by Maria Tatar
THE MYTHICAL BACKGROUND: BRUTE APPETITES AND SOUL MATES
Fairy tales mix history, myth, and psychology to produce compelling narratives that get us talking and thinking about our values. While it is impossible to identify an Ur-narrative—a primal Beauty and the Beast story that laid the foundation for cultural variants—there are many early versions that are telling in their own way. Legends about animal deities and their sexual congress with humans can be found in ancient cultures the world over—Sumerian, Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, and Babylonian. The ancient sources best known to occidental cultures are the Greek myth of Zeus and Europa and the Roman tale of Cupid and Psyche, stories that frame encounters between gods and humans in very different ways. One is a narrative of abduction and sexual assault, despite the efforts of painters, poets, and philosophers over the centuries to capture the moment of “rapture” in it. The story of Zeus and Europa remains a rape, with a young virgin taken away from her companions by a bull, against her will. The other is a story about the union of Eros and Psyche, with allegorical figures for carnal desire and soulful yearning confidently forming a perfect union.
The Greek myth and the Roman tale both have a rich history of translation and transmission, in story, song, sculpture, painting, and other media. Zeus and Europa figured prominently in the imaginations of countless European artists, with painters ranging from Titian and Giordano to Noël-Nicolas Coypel and Gustave Moreau giving us scenes of erotic abandonment and oceanic ecstasy in paintings with “rape” and “abduction” in their titles. Few artists and even fewer viewers registered alarm at the mismatch between the revels on the canvases and the perils spelled out in their titles, as well as the story behind the painted scene. (Rembrandt is almost the exception to the rule in portraying a Europa whose features register trepidation rather than ecstasy as her white mount charges through the waters, tail raised high.)
The story of Zeus and Europa remained remarkably durable, migrating into books designed for children as well as adults. The Greek poet Moschus, living in the second century B.C., preserved the account in his poem Europa, which was retold for English-speaking audiences by Thomas Bulfinch in his popularization of Greek mythology published in 1855. Bulfinch’s tightly ordered narrative remained the standard retelling of the myth in Anglophone cultures until Edith Hamilton published her Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes in 1942.
Given the shock value of a story that shows a young woman abducted by a bull in preparation for a sexual assault, it seems astonishing that the myth of Zeus and Europa found its way into literary channels that transmitted the tale to multigenerational audiences. Nathaniel Hawthorne somehow believed that he had created a child-friendly version for his Tanglewood Tales (1853), in which Europa, “a very beautiful child,” encounters a bull described as “gentle, sweet, pretty, and amiable.”10 The tale is not entirely steeped in treacle, for the bull turns “treacherous” when it leaps into the waves and carries the girl off, leaving her three brothers to gaze at the “sad spectacle.” It is perhaps our misplaced reverence for ancient Greece and its sacred myths that led Hawthorne and others to consider the story as “pure” as the children to whom it is told. Tales from a time described as “the pure childhood of the world” are perfectly suited—and this was an article of faith for Hawthorne—for young “auditors,” marked by “childish purity.” “The objectionable characteristics of the plot seem to be a parasitical growth, having no essential connection with the original fable,” the folksy narrator insists in the introduction, as if the central events—abduction and rape—were not the backbone of the “original fable.”
There may be pragmatic reasons for Zeus to conceal his identity (Hera has her spies, after all), but they seem a mere pretext for putting on display the spectacularly incongruous pairing of young woman and bull, a pairing that does more than border on the pornographic. How do we explain the powerful afterlife of a story this offensive? Why would artists come back to the story again and again, in a nearly desperate effort to re-create scenes of carnal and spiritual ecstasy from stories that in reality depict abduction and rape?
Human sexuality has at its core a basic conflict between tenderness, affection, and compassion on the one hand and violence, aggression, and rough-and-tumble play on the other. That the language of love so often draws its power from the language of combat and the hunt reveals exactly how divided we are when it comes to considering the operation of sexual desire. Discomfort with the cruder, animal-like aspects of human sexuality can easily lead to disavowal, with projections of the ferocity of assaults onto either gods or beasts and only rarely onto normal human subjects. In the story of Zeus and Europa, the divine and the beastly both become culprits, larger than life and twice as unnatural.
Quod licet Iovi, licet bovi. Perversely, in the arena of storytelling, beasts have the same license as gods to commit acts of atrocity. In projecting brute sexual force onto gods, centaurs, and beasts, the ancients in a sense also licensed its representation and enabled debate about its legitimacy or lawlessness. Verbal and visual depictions of erotic pursuit throw us into a hermeneutic crisis precisely because they invoke cultural anxieties about defining and maintaining the lines we draw between nature and culture, between brute beasts and caring humans. The mechanism of disavowal, combining denial and displacement, is a powerful manifestation of the rich mix of shame and desire about the beastly aspects of human sexuality. And, in some mysterious way, it also stimulates the storytelling instinct.
Passion can be a volatile and combustible emotion, consuming itself as quickly as it is ignited. Zeus, we recall, is not only a serial rapist, moving from Io to Europa to Leda, but also polymorphously perverse, abducting youngsters like Ganymede. Our modern-day tales about Beauties and Beasts do not do away with passion altogether, but, with their emphasis on an enduring happily ever after, they demonstrate that domestic partnerships have something going for them—the affection, stability, and longevity absent from the short-lived couplings of the mythic tales. Our versions of “Beauty and the Beast” reveal a cultural investment in privileging companionate pairings over passionate couplings that are made culturally acceptable by the divinities who participate in them.
Antecedents can be found in the ancients for the caring, compassionate union of soul mates. Back in the second century A.D., Lucius Apuleius included the tale of Cupid and Psyche in The Golden Ass. The story displays a distinct kinship with earlier myths about gods and mortals, with a hero who is the son of Venus paired with a woman so beautiful that she is not meant for ordinary men. Psyche, as obedient as she is beautiful, consents to follow the decree of the oracle and to marry a creature who may be a monster. Tempted by her sisters to turn disobedient, Psyche lights a lamp while her husband is asleep and discovers the true meaning of love at first sight. Cupid becomes as flighty as Zeus, and leaves his beloved on real wings, only to return when Psyche has completed a series of “impossible tasks” as a sign of her devotion. The two are married by Jupiter, who is tired of hearing tales about Cupid’s “lechery and riot” and decides to put an end to his “intemperance” with the “bonds of matrimony.”
Apuleius’s fairy tale, told by a drunken and half-demented old woman, shows us the marriage of spiritual love (in Greek mythology, Psyche incarnates the human soul and is often portrayed as a butterfly) with physical passion (Cupid is the god of erotic love, born of the union of Venus and Mars, and it is no accident that he shoots arrows to inspire love). The rich irony of channeling our iconic story about the union of passion and spirituality through a crazed crone comforting a young woman abducted by vicious robbers powerfully reminds us of the gulf between fairy tale and real life. As important, it brings to mind the etymology of the German term for fairy tales. Märchen are misrepresentations, rumors, untruths connected to the practice of lying. Apuleius’s “Cupid and Psyche” may be closer to our hearts and minds than the story of Zeus and Europa when we indulge in fantasies about romance and courtship, bu
t, as Apuleius suggests in the tale’s frame, it may be nothing but a set of beautiful lies designed to distract from horrifying realities. More likely, Apuleius, like all great storytellers, uses his art to give us a mix of beastliness and beauty, to show how they intersect, and how their collision compels us to think hard about the human condition. No wonder Einstein is reputed to have said that if you want intelligent children, read them fairy tales. And if you want more intelligent children, read them more fairy tales. These are the stories that challenge us to figure things out.
MACHINES, MONSTERS, AND CULTURAL ANXIETIES
“Beauty and the Beast” has become a kind of dense palimpsest of narratives, with so many layers that it becomes almost impossible to sort out the many different cultural stakes in the narrative. In the future, the Beast may take the form of an android or cyborg, machines that embody our anxieties and phobias about what the future holds for man-made devices. For now, our animal brides and animal grooms function as mediators between nature and culture, enabling us to think through our relationship to “otherness.” They are “impossible” hybrid creatures that help us to negotiate that divide, to construct our own realities and identities through the dialectical interplay between the animal and human kingdoms. Stories featuring these creatures, often as charismatic as they are monstrous, take up matters both primal and mythical as well as domestic and down to earth. As humans, we have distanced ourselves from nature, set ourselves apart as a separate breed, and yet we are perpetually drawn to the wild side, searching for an understanding of what we share with beasts even as we try to discover what makes us human.
These days we have begun to recognize the downside to being at the top of the food chain. In a curious twist, anthropocentric ideologies have backfired to turn us into the monsters, with animals as our innocent victims. And the symbolic calculus has shifted in significant ways, as new technologies make it attractive to invest more cultural work in our relationship to androids, cyborgs, and other high-tech wonders. Still, our need to understand the “beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all beings,” as Darwin put it, is more than likely to keep replenishing the broad, deep, and capacious reservoir of stories about Beauties and Beasts.
MARIA TATAR
NOTES
1.Angela Carter, “About the Stories,” in Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales, ed. Angela Carter (Boston: Otter Books, 1991), 128.
2.“East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” in The Blue Fairy Book, ed. Andrew Lang (Harmondsworth: Penguin/Puffin Books, 1987), 2.
3.Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New York: Vintage, 1991), 3.
4.Barbara Fass Leavy, In Search of the Swan Maiden: A Narrative on Folklore and Gender (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 2.
5.www.endicott-studio.com/articleslist/married-to-magic-animal-brides-and-bridegrooms-in-folklore-and-fantasy-ii-by-terri-windling.html.
6.Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28.2 (Winter 2002): 369–418.
7.The passage is cited, along with the Bible passage, by Laurie Shannon in “The Eight Animals in Shakespeare; or, Before the Human,” PMLA 124:2 (March 2009): 472–79.
8.Rosi Braidotti, “Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt: On Teratology and Embodied Differences,” in Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine, and Cyberspace, eds. N. Lykke and R. Braidotti (London: Zed Books, 1996), 135–52.
9.Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture,” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 20.
10. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Wayside,” introduction to Tanglewood Tales (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1913), 7–14.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
———. Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013.
Baker, Ronald L. “Xenophobia in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and Other Animal/Monster-Groom Tales.” Midwestern Folklore 15 (1989): 74–80.
Barchilon, Jacques. “Beauty and the Beast.” Modern Language Review 56 (1961): 81–82.
———. “Beauty and the Beast: From Myth to Fairy Tale.” Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Review 46 (1959): 19–29.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Knopf, 1976.
Block, Francesca Lia. “Beast.” In The Rose and the Beast. New York: HarperCollins, 2000, pp. 133–49.
Bottigheimer, Ruth B. “‘Beauty and the Beast’: Marriage and Money—Motif and Motivation.” Midwestern Folklore 15 (1989): 79–88.
———. “Cupid and Psyche vs. Beauty and the Beast: The Milesian and the Modern.” Merveilles et Contes 3 (1989): 4–14.
Bryant, Sylvia. “Re-Constructing Oedipus Through ‘Beauty and the Beast.’” Criticism 31 (1989): 439–53.
Burton, Anthony. “Beauty and the Beast: A Critique of Psychoanalytic Approaches to the Fairy Tale.” Psychocultural Review 2 (1978): 241–58.
Canepa, Nancy. Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale in Italy and France. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.
Canham, Stephen. “What Manner of Beast? Illustrations of ‘Beauty and the Beast.’” In Image and Maker: An Annual Dedicated to the Consideration of Book Illustration, edited by Harold Darling and Peter Neumeyer. La Jolla, Calif.: Green Tiger Press, 1984.
Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. New York: Penguin, 1993.
Cashdan, Sheldon. The Witch Must Die: How Fairy Tales Shape Our Lives. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
Cunningham, Michael. “Beasts.” In A Wild Swan and Other Tales. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, pp. 101–16.
Darnton, Robert. “Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose.” In The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
Datlow, Ellen, and Terri Windling. The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People. New York: Viking, 2010.
Davidson, Hilda Ellis, and Anna Chaudhri. A Companion to the Fairy Tale. Cambridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 2003.
DeNitto, Dennis. “Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.” American Imago 33 (1976): 123–54.
Donoghue, Emma. “The Tale of the Rose.” In Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins. New York: HarperCollins, 1997, pp. 27–37.
Edens, Cooper. Beauty and the Beast. San Diego, Calif.: Green Tiger Press, 1989.
Erb, Cynthia. “Another World or the World of an Other? The Space of Romance in Recent Versions of ‘Beauty and the Beast.’” Cinema Journal 34 (1995): 50–70.
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York: Ballantine, 1992.
Fine, Gary Alan, and Julie Ford. “Magic Settings: The Reflection of Middle-Class Life in ‘Beauty and the Beast.’” Midwestern Folklore 15 (1989): 89–100.
Frus, Phyllis, and Christy Williams, eds. Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical Transformation of Original Works. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010.
Galef, David. “A Sense of Magic: Reality and Illusion in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.” Literature-Film Quarterly 12 (1984): 96–106.
Griswold, Jerry. The Meanings of “Beauty and the Beast.” Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004.
Haase, Donald, ed. The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993.
———. Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004.
———. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy
Tales. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2007.
Hallet, Martin, and Barbara Karasek. Fairy Tales in Popular Culture. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2014.
Harries, Elizabeth Wanning. Twice upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Hawkins, Harriet. “Maidens and Monsters in Modern Popular Culture: The Silence of the Lambs and Beauty and the Beast.” Textual Practice 7 (1993): 258–66.
Hearne, Betsy. Beauties and Beasts. Phoenix, Ariz.: Oryx Press, 1993.
———. Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Heinen, Eglal. “Male and Female Ugliness Through the Ages.” Merveilles et Contes 3 (1989): 45–56.
Heiner, Heidi Anne. Beauty and the Beast: Tales from Around the World. N.p.: Surlalune Press, 2013.
Hood, Gwyneth. “Husbands and Gods as Shadowbrutes: ‘Beauty and the Beast’ from Apuleius to C. S. Lewis.” Mythlore 15 (1988): 33–43.
Hopkinson, Neil, ed. Theocritus, Moschus, Bion. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015, pp. 455–65.
Jeffords, Susan. “The Curse of Masculinity: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.” In From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, edited by Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Joosen, Vanessa. Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue Between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011.
Leavy, Barbara Fass. In Search of the Swan Maiden. New York: New York University Press, 1994.