From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  The bestial provided artists with the devilish imagery they needed: horns, fangs, claws, paws, talons, hooves, webbed digits, maws and jaws were mixed and matched. (Le Livre de la Vigne Nostre Seigneur, French, c. 1450–70.)

  Though the Devil’s hoof is famously goatish and cloven, artists’ fantasy did not stop there, and bird claws or webbed digits or hybrid varieties of both recur in illustrations of the tempter and his minions (left). In the medieval miracle play Mary of Nimmegen, for instance, the heroine’s one-eyed devil suitor tells her:

  It’s not in our power, we devils from hell

  To incarnate ourselves …

  Without some little defect here or there,

  Be it in the head or the hands or the feet.27

  Asymmetry often intensifies the presence of unofficial, even forbidden, knowledge: the Devil wears motley, his limbs are mismatched, and he limps, walking pede claudo, listing to the left.28 The theologian Fulgentius (d. 533) wrote that the bird-bodied sirens of classical myth have ‘hen-like feet’ because ‘lust scatters all that it possesses’.29 The seductresses in medieval images of the temptation of Saint Anthony often have one bird-foot peeping from below the hems of their dresses, as in a painting of Saint Justina tempted by the Devil, for instance, by Friedrich Pacher, from the end of the fifteenth century (here); in Sicily, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, women on trial for witchcraft confessed to night-flying with mysterious ‘women from outside who were beautifully dressed but had cats’ paws or horses’ hooves’.30 When the knightly hero is nearly deflected from his quest for true love by Jealousy, her foulness includes webbed feet, a recurrent sign of contrariness, and, in women, of deviancy (here). These sinners might have inherited their dangerous talons from Judaic and Greek mythological harpies and she-monsters, like Lamia and Lilith (though these avatars tend to have both limbs misshapen). In Hellenistic magical belief, Hecate’s foul offspring, the Empusae (literally, one-footed), were bloodsuckers, succubi and child-stealers, and had one foot of brass and the other an ass’s hoof, but they could also disguise themselves as lovely girls to seduce victims.31 The tradition found its way into all levels of popular culture: a traditional children’s game, called Old Witch, which resembles Grandmother’s Footsteps, requires the catcher or ‘It’ to limp as s/he tries to catch the other players, in imitation of the old witch of the title.32

  The devil could take cunning disguises; here he appears as a beautiful woman to tempt Saint Justina – but the bird talons under his dress betray him. (Friedrich Pacher, The Temptation of Saint Justina, Austria, late fifteenth century.)

  The titillating side of the folk tale about the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon’s magic trick hints through the metonymy of hairy legs or a misshapen foot at secrets hidden under women’s dresses which men fear to see, but long all the same to know. In this allusion, it connects with the imagined avian metamorphoses of the beldames in such bawdy books as Les Evangiles des quenouilles, as another strand in the same DNA encoding female heterodoxy as bird-like. The image of the questionable foot arises from the fantasized illicit knowledge that women are supposed to possess, and from curiosity about tabooed domains, the very domains allotted to the old wives of the old wives’ tale. The anonymous Master of the Hours of Catherine of Cleves included, in the ornamental margins of the miniature which shows the Queen of Sheba wading the stream, a vignette of an old market woman spinning as she sits in a tent with her produce laid out for sale on a board in front of her – a working woman, travelling and doing business independently, and networking as she does so, no doubt (here).

  The same fears were damagingly projected on to unbelievers of all kinds: antisemitism demonized the physical appearance of Jews by fantasizing such defects as splay feet; Melanchthon and Luther issued a pamphlet in 1523 portraying Rome as a beast with one ass’s hoof, one bird’s claw, an ass’s head, the torso of a naked woman and a cock crowing from her rump (here); and when Edmund Spenser imagined the Catholic Church in The Faerie Queene, he drew on a similar phantasmagoric repertory of monstrous features.33, 34 When Duessa, the witchlike daughter of Deceit and Shame, seduces the Knight, he realizes what she is only when he peeps at her bathing and

  Her neather partes misshapen, monstruous,

  Were hidd in water, that I could not see –

  But they did seeme more foule and hideous

  Then womans shape would beleeve to bee …35

  Later, the poet again specifies the bestial horror of her lower limbs:

  Her neather parts, the shame of all her kind,

  My chaster Muse for shame doth blush to write …

  [But write he did]

  And eke her feete most monstrous were in sight;

  For one of them was like an Eagles claw

  With griping talaunts armd to greedy fight;

  The other like a beares uneven paw,

  More ugly shape yet never living creature saw.36

  The Faerie Queene, published during the reign of Henry VIII’s Protestant daughter Elizabeth I, proclaimed the truth of the reformed Church against Rome, and the figure of Duessa, in counterpoise to valiant and virtuous Una, personifies the prostituted papacy, brimming with lies and luxury and lust. Luther and Spenser were turning back on the Church the very rhetoric it was accustomed to use to define its enemies.

  A younger contemporary of the fairytale authors like L’Héritier and D’Aulnoy, the Breton-born writer Alain-René Lesage (d. 1747), wrote a highly successful comic and orientalizing wonder tale, Le Diable boiteux (The Limping Devil), which appeared in 1707. The devil Asmodeus is set free from a bottle, Arabian Nights style, and in return lifts the roofs off the houses of Madrid and shows his rescuer everything going on inside. Lesage was able to paint a vivid and gaily satirical picture of contemporary Parisian society, and his device probably inspired Diderot’s famous pornographic squib, Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748), in which all is revealed – but by means of a magic ring which has the power to make women’s vulvae speak.37 The idea that the transgressive has access to the unknown and ineffable governs this repertory of devices and images, and Mother Goose, unlikely as it may seem, belongs there, as an anomalous figure of forbidden knowledge. The Comtesse de Murat found Lesage’s device so intriguing that she began a sequel to Le Diable boîteux, but did not complete it.38

  A donkey head and cloven hoof, a rooster’s claws and crowing beak help portray the monstrousness of Rome in a pamphlet by Luther and Melanchthon. (‘The Papal Ass’, Germany, 1523.)

  Though each and every type of beast or creature invoked, be it an ostrich or a stork or a goose or a bear or a snake, carries a set of particular associations, the exact form of the bestial nether limbs is mutable: webbed, clawed, gnarled, threetoed, five-toed, encurled, club-footed, not to forget cloven, the appendage itself partakes of polymorphous perversity within the range of the base, not-human possibilities (here). Indeed, this very mutability informs the character of the heterodox and the dangerous. Bird, amphibian, lizard, serpent, the diabolical mutates into many guises, perhaps because a lingering Platonic correlation between beauty and form influences Christian images of the monstrous. Monstrousness shares in disorderliness’s clumsiness, its defective classifications and harmonies, it enacts aberration by failing to remain consistent even with itself. A demon on a medieval cathedral can have the head of a ram, the tail of a donkey, the feet of an eagle, the bottom of a gryphon, the ears of a bat and the elbows of a rhinoceros, and so forth. Shifting and slippery forms in themselves convey that chaos which is evil, and, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, sexuality offered the principal site of danger. When the Queen of Sheba’s foot is restored to human shape, as related in one branch of the legend, it not only signifies her recognition of the true god, but announces the possible miraculous redemption of her femaleness.

  III

  In western and northern Europe, the goose-, the stork-, the bird-woman appear in a richly braided train of perverse associations, and these take us to the heart of medieval romance
and the seed-bed of fairy tales. For the inherent tendency in the genre to topsy-turvy, to turning pauper to prince, bane to boon, affects the brandings and birthmarks and deformities of the protagonists as well: fairy tale chronicles conversions, too, in the form of transformations.

  When the French fairytale writers in the salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries traced the genre back to the troubadours of Provence, they were right in many ways: the medieval romances are the sources of many fairy tales. One of these, a pattern to which many later tales are cut, coincides in significant motifs with the legend of the Queen of Sheba.

  In the mid-thirteenth century, the Brabançon minstrel Adenet le Roi composed a French verse romance about the mother of Charlemagne, Bertha, queen and wife of Pépin le Bref (Pippin the Short) in which he melded oriental romance, troubadour poetry and pseudo-historical record.39 He called his poem ‘Berthe aus grant pié’ (Big-Footed Bertha). The text does not expand on the reason for the name, just concentrates on the wealth of subsequent mishaps Berthe suffered until the triumphant appearance of the founder of the French royal line, her son Charles. But in other redactions and variations by minstrels all over Europe, the reason for her name was understood literally. In an early fifteenth-century codex, for instance, the writer tells us:

  Eia oit li pe asa plus grant

  Qe nulla autre dame soit de son courant.40

  [She had a foot indeed much larger than any other woman of her day.]

  In folklore this misfortune inspired the sobriquet La Reine Pédauque (Queen Splayfoot), and in visual representations this was no Clementine-style aberration (‘And her shoes were number nine’) but a single webbed foot like that of a goose.41

  The historical Bertha (d. AD 783), daughter of the Count of Laon, gave birth to Charlemagne, the future Holy Roman Emperor, in 742. In French tradition, however, passed on in the romances, she was given a grander birth: Flor, the King of Hungary, for a father and Blancheflor, the daughter of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, for a mother. Flor and Blancheflor were themselves characters in a jongleur romance of star-crossed love, while ‘the daughter of the King of Hungary’ becomes a stock figure of fairy tale, appearing as the wronged Constance in Chaucer’s ‘Man of Lawe’s Tale’, for example, as well as innumerable other stories.42, 43 Physical deformity of some kind frequently brands the heroine-victim and brings about her – temporary – outcast state. But Bertha’s romance family also fulfils another, more political function, confirming the holy and august character of the French royal house by connecting it to the established, ancient empire in the East and the selfsame ruler who had saved the relics of the cross from the infidel. Just to make sure of the family’s credentials, Berthe was provided with a brother – Saint Martin of Tours, he who cut his cloak in half to give to a beggar.

  Her romance coincides therefore with the Queen of Sheba’s not only in the matter of her abnormality, but also in her typological position: as the Queen of Sheba stands to Solomon, Helena stands to Constantine, as we have seen; in turn, Helena, mother of the first Christian Roman emperor, finds a symbolic descendant in Bertha, the mother of Charlemagne. In 1165, the emperor Charlemagne was canonized as the ‘powerful athlete of Christ’, and was subsequently venerated as a saint himself throughout the middle ages, as one of the movers of Christian success in the West.44 In this light, the three queens make up a cluster, rhyming across time and place; all three helpmeets in the expansion of Christendom through their virtue and wisdom.

  At a further, internally circumstantial level, Bertha belongs in the narrative later attributed to Mother Goose and Mother Stork. The romance Adenet interwove with French royal legend belongs to one of the most widespread and popular folk-story cycles in the world, about accused queens and wronged maidens, current since the fifth century at least. Adenet was alert to old sources of wonder tales: he also composed a versified ‘Alexandre Le Grand’, using the fairytale material about the hero emperor from the fantastical Greek romance of the third century AD. The plight of the defamed or otherwise wronged wife was elaborated with variations in dozens of fairy tales, familiar for instance from Chaucer (‘Patient Griselda’; ‘The Man of Lawe’s Tale’) and Shakespeare (The Winter’s Tale).45 The features of the wrongdoing vary, but in Adenet’s poem, Berthe’s maid Aliste, with the connivance of her wicked mother Margiste, treacherously takes the queen’s rightful place in the king’s bed, usurps her status as Pépin’s queen and bride, and concocts all kinds of horrendous charges against her. Berthe suffers all in silence until the truth is revealed; she is reinstated and the false bride punished.

  This plot provides the dominant frame story of Basile’s firecracker of a collection of fairy tales, Lo cunto de li cunti, in the seventeenth century. His group of female storytellers exchange many tales of substituted brides and false queens, and at the end actually unmask a similar wicked usurper prospering in their midst. It is most famously developed in the body of modern fairy tales by the Grimm Brothers, in ‘The Goose Girl’: a servant takes the place of the true bride, who becomes a goose herd. Her mother gives her a magic horse Falada, who, even after the usurper has had his head cut off, continues to speak, even as a trophy mounted on the wall, and to tell the truth about his real mistress. For her own part, she is also able to perform magical tricks, and so is at last recognized and vindicated.

  The transference, which accords the teller of the tale the characteristics of the protagonist, turning goose-footed and goose-herd heroines into taletelling mother geese, receives another scrap of supporting evidence from an Italian saying, which means once upon a time: ‘Nel tempo over Berta filava …’ (In the days when Bertha spun …); in the tradition that surrounds the old wives of the old wives’ tale, they characteristically spin while they tell their tales of olden times. It is also axiomatic that they represent timeless folk memory reaching back through oral reminiscence to a time and a place out of time. Jacob Grimm writes that it was common to swear on Berthe’s distaff, because the name Bertha belongs generically to the ‘old grandmother or ancestress of the family’. He derives it from Teutonic roots meaning ‘bright, light, white’ (peraht, berht, brecht), writing that the abnormal foot of legend is a ‘swan-maiden’s foot, a mark of her higher nature’.46 He goes on to connect it with the splay foot of a woman who works a spinning wheel all day – again a return to the scene of storytelling – an association however which would postdate by some considerable interval the romance of ‘Berthe aus grant pié,’ as the spinning wheel reached Western Europe from the Middle East only some time in the fourteenth century.47

  In the story of the knight in the fairy kingdom who peeps at his beloved and finds that she has monstrous limbs, in the profusion of legends about women’s hidden nether parts, furred, clawed or webbed, in Sheba’s heterodox malformation as pictured by the spirited imagination of Pantaleone of Otranto, the fantasy and energy of curious imaginations – boys’ and girls’ – have faced the place of origin, the mother’s genitals. Lacan argued that the phallus functioned as the dominant sign of symbolic language and that the vulva was bodied forth only by lack or absence; but it takes looking to see the obvious, the mutations and migrations performed by vernacular symbolism once on everybody’s lips. The metonymy of bird feet for the secret, ‘shameful’ part of woman, that organ tempting men to sin, circulated in the common language of medieval and Renaissance Europe, attaching itself to figures as various as midwives, riddling queens, and nursery storytellers. It is even hinted at in the famous story of Cinderella, where she is proved by her foot – or does the love and recognition she wins from the prince heal her in the place where her innermost nature is marked? From a historical point of view, it is interesting that the earliest surviving tale of a wronged daughter dropping her shoe was set down in China in the ninth century when footbinding was practised (see Chapter Thirteen).

  The stigma of the secret foot acknowledged the power of narrative to transmit knowledge, retaining the suspicion that stories and narrators could be highly un
reliable; it represented an attempt to contain and subdue the heterodox; it accorded the tellers all the fascination that secrets hold, while it held out a promise that the act of narrative itself could enrol its makers and hearers back into the fold.

  CHAPTER 9

  On Riddles, Asses and the Wisdom of Fools: The Queen of Sheba III

  ‘Know thyself’: a fool in ass’s ears is admonished by a stern nymph with a looking glass in an early example of instructive children’s literature. (John Bewick, vignette in John Trusler, Proverbs Exemplified, London, 1790.)

  And be these juggling fiends no more believ’d

  That palter with us in a double sense …

  Macbeth, V, vii