From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  CHAPTER 10

  Sweet Talk, Pleasant Laughter: Seduction I

  Mother Goose comes in many guises: John Inman takes up the traditional drag role in the pantomime, c. 1990.

  There was an old woman tossed up in a basket,

  Seventeen times as high as the moon;

  Where she was going I couldn’t but ask it,

  For in her hand she carried a broom.

  Old woman, old woman, old woman, quoth I,

  Where are you going to up so high?

  To brush the cobwebs off the sky!

  May I go with you?

  Aye, by-and-by.1

  MEDEA’S NURSE IN Euripides’ tragedy, or Juliet’s in Shakespeare, eggs on the young to pleasure, to vice and folly; the old nurse or crone’s connection with inflammatory, foolish advice, with artful persuasion and insider’s erotic knowledge, led to their adoption as persuaders by a different variety of aspiring seducer: the storyteller. The effective seductiveness of the crone was so deeply implied that authors appropriated it for themselves to their own ends, or at least represented with some relish male impersonations of the storytelling old wife and her powers of persuasion. Vertumnus, god of autumn fruitfulness, fell in love with Pomona, goddess of summer fruitfulness, of orchards and gardens, but found that she was very zealous to keep her chastity; so he disguised himself as an old woman (Pl. 11). In this masquerade, as the first wolf in granny’s clothing, the god of autumn softens Pomona; when he changes back into his ‘undimmed manly radiance’, she puts up no further resistance.2

  It is one of many stories of seduction which Ovid tells in the Metamorphoses, and he presents it as a true story, a little-known episode from the days of ancient Rome. The theme enters art in the seventeenth century: a sunny, pastoral version of this cross-dressed wooing was painted by the French artist Jean Rane, around 1710–20 and another by Jan van Kessel in Holland (Pl. 11).3

  In The Golden Ass, in order to tell the story of Cupid and Psyche, the author, as we have seen, abandons his chief narrative voice, that of his hero Lucius, the eponymous ass, and assumes the voice of an old woman instead.4 Again, the book began to enjoy a new readership in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after it was censored (as often happens): it became a favourite subject of libertine reflection, when the works of Lucian, who had closely influenced the book, were condemned at the Council of Trent.

  What men can do, women can also; impersonations of the old gossip, the knowing crone, adept at erotic arts and powerful with her magic and her secrets, do not end with the male scribe of Les Evangiles des quenouilles, with Apuleius’ mouthpiece, or Vertumnus’ seduction. Once the literary fairy tale began to be published and disseminated, the negative, pilloried figure of the crone proved a valuable mask, akin to the sorceress, which men and women could both assume when they wanted to find a mode of self-expression.

  Il Pentamerone, or Lo cunto de li cunti, the cycle of fifty tales by the Neapolitan historian and belletrist Giambattista Basile, can lay claim to being the foundation stone of the modern literary fairy tale; published in 1634–6, it contains some of the earliest written versions of the most familiar stories – including ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Basile’s tone throughout is extravagantly comic, often extremely bawdy, and this may come as a surprise to the twentieth-century reader, who no longer expects ribaldry to dominate the fairytale genre. The often seamy comedies Basile’s female narrators tell are inextricably connected to their imagined voices, as well as arising as it were naturally from the ‘delicate’ matters the fairy tales deal with – erotic, transgressive, personal, intimate.

  Basile’s exuberant excesses unroll in a great cartwheel of narrative within a frame – the stories are told to a purpose, to unpack the riddle at the heart of the story. Significantly, this plot itself, which is accompanied by a sequence of jesting riddles, concerns the place and power of laughter.5

  The book opens with an introduction, in which appears a familiar figure from fairy tale: a heroine who cannot smile or laugh. Nothing Princess Zoza’s doting father does can raise a titter out of her.6 He invites tumblers, jugglers, well-known comedians, performing monkeys, dancing dogs. No response, not a trace of a smile. Finally, her father orders a fountain of oil to be placed in the market square so that the huge crowds coming to market there will slip and slither and fall down – bringing merriment to all who watch them. An old woman comes to the fountain and begins collecting the oil with a sponge, filling a pitcher, when a young boy throws a stone and breaks it. She curses him roundly – her oaths cascade from Basile’s exuberant fantasy for nine lines of demotic insults – very funny, very outrageous when spoken aloud. The boy retorts in kind, and this drives the old woman to such a pitch of fury that she lashes out to catch him – and slips. When she tumbles, her skirts fall over her head and she reveals what Basile calls Ha scena boschereccia’ (the woodland or shrubby landscape) – this is a mock-pastoral, theatrical metaphor for the old woman’s fanny.

  The silent princess has never seen anything so funny in all her life and she begins laughing fit to burst. The old woman then curses her – sentencing her to fall hopelessly in love with a certain Prince of Camporotondo.7 When the princess summons her and asks for an explanation, the old woman tells her the prince is under an enchantment, buried in a tomb, and will only be revived if someone fills a jug with her tears in under three days. For such untoward laughter, the only absolution can be wrought by weeping.

  The story then plunges into a multitude of complications, which tell how Zoza manages to fulfil this adynaton, or impossible task, only to lose her resuscitated Prince Taddeo to a base slave who steals the jar of tears and marries him instead. But Zoza, like a true fairytale heroine, is tenacious. With the help of several fairy godmothers, she perseveres, until at last she manages to smuggle in a magic doll to her beloved prince’s household. The doll has been programmed to inspire in the usurping queen an insatiable craving – not for fruits or sweets or other toothsome delicacies – but for stories. The slave who had stolen Taddeo under false pretences is now pregnant, and if she does not hear stories, she will do herself and her future baby a great mischief.

  To prevent this, Taddeo summons all the women of the district – and picks ten of the best storytellers from among them. They are each and every one an old hag, hunchbacked, cross-eyed, dribbling, and – limping. Comic crones, conforming to the type of gossip, old wife, witch and bawd; Basile’s humour shows no mercy. Taddeo takes a seat beside his wicked wife under a baldaquin and invites the old women to eat, and then, over five days, to tell a story to relieve the desire of his wife in her delicate condition.

  The book with its cycle of fifty stories unfolds, until the last tale is told by Zoza herself – and the usurping wife is unmasked, confesses her guilt, is summarily sentenced to be buried alive; and Zoza can now take her rightful place as the Prince of Camporotondo’s true bride. This is where the framing narrative takes up the familiar folk theme, of the False or Substituted Bride, present in early medieval romances, like ‘Berthe aus grant pié’, and familiar from the Grimm Brothers’ ‘The Goose Girl’. Basile’s overall architecture in his anthology thus begins with laughter as the catalyst of the action, when the old woman curses Zoza for laughing at her, and then moves through a dazzling sequence of stories, both romantic and grotesque, to arrive at the comic restoration of order.

  The silent princess embodies the audience of fairy tale as well as taking part in the story itself, because the tale itself exists to excite responses, to bring life, to assert vulgar rude health against pale misery and defeat, to stir laughter or wonder or tears or hope. Fairy tales put an end to mutism; even when they are about dumbness and dumblings, they break the silence.

  In Basile, Zoza’s initial, fatal outburst of laughter was provoked by the sight of the old woman’s genitals. This scene echoes the classical encounter between Demeter and the old woman, called Baubô or Iambe in the ancient sources, and recapitulates the grieving Demeter
’s response to Baubô’s similar antics.8 But unlike Baubô, this old woman’s exposure is involuntary, and she curses Zoza to quest, Psyche-like, through terrible trials for her true love.

  In a bawdy Croatian version of a widespread folk tale, another princess cannot laugh, and it takes a younger brother, a ‘Dummling’, says the story, with a magic flute and the magnetism of the Pied Piper, to make her do so. The flute has been given to him by an old woman, to whom he was kind when his elder brothers spurned her. When he plays it, anything within earshot becomes stuck fast to him. So he appears before her window with three golden ducks, three greedy girls who wanted their feathers, a baker who smacked the girls’ bare bottoms when the wind blew up their skirts, a trouserless naked monk who did the same, and a cock who pecked at the monk’s bottom because it was still dirty. And when the princess sees this antic procession, she laughs for the first time in her life and marries the youth with the flute.9

  In the impassioned manifesto, La Jeune née (The Newly Born Woman) by Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, the writers take up Freud’s theories about laughter from a feminist perspective. Freud wrote:

  The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure … Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies not only the triumph of the ego but also of the pleasure principle, which is able here to assert itself against the unkindness of the real circumstances.10

  Cixous and Clément reaffirm this, invoking laughter’s power to explode prejudice, to confront fear, to destroy enemies, to resist oppression; and in the course of their enraptured battle cry, they place centre stage the figure of Baubô, the woman who made Demeter laugh in spite of herself, as prototype and model of women’s potential for disruption and change.11

  Persephone, in the famous myth, had been abducted by Hades, Lord of Death, when she was playing with her friends in a springtime meadow in Sicily, and her mother Demeter’s subsequent sorrow at her loss had blighted the earth, ending its eternal summer and bounty. But the grotesque crone Baubô, by telling her dirty jokes and even – perhaps – mooning, showing her bare bottom and genitals, like a fool who shows his bare rump, made the goddess forget to mourn for a moment, made her smile again, even laugh.12 In Clement of Alexandria’s account, in the second century AD, Baubô offers water mixed with barley to the parched and grieving goddess; when Demeter refuses to be comforted by the drink, Baubô takes offence, and ‘uncovers her secret parts and exhibits them to the goddess’. The goddess cannot help enjoying this, and agrees to drink – Clement calls this a shameful story and can barely contain his horrified disgust at this behaviour of the pagan gods. But he goes on to relate it to the Eleusinian mysteries, quoting a fifth-century BC hymn to Orpheus. This describes the sight Baubô reveals to the goddess in rather different terms: as the god Iacchus or Bacchus as a baby, the future presiding genius of merriment and wine, laughing and dancing there:

  This said, she drew aside her robes, and showed

  A sight of shame; child Iacchus was there,

  And laughing, plunged his hands below her breasts,

  Then smiled the goddess, in her heart she smiled,

  And drank the draught from out the glancing cup.13

  It is impossible to tell from the verse whether the child is present in the folds of her lifted clothes, or is a vision in her womb. But in either case, the enigmatic encounter between Demeter and Baubô combines licentiousness and laughter, through the release from melancholy of the goddess by means of Baubô’s bodily display and gift of inebriating liquor.

  The name Baubô was also used of the dildo, specifically for the leather dildo worn by comic actors in the satyr plays; hence when the old woman clowns, she alludes, through her very name, to the cathartic function of the bawdy, drunken Dionysiac comedies which concluded tragic trilogies. The actors were not however cross-dressed, as she is, but costumed to exaggerate sexual masquerade; her display of sexual organs, either her own, or the false stage attribute of the satyr’s dildo, gains its comic force from its incongruity. Zoza in the Basile story laughs like Demeter when she sees the ‘woodland scene’, because it belongs to an ugly old woman. A beautiful young woman would not provoke the same degree of merriment – but desire, envy and maybe even fear. This incongruity lies at the heart of the grotesque, which is one of humour’s manifestations; the inappropriate juxtaposition of elements is one of the principal dynamics of the joke.

  Baubô’s other name, in the Greek sources, is Iambe, the origin of ‘iambus’, the limping metre, one short syllable or stress followed by one long; the listing gait of the halt and the old, the ill-assorted and incongruous represented in sound – this is one of the reasons, inherited from pagan belief, for the imaginary misshapenness of the Devil and his agents.

  Iambics were first used in lampoons, by the Greek satirists Archilochus and Hipponax from the mid-seventh to the mid-sixth century BC; Hipponax in his satires modifies an iambic trimeter to end in a spondee, thus creating the ‘limping iambic’ or scazon. Such syncopation implies a funny foot, and though Baubo/Iambe is not explicitly described as lame, her name and her age imply that she is. But the variations on this metre spread from these poets’ work into so much high, tragic poetry that the rhythm’s first freight of meaning has been covered over.

  The iambic metre, however, is also one of the most ordinary speech rhythms in Greek and Latin. It is the beat to which common people commonly talked – and still do talk, in many languages, including English – the Bourgeois Gentilhomme may have been delighted to be talking in prose, but he was also likely to be talking in iambics. At least now and then.

  Lameness returns as the mark of the outcast with secret resources; the limping, merrymaking crone persists as a stock figure of fun in medieval and Renaissance literature, appearing as both a joke and a joker, fooling and fooled.

  The fool can speak out when the wise man stays mute, as King Lear shows: the Fool speaks in riddles, which encode a truth the king accepts as such when he will not resign himself to any honest declaration, of love or, later, hatred from his daughters or from anyone else. Mockery, playacting, riddling spring uncomfortable messages from the privy mind into the public domain with a freedom denied to those who speak or write in earnest; the puppet caricatures of television’s Spitting Image, savaging figures from the Queen downwards with often deadly accuracy, the ferocious excesses of comedy series like Yes, Minister (catching the greed and ruthlessness of Thatcherite politicians in particular), are broadcast in Britain today even while self-censorship and political gagging of ‘serious’ criticism increase.

  As long ago as the first century, Phaedrus (15 BC–AD 50) wrote in his collection of animal fables (which introduced the Aesopian genre to Rome):

  Now I will briefly explain how the type of thing called fable was invented. The slave being liable to punishment for any offence, since he dared not say outright what he wished to say, projected his personal sentiments into fables, and eluded censure under the guise of jesting with made-up stories.14

  Phaedrus was himself born a slave, was freed and became the librarian of Augustus Caesar, so may have been especially alive to the issue of censored speech from both social vantage points.

  The fool’s cap marks fools out as different from the rest, belittles and segregates and demeans them. But at the same time it resembles the magic cap of invisibility from a fairy tale, because it frees the jester’s tongue as if he were not there to be accused, or caught, or punished.

  The fool fools because he makes no difference; it is not perhaps poetry that makes nothing happen, but jokes. Yet neither formula is quite right somehow: both shake out the mind, air it from a new window, lighten it, like laundry in the breeze. The revolutionary Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen commented: ‘In church, in the palace, on parade, facing the department head,
the police officer, the German administrator, nobody laughs. The serfs are deprived of the right to smile in the presence of the landowners.’ (Wipe that smile off your face, says the bullying teacher.) Herzen concludes, Only equals may laugh.’15 So the laughter of the clown, the mockery of the fool, can be the expression of freedom, the gesture that abolishes hierarchy, that cancels authority and faces down fear.

  Its release can lie in the way it abolishes hierarchy and authority. Riddle books in the eighteenth century, produced for children’s amusement, and filled with concealed meanings, knew this function of laughter:

  Of Merry books this is the chief,

  ’Tis as a Purging Pill;

  To carry off all heavy Grief,

  And make you laugh your Fill.16

  But most riddling allusions, including the Fool’s in King Lear, need glossing today; actors have increasingly stressed the physical sides of the part, performing as a draggle-tailed transvestite or as a circus acrobat, in order to put the character across.17 The double entendres tend to fall fast and thick on deaf ears among audiences today, unused to the dirty patter of medieval and Renaissance laughter.

  II

  Mother Goose becomes one of the vehicles for the survival of this folklore – as one of its personae as well as its mouthpiece. As an author, she enters English children’s publishing in the late eighteenth century; not by any means associated exclusively with fairy tales, she is credited with every other kind of nursery entertainment: ditties, songs, traditional nursery rhymes, pantomime plots.18 A certain positivist tendency has led some researchers to hunt for real-life originals, and several candidates have been proposed: Mother Goose ‘was not only a veritable personage’, wrote one editor firmly, his tongue tucked away out of sight, ‘but was born and resided many years in Boston, where many of her descendants may now be found … This was the “Wealthy family of Goose” which is immortalized by Mr Bowditch in his book of Suffolk names …’19 Another story maintained that a certain Mrs Vergoose, also living in Boston in the seventeenth century, drove her family mad with her incessant singing and reciting, until her son, a printer, collected her songs.