From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  In French, the verb cacarder is used for the noise made by a goose; caquet or chatter, as we saw, means women’s talk as well as the goose’s cry. Not as onomatopoeic as the English ‘honk’, cacarder does catch the coprological side of infantile existence more than ‘cackle’. However, the associations of the bird do not end there. Geese strike erotic not just scatological resonances: they were sacred to Isis as well as to Aphrodite, who uses them as her flying steeds, standing on an outstretched bird in a dish from Boeotia of the sixth century BC, and riding most gracefully sidesaddle on a particularly beautiful white ground kylix made around 460 BC (here).22 (Though it must be said that it is not always possible, in the silence of monochrome artefacts, to tell geese and swans apart.) The goose was specifically sacred to Peitho, the nymph who personifies Persuasion and stands at Aphrodite’s side in scenes of seduction – the embodiment of her sweet-talking tongue. In France la petite-oie, little goose, was used of fripperies of dress, and, by extension, of favours begged and received between lovers.23

  The overtones grew more explicit, too: ‘goose’ became a term for venereal disease in England in the sixteenth century. The folklore scholar Malcolm Jones suggests that the way geese waggle their short tails may have given rise to these connections, and cites the nickname of a prostitute like Johanna Culdoe (Cui d’oie: Goosebottom) from Paris, in 1292.24 A squat goose appears on the sign hanging above the brothel in Bosch’s painting of The Prodigal Son, and Chester Kallman and W. H. Auden gave the brothel-keeper in their opera of The Rake’s Progress the name Mother Goose. Oies blanches is still used in France for convent girls, ripe for picking; goosefeather beds are synonymous with luxury, and the prodigious infant Gargantua, after trying out every kind of material to wipe his bottom, concludes that there is nothing in the world as blissfully soft as gosling’s down.25, 26

  The sexual associations led inevitably to a connection with reproduction: the ‘goose-month’ was a term used for a woman’s lying-in before the birth of a child. But the goose could also convey bliss under a more benign aspect: not only sex, but cosiness, the partner in the (goose-feather) bed who is a skilled homemaker too.27 In Normandy, fairies took the form of geese to turn a good deed (or a foul) on humans.28 Ducks carry similar associations in contemporary survivals: the Cockney endearment ‘ducks’, for instance. In rhyming slang ‘goose and duck’ means ‘fuck’. Meanwhile the French canard (false trail, old rag) continues to net birds and tall tales together.29

  III

  These associations grow even richer with regard to another of the larger nonpasserine birds, the stork. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie attributed fairy tales to storks as well as geese; around a hundred and fifty years later, Hans Christian Andersen opened ‘The Bog King’s Daughter’ (1858), one of his most complex and beautiful stories, with the words:

  The storks tell their young ones many stories and fairy tales … [They] know two stories that are very ancient and very long: one of them is the story of Moses … The other tale is not well known, possibly because it is a bit provincial. It is a fairy tale that has been told by stork mothers for a thousand years … The first storks who told it had experienced it themselves …30

  Children’s publishers in Victorian England took up the image and illustrated the storytelling stork on the covers of their collections of fairy tales (here).31

  The symbol of the stork flourishes within a myth of rich complexity, edifying and bawdy at once. The beldames of the Evangiles des quenouilles are really storks in disguise, because their particular areas of expertise – venery, parturition, the domestic hearth, curing – took the bird as totem. The bestiaries of the middle ages, following Aristotle and other classical sources after him, describe the stork caring for its parents in their old age – in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Antigone who looked after the blinded Oedipus is changed into a stork, and in Renaissance paintings the bird symbolizes filial piety.32, 33 The beldames of Les Evangiles are claiming the high ground of fidelity, in itself a matter of intended merriment for the book’s readers. But it is they who are also likely to have received the news of the crones’ disguise as a scabrous reference.

  In his encyclopedia, On the Property of Things, Bartholomaeus Anglicus (also called Bartholomew de Glanville) passed on a traditional Just-So story of the time:

  A stork is a water fowl and purgeth herself with her own bill, for when she feedeth herself with much meat she taketh sea water in her bill and putteth it in at her hinder hole and so into her guts, and that water neisschith [softens] hardness of hard meat and biteth the guts and putteth out superfluities.34

  Monkish teleological reason hunts for the divine plan behind such an exaggerated aspect of creation as the beak of a stork. The book was compiled in Paris in the mid-thirteenth century, but it appeared in print only around 1470, almost contemporaneously with Les Evangiles. The idea was not confined to one source. Polydore Vergil included a chapter about animals’ contributions to knowledge in his compendium on inventions, published in 1546. He marvels at the sandpiper’s benevolent picking of crocodiles’ teeth, and moves on to the ibis:35

  Likewise it was a bird in Egypt who demonstrated a similar thing. The name of this bird is an ibis, and it is almost the same as a stork, and is also the enemy of snakes and very harmful to them. This bird, with the hooked part of its beak, washes itself and washes again in that part where the dross of foodstuffs are expelled.

  The ibis of Egypt, which was identified with the stork in more northerly climates, was credited with the invention of the clyster in medieval zoology; hence the bird was also connected to pollution, illness and tabooed, secret knowledge. (Andreas Alciatus, Emblemata, 1550).

  The passage concludes, ‘From this doctors first learned the use of the clyster.’36

  The identifying implement of a midwife, or woman healer, in images of the seventeenth century, was the clyster or large syringe, which can be used, ibis- or stork-style, to deliver enemas before childbirth. A scene of such medical attention is carved on a misericord of 1531 in the church at Walcourt, Belgium, dedicated to Sainte Materne.37 The woodcarver may have been making a tongue-in-cheek pun on the church’s patron saint (Saint Motherly). A seventeenth-century painting called The Sick Lady, attributed to Jan Steen, in the Boymans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, shows a leering matron in veil and wimple approaching a fashionably dressed, ailing younger woman and flourishing a medical instrument of this type; the scene takes place in the patient’s bedroom and, in spite of its air of a genre report on reality, includes many bawdy clues: the scarlet stays of the patient, as well, of course, as the crude angle and size of the clyster itself.38 The joke here is simply coarse, an allusion to a basic remedy for love pangs. A print of Abraham Bosse published in 1633 shows an apothecary (male) armed with the same tool and sets innuendo aside in the caption:

  In a variation on the bawdy theme of remedies for lovesickness, a barber-apothecary approaches a patient. A clystering will cool the patient’s ‘fire’, says the barber, but the old woman, with a restraining hand on his arm, wants to take over the operation. The ‘bride’ in the bed meanwhile calls out impatiently for treatment. (Cornelius Danckertsz, after Abraham Bosse, mid-seventeenth century.)

  J’ay la syringue en main, hastez-vous done, Madame …

  De prendre pour le mieux ce petit lavement

  … Voutil que je tiens entrera doucement.39

  [I’ve the syringe in hand, so hurry, Madam, and accept this little

  purging to make you better … the tool I’m holding will go in gently … ]

  But the image carries in some cases a more unruly meaning. Women’s access to contraception and abortion through informal channels of information were epitomized by clucking gatherings of women alone, as we saw in Chapter Three; this in turn implied infidelity. Steen’s image, ostensibly a painting of illness, could also carry an illicit message, in a spirit of combined humour and blame. For this type of syringe could and can be used to douche the vagina. A print by Cornelius Danckerts
z from 1660 (left), after the earlier Bosse image, shows the same scene, but includes some different suggestive verses in which the old woman takes over the handling of the clyster from the man, protesting, ‘This would be more suitable for me … I know how this should be done.’40 The topos was not confined to a popular taste for the seamy or to sturdy Dutch realism: no less graceful a painter than Watteau drew an energetically erotic scene known as Le Remède, showing a maid approaching a naked woman on a bed with a syringe.41

  Healers using such an instrument were either servicing women’s desires by undoing their consequences, or giving them clandestine pleasures. When old women storytellers were dubbed with the name Mother Stork or Mère Cigogne, derogatory – dirty – innuendoes, connected to bodily functions of various unmentionable kinds, would also have sounded in contemporary ears.42

  The imagery of the clyster begins to be applied to male physicians around the beginning of the seventeenth century, it seems, when the medical profession was establishing control over the healing arts and even ousting women from practising their usual skills in obstetrics and gynaecology. Later, by analogy, physicians were actually nicknamed ‘clysters’ in English, and the same dubious message was passed. In Holland, plague doctors wore a remarkably carnival-like costume: a tall hood with a long, curved, beak mask which was filled with prophylactic herbs (here, right); indeed, on the feast day of their patron saints, Cosmas and Damian, medical students in France would dress up as storks, and let loose with syringes, squirting passers by.43 Grandville’s caricature, drawn in the mid-nineteenth century, recalls with more pointed and genial wit the legendary origin of the instrument (here, left).

  Doctors came to be nicknamed ‘clysters’ in England, and their costume in time of plague in Denmark RIGHT included a bird mask with a curved beak; the French fantasist Grandville punned with his brilliant wit on the connection, LEFT, in P. J. Stahl, Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux (Paris, 1842).

  Obstetrical instruments adopted stork motifs: a knife for cutting the umbilical cord, made in England in 1870 from mother of pearl and steel, has a pivoted blade in the shape of a stork’s beak.44 It is of course common lore that the stork brings babies: the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, illuminated around 1440 in Utrecht, includes a painting of a stork and a baby in a cradle in the marginal decorations to the image of the Judgement of Solomon.45 While the wise king calls for the baby to be cut in two in order to discover the true mother, the artist teases from the margins, with rather donnish wit, that the real mother is not human at all, but a stork (here). The old wives of the Evangiles des quenouilles refer to this aspect of the bird’s legend, too, reporting that storks always pay their tithe to God after they have ‘made some little ones’.46 A richly painted manuscript of around the same date as Les Evangiles includes a stork bystander at the scene of Julius Caesar’s birth – he is being delivered by caesarean section from the body of his dying mother.47

  The nineteenth-century love of euphemism spread the story more thoroughly through stories for children, especially in urban settings.48 Interestingly, the association of this waterfowl with midwifery was stronger then than now: children were told that a midwife had pulled the new baby up out of the household well. Gradually the stork eclipsed the figure of the woman, which has been all but totally forgotten, partly because the midwives’ sphere of knowledge was declared definitely off-limits to the children. The stork took its place among the fantasy cast – Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy – who provided appropriately childlike explanations for events in the adult world as well as encoding a system of rewards and punishments. The bird also satisfied the new European tribalism of the times, as part of the dreamed-of authentic pagan past.

  For Hans Andersen, storks not only bring babies, but their repertory consists of stories about the arrival of babies: Moses in the bulrushes, and the Marsh King’s daughter herself, whom the stork family find lying in a waterlily. In an earlier tale, ‘The Storks’ (1838), Andersen imagined the primal scene: ‘There is a pond where all the little children lie until the stork comes and gets them for delivery to their parents. There they lie dreaming far more pleasantly than they ever will later in their lives …’. On greetings cards and christening gifts today (which still can include scissors in the shape of the bird), a stork is often represented carrying the baby suspended from her beak in a shawl or a basket, and leaving it in the cradle.49, 50 In this act of delivery, the stork is of course playing midwife, not mother, the woman with authoritative knowledge of the body’s functions. The word is often feminine in gender in countries where the belief in the stork’s powers circulates: in French (cigogne) or Italian (cicogna). In Dutch (ooievaar) the word is not gender marked, but in German, Storch, the word is masculine, with corresponding, revealing effects on the folklore of the bird’s role in bringing babies about: it is associated more with conception than delivery, for it was common in Germany, until this generation, to answer children’s questions about where babies came from by saying, ‘A stork came and bit Mummy in the foot.’

  This would seem a clear euphemism, as Storch is related to stark, meaning stiff or rigid, and to such cognates as stoke and stick and stock.51 The Grimms glossed the alternative archaic and poetic word for the bird, odebero, as a possible conjunction of ot, riches, and od, progeny – the bringer of gifts would be an appropriate etymology for the bird who delivers babies.52 This word is interchangeably used with ‘stork’ in nursery rhymes:

  Adebar, du goder, bring mi’n lutjen Broder.

  Adebar, du bester, bring mi’n lutje Swester.53

  [Stork, good stork, bring me a little brother.

  Stork, best of storks, bring me a little sister.]

  English, being a language largely lacking gender inflections, has adopted the German linguistic implications, and frequently understands the stork to be a male bird: it appears dressed in a doctor’s suit on greetings cards, and in the latest novelty, two-foot-high plastic Dr Stork balloons bearing the news ‘It’s a boy!’ (blue balloon) / ‘It’s a girl!’(pink balloon). These modern manifestations still connect with the symbol’s distant origins, however, and sometimes in other, suggestive ways: the trading device of Régielinge, a French laundry offering a special nappy service, shows a stork bearing a bag of dirty linen in its beak – a survival of the bird’s associations with process and pollution. In Britain, more salubriously, a leading adoption pressure group has called itself Stork.

  Wise King Solomon suggests cutting the baby in half; the true mother pleads for the child’s life. The illuminator of this fable about motherhood included a baby in a rocking cradle and a stork-like bird on the right. (The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, Utrecht, c. 1440.)

  Historically, stork imagery, in art and literature and even clothing, frequently returns the searcher to the Netherlands, where the folklore about the bird still flourishes. In 1695 the stork’s role was mentioned in a Dutch Harlequin play – and this is the decade which saw the publication of contes de la cigogne by both D’Aulnoy and Perrault in Amsterdam.54 The English poet John Heath-Stubbs has made the inspired suggestion that the beliefs about the stork migrated with the Dutch themselves, and that, like Santa Claus, they were naturalized in Western culture by the settlers of New York, whence they spread back to Europe far beyond their original territories, losing in the crossing all comic, even pornographic connotations and becoming happy ciphers with which to greet a new arrival.55 This would illuminate a coincidence in the largely forgotten lore about the bird, that the Dutch word for the bill-clattering noise they make (klepperen) corresponds to popular disparagement of women’s talk (or babbling) as clapperij or clapperatie.56

  Mother Stork’s part in storytelling moves along two axes: how she communicates (her clatter, her chatter) and what she talks about (her naughty claptrap). This folklore does not belong in the classical tradition of myth; it grew up at the childbeds, the lyings-in, the bedrooms and the nurseries of more recent history, and more northerly climates than Greece or Sici
ly. Storks were more common in continental Europe than they are today, though they can still be seen, sometimes. Migrating south in the winter, as Les Evangiles des quenouilles reports, they returned as heralds of the spring, of the rise of sap and the season of fertility, so that the mere sight of them, for instance, augured conception, as described in the recent novel Bohin Manor by the Polish writer Tadeusz Konwicki.

  Storks can still be seen in parts of central and northern Europe, though they are now much less numerous than they were. Stately and poised in black and white livery, they graze in couples in the fields in summertime and take off with magnificent ease, controlling their flight with deep wing-beats, skimming the earth or rising high in the sky till they are lost to view.

  Emblematic signs of the goose and stork, like the webbed foot or the long beak, recur in synecdoche to denote female sexual knowledge and power, as well as the implied deviancy which accompanies them; the sirens who lured men on to the reefs with their song were also bird-bodied and web-footed, in the classical tradition.57 These signs were attached to the stories and other materials in which such knowledge was transmitted and counterpoised to male strengths, both physical and social, the domain of fertility opposed to the male domain of sovereignty: contes de ma Mère l’Oye, contes de la cigogne. Waterfowl and large amphibious birds were connected to the most fundamental mystery of all: where do babies come from? And the question gave Mother Goose or Mother Stork the right to speak replies aloud and pass them on. The fine ladies writing fairy tales in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries inherited the tradition, both as its agents and renewers, and as its objects: the misogyny which buoys Les Evangiles des quenouilles greeted the salonnières’ fad for fairy tales, yet the targets of scorn found in the form’s marginal and despised status a means to articulacy and a way of struggle.