From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  When her father the wizard is arrested for his deceit, Herminie throws herself on the mercy of the king and confesses that everything is her fault. This is a lie, gallantly told to save her father, but in one sense, as the author’s alter ego, the artist did indeed make the robe: she sewed the stitches of the alliances, drew the design of the romance. The adulteries and other crimes men fantasize when they see nothing in the robe represent the slanders levelled at innocent women; Herminie’s collaboration with her father reveals the web of conflicting allegiances in which women are trapped; her woven tales and pictures, like L’Héritier’s own writings, stand for her protest – the different story, the women’s version. Like Idle Dreams, the mischief-making robe provides a metaphor for the world of fancy and romance, the kingdom of fiction which can function as an instrument of greater honesty, too.

  Devils are defeated when you guess their name, and so are unwanted suitors: Rumpelstiltskin tears himself in two. (George Cruikshank in Gammer Grethel’s Fairy Tales, London, nineteenth century.)

  ’What big eyes you have!’ Saucer-eyed herself in their shared bed, Little Red Riding Hood wonders at the change in her granny. (Gustave Doré, Les Contes de Charles Perrault, Paris, 1862.)

  CHAPTER 12

  Granny Bonnets, Wolves’ Cover: Seduction III

  – In bocca al lupo!

  – E muoia il lupo!

  [‘Into the jaws of the wolf!’

  ‘Death to the wolf!’]

  Good luck sayings, Italy

  FOR THE FAMOUS fairy tale, ‘Le Petit chaperon rouge’ (Little Red Riding Hood), Charles Perrault adapted a traditional story, in which a little girl takes food and drink to her grandmother and meets a wolf. It is likely that he set aside aspects which struck him as crude but which have survived in later retellings: in these, the wolf tricks the heroine into eating a piece of her granny’s flesh and drinking some of her blood, but the little girl eventually manages to get away by refusing to get into bed, saying she has to pee. The wolf urges her to do it in the bed (!), but she refuses, so he ties her by a long cord to the bed post and lets her leave the cottage.1 Once in the woods, she manages to slip the knot and get away.2

  From the point of view of Mother Goose’s symbolic identity and its connection to women’s persuasive speech, Perrault’s retelling continues an important aspect: the possibility of confusing wolf and granny. In Perrault’s version, the wolf cannot be clearly distinguished from Red Riding Hood’s beloved grandmother: that is the crucial collapse of roles in his story. (A children’s glove puppet today neatly combines granny and wolf as a Janus-faced head under a single mob cap.)

  The wolf is kin to the forest-dwelling witch, or crone; he offers us a male counterpart, a werewolf who swallows up grandmother and then granddaughter. In the witch-hunting fantasies of early modern Europe they are the kind of beings associated with marginal knowledge, who possess pagan secrets and are in turn possessed by them. Both dwell in the woods, both need food urgently (one because she is sick, the other because he has not eaten for three days), and the little girl cannot quite tell them apart. The climactic image of ‘Red Riding Hood’, the wolf’s mouth, has led many commentators to note the emphasis on orality. This orality has been interpreted, by the Freudian Géza Róheim, as an allegory of a child’s aggressive feelings towards the mother’s breast. But the orality has not been interpreted as revealing another form of maternal nurturance: language or oral knowledge.3

  Perrault himself put on Granny’s bonnet, as it were, when he hid behind the figure of an old nurse, telling stories to children of higher social rank than herself On the title page and frontispiece of the Contes du temps passé (Tales of Olden Times), the author in fact doubled his disguise: Mother Goose was shown in the picture telling the stories, and Perrault’s son, Pierre Darmancourt, was given as the author. The image might represent a memory of Perrault’s own childhood, but even so, it offers an alter ego for Perrault himself which he uses as a cover: he was transmitting the voice of the storyteller, a compound of old woman and child.4

  Perrault’s unhappy ending becomes very interesting indeed in this light, for his little girl is swallowed up into the body of the wolf along with her granny, and does not emerge again. There is a possible reading – among many possible readings – of this ending: like the children who grow up in traditional lore and language, Little Red Riding Hood is incorporated, the lineal and female descendant of the grandmother who has herself been devoured, and the wolf does not release either of them. The wolf to whom they are thus assimilated could represent the indigenous inhabitants of the countryside, hairy, wild, unkempt, untrammelled by imported acculturation, eating raw foods and meat, a native beast in the native landscape, where a specific age-old corpus of homegrown literature flourishes and is passed on. Such a counterpoint between the woods and the home Red Riding Hood leaves with her basket of prepared food – butter and cake – is suggested in the Perrault, and the theme was made explicit later in the interpretive literature. Certain German romantic patriots, for instance, commenting on the tale in the 1920s, allegorized the grandmother as ancient Aryan mother-right who must be regenerated by the granddaughter.5 On the other hand, accepting Red Riding Hood’s death inside the animal as an allegory of national tradition clearly entails reading against the cautionary message of the story, and against the morality Perrault appended to the tale, in which he warns little girls against wolves.

  In these final verses, Perrault distinguishes the hidden identity of the wolf:

  Now, there are real wolves, with hairy pelts and enormous teeth; but also wolves who seem perfectly charming, sweet-natured and obliging, who pursue young girls in the street and pay them the most flattering attentions.

  Unfortunately, these smooth-tongued, smooth-pelted wolves are the most dangerous beasts of all.6

  It is this wellspoken seducer, urbane, not rustic, who turns out to be Perrault’s wolf, and who, eating up little girls and grandmothers, makes possible yet another twist in the significance of the story. For he overwhelms and absorbs them in the same way, one could say, as classical learning, metropolitan manners and other customs, alien rather than autochthonous, swallow up the homebred nursery culture of old women and their protegées, of Mother Goose and her young listeners.

  It is not unusual in Perrault to find his moralités introducing an irony: here the wolf no longer stands for the savage wilderness, but for the deceptions of the city and the men who wield authority in it. He openly turns the usual identity of the wolf on its head and locates him near at hand, rather than far away and Other. It is almost as if Perrault could not bring himself to follow the convention of the happier ending, with Granny dead and Little Red Riding Hood cunningly escaped, because he wanted them to remain united, in the wolf’s belly. Nor, apparently, did he want to introduce a huntsman, the figure of masculine civilization who restores them to life, as in the later Grimm version. But yet he could not stop at their ultimate and unregenerate incorporation into the wolf either, as he knew, deep down, this resolution did not represent the true facts of the matter. Tradition cannot be kept sealed off and apart; so at the last minute, in the moral, he switched the emphasis and turned the wolf from a forest creature into a polished and sweet-talking man, and by the way produced an allegory about the impossibility of separate female lore and language.

  Perrault was also in two minds about the pristine, aboriginal source that L’Héritier proclaimed, for his jaunty tone consistently belies the earnestness with which he presses the claims of fairy tale to wisdom. His stories have been so romanticized in subsequent retellings that it comes as quite a revelation to find him cracking his typical jokes, at the expense of his material. When the Sleeping Beauty’s death has been ordered by her cannibal mother-in-law (an episode usually left out these days), Perrault comments, ‘she was over twenty years old, not counting the hundred years she had slept: her hide was a little tough, though lovely and white …’ Though Perrault often asserted the contrary in the quarrel with Boi
leau, the style of his Mother Goose tales betrays that he could not take the claims of native literature altogether seriously, that for him Mother Goose would always raise a laugh.7

  Speech is strong magic in fairy tales: the bad sister cursed the beggarwoman at the well and ends up spitting slugs and snails and puppy dog tails; roses and pearls fall from her good sister’s lips. (The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book, London, 1933.)

  Perrault was much less defensive about adopting the disguise of Mother Goose than his female colleagues; as Virginia Woolf pointed out, it is all very well to spurn Greek when you have been given the chance to study it, to reject tradition when you have been raised in it. But the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes affected men and women writers differently. L’Héritier could not have composed a sonorous Latin ode or a canny epigram in Greek for the king’s birthday even if she wanted to. She had to be a Modern, on the side of the mother tongue willy-nilly. No wolf was needed to dish up Mother Goose to hungry listeners: in some ways the most successful of accomplished L’Héritier’s disguises was her concealment of her true wolf nature. For it was she who came along and gobbled Grandmother, or Mother Goose, by making her clean and tidy and sortable – fit for polite society.

  In L’Héritier’s ‘Les Enchantements de l’éloquence ou les effets de la douceur’ (The Enchantments of Eloquence or the effects of gentleness), a version of the story known to folklorists as ‘Diamonds and Toads’, the issue of women’s talk is also central.8, 9

  One day, when the heroine Blanche is drawing water at the well, a prince out hunting – inevitably – wounds her by mistake, but her soft answer enchants him, and he falls in love with her mild and unreproachful speech as much as with her beauty. Later, a fairy appears at the house in disguise as a poor old peasant woman to give Blanche a magic balm for her wound. Her fairy name is Dulcicula – little sweet, with its reminiscences of the dolce stil novo of the Italian troubadours. Blanche receives her kindly, even though – L’Héritier is careful to tell us – she does not swallow old wives’ tales readily. Alix, the unkind and foul-mouthed stepsister, meanwhile flies off the handle in her fishwife way, and bawls her out in colourful idiom, calling her an old fool, a midwife and a beast in a single tirade.10 (L’Héritier unconsciously relishes the opportunity to foul her own mouth, it seems, by impersonating the profane Alix.) After this visit the fairy confers the gift of ever gentle speech on Blanche, and perpetual invective on Alix, thus locking them in their original personalities, rather than working any magical transformation. When another fairy, this time a brilliant court lady, radiant with jewels and silks, later appears by the fountain, she asks to drink. Blanche tilts the vessel to her lips; Alix visiting the fountain refuses with a stream of abuse. At this stage, diamonds and other jewels begin to spill from Blanche’s mouth when she speaks, while Alix is condemned to spit toads and snakes and other ingredients of the witches’ broth (left).11

  The complications and inconsistencies of L’Héritier’s tale – why two fairies? would Alix really have been so rude to such a grand lady asking for a drink after she knew how Blanche had been rewarded? – can be unravelled if the author’s partisan purposes are kept in mind. The first, seemingly redundant test – the offer of the peasant cure – is much more apt to her argument than the request for water at the well, because it exactly reflects her own belief in taking from the simple folk what is good with good sense, discrimination and unfailing courtesy. Alix is punished, at this stage, for being grossière (uncouth) with the poor. The fairy offering her remedy in the guise of a peasant with a possibly quack medicine is another Mother Goose, the source of pure water that does however need to be filtered. The second, resplendent fairy, called Eloquentia Nativa (Native Eloquence), meets L’Héritier’s need to enter her own text as a new kind of speaking woman. There is no reason for the first fairy not to metamorphose into Eloquentia Nativa. But by keeping them distinct, the narrator can occupy the latter’s place, and also continue her invitation to her friend Henriette-Julie de Murat, issued in her preface, to write with native eloquence of native things herself. Eloquentia Nativa is an awkward, Spenserian allegorical figure, in the midst of a lively story of virtue rewarded and vice punished, but she represents the issue of language in the present day for the tale’s author; she embodies the potential gift of female eloquence, of speaking diamonds, not toads, for the modern receivers and disseminators of the tale, among whom L’Héritier counted herself. Mother Goose must learn to speak according to the principles of civilité, the aristocratic and précieux ideal of proper language, and L’Héritier continues to struggle to align this ideal with feminism. At one moment she pauses to issue another personal challenge, explicitly valuing women’s eloquence over classical male oratory: ‘I’d just as much like to say that pearls and rubies fell from Blanche’s mouth … as say that lightning flashes issued from that of Pericles’.12 As Marc Fumaroli has pointed out, the vindication of the heroine in fairy tales often expresses the teller’s desire to vindicate the feminine, with which the genre was so closely identified.13

  This was not an issue for Perrault, and when he wrote his variation on the tale, ‘Les Fées’ (The Fairies), the good fairy’s gifts remain purely monetary: jewels for the good sister, dust and ashes for the bad. It is doubly ironical, therefore, that Perrault imitated much more convincingly the bantering, old-womanly style of tale-telling associated with Mother Goose, while L’Héritier rejected false naivety in favour of polish.14 For the feminine in L’Héritier’s hands had to conform to certain high principles of the courtly douceur of her title: the toads were black magic, illusion, coarseness, unkindness, colloquial speech or orality, and the upstart bourgeoisie; the diamonds were theurgy, or white magic, truth-telling, refinement, kindness and written literature mediating peasant wisdom. The oral character of Mother Goose vanished into the courtly and scripted figure of Eloquentia Nativa, who is L’Héritier’s ultimate source figure in a new travesty or disguise, all cleaned up and polished, polie – polite. This is the drift of fairy tales once they had reached print and entered the nursery. Make-believe children were to become bona fide innocents; Mother Goose must not talk dirty any more.

  The Comtesse de Murat did follow her friend Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier’s urgings, and wrote several fairy tales soon after. She dedicated her Histoires sublimes et allégoriques of 1699 to Les Fées modernes (Modern Fairies) and she anticipated the metamorphosis of Mother Goose with great clarity as she addressed them:

  Oldentime fairies appear nothing but comedians next to you. Their occupations were lowly and childish, and the most significant effects their art brought about was to make people weep pearls and diamonds, blow emeralds out of their noses and spit rubies. Their entertainment was dancing by the light of the moon, turning themselves into crones and cats and monkeys and werewolves to terrorize children and weak minds. That is why all that remains today of their Exploits and Deeds are only Mother Goose Tales. They were almost always old, ugly, badly dressed and badly housed; and apart from Mélusine and half a dozen or so like her, all the rest of them were just beggarwomen …15

  Is there any irony in Murat’s envoi? Or any regret? She certainly puts her finger on the identity of the fairies, the crones, the beggarwomen, the witches and the tale-tellers like Mother Goose. The campaign L’Héritier proclaimed through her tale ‘The Enchantments of Eloquence’, shows how a woman of independent mind had to manoeuvre between negative and positive images of her sex in order to continue what she was doing and argue for its value and acceptance. She had to sentence the foul-mouthed Alix to failure (she dies abandoned in the woods), eye the peasant’s remedy with circumspection, rinse the stories she accepted in the purifying language of the court, disinfect Mother Goose of her associations with babbling and spells, and turn her into Eloquentia Nativa, the lifeless but direct precursor of the Sugar Plum Fairy, or even Tinkerbell. She championed the feminine, but in order to do so successfully she had to define its virtues very closely, and in some way betray the character
of the very literature she was defending by repudiating the uncouth in favour of refinement, by consuming Granny and spitting her out again as diamonds and flowers.

  Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier achieved some of the fame and standing she desired. She was the first woman elected to one of the prestigious and exclusive French academies, the Académie des Lanternistes of Toulouse, in 1696. She was also admitted, the following year, to the Ricovrati of Padua, who chose nine women for the nine Muses in their company (p. xv). But she is hardly read today, paradoxically because the highly refined and embroidered style she chose, the mannered and flowery eloquence she evolved in order to stave off criticisms about unsuitable material in improper hands, has dated and become tedious compared to the flashing and humorous concision of Perrault, who did not have to struggle so hard with the figure of popular, aboriginal female wisdom, as he could annexe Mother Goose without being confused with her.

  It is a shame that L’Héritier is often so prolix and indeed so precious, that the flashes of feline wit and her moments of inventive cruelty are few and far between. Her predicament, poised between respectability and exclusion, mirrors that of the contemporary woman writer. The problem of Mother Goose’s double tongue remains: is she truly a female storyteller, only now and then in drag, or does the drag constitute a claim on credence, advanced by men invoking something more authentic than themselves? If L’Héritier were as bawdy and comic and knowing as she describes her peasant sources, and as the British panto tradition has developed, she would have fed the prejudices that make old wives’ tales suitable fare for no one but children and their lowclass minders. Or would she have been able to overcome that persistent tinge of contempt? It is a quest doomed to failure, both historically and psychologically, to try to occupy some imaginary primordial femaleness, an essentialist hortus conclusus where history and law and all the other factors in sexual politics have not gained entry. Furthermore, there is a distinction between a woman telling a story, and telling a story as a woman, though both run up against the difference their femaleness makes. Mother Goose does the latter; she may not have been a woman at all, but only a fantasy of nursery, of nurture, of female magic, of woman at the hearth. She vividly represents in Victorian culture and in our own the continuing mixed feelings both men and women experience about such a voice, such a practice. For a female writer, Mother Goose’s presence is a comfort and a source of unease at one and the same time, holding up before us a long history of enchantment on the one hand, of ridicule on the other. Any writer who has identified herself with women’s issues knows how she will trip up over mockery; yet laughter can be answered in kind, for it has its own retaliatory strength, as a goose knows when she cackles.