From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  In her later fiction, Carter used her own brand of carnivalesque comedy to mock the yearnings and delusions of eros, and she performed in Wise Children, a jesting burlesque on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, recasting this recension of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ as a full Hollywood spectacular, Cecil B. DeMille-cum-Busby Berkeley; like the Bard, a presiding presence in the book, Carter has fun at the Queen of the Fairies’ expense, but she vividly takes the part of the rude mechanicals, too. Wise Children is another of Bottom’s dreams: it literally looks at romance from the angle of those at rock bottom, the Chance sisters, and snatches victory from the jaws of defeat, as the donkey proves, against all expectations, that folly has its wisdom too.

  It is uncomfortable to list to the iambic distych, to know you are identifying yourself as an outsider by what you say, that all the disguises in the wardrobe will never fix identity, all the voices in the repertory will not tell the complete story. Angela Carter was the most recent and most original of the goose-footed queens, of the riddling, scabrous dames, to put hard questions.

  PART TWO

  The Tales

  O fellow; come, the song we had last night.

  Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain;

  The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,

  And the free maids that weave their thread with bones,

  Do use to chaunt it: it is silly sooth,

  And dallies with the innocence of love,

  Like the old age.

  Twelfth Night, II, iv

  Each man

  Is an approach to the vigilance

  In which the Utter of truths becomes

  A whole, the day on which the last star

  Has been counted, the genealogy

  Of gods and men destroyed, the right

  To know established as the right to be.

  We shall have gone behind the symbols

  To that which they symbolized, away

  From the rumors of the speech-full domes,

  To the chatter that is then the true legend,

  Like glitter ascended into fire.1

  Wallace Stevens

  As her sisters drive off, outcast and orphaned Cinderella wishes on the sapling growing from her mother’s grave and finds herself clothed by magic in a dress and jewels and slippers, so that she can go to the ball. (Joseph Southall, Cinderella, 7 893–5.)

  CHAPTER 13

  Absent Mothers: Cinderella

  What happened to the mother

  who looked at the snow? I don’t say

  (you don’t know this grammar yet)

  how mothers and stepmothers change,1

  looking, and being looked at.

  It takes a long time …

  Sinister twinkling animals,

  Hollywood ikons, modern Greek style:

  a basket of images, poison at work

  in the woodland no Cretan child

  ever sees. Closer to home

  I’ve seen a loved girl turn feral.

  These pages lurk in the mind,

  speak of your sister,

  her mother, and me. Perhaps,

  already, of you.

  Ruth Padel

  THE GOOD MOTHER often dies at the beginning of the story. Tales telling of her miraculous return to life, like Shakespeare’s romances Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, have not gained the currency or popularity of ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Snow White’ in which she is supplanted by a monster.

  Figures of female evil stride through the best-loved, classic fairy tales: on this earth, wicked stepmothers, ugly sisters; from fairyland, bad fairies, witches, ogresses. In the most famous stories, monsters in female shape outnumber the giants and hobgoblins of ‘Tom Thumb’ or ‘Puss-in-Boots’ or ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, and certainly eclipse them in vividness and their lingering grip on the imagination: children are more thrilled than disgusted by the wolf who gobbles up Red Riding Hood, whereas they are repelled by the witch who fattens up Hansel to eat him. He exercises the beast’s seductiveness, she is consigned to the flames of her oven to a loud sigh of relief, or even a hurrah.

  All over the world, stories which centre on a heroine, on a young woman suffering a prolonged ordeal before her vindication and triumph, frequently focus on women as the agents of her suffering. The earliest extant version of ‘Cinderella’ to feature a lost slipper was written down around AD 850–60 in China; the story was taken down from a family servant by an official, and the way it is told reveals that the audience already knows it: this is by no means the Ur-text.2

  The Chinese Cinderella, Yeh-hsien, is ‘intelligent, and good at making pottery on the wheel’. When her own mother dies, and is soon followed by her father, her father’s co-wife begins to maltreat her, and to prefer her own daughter. A magic golden fish appears in a pond and befriends Yeh-hsien. When the wicked stepmother discovers this source of comfort for her hated stepdaughter, she kills it, eats it and hides the bones ‘under the dung hill’. When Yeh-hsien, all unknowing, calls to the fish the next day as is her custom, an enchanter descends from the sky and tells her where to find the bones: ‘Take [them] and hide them in your room. Whatever you want, you have only to pray to them for it …’ Yeh-hsien does so, and finds that she no longer suffers from hunger or thirst or cold – the fishbones care for her. On the day of the local festival, her stepmother and stepsister order her to stay behind, but she waits till they have left, and then, in a cloak of kingfisher feathers and gold shoes, she joins them at the festival. Her sister recognizes her, and it is when Yeh-hsien realizes this and runs away that she loses one of her gold shoes. It is picked up and sold to a local warlord: ‘it was an inch too small even for the one among them that had the smallest foot. He ordered all the women in his kingdom to try it on. But there was not one that it fitted. It was as light as down and made no noise even when treading on stone.’

  Yeh-hsien comes forward and, taking her fishbones with her, becomes ‘chief wife’ in the king’s household. Her stepmother and sister are stoned to death. One of the few divergences from the later – much later – European tradition occurs here: the local people are sorry for the mother and sister and dub their grave ‘The Tomb of the Distressed Women’; it becomes a fertility shrine, much visited by men: ‘any girl they prayed for there, they got’.

  The great antiquity of this story gives the reader today a dizzy feeling; in its essential structure and its lively details ‘Cinderella’ has been told for over a thousand years, passed on from voice to text and back again, over and over again until it reaches the decorous drawing rooms of the Parisian précieuses and finds its Western canonical form in Perrault’s ‘Cendrillori.3 The Chinese version exhibits many features of its social context. The tiny, precious golden shoe, a treasure among country people who would have gone barefoot or worn bark or straw pattens, also reverberates with the fetishism of bound feet: the T’ang dynasty, established in the sixth century, introduced this custom to China and it marked out highborn, valuable, desirable women. The strains between women in this Chinese Cinderella’s family are knotted into the structure of polygamy. In China (and elsewhere), this type of marriage has inspired a huge body of literature about female rivalry – Raise the Red Lantern, the recent film directed by Zhang Yimou, dramatized the continuing tragic tensions in a warlord’s palace between his wives in the 1920s, as each schemes to win their master’s favours and he plays one against the other for his own pleasure.

  In other settings, the lost shoe likewise denotes the wearer’s beauty, and brutal imagery of deformation, cultural and literal, returns: in the Grimm Brothers’ tale, the sisters hack off their toes, hack off their heels to fit the slipper, and birds warn the prince:

  Turn and peep, turn and peep,

  There’s blood within the shoe.4

  The shoe it is too small for her,

  The true bride waits for you.

  In Aelian’s brief, late second-century AD tale of Rhodope, her sandal is carried off by an eagle when she is bathing, and dropped at the
feet of the Pharaoh in Memphis. He instantly vows he must possess the woman this delightful object fits; he searches the whole of Egypt to make her his wife.5 The ancient site in Naples, dedicated to the Madonna di Piedigrotta since the fourteenth century but known in pagan times, also enshrines a cult of a virgin’s foot; some Neapolitans claim possession of Mary’s own slipper – and very small it is, too. The symbolic erotic significance of the shoe has been thoroughly explored by Bruno Bettelheim in his influential study of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment; the substitution of body parts effected by the imagery relates to the webbed or otherwise odd foot of the storyteller, discussed earlier.6 The fairy tale proposes a perfect foot from knowledge of the imperfections of feet and what they stand for; it offers a remedy in itself for the problem. As the stream restores Sheba, so the recognition brought about by love in the flow of the narrative undoes the perception of ugliness. The story advocates small feet only at its most literal, patent level of meaning; like other variations in the cycle, it promises that what is hidden and not known can be beautiful, if beheld in the right spirit.

  But Cinderella’s goodness changes character; even her colouring reflects canons of virtue and standards of beauty according to circumstances: in China, pottery and intelligence, in contemporary England ‘long golden hair, and eyelashes that turn[ed] up like the petals of a daisy’.7 Above all, however, the Chinese imagery reveals itself in the choice of animal familiar, for fish occupy an exalted place in their mythological bestiary, which is taken up in their cuisine and their gardens – ornamented with carp of great price, with goggle eyes and swirling fins.

  The animal helper, who embodies the dead mother in providing for her orphaned child, constitutes a structural node in the Cinderella story, but the creature changes in later European versions until she takes the form of the fairy godmother familiar today.8 In the Grimms’ ‘Aschenputter of 1812, a hazel sapling grows up on the mother’s grave, and her bones transform it into a powerful wishing tree, to work her daughter’s revenge and triumph (here). The tree shakes down the dresses of gold and the silken slippers this Cinderella wears to the ball, and shelters the doves, who act as her protectors: her father thinks she is hiding in the dovecote perched on its branches and he chops down the tree in his rage. It is the doves who sort the peas and the lentils her stepmother scatters, and who unmask the false sisters with their song. At the end, they peck out the wicked sisters’ eyes in punishment. No quarter is offered here, no posthumous shrine.

  In perhaps the oldest illustration of Cinderella, she weeps by the hearth after her stepmother has tossed lentils and peas into the cinders and ordered her to sift them. (In Das irrige Schaf, Nuremberg, early sixteenth century.)

  In ‘Rashin Coatie’, the appealing and lively Scottish version, published by Andrew Lang at the turn of the century, the dead mother returns in the form of a red calf, who offers the starving child food out of her ear; the stepsister spies on her, and the calf is killed; but it continues to protect her, giving her fine clothes and satin slippers, so she can go to church like the others and meet her young prince there.9 Variants on the tale from all over the world give the mother’s ghost some kind of consoling and magical role in her daughter’s ultimate escape from pain, and it was this aspect which drew Angela Carter.10 In her version, called Ashputtle’, she creates a vision of dark, archaic grief in an uncanny short tale; the mother’s ghost returns in the form of one animal after another to give back life to her child.

  The little cat came by. The ghost of the mother went into the cat.

  ‘Your hair wants doing,’ said the cat. ‘Lie down.’

  The little cat unpicked her raggy lugs with its clever paws until the burned child’s hair hung down nicely, but it had been so snagged and tangled that the claws were all pulled out before it was finished.

  ‘Comb your own hair, next time,’ said the cat. You’ve taken my strength away. I can’t do it again.’

  The same happens with a cow who gives this Cinders milk and a bird who gives her clothes; each time, the mother takes possession of the animal and is worn out by the task, until at last Ashputtle escapes – with a lover whom her evil stepmother had wanted.

  ‘Now I can go to sleep,’ said the ghost of the mother. ‘Now everything is all right.’11

  II

  In most of the more familiar retellings today of this classic and much-loved story of female wish-fulfilment, the heroine’s mother no longer plays a part. In Basile’s exuberantly fanciful ‘La Gatta Cenerentola’ (The Cinderella Cat), the heroine Zezolla first conspires with her governess to kill her wicked stepmother: she drops the lid of a trunk on her head while she is rummaging in it to find some rags for Zezolla to wear. All goes according to plan, and the governess duly marries Zezolla’s father:

  But after a very short time she completely forgot the kindness [Zezolla] had done her … and she began to push forward six daughters of her own who had been kept secret till then … And Zezolla from one day to the next was reduced to such a state that she went from the bedroom to the kitchen, from the canopy to the hearth, from splendid silks and gold to dish-clouts, from the sceptre to the spit …12

  But the dirty and neglected hearth cat, living in the cinders, will find her feet: a fairy materializes in a date tree Zezolla’s father has brought back for his daughter from his travels, and she casts the spells which transform her into the richly arrayed beauty who, appearing three times at the local festival, bedazzles all, including the prince.

  Basile, by omitting any mention of graves or bones, severs the narrative link between the orphan’s mother and the fairy enchantress – this disjunction returns in Perrault, and in all the best-known versions circulating today. Very occasionally, the original baptismal vow a godmother makes, that she will act in loco parentis, provides a motive: ‘Up rose a Fairy! all at once, with wings and a wand, and it was her own god-mother who promised her dying mother to love her as her own child.’13 But on the whole, the absent mother no longer returns. Once upon a time there was a girl called Cinderella. She was very unhappy as she had no one who loved her’ – this is the classic opening of the modern fairy tale, repeated again and again in the available editions.14 None of the Disney films suggest that the heroines’ mothers return to help them – not even the crowd-pleasing calculations of the recent Beauty and the Beast could produce a natural mother for Beauty, but only a cosy teapot-cum-housekeeper in lieu.

  Yet Cinderella is a child in mourning for her mother, as her name tells us; her penitential garb is ash, dirty and low as a donkeyskin or a coat of grasses, but more particularly the sign of loss, the symbol of mortality, which the priest uses to mark the foreheads of the faithful on Ash Wednesday, saying, ‘Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.’ Basile only half explains her name – Gatta Cenerentola – when he says that she ends up sleeping in the ashes of the hearth like a cat; Perrault, likewise, when he writes that the kinder of the two stepsisters softens her nickname from Cucendron (Cinder-bottom; Cinder-fanny) to Cendrillon. But Perrault’s withdrawn obscenity does preserve the hint at ritual pollution in ancient mourning customs, without apparently understanding it. The lays and romances of medieval literature are thronged with bereaved heroes and heroines who will not wash, or cut their hair or their beard, but hug the dirt to keep close to their lost loved one, to be outcast as they are in death, to keep their own personal Lent, wearing sackcloth and ashes.15 The knowing Basile writes that mourning lasts as short a moment as pain in the funny bone, but Cinderella, in her rags, in her sackcloth and ashes, is a daughter who continues to grieve.16

  It would be very simple-minded to pin the picture of female hatred and cruelty in the Cinderella cycle and fairy tales like ‘Rapunzel’, ‘Snow White’ and ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ on male authors and interpreters alone. They have contributed to it and confirmed it, from Charles Perrault’s wittily awful sisters (not ugly but beautiful) and terrifying cannibal ogresses (in his ‘Sleeping Beauty’, see below) to the Grimm Brothers and their br
illiantly successful spiritual heir Walt Disney, who made the cartoon films Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs(1937) and Cinderella (1950), which have done more than any other creation to naturalize female – maternal – malignancy in the imaginations of children worldwide.

  Both films concentrate with exuberant glee on the towering, taloned, ravenhaired wicked stepmother; all Disney’s powers of invention failed to save the princes from featureless banality and his heroines from saccharin sentimentality. Authentic power lies with the bad women, and the plump cosy fairy godmother in Cinderella seems no match for them. Disney’s vision has affected everybody’s idea of fairy tales themselves: until writers and anthologists began looking again, passive hapless heroines and vigorous wicked older women seemed generic. Disney selected certain stories and stressed certain sides to them; the wise children, the cunning little vixens, the teeming population of the stories were drastically purged.17 The disequilibrium between good and evil in these films has influenced contemporary perception of fairy tale, as a form where sinister and gruesome forces are magnified and prevail throughout – until the very last moment, where, ex machina, right and goodness overcome them.

  Visual artists have continued to bring relish to the task of portraying the wicked witches and evil stepmothers of the tales: Maurice Sendak and David Hockney have created memorably warty, hook-nosed, crouchback horrors in their illustrations to Grimm. Furthermore, father figures tend to be excused responsibility, as we shall see in more detail later (Chapter Twenty-one). The tales consistently fail to ask, why did Cinderella’s father marry again so quickly, so unwisely? Or, why does he allow Cinderella’s mistreatment at all?