In this case, the magic objects can be interpreted without reference to sexual symbolism, but more often the opposite is true. Many if not all the vivid details I have mentioned, and the scenes in which they occur, are usually explicated with reference to sexuality. Thus the old woman’s spindle on which Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger is not only a picturesque item in the narrative but a sexual symbol, its swelling shape suggesting a woman rather than a girl. More obscurely, although from Perrault himself onwards commentators have been virtually unanimous on the point, Red Riding-Hood’s encounter with the wolf symbolizes the sexual act, the colour of the hood implying from the outset that she is, at least potentially, a sexual being.
Caution is required in symbolic analysis; it is not enough, as is sometimes assumed, to equate symbol to reality in a one-to-one relationship and leave it at that. Things are usually more complicated. Bluebeard’s beard is a masculine symbol, yes, as Donkey-Skin’s ring is a female one; but whereas in her story a sexual implication can clearly be seen when she hides her ring in the cake intended for the Prince, 29 it is not at all clear why the beard is blue, and commentators have offered many explanations. Later in the tale, the symbolism becomes even more enigmatic. Even in Donkey-Skin, there are problems with the somewhat comic animal (‘the beast so pure | That what he dropped was not manure …’) and its skin; the association of excrement with wealth is common in folklore, and a donkey often symbolizes crude male desire, but it would probably be wrong to look for any exact meaning here: the associations are effective while remaining vague. However, it does seem that the killing of the donkey corresponds to the destruction of the threat from Donkey-Skin’s father.
As with Freudian theories in general, there is commonly some reluctance to accept that stories which seem innocent and charming, like children, contain a substratum of meaning which is neither. Many parents are like Sleeping Beauty’s father, who seemingly wants to preserve her from sexuality. However, whether or not Freudian analysis is correct in affirming that children are already sexual beings, there is no doubt that, however charming, they are destined to become so. Virtually all the symbolism in Perrault’s tales points to the conclusion that one of the underlying subjects is this great transition in human development. Another is the more general process of growth away from dependence on parents.
This is the basis for an interpretation of fairy-tale which has had very wide influence, that of Bruno Bettelheim in his The Uses of Enchantment. 30 Fairy-tale in general, he argues, is concerned not simply with growing up, but with the manifold anxieties, often deeply felt and disturbing, to which children are subject as their development continues. The function of the stories is to provide imaginative reassurance that the process will not result in disaster but end ‘happily ever after’. Thus fairy-tale should evoke fears, but also show how they may be surmounted. There are reservations to be made about Bettelheim’s work, especially over the detail of his commentaries on individual tales, but his theory in outline convincingly explains both why the content of so many of them is unpleasant, and why they have an important role to play in ensuring children’s psychological health. Few adults would deny, even if they do not remember it in themselves, that children suffer what seem unwarranted and exaggerated anxieties, about both their present circumstances and the future, or that they are often in open or concealed conflict with parents and siblings, while remaining deeply attached to them. Fairy-tales, which children know to be unreal, permit them vicariously to confront fears and indulge feelings they recognize as bad but cannot avoid: fears of rejection by parents, for instance, in Hop o’my Thumb, or hostility to parent and sister in Cinderella. The freedom to feel with Hop or Cinderella is the greater because their circumstances are amplified by fantasy: the ordinary resentments of childhood, if realistically reproduced, would not offer the same emotional depth as the extreme situations of fairy-tale. Bettelheim stresses the greater imaginative force and value of seemingly unrealistic fairy-tales as compared with rational discourse or the dull realism of much fiction for children.
At the same time, the stories make positive suggestions about resolving anxieties and conflicts. A bad mother-figure, in the shape of Cinderella’s stepmother, is superseded by a good one when her godmother appears, leaving the child free to believe that, somehow, the mother it is cross with and by whom it is persecuted will disappear and be replaced by a kinder one. In Hop o’ my Thumb the progression is different. The parent-figures in the second part are even more threatening than the ‘real’ parents of the first part (though in relation to each other they are the same: the mother less cruel than the father), but Hop’s cleverness gets him and his brothers out of their predicament, and, very quickly, brings success in the wider world. The obvious message, put openly in the Morals, is that attractiveness and kindness for girls, and intelligence and bravery for boys, are valuable qualities. Since we like to believe that we possess them, the message is likely to prove acceptable.
A specific problem in interpreting Cinderella is raised by its association with Donkey-Skin in folklore studies. 31 Comparing the two shows at once that the outline of Cinderella is to be found in the later parts of Donkey-Skin. The main difference, of course, lies in the family relationships: the father is largely or completely excluded from Cinderella stories. He is either dead or powerless against the second wife, and the persecution of the heroine is due not to him, but the other females in the family. This suggests that, in the history of the tale (at least as regards Perrault’s version) the original plotline was that of Donkey-Skin, and that at some point the outline story of Cinderella became separated from the incidents that precede it in Donkey-Skin. The result is that Perrault’s Cinderella does not contain any reference to incestuous child-abuse. For Perrault, then, as for Basile before him, the two tales are distinct. If the prose Cinderella is a romanticized fantasy for children about growing up, the verse Donkey-Skin, with its franker treatment of the sexual side, is a straightforward cautionary tale, the fairy openly describing the father’s desires as wrong.
Sleeping Beauty, The Fairies, and Ricky, together with the more difficult Red Riding-Hood and Bluebeard, are other tales manifestly directed towards girl children which concern the normal processes of maturation. The symbolism in Sleeping Beauty, as I have mentioned, transforms the onset of puberty into the famous spinning-wheel incident. The later piece of magic, the barrier of trees that is effective against all except her future husband, implies a long period of chastity before the first sexual experience, which in Perrault, unlike his best-known predecessors, is equated with marriage. In later versions this is where the tale concludes, making it an ideal allegory of bourgeois mating rituals: children protected, sexuality reluctantly conceded, but hidden, then a refusal to allow anyone except one worthy suitor to approach. The Grimms’ version adds some rivals to point the lesson, but ends with marriage.
In the later part of Perrault’s version, Beauty’s role becomes that of the wife in a clandestine marriage, a not uncommon event in France at the time. It becomes necessary to hide the offspring from the mother-in-law, who behaves (leaving her ogreish propensities aside) like any other mother who suspects that her son is having an illicit affair. The story’s subject, then, has changed, and now concerns the notoriously difficult relationship between a man’s wife and his mother—perhaps not a topic that might be expected in a fairy-tale. We can reconstruct the reasons for it by comparing Perrault’s tale with Basile’s earlier version. Here, the Prince who finds the sleeping Talia is already married, and takes advantage of her unconscious state to father twins on her; in due course, the jealous wife finds out, and seeks a dreadful revenge, exactly like Beauty’s mother-in-law. But when Perrault was writing, propriety forbade that a princess should suffer virtual rape. Perrault makes the Prince behave honourably—though the marriage takes place with suspicious haste—but then has to face the problem that there is no convenient jealous wife to act as villain. The traditionally troublesome figure of the mother-in-law co
mes to the rescue, though at some cost to narrative plausibility. 32
Little Red Riding-Hood, The Fairies, and Ricky the Tuft treat the subject of growing up with a greater or lesser degree of magic symbolism. The warnings, reassurance, or advice they contain seem to be intended for different age-groups. Only in the first, for the youngest, does the symbolism present serious problems. In each, the advice seems obvious (though not quite what the Morals say): do not talk to strange men; be nice to your elders, even if they are poor; and remember that looks are not everything, intelligent conversation counts as well. Ricky, the longest, needs its length in order to give examples of what is meant; it is designed for young women of the later seventeenth century in France, with its précieux traditions of elegant talk, often flirtatious, in the salons where articulate women dominated. It is also, no doubt, a weaker, polite version of tales of the ‘Frog Prince’ type, in which the future husband appears first as repugnant, the animal suitors symbolically representing fears about the physical side of sex. 33 The Fairies, by contrast, must be for a young audience, old enough to appreciate that the unkind sister is ‘rude’, as children say, but not enough to object to the scarcely disguised nannyish advice.
Little Red Riding-Hood is difficult not only because it has been made so by commentators, who often speculate about the complicity of the little girl in her seduction, if seduction it is, but also because there are widely differing versions, of which that by the Brothers Grimm, in which the wolf is killed, has tended to supersede Perrault’s. 34 Killing the wolf seems appropriate for a cautionary tale, seriously warning about real wolves in the countryside, but Perrault’s Moral, making the wolf symbolic, suggests that in Paris the threat of actually being eaten was no longer felt to be serious. Indeed, it is hard to understand why the bed scene would have been devised if the ‘wolf’ was only wanting food. If the intention was to tell the story to small girls, then a simple explanation seems to be best: a warning that males—whatever else he is, the wolf is male—may do awful things to girl children. That sexual danger is meant will be apparent to adults, as with the marriage in Donkey-Skin, but for the limited understanding of the child it is transformed into another dreadful fate. The enjoyable series of questions and answers at the end, nonetheless, seems to me ambiguous, more subtly so than is sometimes assumed: it shows the danger but, by turning the dialogue into a kind of game, suggests that it is not entirely real, leaving the way open for the child to develop her own understanding of what is involved.
Those who know other versions of Red Riding-Hood may find this too simple. Many versions collected from rural France in the nineteenth century and later contain puzzling and gruesome elements which had been lost to sight to polite society. Among them are the two routes that the girl can take, the ‘path of pins’ and the ‘path of needles’; explicated in terms of the rural culture of the time, they symbolize successive stages in her life, first when she can have suitors, and then the stage of sexual activity. 35 As for the wolf, sometimes called a werewolf, he consumes the grandmother but keeps back some flesh and blood which he tells the girl to cook and eat, which she does (sometimes being warned what she is doing; sometimes reluctantly). Incongruously, when in bed, she escapes by saying that she must go outside to relieve herself. The wolf tells her to ‘do it in the bed’, but she insists. It is entirely probable that, despite the lapse of two hundred years, versions with such motifs come virtually unaltered from Perrault’s time, or well before, and that in Le Petit Chaperon rouge we have a story which has been cleaned up, either by Perrault himself or some previous teller.
Despite this, Red Riding-Hood is easy enough to comprehend on the surface at least, both for child and adult. Bluebeard, by contrast, has always seemed both terrifying and mysterious. Although his wife is rescued, the tension generated by the wait for her brothers leaves behind it the sense that the dangers cannot be simply forgotten. But what is her sin, exactly? The literalist view—that it is mere inquisitiveness—cannot be taken seriously, despite Perrault’s first Moral (itself tongue-in-cheek); the punishment is too severe. Marina Warner, however, has a wealth of material to show that in Victorian times the tale was taken to warn, with enthusiasm, of the dangers of curiosity, 36 as if the commentators were on Bluebeard’s side. This tendency was foreshadowed in a Christianized variant recorded by the Grimms, Our Lady’s Child, which keeps the heroine’s curiosity but removes the context of marriage; a girl adopted by the Virgin is cruelly punished for a sin analogous to that of Bluebeard’s wife. She admits her sin at the last moment, which saves her from being burnt alive.
Disregarding this, what Bluebeard forbids his wife must be some kind of sexual knowledge or act, shown symbolically; what it is has been interpreted in various ways, all open to serious objections. Perhaps the commonest view follows Freud: the key and the lock symbolize the sexual act. Hence the dead wives show what will happen to the new wife if she is unfaithful, and the ineradicable blood shows that infidelity cannot be concealed. In favour of this view is the likelihood that a wife would be warned against it, that Bluebeard’s departure provides an obvious opportunity, and that jealous husbands were frequently violent if adultery was proved; against it, that the wife is not actually unfaithful—unless the key and lock are taken to represent it; but then, there is no lover. Nonetheless, Bluebeard behaves as if she had been unfaithful, like, presumably, all the other wives. In the terms of the story, what she has done is to yield to the temptation he deliberately places before her; it must therefore be meant as a test.
The other problem is that, if the wife has been guilty, she gets away with it. Among the many other versions of the tale, some stress the monstrosity or devilishness of the husband, thus justifying the wife’s escape. Other, less closely related versions, say that Bluebeard kills his wives if they become pregnant. This is the tradition preserved in a saint’s life from Brittany, a region long connected with Bluebeard. The saint’s life might not be especially relevant except that medieval frescoes illustrating it correspond exactly to scenes in Perrault’s tale: the marriage, the handing over of a key, a room in which seven dead wives are hanging, and Bluebeard’s attempt to murder his wife. 37
The efforts that have been made to unravel the obscure but powerful symbolism tend to preserve the assumption that Bluebeard’s wife is at fault, but it is of course he who is the villain, and several times over, so it seems: a serial killer. The lesson to draw, then, might be very simple, that girls should avoid marrying sinister men, even if, or perhaps especially if, they possess great wealth. Mothers too should find a lesson here, the girl’s mother having taken no notice of the warning signs. Bluebeard is not quite an anti -Cinderella in the sense that it warns against marriage in general—the wife remarries happily—but it certainly makes clear that there may be dangers involved.
The two tales for boys, Hop o’ my Thumb and Puss in Boots, are distinct in that the symbolism usually does not concern sex, while the message conveyed by the success of the heroes is naturally about the worldly qualities considered valuable for men, courage and ingenuity rather than beauty and charm (though Perrault in one of the Morals is not above pointing out that masculine attractiveness may also be useful). Hop o’my Thumb, though less skilful as narration than Puss, is the more disturbing, in that it openly deals with a terrible idea, the possibility of being eaten. Do we therefore interpret the tale (and its more successful version from the Brothers Grimm, Hansel and Gretel) as being basically a resolution of such anxiety? To do so involves believing that children do in fact suffer from this fear, and that the story does not only magnify the fear of rejection. 38 The threat of being eaten is of course a common theme both in folk-tale generally and in stories for children; the Grimms’ The Juniper Tree is another well-known example. Often the threat comes from an ogre, defined by Perrault as ‘a savage man who ate small children’, 39 but more usually thought of as a giant, as in the English tale of Jack the Giant-Killer.
If children are indeed afraid of being eaten, if only
in nightmares, the person they fear must be an adult, who is in the same relation of size to a child as a giant is to men. Bettelheim records the response of a 5-year-old boy to his mother after she had told him the tale of Jack the Giant-Killer: ‘There aren’t such things as giants, are there?… But there are such things as grownups, and they’re like giants.’ 40 In Perrault, the terrifying idea is somewhat mitigated by the division of the story into two parts (rather like the division in Sleeping Beauty, where an equally horrifying episode is kept until the second part). In the first, the parents, faced with starvation, prefer to abandon the children in the forest rather than to watch them die; it is in the second and more fantastic section that the fear of being eaten is made explicit, and the danger does not come from a parent, but from a monstrous stranger. Assuming that Perrault’s source was a tale of the ‘Mother Killed Me, Father Ate Me’ type, he converted what must be the most terrible fear of all into something marginally less so (as did the Grimms with the witch): the threat comes from a being who can, as it were, safely be defeated because he is a monster, and the child can identify comfortingly with the dauntless hero. When Perrault published the Contes, the possibility of being eaten was not pure fantasy, since widespread and serious famine had recently occurred, which must have made the implications in Hop o’my Thumb worse than they probably appear now.
Complete Fairy Tales Page 3