From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  At the blackboard, in fool’s spectacles and granny bonnet, Mother Goose shows she can instruct the young as well as entertain them. (Chester Loomis, Mother Goose Tales, 1888.)

  Cackling and honking, Mother Goose acted as traditional mouthpiece for nonsense rhymes and ditties, children’s stories and songs. (W. W. Denslow, Mother Goose, London, 1902.)

  But there is not a trace of so early an edition of Mother Goose rhymes, which would predate by over a century the pioneering children’s publisher John Newbery’s Mother Goose’s Melody of around 1765.20 Even the circumstances of Mrs Vergoose’s story appear to be borrowed from traditional associations of women and talk: the antics of ‘Mother Hubbard’, for example, were first committed to paper in the now familiar verse form by Sarah Martin in 1805.21 She too was reckoned an irrepressibly garrulous old soul, cured by her venture into print. Besides, accepting a real-life character as the prototype of Mother Goose would mean setting aside the antiquity of the proverbial term, and all the condensed symbolism it contains, as we have seen.

  Mother Goose took root in British folklore in the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as a comical witch figure compounded of many fancies and dreams, a fount of female wisdom, a repository of tradition, an instrument of children’s entertainment, as well as a familiar butt of the material in which she starred. She has many relatives among other Baubôs of the nursery, who, like her, appeared between the covers of anthologies that actually bore her name:

  There was an old woman, and what do you think?

  She lived upon nothing but victuals and drink:

  Victuals and drink were the chief of her diet;

  And yet the old woman could never be quiet.22

  This nonsensical and ribald old woman, alongside Mother Hubbard, Old Dame Trot, Dame Wiggins of Lee and other characters of eighteenth-century nursery rhymes, shares in the illustrator’s eyes Mother Goose’s crone features, her chapfallen jaw, the toothless bight of chin and nose in profile, the Punch-like proboscis, the stick, the conical hat and the apron and petticoats (Pl. 13).

  Burlesque witchcraft has continued a stock theme in children’s literature this century. Willy Pogany, in the 1920s, illustrated a little-known but wonderfully good-natured anonymous nonsense rhyme which had been published in London in 1805:

  There was an old woman who rode on a broom

  With a high gee ho! gee humble;

  And she took her Tom Cat behind for a groom,

  With a bimble, bamble, bumble.23

  They travelled along till they came to the sky

  With a high gee ho! gee humble;

  But the journey so long made them very hungry

  With a bimble, bamble, bumble.

  Says Tom, I can find nothing here to eat,

  With a high gee ho! gee humble;

  So let us go back again, I entreat,

  With a bimble, bamble, bumble.

  But controlling children through bogeys, rather than lulling their terrors through merriment, inspires many famous tales in English in the nineteenth century The earliest written version of ‘Goldilocks’, called ‘The Three Bears’ in a manuscript of 1831, does not feature the little girl of today but another witchy old woman, and in much less benign spirit than the characters of nursery rhymes. At first, she stoves in the chair she sits on and lands, legs flailing, on her bottom; her pranks in this story are at first intended to be funny but turn ambiguous.24 For the end appals: the bears ‘drag forth the dame, half expiring with fear’, maltreat her for a witch, throwing her on the fire to burn her, and then ‘swimming’ her in a pond where, like a reputed witch, she floats. As if this were not enough, they then ‘chuck her aloft of St Paul’s churchyard steeple’.25 The teller also illustrated her manuscript, which she was giving as a present to her nephew. The three bears’ house is very large, gracious and well-appointed, and stands behind bayonet railings: the little nephew was learning about the social order. Violence in children’s literature changes form, and its targets differ – but it never disappears.

  The poet Robert Southey, who first published the story six years later, stressed the social message: ‘a little old Woman came to the house. She could not have been a good, honest, old Woman … She was an impudent, bad old Woman, and set about helping herself.’26 The story unequivocally takes the part of the bears when, at the end, the bad old woman jumps in terror out of the window: ‘whether she broke her neck in the fall; or ran into the wood and was lost there; or found her way out of the wood, and … was sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her.’27

  Southey’s nasty children’s story punishes an old woman in the attempt to contain or at least discipline beggars and vagrants – who had often been taken for witches.28 Later Victorian cheeriness can be seen to be extending a kind of amnesty of sorts, for most of the low-class, noisy, bawdy old nurses of nursery literature are pictured enjoying a special, easy, and safe relation with animals, their sorcery connotations recalled only in the highest spirits: bears, dogs, cats, monkeys and mice attend them as familiars in their cottages and kitchens. The rhymes frequently inspired illustrators to zestful, Rabelaisian mischief: the Dalziel Brothers created a richly waggish series of dogs capering and clowning for Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog’ in the bumper compendium Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales of 1892.

  Like the absurd figure of the learned ass in popular comic lore, Mother Goose often dons spectacles; in her bird shape, with glasses perched on her beak, she presides before the blackboard in children’s books like Chester Loomis’s Mother Goose Tales (here).

  Spectacles carry a double meaning: in medieval painting, the rabbi at Jesus’ circumcision sometimes wears them, and Saint Anne, too, lays them down in the crease of her Bible (here).29 But the learned can be fools, as in Swift’s kingdom of Laputa, where the scholars all wear spectacles and see nothing. And fools, on the other hand, can be wise: Jan Steen’s painting of 1671 shows King David returning in triumph to Jerusalem after his victory over Goliath; a jester is capering and beating a tambourine to the music-making of the crowd. He has a pair of pincenez spectacles blazoned on his rump (right). In his novel The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco threw these motley ingredients – the irreverent laughter and the wise fool’s spectacles of the middle ages – into a witch’s cauldron to produce his exuberant, cunning pastiche of scholasticism, sorcery and country house murder stories – a supreme work of contemporary folklore.

  The British pantomime tradition has prolonged the life of the medieval diablerie, and Mother Goose, irreverently guying her betters, crossed over from the nursery and the riddle book to flourish on the boards. Significantly, Mother Goose is a drag role; like Widow Twankey or the Wicked Stepmother, she was played by a pantomime dame in the Christmas dramas and music-hall revues (here). The earliest piece extant to pluck her from the pages of children’s collections of tales or rhymes and put her on stage was called Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, the Golden Egg, and it blended, as the title suggests, commedia dell’arte stock characters with British comic fairytale motifs. Sex reversals pointed up the magic as well as the absurdity: the name of Pulcinella, Mister Punch’s clownish ancestor from Italian masked comedy, ends in the feminine a which retains the memory of his travesty. Mother Goose triples the inversion: she is played by a man to look like a cross-dressed woman who herself looks like Pulcinella/Punch.

  The pantomime was written by Thomas Dibdin, and opened at Drury Lane just after Christmas in 1806. With the help of a goose that lays golden eggs, the hero, Jack (who takes the Harlequin role), succeeds in winning the hand of the ogreish squire’s lovely daughter (Columbine). Mother Goose is Jack’s fairy godmother, and she provides him with the marvellous bird; she appears astride a gander as in the nursery rhyme (Old Mother Goose / When she wanted to wander / Would fly through the air / On a very fine gander’) (here); she may have even flown down on to the stage in a goose-shaped machina; she perfor
ms further wonders, whistling up a wind like a witch and – even more powerful than the weird sisters – raising the dead. In the impresario Joseph Grimaldi’s production that year, Samuel Simmons played her as an ancient and mannish hag; in 1902, nearly a hundred years later, at the same theatre, the much loved music-hall performer Dan Leno wore periwig, jewels, ostrich feathers, frills and furbelows in a less gothic interpretation of the traditional figure of Mother Goose.30

  Glee of the weak at the defeat of the strong: the fool, spectacles blazoned on his bottom, dances at the feast of victory over Goliath, while a child urinates on the dead giant’s head. (Jan Steen, David Returning Victorious, detail, 1671.)

  The transvestism of the pantomime part sharpens the comedy. But before the pantomime opened in London, Mother Goose was being annexed by less rambunctious voices, anxious to mitigate old women’s wickedness, and to enrol her in education:

  I think I have now amused you with some very entertaining Tales, which shew you what has been done in Past Times. You know the Fairy days are now over and … it is your duty, in whatever station you are placed, to labour honestly and diligently for your support in life. No gifts are now bestowed upon us but what come from a Superior Cause. Consequently you cannot expect to grow good, rich, or opulent, without a proper use of those means which are most bountifully given to all mankind. Study, therefore, to be useful, avoid censure and evil-speaking. Do good to all, and you may be assured that the best of gifts will fall to your share, namely, present as well as future happiness.31

  Mother Goose the wonderful and wonder-working crone was destined for a long career in pedagogy.

  In the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth, the relation between official and unofficial culture in the sphere of folklore begins to undergo a transformation, in France and England: hitherto vulgar, and often unofficial, means of expression – the release of the belly laugh, the allure of the grotesque, the pleasure of fancy – are established at the centre of officially approved culture – but for young people. Mother Goose was annexed, occupied, and was to preside over the educationalist task of sweetening lessons in life by high jinks and hopeful romances; her double nature, her masquerade, was built into her role as a children’s entertainer who is at heart bent on moral instruction.

  In this the British incarnation of Mother Goose followed a parallel development to the role of ma Mère l’Oye, for in France, too, as we shall see, writers of fairy tales insisted loudly on their edifying intentions.

  But the place of occupation can still be squatted, the invested city can always be re-invested; when the laughter of unequals has been muffled, it can erupt again. Mother Goose can take off her drag and turn out to be what she seems after all – a real woman, authentically vulgar, who speaks – and writes – in her own range of adopted voices.

  Laugh that you may not weep: the Grimms Brothers’ tales as sources of great merriment. (George Cruikshank’s frontispiece to German Popular Tales, volume one, 1823).

  CHAPTER 11

  In the Kingdom of Fiction: Seduction II

  Denunciations of arranged marriage were frequent but powerless: when his daughter refuses to marry the rich (and poxy) son-in-law her father has chosen, he has her literally tied to him. (‘The Contagious Husband’, Andreas Alciatus, Emblèmes, 1549.)

  Would you have me write novelles like the Countess of

  D’Anois? And is it not better to tell a plain truth?1

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

  THE FAIRY TALE which marks the beginning of the literary enthusiasm in Paris, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s ‘L’Ile de la félicité’ (The Isle of Happiness’, of 1690, tells the story of Adolphe, Prince of Russia, who, one day, out hunting bears in a manly fashion, is overtaken by a storm.2 Taking shelter in a cave, he meets the little god Cupid, who tells him about a magic place of bliss: ‘People have exhausted themselves trying to find it …’ The prince pesters the god for more information and at last persuades Zephyr, the West Wind, to help him. Zephyr gives him a cloak which, worn with its green side out, will render the prince invisible to the monsters who guard access to the island. ‘He [Zephyr] wanted to carry him on his wings, but he did not find this way comfortable …’ So the wind picks him up in his arms instead and flies off until he reaches the island, and sets the prince down in a rose-scented, enchanted palace, with walls of precious stones and the best furniture from fairy cabinet-makers. Adolphe wanders on, past grottoes, honeysuckle arbours and musical fountains until he meets the princess, Felicity, seated on her throne, with adorable dallying nymphs and frolicking cupids all around her: ‘The princess had never seen a human being, and so she was extremely surprised … “Great princess,” said [Adolphe], “I want to offer you my heart and devotion.”’

  So they live in bliss; meanwhile, time passes. Eventually, in spite of the perfection of his love, and the undiminished round of pleasures in her enchanted realm, the knight suddenly feels pangs of homesickness, and he asks how much time has passed since they have been together. The lady tells him to guess. Three months, he says. She exclaims in response, ‘Why no! It’s been three hundred years!’

  He is appalled; what of his honour? his reputation in the world? his name? He wants to leave. ‘You barbarian,’ she cries, but his distress strikes him like a sickness, and he pines. She lets him go. He wanders back into the world above, where he finds across his path an overturned waggon, and an old man, pinned under its load. The prince, every inch a chivalrous knight, sees the old man’s predicament, dismounts and gives him a hand. The old man seizes hold, jumps to his feet, vigorous and unharmed, and will not let go: his waggon is loaded with wings, and he says to Adolphe, ‘Finally, … Prince of Russia … I’ve found you. I’ve used all the wings this waggon is carrying to cross the world in search of you … nothing that lives can escape me.’

  Not a fairytale happy ending, but a warning against the dream of eternal bliss. It is a story like Guerino il Meschino’s or Tannhäuser’s, and it is still being told – John Berger, the novelist and art critic, has recounted a version he heard in the Haute Savoie, in which Time’s waggon is loaded with the shoes, not the wings, which he has worn out looking for the hero.

  The Dictionnaire de l’Académie had sneered at the old wives’ tale a century before Le Cabinet des fées first began appearing, but the writers of fairy tales, like Mme d’Aulnoy, retaliated, if not quite in kind, but with spirit. They would have recognized the description the académiciens gave, but they nevertheless aligned themselves with – and played to their subsequent identification with – le vulgaire, les vieilles, and the popular and oral transmission of fairytale material. They did, however, accord the genre a different value, and their act of identification, their placing of themselves in the old wives’ traditional place, utterly transformed, in the manner of fairytale disenchantments, the status of the storyteller as well as the character and reception of the tales themselves.

  Within the frame of one of her romances, Don Gabriel Ponce de Léon, Mme d’Aulnoy describes a storytelling scene in which the Duenna-governess and narrator cites as her immediate source ‘une vieille esclave arabe’ (‘an old Arab slave woman’). She adds that ‘this slave knew a thousand fables from the famous Locman, so well known in the Orient, who it is thought was none other than Aesop, that character so naïve and childlike … many good minds consider them works which suit nurses and governesses more than people of good breeding …’3

  The naïve and childlike wisdom of the putative ‘old Arab slave woman’ derives immediately from Locman, who, it turns out, is the same person as Aesop – oriental and classical sources mingle and meld; this legacy of wisdom records the despotism of the fairies, and in some fairy tales (but not all) relates its undoing. These are tales of the fairies, but they do not celebrate them; to some degree they emanate from another sector of canny folk, powerless by comparison, victims of their powerful whims, their arbitrary enchantments. Mme d’Aulnoy, a glittering, cosmopolitan mondaine, nevertheless conveyed in
her work her indebtedness as a writer to the low, enslaved, outsider figure of the most famous of the oral storytellers, Aesop, who survives by tricksterism and fabrication.

  In the fantasy biography by the Byzantine monk Planudes on which La Fontaine based his own sprightly account in the preface to the Fables, Aesop is a slave, and nature has made him ‘misshapen and ugly of countenance, with barely a human face, to the extent of denying him almost altogether the use of speech’.4 But he has been given, inside, ‘un très bel esprit’ (a very fine wit), and eventually, in the course of his adventures, he proves himself by many strokes of kindness and brilliance, and is rewarded not only by the loosening of his tongue, but by the freeing of his person from ownership.5 Aesop’s own life follows the pattern of the Cinderella story.

  With a difference, however: for it is through language, through native wit, that Aesop achieves liberty. La Fontaine identified himself openly with Aesop, who was one of his principal sources, of course, and the women writers of fiction and fable in the form of prose fairy tales grasped the same classical forebear for their own practice of homiletic humour.

  When grandes dames fairytale writers found themselves prefigured by the male slave and the female servant in current mythology, they were not making common cause in a political sense: the sympathy was claimed through use of language, of sources, of voice. Fairy tale constituted in itself a genre of protest; at the level of content it could describe wrongs and imagine vindications and freedom; from the point of view of form, it was presented as modern, homegrown fabulism, perfectly suited to express the thoughts of a group also perceived as low. The writers of fairy tale like Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy are comic writers in the broad sense: their tales end in reconciliation, vindication, partnership, the traditional happy outcome of the fairy tales, with the wronged child triumphant, the wicked punished, the poor made rich, the foundling identified as a princess, and so forth. Or, when they do not end happily, the mood is stoic, the author shrugs her shoulders with cool irony; dourness also aligns the late seventeenth-century fairy tale with the comic fantasist’s mode. Their writings issue warnings about the future, and forestall hope about humankind with gallows humour.