From the Beast to the Blonde
Page 24
II
The German Romantics, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, prized the products of the imagination, of fantasies and dreams, with unprecedented conviction, and they consequently accorded fairy tales the highest literary status they had ever achieved, even in the late seventeenth century. They identified the genre with the spontaneous, innocent, untutored mind – with children and with ordinary, unsophisticated people. Both were pure, not-adult – literally, unadulterated. The German mystical poet Novalis (1772–1801), who was one of the first thinkers to propose that fairy tales have the power to unlock mysteries of the spirit, wrote in his notebooks:
A true fairy tale must also be a prophetic account of things – an ideal account – an absolutely necessary account. A true writer of fairy tales sees into the future. [They are] confessions of a true, a synthetic child – of an ideal child. (A child is a good deal cleverer and wiser than an adult – but the child must be an ironic child.)16
Novalis, who had adopted his name to symbolize the new world that poetry and fantasy would bring about, realized that the new age of the child could not depend on children themselves, but on people like himself assuming the persona of the child – ironical children. The old woman had been the preferred mask of the storyteller in the seventeenth century, but in the late eighteenth she ideally spoke as if she were still a child, from the memories of her infancy, which tallied, in the perspective of romanticism, with the childhood of the culture itself, before it became corrupt. Inside the wolf, child and crone are one.
Dorothea Viehmann, market saleswoman, daughter of an innkeeper and wife of a tailor, was one of the Grimm Brothers’ chief sources; they liked to stress the Volk character of their informants – she soon turns into a generic peasant, Gammer Grethel. (Ludwig Emil Grimm, Children and Household Tales, 1819, copied, anon., Gammer Grethel’s Fairy Tales, London.) The historical woman gradually disappears. The first English translation of the Grimms, 1823, was illustrated by George Cruikshank; his storyteller was absorbed too into the image of the archetypal goody nurse of merry days of yore OVERLEAF.
Behind the old who tell the stories lurk the children they once were, listening, and with that fantasy there rises the memory of the storyteller, the mother, grandmother or nurse who stood in loco parentis. She brings back the voice heard in childhood, its mixture of authority and cajolery, its irresistible formative view of the world. The film theorist Kaja Silverman has called the maternal voice an ‘acoustic mirror’, which acts to reflect and mould the child’s developing identity.17 In the context of seventeenth-century childrearing, this mirror was as often held up by nurses or grandmothers as by mothers, and not only in the circles of the aristocracy. The testimony of fairy tales as well as the imagined account of their origins reveals how intense the memory of this voice remained. There are reasons, psychological as well as social and literary, for the eclipse of the Scheherazade type of storyteller by the crone figure of Mother Goose, Mother Bunch, or Gammer Gurton.
Around 1811 Ludwig Emil Grimm, the artist brother of the family, drew a portrait of Dorothea Viehmann, one of the principal sources of the Brothers Grimm collection Kinder- und Hausmärchen. This portrait was engraved and published as a frontispiece in numerous popular editions; Frau Viehmann has become the most prominent of the many oral storytellers on whom the Grimms drew, and a kind of primal scene of folklore transmission, as conceived in the nineteenth century, featured her in her domestic setting, surrounded by her children and grandchildren as the two scholars listen attentively. The painter Ludwig Katzenstein in 1892 showed chickens pecking among the floorboards, the dresser laden with still lives, the curtains of the bed (in the kitchen) drawn aside, the door to the yard standing ajar: a Pieter de Hooch interior of perfect domestic husbandry.
The fairytale tradition held to an imaginary idea of the Grimms’ methods. (Ludwig Katzenstein, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm with the fairy-storyteller Dorothea Viehmann, 1892.)
Dorothea Viehmann was not a peasant, but an innkeeper’s daughter who later married a tailor, a smalltown dweller of the artisanal class, and worked at the quintessential storyteller’s trade, itinerant marketing – of fruit, eggs and cheese. She told her stories to the daughters of the Huguenot pastor in Kassel, and came to the attention of the inspired, independent-minded circle of Romantic thinkers centred on the manor farm at Brakel, near Kassel, where the von Haxthausen family were landowners.18 There, in this German variation on the salons of Paris, the poets Clemens Brentano and Annette von Droste-Hiilshoff (1797–1848) were also invited to stay and exchange ideas; Brentano became a pioneering writer of fairy tales himself, and Annette von Droste-Hiilshoff was committed to the literature of the imagination and collected stories for the Grimms. It was she and her friends who ‘discovered’ Frau Viehmann and her repertory of fairy tales and recommended her to the Grimms. In Droste-Hülshoff’s unfinished novel, Ledwina, a fiery autobiographical account of a daughter in rebellion against her brothers’ world of conformism and unquestioned militarist hierarchy, it is striking how passionately the heroine sympathizes, indeed identifies, with the family’s old nurse, who has since retired to a poor cottage on their estate, continually taking the part of workers on the estate against the male authorities in the household.19
The Grimm Brothers were building on the group’s fervent interest in retrieving a vernacular, traditional, national literature, and had undertaken the patriotic task of recording local tales, in Low German dialects when the occasion arose, without the customary scholars’ prejudice against the ‘vulgar’. But they did not roam the countryside themselves, gleaning stories. Frau Viehmann travelled to Kassel, to visit the brothers in their study in the city. They also gathered tales from their own immediate family members, as well as from friends like Droste – Hülshoff, many of whom were in touch with French influences. Though the stories are unquestionably traditional, they are not quite as homespun – or as rustically lowborn – as the brothers claimed.
Born in 1755, Dorothea Viehmann was fifty-five when she met them, and died soon afterwards, in 1815, poor and ill. Her tales – they include some of the most famous, like ‘The Twelve Brothers’, ‘The Three Feathers’, ‘The Goose Girl’, ‘Mother Holle’ – were recited to them over and over again so that they could take them down, as Wilhelm remembered in a preface: ‘Among people who follow the old ways of life without change, attachment to inherited patterns is stronger than we, impatient for variety, can realize.’20 Later, however, the brothers reshaped their collection according to their requirements. But Dorothea Viehmann’s presence in the frontispiece and the references continued to guarantee an illusion of direct, unmediated storytelling.
Ludwig Emil Grimm’s portrait shows a thoughtful, even anxious woman, with permanently creased brow over high arched eyebrows, a gaze focussed on the horizon, a serious, closed, narrow mouth, beaky nose and hands folded over one another, holding a sprig of wild flowers (here). She is wearing a regional bonnet over wispy grey hair, and there are other local touches in her kerchief and overdress. The whole image betokens an identity rooted in a particular soil, where those wild flowers grow, while the pose and the gaze suggest a mind fixed on distant times and events. Her expression confirms Wilhelm’s express wish that the tales represented ‘the reawakening of the long forgotten literature … not only did we seek something of consolation in the past, our hope, naturally, was that this course of ours should contribute somewhat to the return of a better day’.21
In fact, Dorothea Viehmann had been born Pierson, a French Huguenot (her father came from Metz), and her culture was much more mixed and rather less rootedly Hessian than the Grimm Brothers wanted to suggest. Like Perrault, who hid himself in the skirts of ma Mère l’Oye, the brothers put on the granny bonnet of Dorothea, icon and voice of the folk.
The connections and kinship of other Grimm informants have also been shown to be much more permeated with literary, French influence than the Romantic brothers wished, but until recent scholarship examin
ed the tales, this aspect was neglected in favour of the mythical dream of autochthonous purity, which then becomes available to all who hear or read the stories.
In an English edition of fairy tales after Grimm, illustrated by George Cruikshank and introduced by Laurence Housman, the Emil Grimm portrait was redrawn for the frontispiece. The book’s title is Gammer Grethel’s Fairy Tales, and the caption to the picture says, ‘The True Portrait of Gammer Grethe’ – Gammer here being a word for old wife that had become itself archaic, giving off an authentic whiff of traditionalism (here). ‘For the true and unpolluted air of fairyland we have to go back to the old and artless tales of a day purer and simpler than our own,’ writes Laurence Housman in the Introduction. ‘Purer because so wholly unconcerned with any question of morals, simpler because so wholly unconscious of its simplicity.’22
To this, wonder is indeed one possible response. Laurence Housman here shows one grownup’s art of make-believe as he poses with such blatant disingenuousness as a child – an ironical child, not of the quality of Mme d’Aulnoy or Perrault or L’Héritier, but of their descendants. A child who is not a child, whose voice is always doubled, always deceitful, always masked, all the better to speak to you with, my dear, all the better to persuade you with.
III
In the twentieth century, traditional tales have paradoxically offered many imaginative writers a territory of freedom to express their rebellion; the granny bonnet, the wolf mask have offered a helpful disguise to some of the boldest spirits. Angela Carter’s quest for eros, her perseverance in the attempt to ensnare its nature in her imagery, her language, her stories, drew her to fairy tales as a form, and before her death in 1992 she wrote some of the most original reworkings in contemporary literature in her collection Fireworks (1974) and The Bloody Chamber (1979); the posthumous American Ghosts (1993) contains a Cinderella story, told with the succinct lyrical poignancy of Carter at her most tender (see here).
In the longer fiction, The Magic Toyshop (1967), Nights at the Circus (1984), and Wise Children (1991), Carter conjures gleefully with fairytale motifs: changelings and winged beings, muted heroines, beastly metamorphoses, arduous journeys and improbable encounters, magical rediscoveries and happy endings. Her recuperation of the form has had a widespread influence, palpable in the writings of contemporaries like Salman Rushdie, Robert Coover, and Margaret Atwood.
It is interesting, in the context of fairytale narrators’ masquerades, that Carter was also deeply fascinated with female impersonation, as a literary device, as a social instrument of disruption, as an erotic provocation; with bravura, she made theatrical burlesque and music-hall travesties into a high style; her own prose was glitteringly, self-mockingly hybrid, contrived and slangy at once, mandarin and vulgar, romantic and cynical. These contradictions were conveyed through the figure of the cross-dressed male or female. As on the boards, cross-gender disguises provide a recurrent tease; from Shakespeare in his comedies and romances Carter borrowed the fantastic, perverse, bewildering entertainment of double drag – Rosalind and Viola dressed as boys played by boys cross-dressed as girls; she continually explored, in the personae of her protagonists, the imagination’s own capacity for protean metamorphoses, which allows it to leap barriers of difference, or at least play with them till they seem to totter and fall. It is revealing that she enjoyed the fairytale motif of the witch’s duel, when the heroine or hero seizes hold of the witch or evil fairy who has snatched away their beloved, and holds on and holds on; the witch shifts her shape, from one creature to another, but in vain, until dawn breaks and she has to let her victim go.23 Angela Carter understood both roles very well in her writing: mercurial slipperiness of identity, as well as the need to secure meanings.
The centrepiece of her novel The Passion of New Eve (1977) dramatizes, in a phantasmagoric, extreme Grand Guignol tableau, the wedding of Tristessa, the legendary screen goddess, who is really a man in disguise, and her longtime fan, the novel’s New Eve and protagonist, who began life as a boy but has travelled a long way since then.24 In Nights at the Circus, seven years later, the American journalist and questing hero, Jack Walser, speculates at the very start that Fewers, the winged giantess, might be a male in disguise.
Carter’s treatment of travesty moves from pleasure in its dissembling wickedness and disruptiveness of convention in the early work, to exploring its function as a means of survival – and a specifically proletarian strategy of advancing, through the construction of self in image and language. In this, many of Carter’s heroines – both in her writing and in life, like Fewers, like the music-hall artistes the Chance sisters of Wise Children, like her idol Lulu/Louise Brooks – resemble the literary text of the kind she herself was writing: ornate, bejewelled, artificial, highly wrought prose playing hide-and-seek with the chatty, downmarket, vulgar unadorned personae of the characters underneath the greasepaint and the costumes. Her crucial insight is that women like the circus aerialiste Fewers produce themselves as ‘women’, and that this is often the result of force majeure, of using what you have to get by. The fairytale transformations of Cinders into princess represent what a girl has to do to stay alive.
Angela Carter knew the storyteller’s time-honoured ruses, and played with the masks, the spells and the voices in her brilliant variations on fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber.
Angela Carter was a fantasist with a salty turn of mind, a dissident with a utopian vision of possibilities in the midst of disaster, who always sprang surprises and challenged the conventional response, as in her controversial essay of the late 1970s, The Sadeian Woman, which found in Sade a paradoxical champion of women’s sexual liberation. In her novels of the 1960s and early 1970s (Heroes and Villains, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman), in the dazzling reworkings of The Bloody Chamber, and her last, full-stretch flights (Nights at the Circus and Wise Children), she developed Freud’s polymorphous perversity with panache, and played with humour in a wide variety of keys, ranging from flamboyantly upfront ribaldry to the quietest, dryest, droll asides. She opened a recent anthology of fairy tales with Sermerssuaq, a character of contemporary Eskimo folklore, who was ‘so powerful’ that
she could lift a kayak on the tips of three fingers. She could kill a seal merely by drumming on its head with her fists … Sometimes this Sermerssuaq would show off her clitoris. It was so big that the skin of a fox would not fully cover it. Aja, and she was the mother of nine children, too!
Carter was invited to moderate this passage, as its inclusion, especially in the heraldic position at the beginning of the book, would prevent teachers using the collection in schools. But she stood firm; she practised through her writing a constant stretching of the permitted, of the permissible. Taboo was her terrain, nothing was sacred (the title of a collection ofjournalism), and comedy was one of her ways of entering it. Not for her the humour of control, of convention, of censure. In one of the very last pieces she wrote, she celebrated the British pantomime tradition, its use of heavy innuendo and bawdy banter about sexual oppositions and its transvestite roles:
The Dame bends over, whips up her crinolines; she has three pairs of knee-length bloomers … One pair is made out of the Union Jack … The second pair is quartered red and black, in memory of Utopia. The third and vastest pair of bloomers is scarlet, with a target on the seat, centred on the arsehole …25
The Fool in Dutch painting deals in comic obscenity in this manner; fools can enter where angels fear to tread, and thumb their noses (show their bottoms) at convention and authority: tomfoolery includes iconoclasm, disrespect, subversion.
The Dame became one of Angela Carter’s adopted voices (a woman speaking through a man disguised as a woman); this double drag scatters certainty about sexual identity, of course, it puts fixity to the question. But it was not always so, and in the broadening of her comedy one can decipher the risks and the difficulties she suffered as a writer. This transformation itself forms part of the larger shift that has taken place in recent times
, which has made humour the weapon of the dispossessed, the marginal, the response of the victim who feels Punch’s stick, not the manic joy of Mr Punch himself.
Her humour was of the unsettling variety, that made it necessary to examine one’s own received ideas. It was so very impolite, with its particular idiosyncratic feminism, its blend of the irreverent and the gothic, its dazzling linguistic intricacy and relish for imagery. But it is this humour, its dark and even snaky stabs, that above all produced the shock and unease people felt at her work – which is of course what she – what Sermerssuaq, what the Panto Dame – intended.26
The growing presence of humour in Carter’s fiction signals her defiant hold on ‘heroic optimism’, the mood she singled out as characteristic of fairy tales, the principle which sustained the idea of a happy ending, whatever the odds. But heroic optimism shades into gallows humour. Although laughter breaks the silence and jesting can be provocative, disruptive, anarchic and unsettling, some laughter never unburdens itself from knowledge of its own pessimism; it remains intrinsically ironic.27