by looking at Snow. In the show's first episode, the audience is given the great privilege to watch Snow give birth to her daughter Emma, who also happens to be the Savior (yes, capital "S"), the product of True Love, and manipulated destined to be untouched by darkness. She parallels the Virgin Mary in terms of giving birth to a Savior child, being married, and considered pure.  While Mary was a virgin (one way in which there can be a removal of association between Jesus and the fact that he was in a womb), Snow White is clearly demonstrated to have been sexually active to become pregnant (not only with Emma, but with her second child Neal) due to a lack of holy or magical conception. And a primary feature of Snow White's character is that she is perceived as being good, pure, and a hero of the people -- associated with her actions as a hero rather than her state as a virgin. Coincidentally, Snow frequently wears white (Margery Kempe would be so proud) even after her marriage, and most importantly, when she is giving birth to Emma.

Now let's take a look at Emma. She's the most intriguing part of the neomedieval setup because the audience perceives her from goop-covered infant to adult woman birthing a child to Savior figure -- all kinds of abject to super awesome sauce (so much intended). So we have a mirror of the same issue from the medieval perspective on Emma as they did with Jesus: being born from a womb where all the body goop is. However, because Emma later becomes an adult who menstruates (unlike Jesus), she obtains an additional level of the medieval abject-ness -- an extremely inappropriate trait for a female hero/Savior. Not only this, but Emma becomes pregnant (ironically enough with the son of the man currently hosting all Darkness inside him), out of wedlock, by being sexually active. In this way, Emma also embodies an inversion of Mary, by being impure (can anyone say vigilante or thief?) and very unmarried. At least she only wears white when she's in the Enchanted Forest and wearing white signifies her hero status. Technically, her son Henry is questionably a Savior-like figure -- he too possesses incredible magic tied to his destiny and bullshit epic power, albeit in an indirect form (no fireballs for young princes) -- but can also be negated by the fact that he came from a womb and was conceived in the traditional manner.

"The Whole Family -- minus the rest of the cast"

But there you have it: Snow White is Mary, Henry is Jesus, and Emma is a Mary/Jesus hybrid -- the Hybrid Hero.