Long Live the Pumpkin Queen: Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas

“Jack grins at the Clown and exclaims, ‘Wonderful!’ But I feel wholly overwhelmed. Too many hands reach out for us, touching the fabric of my dress, as if I’m someone new and unfamiliar they’ve never seen before. As if I’m not the same person I was before I married Jack. Before yesterday. They push one another aside, trying to get closer—to see me better. And I hate the way it makes me feel. Examined, scrutinized. As though I am some nighttime creature they have caught in their net and are about to dissect.”

The people of Halloween Town have never had a queen before and don't know how Sally fits into their world any more than she does. They are exploring and testing to try to find out how she is going to impact them. Sally's inner doubts make this mutual testing all the more uncomfortable.

“But I never truly wanted to be queen. I was happy to remain a rag doll—imperfect, broken in places. Hair straight as a board and dry as bone. A girl unchanged. But that’s not true, either. I was never content in my life before Jack. Never satisfied to remain trapped in Doctor Finkelstein’s lab. Never liked the idea of being built, molded, sewn together by a mad scientist in a cold, damp lab, on a dark, rain-drenched night. I wanted something else, something more than the life I was given. But now I’m queen and it feels like there are pieces missing between my two lives—seams not properly folded together. Jagged and knotted. Parts of myself I don’t quite understand.”

The figurative language conveys Sally's sense of discomfort with her own being. She has never felt like she belongs to herself. Her sense of pieces missing between her two lives foreshadows the discovery that a part of her—her memories of everything before she was 12 years old—are missing. The reference to seams and stitches illustrates how experience shapes thought. Sally is accustomed to stitching herself together when a seam rips.

“But I hadn’t imagined this. That I would finally be free of Doctor Finkelstein but still not feel like myself. A girl whose life had always been decided for her and would discover the same dark prison walls once she became queen. And I wonder: do other queens and princesses and duchesses feel as I do? In other realms, other times? Have they peered at their reflections in ponds and warm bathwater and magic mirrors and wondered who they’ve become? How they lost the girl they once were?”

Sally the maiden must come of age and progress to the next stage of her development by becoming a queen. She first looks for role models who can advise her. The problem with seeking role models is that every queen must pass through her maiden arc, which is different for everyone. Every maiden becomes a queen on her own terms. Even if Sally were to be able to talk to another queen, she might be able to learn something from their experience, but she would still have to find her own way to be the queen she wants to be. To emulate another queen would be a false coming-of-age.

“The wind sails among the branches, and he barks again, somewhere beyond the grove of trees. Deeper into the woods. I follow the sound, across a barren stream, through dead autumn leaves where no path marks the way, into a part of the forest where I’ve never been.

A darker part.

A quieter part.

Where even the shadows have no shape. Where even the crows don’t dare roost. Only darkness lives here, in the eerie calm and quiet of these bare trees.”

The woods—the darker and wilder the better—is where the protagonists of fairy tales go to initiate change and growth. Sally exhibits curiosity and a pull toward change in discovery, showing that she is not passive in her struggle to find her way into her adult role, but the change is still terrifying and is represented by the darkness of the unknown.

“It’s a ghastly thing to lose an arm—or any part of yourself, really—to feel disconnected from your body. Not quite whole. And I’ve always wished Doctor Finkelstein had stuffed my insides with something other than dried, shriveled leaves, tossed aside by the trees. Cotton perhaps, or rose petals. Something silken and ladylike.”

The loss of her arm is a metaphor for Sally’s underlying feeling of disconnection from herself. Even her very stuffing feels wrong—dry and dead instead of soft and clean or silken. Sally’s feeling that she doesn’t fit her new role as a queen is part of a deeper sense that there is something not right about herself. She will have to resolve the feeling of internal disconnection before she can resolve her outer role. Her sense of disconnection probably comes in part from Doctor Finkelstein having erased her memory. She has literally lost a part of herself.

“But now…they are all asleep, and everything is perfectly, unexpectedly, wondrously quiet. For the first time since Jack and I returned from our honeymoon, my heart settles in my chest, the tension in my jaw softens—all of my threaded seams loosening just a little, like a corset being unknotted at the spine. I am alone. […] The breath in my chest is suddenly, oddly, calm. My eyes glance around the bedroom as if seeing it for the first time—a room that is just a room. Not a royal jail.”

Since her arrival back at Halloween Town after her honeymoon, people have pushed Sally back and forth, trying to squeeze her into the role they expect her to take. She needs this interval of peace to gather herself together and see the potential for a future that doesn’t feel like a trap. At the moment, this is a rejection of Halloween Town in its entirety, but in time, Sally will be able to experience this sense of belonging and fitting in even when other people surround her. In fairy tale terms, the world has been put to sleep around her, giving her time to transform and emerge from her cocoon.

“‘Please,’ I whisper, so softly I know he won’t be able to hear. Tears stream over my threaded eyelids, falling onto his cheeks. ‘Jack.’ My voice breaks, desperate, pleading. I need him to squeeze my hand, to wake up and wipe the tears from my face. I thought I wanted to be alone, but now I see the flaw in it—the gaping, awful wound. To be alone means to feel alone. To stand in a place that should be bustling with noise, and hear only the soft exhale of your own shallow breath. I was wrong. And I need Jack to wake up.”

Confronted with the deathly silence of the town, Sally realizes that solitude is not the answer to her problem. It’s not enough to be comfortable with herself when she’s alone. She also has to be able to be herself among others. Even now, she turns first to Jack for guidance and support, but nothing has changed. The kingdom—including its king—must still sleep until the Queen finds the power to wake it.

“I pick at the thread on my wrist as another thought begins to fester in my mind: The aloneness rotting in my chest taking on a new meaning. Clear and undeniable. There is no one else to undo what’s been done. No one left but me. With Halloween less than two weeks away, it’s not only the residents of Halloween Town who I have doomed, but all of Halloween.”

Sally has still been hoping to find help for safety or rescue. With the discovery that she is responsible for the disaster, she realizes more clearly that everything—not just her home but Halloween itself—is in peril, and she is the only one left to save it.

“‘If we don’t stop the Sandman, St. Patrick’s Day won’t happen, either,’ I say, sounding desperate, a scratching at my rib cage. ‘And you’ll be all alone here…forever.’ The little man steps toward me, raising one of his red scraggly eyebrows, golden eyes shimmering wildly like I have stirred up some hidden part of him. ‘Then you have to go into his realm,’ he replies bluntly. ‘Into Dream Town. Surely someone there knows how to bring the Sandman back to where he belongs.’”

Sally tries to persuade the leprechaun to help her by threatening him with what she fears most—isolation from every other living person. He turns the table on her by putting the responsibility for all the holiday worlds firmly on her shoulders. The message is that Sally is to have no help even from those who stand to lose as much as she does. It’s an unfair burden even if she is (inadvertently) responsible for releasing the Sandman.

“I felt so certain that once I entered Dream Town, I would either meet my end—by falling into a deep sleep, or some other awful demise—or I would find someone who knew how to stop the Sandman. But not this. Not a town populated by people who talk in circles. Who I can’t understand.”

Once again, Sally is disappointed in her search for assistance. The reader, by this time, has probably already realized that Sally must have originally come from this world, yet she cannot communicate with its denizens. Sally is still an outsider; not having grown up in this world, she cannot speak the language.

“And beneath the soot-dark despair and the pain in my chest, is another feeling…Guilt. If there is no undoing what I’ve done, then there is no atonement. No setting things right. No amends. I wanted this, after all. To be alone. To be anything other than a queen. And now I’ve gotten exactly what I wished for. And maybe I deserve it.”

Sally doesn’t deserve to be alone forever as punishment for wanting to avoid a job that doesn’t fit her. Metaphorically, however, by running away, Sally rejected maturity rather than creating her new role to fit her; she tried to remain a child. She is learning that failing to embrace adulthood has potentially life-blighting consequences.

“What an odd thing: to spend your life feeling wholly rare, unusual and strange. To assume there is no one else like you in the entire, endless, known universe. Only to realize, in one stark thunderbolt moment, that you are not the only one.”

Part of Sally’s sense of disconnection is the fact that she has never known anyone like herself. Believing herself to have been created by Doctor Finkelstein as a servant, she had no sense of an identity or an origin of her own. This is Sally’s opportunity to go back to her beginning and retrace and redefine herself. Part of discovering who you are is often based on seeing where you came from and recognizing the influences that shape you. What will it mean to Sally that she came from a place where she was ordinary and loved? Will she eventually find that wherever she came from, whatever her origins, she is uniquely and simply herself?

“Perhaps [Doctor Finkelstein] plucked me from this room, stole me away to Halloween Town, then poisoned me and made me forget. Made me think I was simply a creation. A diagram on a lab wall brought to life by electrodes and wires. Not a girl born to parents in a world made of dreams. All this time, I have believed an awful, wretched, unforgivable lie.”

Sally is returning to her beginnings, unraveling the false narrative that shaped her sense of herself. Symbolically, she is shedding the image of herself that was built and imposed on her by a false father. She is resetting herself, changing her understanding of who she is and rebuilding herself on a true foundation.

“Now I see the truth. I am from Dream Town. Dream Sand has no effect on me, because I was born within the borders of this world. I am a girl who was born. Not made. Heat swarms behind my eyes, and all at once, I know it’s true. Greta and Albert are my parents. And I am their daughter.”

This is Sally’s recognition that she is not a person created by someone else. She is a whole, intact, integral person with an unbroken lifeline. She has a foundation and place she has come from. This is the first step in her individuation.

“I know you care about them,” my mother says now, patting my hand where it rests on my knee, her touch like the petals of peonies, silken, tended to. […] ‘Halloween Town was never your home,’ she says gently, creeping closer to the truth. ‘Dream Town is your home. It always has been.’ My father nods, lifting his gaze from the fireplace. ‘This is where you belong, my dear.’”

At this point in the maiden story arc, Sally contemplates giving in to her family’s wishes out of obligation or a sense of responsibility. This is an expression of the maiden’s tendency to appear mature for her age, making difficult and self-sacrificing decisions, but truly achieving maturity includes recognizing when it is appropriate to take care of other people and when you are allowing them simply to control you.

“‘There’s a rumor going around that you’re their daughter, the one who vanished all those moons ago.’ His eyes find mine. ‘Is it true?’ I exhale through my nostrils, clenching at the back of my jaw. ‘Yes,’ I tell him, as we reach the front entryway. ‘But I’m not staying.’ The boy follows me out through the front door, and a listless evening breeze coils around me, the air quiet and calm. ‘Why not?’ he asks, still standing in the doorway. ‘Because I am the queen of Halloween Town,’ I answer, glancing back at him as I descend the stone steps to the street. ‘And I’m going back home.’”

Sally has rejected the life her family plans for her and also embraced the role she chose for herself when she chose Jack. She hasn’t yet figured out how to shape the role to fit her, but she has set herself the task of doing so.

“[My parents] lied to me, hurt me. Took away everything. I have lost Jack for good, and I want to scream, the hurt bulging behind my eyes. I want to tell them that I hate them, that I’ll never forgive them. But all the fury sits planted at the back of my teeth, aching, a vile, wretched feeling.”

Sally’s parents have betrayed her in the worst possible way they could have, by locking her up the way Doctor Finkelstein did and depriving her of choice. They have treated her like a child, demonstrating that Sally cannot stay here if she wants to be a fully actualized person.

“I had tried to make a potion to awaken those the Sandman had put to sleep. But I needed to think about it like a rag doll—one who was born and raised in Dream Town, who would have spent her nights in the library, studying the fundamentals of sleep. A girl who would have read this book over and over, until she knew it by heart. ‘I didn’t need a potion to wake everyone up,’ I say, breathing, glancing to the fallen trees. ‘I needed a potion to put the Sandman to sleep.’”

Different cultures often have their own ways of thinking. The people of Dream Town are interested in sleep, peace, and dreams, but Sally has spent much of her life in Halloween Town, where people think differently. They take a certain amount of dreadfulness as a matter of course. Sally’s combined experience gives her the key to defeating the Sandman.

“If I can’t make a potion strong enough to put the Sandman to sleep, if I can’t stop him, if I can’t wake the others…then what? I’ll be trapped in Halloween Town all alone, with no way to return to Dream Town where it’s safe. I will spend the rest of my life hiding from the Sandman. But this brief, thumbnail-sized thought is quickly replaced by a larger one. The one that overtakes all others. I was born in Dream Town, but I am also the Pumpkin Queen. I will fight for Jack. I will fight to set things right.”

Sally is not just embracing her role, she is confronting it, seeing clearly the risk she is taking and the consequences of failure—a life of fear and hiding and loneliness. She assumes the Queen’s mantle not out of duty or obligation but because her role as Queen is to protect the people she loves.

“On the oval-shaped coffee table sits a pot of tea, gone cold, a delicate, daisy-studded teacup beside it, the liquid inside half-consumed. The scent is faintly of lemon. It feels like such a normal thing—to be sitting and drinking tea in a library. Pleasingly normal. She is a woman who could just as easily be a grandmother, who might bake cookies on Saturday mornings and knit scarves for her grandchildren well into the night. Maybe she is all of these things, and also a queen. Maybe she can be both. A queen with a crown, her portrait hung on the wall. And a grandmother. And a woman. Maybe, maybe, I can be both, too.”

In the human world, Queen Elizabeth probably represents the quintessential queen–more real than Ruby Valentino in Valentine Town. The queen in front of Sally differs from the perfection of her portrait in that the real person is an ordinary woman who drinks lemon tea. Seeing her gives Sally the first clue as to how she might shape her role in Halloween Town to fit herself.

“Yet I’m certain that not every princess or duchess or queen has felt like they belonged. Not every crown worn inside this library, this castle, has felt steady or sure on the heads where they sat. Perhaps the crown has sat heavier on some heads than on others. Threatening to break them or reshape them into something else. Something even mightier.”

Sally sees a new possibility—that assuming her new role, despite its burdens, may be a necessary transformation. Something that seemed frightening to a child stepping into an unknown future now seems inevitable and even necessary. It still frightens Sally, but she recognizes that she cannot run from it.

“‘I’m not pretending to be anyone,’ I say to him. ‘I am Sally Skellington, the Pumpkin Queen.’ There is warmth in my chest now, heat and fury and anger. ‘But I was born in Dream Town.’ The words feel like their own conjuring, a spell, a ritual or bedtime riddle to cast things into the stars and make them true. I feel suddenly awake and alive, a woman who isn’t simply a rag doll, but a ruler who has traveled to all the realms, even the human world, to set things right. Who feels a spark, a wrath growing inside her.”

In her quest through the many worlds, Sally has returned to her beginnings, examined her fears and desires, and embraced her final transformation from maiden to queen. The queen is the protector of her children and her kingdom, and when they are threatened, her wrath is terrible.

“Jack mashes his teeth together, furious, then points a long, bony finger directly at Doctor Finkelstein, and I can hear the gulp in Doctor Finkelstein’s throat when he swallows, the nervous clicking at the back of his teeth. ‘I’m sentencing you to a hundred years of community service in Dream Town,’ Jack announces, voice booming across the ceiling of the Town Hall.”

The role of the archetypal queen is to guide and guard her children and her kingdom. The role of the king is to judge and command. Jack has always been an effective ruler, marshaling his kingdom to get Halloween accomplished every year. Here, he also demonstrates his role as a judge, meting out justice to maintain the order of his kingdom.