Chapter 7
For the Nursery
Fairy Tales: 16th Century, Italy and France
Rape, child abuse, and abandonment are the stuff of contemporary headlines and feature films. But they are also themes central to many of our most beloved fairy tales—as they were originally conceived.
The original “Sleeping Beauty” does not end happily once the princess is awakened with a kiss; her real troubles just begin. She is raped and abandoned, and her illegitimate children are threatened with cannibalism. And in the authentic version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” the wolf has yet to digest the grandmother when he pounces on Red, ripping her limb to limb. Many artists of the day, believing that the two violent deaths were too much for children to endure, refused to illustrate the tale. To make it more palatable, one illustrator introduced a hunter, who at the last minute slays the wolf, saving at least Little Red.
In the present century, numerous critics continue to argue that many fairy tales and nursery rhymes read to children—and repeated by them—are quintessentially unsavory, with their thinly veiled themes of lunacy, drunkenness, maiming of humans and animals, theft, gross dishonesty, and blatant racial discrimination. And the stories do contain all these elements and more—particularly if they are recounted in their original versions.
Why did the creators of these enduring children’s tales work with immoral and inhumane themes?
One answer centers around the fact that from Elizabethan times to the early nineteenth century, children were regarded as miniature adults. Families were confined to cramped quarters. Thus, children kept the same late hours as adults, they overheard and repeated bawdy language, and were not shielded from the sexual shenanigans of their elders. Children witnessed drunkenness and drank at an early age. And since public floggings, hangings, disembowelments, and imprisonment in stocks were well attended in town squares, violence, cruelty, and death were no strangers to children. Life was harsh. Fairy tales blended blissful fantasy with that harsh reality. And exposing children to the combination seemed perfectly natural then, and not particularly harmful.
One man more than any other, Charles Perrault, is responsible for immortalizing several of our most cherished fairy tales. However, Perrault did not originate all of them; as we’ll see, many existed in oral tradition, and some had achieved written form. “Sleeping Beauty,” “Cinderella,” and “Little Red Riding Hood” are but three of the stories penned by this seventeenth-century Frenchman—a rebellious school dropout who failed at several professions, then turned to fairy tales when their telling became popular at the court of King Louis XIV.
Charles Perrault was born in Paris in 1628. The fifth and youngest son of a distinguished author and member of the French parliament, he was taught to read at an early age by his mother. In the evenings, after supper, he would have to render the entire day’s lessons to his father in Latin. As a teenager, Perrault rebelled against formal learning. Instead, he embarked on an independent course of study, concentrating on various subjects as mood and inclination suited him. This left him dilettantishly educated in many fields and well-prepared for none. In 1651, to obtain a license to practice law, he bribed his examiners and bought himself academic credentials.
The practice of law soon bored Perrault. He married and had four children—and the same number of jobs in government. Discontent also with public work, he eventually turned to committing to paper the fairy tales he told his children. Charles Perrault had found his métier.
In 1697, his landmark book was issued in Paris. Titled Tales of Times Passed, it contained eight stories, remarkable in themselves but even more noteworthy in that all except one became, and remained, world renowned. They are, in their original translated titles: “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Blue Beard,” “The Master Cat: or Puss in Boots,” “Diamonds and Toads,” “Cinderella: or, The Little Glass Slipper,” and “Hop o’ my Thumb.” The eighth and least famous tale, “Riquet à la Houppe,” was the story of a deformed prince’s romance with a beautiful but witless princess.
Perrault did more than merely record stories that were already part of popular oral and written tradition. Although an envious contemporary criticized that Charles Perrault had “for authors an infinite number of fathers, mothers, grandmothers, governesses and friends,” Perrault’s genius was to realize that the charm of the tales lay in their simplicity. Imbuing them with magic, he made them intentionally naive, as if a child, having heard the tales in the nursery, was telling them to friends.
Modern readers, unacquainted with the original versions of the tales recorded by Perrault and others, may understandably find them shocking. What follows are the origins and earliest renditions of major tales we were told as children, and that we continue to tell our own children.
“Sleeping Beauty”: 1636, Italy
“The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” was the opening tale in Charles Perrault’s 1697 book. It is the version we still tell today, but it did not represent the complete original story; Perrault’s recounting omits many of the beautiful princess’s horrifying ordeals. The first written version of the tale was published in Italy in 1636 by Giambattista Basile in his collection Pentamerone.
In this Neapolitan “Sleeping Beauty,” a great king is forewarned by wise men that his newborn daughter, Talia, is in peril from a poison splinter in flax. Although the king bans flax from the palace, Talia, as a young girl, happens upon a flax-spinning wheel and immediately catches a splinter beneath her fingernail, falling dead.
Grief-stricken, the king lays his daughter’s body on a velvet cloth, locks the palace gates, and leaves the forest forever. At this point, our modern version and the original diverge.
A nobleman, hunting in the woods, discovers the abandoned palace and the insensate body of the princess. Instead of merely kissing her, he rapes her and departs. Nine months later, the sleeping Talia gives birth to twins, a boy and a girl. Named Sun and Moon, they are looked after by fairies. One day, the male infant sucks on his mother’s finger and the poisonous splinter is dislodged, restoring Talia to consciousness.
Months pass, and the nobleman, recollecting his pleasurable encounter with the fair-haired sleeping beauty, revisits the palace and finds her awake. He confesses to being the father of Talia’s children, and they enjoy a week-long affair before he leaves her again—for his wife, whom he conveniently never mentions.
The original story at this point gets increasingly, if not gratuitously, bizarre. The nobleman’s wife learns of her husband’s bastard children. She has them captured and assigns them to her cook, with orders that their young throats be slashed and their flesh prepared in a savory hash. Only when her husband has half-finished the dish does she gleefully announce, “You are eating what is your own!”
For a time, the nobleman believes he has eaten his children, but it turns out that the tenderhearted cook spared the twins and substituted goat meat. The enraged wife orders that the captured Talia be burned alive at the stake. But Sleeping Beauty is saved at the last moment by the father of her children.
Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. A gentle 1872 depiction of a gory tale.
“Little Red Riding Hood”: 1697, France
This tale is the shortest and one of the best-known of Perrault’s stories. Historians have found no version of the story prior to Perrault’s manuscript, in which both Granny and Little Red are devoured. The wolf, having consumed the grandmother, engages Red in what folklorists claim is one of the cleverest, most famous question-and-answer sequences in all children’s literature.
Charles Dickens confessed that Little Red was his first love, and that as a child he had longed to marry her. He later wrote that he bitterly deplored “the cruelty and treachery of that dissembling Wolf who ate her grandmother without making any impression on his appetite, and then ate her [Little Red], after making a ferocious joke about his teeth.”
In fact, many writers objected to Perrault’s gruesome ending and
provided their own. In a popular 1840 British version, Red, about to be attacked by the wolf, screams loudly, and “in rushed her father and some other faggot makers, who, seeing the wolf, killed him at once.”
During that same period, French children heard a different ending. The wolf is about to pounce on Red, when a wasp flies through the window and stings the tip of his nose. The wolf’s cries of pain alert a passing hunter, who lets fly an arrow “that struck the wolf right through the ear and killed him on the spot.”
Perhaps the goriest of all versions of the tale emerged in England at the end of the nineteenth century. This popular telling concludes with the wolf collecting the grandmother’s blood in bottles, which he then induces the unsuspecting Red to drink. It is interesting to note that while all the revisions endeavor to save Red, none of them spares the grandmother.
The Grimm brothers, one hundred twenty years after Perrault, provided yet another version—the only one that spares Granny. The wolf, logy after dining on Granny and Red, falls asleep. His thunderous snores attract the attention of a hunter, who enters the house, guesses what has transpired, and rips open the wolf’s stomach with a pair of scissors. Out jumps Red, exclaiming, “How dark it was inside the wolf!” Then an exhausted, dissheveled, and silent grandmother steps out. And the wolf is chased away.
Folklorists believe that before Perrault immortalized “Little Red Riding Hood” by committing it to paper in his skillful style, the story existed as oral tradition, perhaps as early as the Middle Ages.
“Cinderella”: 9th Century, China
The Cinderella story is believed to be the best-known fairy tale in the world. It is a tale that may have existed for at least a thousand years in various written and oral forms—most of which involved the brutal mutilation of women’s feet in vain attempts to claim the mystery slipper.
The tale as recounted to children today—in which a poor cinder girl is able to attend a grand ball through the benevolence of a fairy godmother—is due entirely to Charles Perrault. Were it not for his skilled retelling, the Western world might instead know only the trials of “Rashin Coatie,” the lovely, impoverished daughter in a popular Scottish version.
According to that tale, the girl’s three ugly stepsisters force her to wear garments of rushes (hence her name). Instead of a fairy godmother to grant wishes, Rashin Coatie has a magic calf, which her wicked stepmother vindictively slaughters and cooks. The grief-stricken Rashin Coatie, desiring to attend a ball, wishes for a new dress upon the dead calf’s bones. Attired in the “grandest” gown, she wins the heart of a prince, and hurrying home, loses a beautiful satin slipper.
Since the prince will marry whoever fits into the slipper, the stepmother cuts off the toes of her eldest daughter; the foot is still too large, so she hacks off the heel. The prince accepts the ugly (secretly mutilated) daughter, only to be told later by a bird that the foot inside the shoe is not intact—and that Rashin Coatie is the beauty he is after. The prince marries her, and “they lived happily all their days.”
In many old European versions of the story, the ugliest daughter’s foot is mangled to fit into a slipper of satin, cloth, leather, or fur. And a bird of some sort always alerts the prince to the deception. In the French tale that Perrault heard as a child, the shoe is believed to have been of variegated fur (vair in French) rather than of glass (verre). It was Perrault’s genius to perceive the merits of a glass slipper—one that could not be stretched and could be seen through. His awareness of the salient aspect of glass is apparent in his choice of title: “Cinderella: or, The Little Glass Slipper.”
In Europe, the earliest Cinderella-type tale is attributed to Giambattista Basile. It appeared in his Pentamerone, under the title “The Hearth Cat.” A widely traveled poet, soldier, courtier, and administrator from Naples, Basile composed fifty stories, all supposedly related to him by Neapolitan women. His Cinderella, named Zezolla, is a victim of child abuse.
The Basile story opens with the unhappy Zezolla plotting to murder her wicked stepmother; she eventually breaks the woman’s neck. Unfortunately, her father marries an even more vindictive woman, with six vicious daughters who consign Zezolla to toil all day at the hearth.
Desiring to attend a gala festa, she wishes upon a magic date tree and instantly finds herself in regal attire, astride a white horse, with twelve pages in attendance. The king is bewitched by her loveliness. But at midnight, he is left holding an empty slipper—which fits no one in the land except, of course, Zezolla.
Although this earlier Italian version is strikingly similar to Charles Perrault’s, historians believe that Perrault was unfamiliar with Giambattista Basile’s published fairy tales, and was acquainted only with the oral French version of the story.
Who, though, told the first Cinderella story?
The earliest-dated version of such a story appears in a Chinese book written between A.D. 850 and 860. In the Oriental tale, Yeh-hsien is mistreated by an ill-tempered stepmother, who dresses her in tattered clothes and forces her to draw water from dangerously deep wells.
The Chinese Cinderella keeps a ten-foot-long magic fish in a pool by her home. Disguised in her daughter’s tattered rags, the stepmother tricks, catches, and kills the fish. Cinderella, desiring clothes to attend a festival, wishes upon the fish’s bones and is suddenly outfitted in magnificent feathers and gold.
There is no prince or king at the Chinese festival. But on hurriedly leaving the affair, Cinderella does lose a golden slipper, which was “light as down and made no noise even when treading on stone.” Eventually, the shoe falls into the hands of the wealthiest merchant in the province. A considerable search leads him to Cinderella, who fits into the slipper and becomes as beautiful “as a heavenly being.” They marry while an avalanche of heavy stones buries the wicked stepmother and her ugly daughter.
This ninth-century Chinese story was recorded by Taun Ch’eng-shih, one of history’s earliest folktale collectors. He wrote that he had first learned the story from a servant who had been with his family for years. No more is known about the story’s origin; it bears many obvious similarities with later Western versions. Today seven hundred different Cinderella tales have been collected.
“Puss in Boots”: 1553, Italy
“Le Chat Botte,” as told by Charles Perrault in 1697, is the most renowned tale in all folklore of an animal as man’s helper. But Puss, in earlier and later versions of the story, is a role model for the true con artist. To acquire riches for his destitute master, the quick-witted cat, decked out in a splendid pair of boots, lies, cheats, bullies, and steals. As the story ends, every one of his conniving stratagems has succeeded brilliantly, and the reader leaves Puss, dashingly attired, mingling in high court circles. Crime pays, suggests the story.
The earliest Cinderella-like tale tells of the mistreated Yeh-hsien who goes from rags to riches by way of a magic fish, a lost slipper, and marriage to a wealthy merchant.
Once again, the story first appeared in Basile’s Pentamerone. A Neapolitan beggar dies, leaving his son a cat. The son complains bitterly about the meager inheritance, until the cat promises, “I can make you rich, if I put my mind to it.”
As in Perrault’s tale, the Italian cat, Il Gatto, lies and schemes his way to wealth. He even cons the king into offering the princess in marriage to his master; and he coaxes until the king provides a dowry large enough so the master may purchase a sprawling estate. But while Perrault’s tale ends there, Basile’s does not.
The master had sworn to the cat that as recompense, upon the animal’s death, its body would be preserved in a magnificent gold coffin. As a test, Il Gatto plays dead. He then suffers the humiliation of hearing his master joke about the feline’s ludicrous attire and immoral behavior, and he uncovers the man’s true plan: to hurl the corpse by the paws out the window. Il Gatto, livid, leaps up and storms out of the house, never to be seen again. The animal fares better in Perrault’s closing line: “The Cat became a great Lord, and never ran more after m
ice, but for his diversion.”
The resemblance between the Italian tale and Perrault’s is striking on many counts; except that Il Gatto was bootless and the master’s estate was purchased with dowry money. Nonetheless, folklorists feel confident that Perrault was unfamiliar with Basile’s book.
There was, however, an even earlier Italian version of the story, which may or may not have influenced both Perrault and Basile.
In Venice in 1553, Gianfrancesco Straparola, a storyteller from Caravaggio, near Milan, published a tale of a remarkable cat in The Delightful Nights. He claimed that the story, as well as all others in the two-volume work, was written down “from the lips of ten young girls.” It is quite similar to Perrault’s version, differing in only minor details. And Straparola’s book, unlike Basile’s, was published in France during Perrault’s lifetime.
Over the centuries, in various countries, the tale has appeared in children’s books somewhat softened, to make the roguish cat more of a Robin Hood–like prankster, stealing from the rich to give to the poor.
“Hansel and Gretel”: 1812, Germany
This story, in which two children outwit a witch who is about to destroy them, comes down to us from the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who began recording folktales told to them by villagers and farmers near the town of Kassel, Germany, about 1807.
The brothers collected 156 stories in all, many of them similar to tales preserved by Charles Perrault, such as “Cinderella” and “Puss in Boots.” “Hansel and Gretel” was told to the brothers by a young girl, Doretchen Wild, who years later became Wilhelm Grimm’s wife.
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Page 23