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

The archetypal Maiden’s story arc is a version of the coming-of-age narrative most commonly seen in fairy tales featuring girls and young women. It has several distinct features, most of which are present in Long Live the Pumpkin Queen:

1. A girl or young woman has outgrown childhood and needs to leave her family and become her own person. Her father is either weak or absent. She is confronted by a devouring mother—either an overprotective mother who tries to prevent her from becoming an adult or a wicked stepmother who confines the girl to a prescribed role. Both kinds of devouring mothers force the maiden to subvert her own will to others, preventing her from becoming her own person.

In Sally’s case, the devouring mother is represented by Doctor Finkelstein, who claims to have created her. In actuality, he kidnapped her at the age of 12—just when she was beginning to become a woman—and confined her to the role of servant/child. Later, Sally encounters the too-good mother in the form of Greta, who wants Sally to abandon her husband and kingdom and remain in her childhood home, in the very room that was hers in her childhood.