[The storyteller’s] nesting places – the activities that are intimately associated with boredom – are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears …35
Benjamin never once imagines that his storytellers might be women, even though he identifies so clearly and so eloquently the connection between routine repetitive work and narrative – storytelling is itself ‘an artisan form of communication’, he writes. And later, again, it is ‘rooted in the people … a milieu of craftsmen’.36 He divides storytellers into stay-at-homes and rovers – tradesmen and agriculturalists, like the tailors and the shoemakers who appear in the stories, on the one hand; on the other, the seamen who travel far afield adventuring, like the questing type of hero. He neglects the figure of the spinster, the older woman with her distaff, who may be working in town and country, in one place or on the move, at market, or on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, and who has become a generic icon of narrative from the frontispiece of fairytale collections from Charles Perrault’s onwards. The Scottish poet Liz Lochhead, who has drawn on much fairytale imagery in her work, has written:
No one could say the stories were useless
for as the tongue clacked
five or forty fingers stitched
corn was grated from the husk
patchwork was pieced
or the darning was done …
And at first light …
the stories dissolved in the whorl of the ear
but they
hung themselves upside down
in the sleeping heads of the children
till they flew again
into the storyteller’s night.37
Spinning a tale, weaving a plot: the metaphors illuminate the relation; while the structure of fairy stories, with their repetitions, reprises, elaboration and minutiae, replicates the thread and fabric of one of women’s principal labours – the making of textiles from the wool or the flax to the finished bolt of cloth.
Fairy tales are stories which, in the earliest mentions of their existence, include that circle of listeners, the audience; as they point to possible destinies, possible happy outcomes, they successfully involve their hearers or readers in identifying with the protagonists, their misfortunes, their triumphs. Schematic characterization leaves a gap into which the listener may step. Who has not tried on the glass slipper? Or offered it for trying? The relation between the authentic, artisan source and the tale recorded in book form for children and adults is not simple; we are not hearing the spinsters and the knitters in the sun whom Orsino remembers chanting in Twelfth Night, unmediated. But the quality of the mediation is of great interest. From the mid-seventeenth century, the nurses, governesses, family domestics, working women living in or near the great house or castle in town and country existed in a different relation to the élite men and women who may have once been in their charger, as children. The future Marquise de la Tour du Pin recalled in her memoirs how her nurse was her mainstay and that, when she turned eleven and a governess was appointed instead, ‘I used to escape whenever I could and try to find her [the nurse], or to meet her about the house.’38 Another noblewoman, Victorine de Chastenay, also wrote that her own mother alarmed her and dominated her, and that she took refuge with her nurse and her nurse’s family.39 The rapports created in ancien régime childhood shape the matter of the stories, and the cultural model which places the literati’s texts on the one side of a divide, and popular tales on the other, can and should be redrawn: fairy tales act as an airy suspension bridge, swinging slightly under different breezes of opinion and economy, between the learned, literary and print culture in which famous fairy tales have come down to us, and the oral, illiterate, people’s culture of the veillée; and on this bridge the traffic moves in both directions.
Women writers like Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy mediated anonymous narratives, the popular, vernacular culture they had inherited through fairy tale, in spite of the aristocratic frippery their stories make at a first impression. Indeed, they offer rare and rich testimony to a sophisticated chronicle of wrongs and ways to evade or right them, when they recall stories they had heard as children or picked up later and retell them in a spirit of protest, of polite or not so polite revolt. These tales are wrapped in fantasy and unreality, which no doubt helped them entertain their audiences – in the courtly salon as well as at the village hearth – but they also serve the stories’ greater purpose, to reveal possibilities, to map out a different way and a new perception of love, marriage, women’s skills, thus advocating a means of escaping imposed limits and prescribed destiny. The fairy tale looks at the ogre like Bluebeard or the Beast of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in order to disenchant him; while romancing reality, it is a medium deeply concerned with undoing prejudice. Women of different social positions have collaborated in storytelling to achieve true recognition for their subjects: the process is still going on.
For a long time, authenticity was an issue – the scientific folklorist, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, sought to catch the accent of the common people; and authenticity was equated with the pristine, the autochthonous, the tale pure and unadulterated by élite ideas; the enterprise was closely associated with romantic nationalism, as in the case of the Grimms. Oral purity is, however, a quest doomed to failure; the material of fairy tale weaves in and out of printed texts, the Greek romances, The Arabian Nights, Tristan cycle or matière de Bretagne, the novels in verse of Chrétien de Troyes, Mélusine, saints’ lives, and so forth – language conducts from mouth to page and back again, and orature, or, in the West, oral literature, has not existed in isolation since Homeric times. The evangelists knew they had to write down Christ’s teachings, in order to continue the process of passing them on by word of mouth, for preachers to use. But the sacred appeal of oral transmission remains crucial. The memory or the fancy of the story’s origin inspires the simulation of a storyteller’s voice in the literary text, and this performance modifies the narrative, it solicits the audience.
The pretence at anonymity, even in a signed work, like D’Aulnoy’s ‘La Chatte blanche’ (The White Cat) or ‘Serpentin vert’ (The Great Green Worm) or the Grimm Brothers’ ‘Juniper Tree’, confers the authority of traditional wisdom accumulated over the past and acknowledged and shared by many on account of its truthfulness and capacity to teach and be useful.
Fairy tale is essentially a moralizing form, often in deep disguise and often running against the grain of commonplace ethics: Benjamin uses the generic term, ‘the storyteller’, in order to lift his writers into fantasy figures on a priestly level: ‘He [the storyteller] has counsel,’ writes Benjamin, in messianic mode. ‘Not for a few situations, as the proverb does, but for many, like the sage.’ And he concludes, ‘The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.’40 For the élite writers, who lie behind so many of the famous fairy tales as they have come down to children today, the figure of fairytale storyteller, embodied in the righteous old serving woman, was the figure through whom they could encounter their own enhanced value (Benjamin’s ‘righteousness’), a field where they could struggle for their ideas and vision.
The orality of the genre remains a central claim even in the most artificial and elaborate literary versions, of the French, or the Victorians or later inventions; it is often carried in the texts through which fairy tales have circulated in writing for three hundred years by the postulation of a narrator, a grandmotherly or nanny type, called Gammer Gurton or Aunty Molesworth or Mother Hubbard as well as Mother Goose or some such cosy name, and by the consequent style, which imitates speech, with chatty asides, apparently spontaneous exclamations, direct appeals to the imaginary circle round the hearth, rambling descriptions, gossipy parentheses, and other bedside or laplike mannerisms that create an illusion of collusive intimacies, of home, of the bedtime story, the winter’s tale.
The old wives’
tale might be stuff and nonsense, but it too could yield a harvest in corn and gold, if you stroked it smooth and combed it through. Just as history belongs to the victors and words change their meanings with a change of power, stories depend on the tellers and those to whom they are told who might later tell them again. ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale,’ D. H. Lawrence’s famous dictum, fails to notice how intertwined the teller and the tale always are.41
The old wives’ tongues are wagging RIGHT as they pass on lonelyhearts lore in a bawdy parody of sententious manuals, Les Evangiles des quenouilles, or The Gospel of Distaves (Bruges, c. 1475); the patron saint of trouble and strife, dubbed Aelwaer, or All-True ABOVE also makes mock of pious conventions, and rides on an ass like the Virgin Mary fleeing into Egypt, holds a squealing piglet under one arm instead of a baby, while a magpie perches on her head instead of the dove of the Holy Ghost. (Cornelis Antonisz., Amsterdam, c. 1550.)
CHAPTER 3
Word of Mouth: Gossips II
Patient as an old master
I love to study the faces
of pious, spiteful old women.
The mortality of their lips,
and the immortality of the power
that pressed those lips together.1
Olga Sedakova
A FRENCH PRINT of 1660 depicts ‘Le Médecin céphalique or Skull Doctor, hard at work at an unusual task: with the help of a hammer and anvil, he is forging new heads for women brought to him by their menfolk – husbands, chiefly – in order to make them into properly docile wives.2 In jocular style, the inscription relates how the doctor learned the secrets of his trade in Madagascar – a suitably remote, orientalist provenance, with overtones of head-hunting and -shrinking – and then goes on to itemize the women’s offences: they are shrewish, loudmouthed, devilish, angry, mad, haggard, bad, annoying, obstinate. On one side, where French couples are arriving, the inscription above reads:
Great man, through your care almost all our wives
Are now well behaved and give us peace …
And it goes on to say that Frenchmen cannot offer adequate thanks for the great feats the doctor has performed, except to honour his name – Lustucru – for ever more. Lustucru derives from L’eusses-tu cru? (Would you have believed it?).
On the opposite side, foreign husbands add their voices to the praises of Lustucru: men from Germany, Switzerland and Sweden, as well as Spaniards, Dutchmen and Armenians, beg the great doctor to visit their countries now and effect the same transformation on their women. Superannuated, severed heads fill the shelves of Lustucru’s surgery, or hang from the ceiling; outside, more heads are impaled to advertise his remedy. The shop sign shows a headless woman (‘Unefemme sans tête’) with the legend, ‘Everything about her is good’, while in the centre, on the anvil, the inscription reads, ‘Touche fort sur la bouche. Elle a meschante langue’ (Strike hard on the mouth: she has a wicked tongue).
‘I will make you good,’ declares the doctor Lustucru, as he hammers out a wife’s head on the anvil. ‘Husbands, rejoice!’ says his assistant, while another woman, with mouth open, waits her turn. The sign outside the smithy, ‘A La Bonne Femme’, shows a headless woman. This popular eighteenth-century woodcut from Normandy, takes up a satire against bluestockings, feminists, scolds, and other opinionated women of almost a hundred years before.
The print of this burlesque smithy is one of several variations; in another (p 28), Lustucru is saying, as he hammers, Je te rendrai bonne’ (I will make you good) while an onlooker exclaims, ‘Maris, réjouissez-vous!’ (Husbands, rejoice!). There are also Italian and German versions extant; prints continue to appear into the eighteenth century. It was the brainchild – the cephalic offspring, indeed – of a certain curé, and was inspired by the controversy over the bluestockings of the Paris salons, writers and poets like Madeleine de Scudéry, whom Molière satirized in his famous plays Les Précieuses ridicules of 1659 and Les Femmes savantes of a few years later; it belongs to a prolonged and intense satirical conflict provoked by the intellectual ambitions of seventeenth-century aristocratic women. Their ideas and their way of life challenged the conventions of the time: from their position of influence as hostesses in Parisian society, they criticized arranged marriages and the dynastic and social market in wives, and sought instead to cultivate equal, companionable relations between men and women, exchanging ideas in an atmosphere of literary and artistic sophistication. The Querelle des Femmes, in this phase, was fierce, but not always bitter. For instance, a gallant, male partisan of the Précieuses, the poet Baudeau de Somaize, composed an elegy, ‘La Mort de Lustucru: lapidé par les femmes’ (The Death of Lustucru: Stoned by Women) which was recited in the course of one of his comedies, Véritables Précieuses (The Authentic Précieuses), in 1660. It was his learned retaliation against the great number of burlesque sketches in which Lustucru figured as the champion of hen-pecked husbands, a hero among men.3
The last decades of the seventeenth century saw an early outbreak of feminist argument, and the right of women to voice their opinions was at the centre of the struggle. Christian tradition held the virtues of silence, obedience and discretion as especially, even essentially, feminine, but this view spread far wider than the circle of the devout. The Silent Woman was an accepted ideal.4 That cliché about the sex, ‘Silence is golden’, can be found foreshadowed in the pages of Aristotle: ‘silence is a woman’s glory’, he writes in the Politics, adding, ‘but this is not equally the glory of man’.5
The First Epistle to Timothy, attributed to Saint Paul, contains the famous injunction, ‘Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection’ (2:11). The letter then continues, ‘But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence’ (2: 12). The author gives his reasons, moving in a characteristically Pauline way to an allegorical exegesis of the Fall: that Adam was made first, to symbolize his precedence over Eve, and that Eve, the pattern of all women to come, sinned through speech, by tempting Adam to eat with her words. So speech must be denied her daughters. The prejudice against women’s talk has scriptural legitimacy.
The epistle later lists the varieties of improper speech in which women will so frequently indulge, and it proscribes at least five of them: above all, Timothy must not listen to ‘profane and old wives’ fables’ (4: 7). Even younger widows, too, warns Paul, are ‘not only idle, but tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which they ought not’ (5: 13). He fears gossip as well, and observes that young widows’ behaviour will give rise to talk unless they remarry. By contrast, he exhorts his disciple to be ‘an example of the believers, in word, in conversation …’ (4: 12), and at the end to avoid ‘profane and vain babblings’ (6: 20).
The translators of the King James Authorized Version, working in the period 1604–11 – that is, just subsequent to George Peele’s play The Old Wives’ Tale – had no difficulty with English words for these different types of condemned speech; and in this matter, at least, Catholics and Protestants were in agreement: garrulousness was a woman’s vice, and silence – which was not even considered an appropriate virtue in the male – one of the chief ornaments a good woman should cultivate. It is a commonplace that what counts as articulateness in a man becomes stridency in a woman, that a man’s conviction is a woman’s shrillness, a man’s fluency a woman’s drivel. The speaking woman also refuses subjection, and turns herself from a passive object of desire into a conspiring and conscious stimulation: even fair speech becomes untrustworthy on a woman’s lips. The mulier blandiens or mulier meretrix of Ecclesiasticus (25:17–36) and Proverbs (6: 24–6) comes in for much vituperation; the biblical text ‘A man’s spite is preferable to a woman’s kindness’ (Ecclus. 42: 14) provoked much nodding of pious heads, as well as pamphlet and chapbook confirmation.6
The interdiction on female speech tolls down the years, one of those insistent refrains of misogyny that has acquired independent life, regardless of context, of the times, or the speaker’s own circumstances.
The French poet, historian and polemicist Christine de Pizan (d. 1430), who complained about the portrayal of women in the writings of predecessors like Jean de Meung in his Roman de la rose, noticed this poverty of invention in the abuse, the way such writings perpetuated the stale conceits of classical invective. The early middle ages had seen comparative tolerance towards women’s communications, but by the fifteenth century reaction invoking the Church Fathers and classical authorities had set in.7 As Howard Bloch points out, in his study Medieval Misogyny, ‘Misogyny is a way of speaking about, as distinct from doing something to, women’; such speech acts can sometimes seem as indestructible as those plastic containers which drift over vast distances, bobbing unaffected by on the various currents and deeps of changing individual experience.8 A packet of popular ‘wheat wafers’ called Miller’s Damsel, currently on sale in English supermarkets, gives this explanation for its name:
Our company name is derived from a three-tongued rod used in the milling process, which rotates and vibrates the hopper and enables wheat to be fed into the millstones. Over the years this rod has been referred to affectionately as a Miller’s Damsel because ‘it has three chattering tongues’ and our symbol is a representation of it.9
Nobody would suggest that this brand of biscuit will inspire in consumers a sudden fresh conviction in women’s propensity to chatter in the world around them, any more than it will conjure up millers and damsels; but the example does illustrate the clinging character of certain ideas – which contain a reflection of reality, of experience perhaps, of imagination for certain.
The seduction of women’s talk reflected the seduction of their bodies; it was considered as dangerous to Christian men, and condemned as improper per se. Female folly had brought about the Fall, so must be quelled. In the Vulgate, Jerome used seducta for Eve’s transgression: the serpent led her astray, and she then ‘seduces’ Adam, too. The connotations of the verb are already sexual. Women’s words are mixed up with women’s wiles – beauty and expression go hand in hand, as Paul implies when he also lays down that women should dress modestly, without show of jewels or elaborate coiffures (1 Tim. 2: 9). Eve sinned by mouth: she bit into the apple of knowledge, she spoke to the serpent and to Adam, and she was in consequence cursed with desire, to kiss and be kissed (‘Thy desire shall be to thy husband’ (Gen. 3: 16)).
From the Beast to the Blonde Page 5