From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  Terror of the witch, so deliberately exorcized by Perrault’s urbane wit, returns in malignant force through the imagination of pantomime, film, and children’s books, not in the magic person of the fairy godmother, but in the vicious power of the evil stepmother.18

  The fairy godmother as witch: in steeple hat and pointy shoes, she tumbles down the chimney. (Arthur Rackham, Cinderella, London, 1919.)

  Nevertheless, the misogyny of fairy tales engages women as participants, not just targets; the antagonisms and sufferings the stories recount connect to the world of female authority as well as experience. Also, as they so frequently claim to speak in a woman’s voice (the storyteller, Mother Goose), it is worth pausing to examine the weight and implications of that claim before pointing the finger exclusively at Grimm or Disney or Cruikshank. Bengt Holbek observes that ‘men and women often tell the same tales in characteristically different ways’, and the scholar of German fairy tales Ruth Bottigheimer has recently studied the differences in narrators’ approaches.19 Anthropologists, too, have proceeded along lines of inquiry into the differences. Reimar Schefold, working among the Mentawaians of Indonesia, was told a story by his assisant, Tengatiti: later, he was approached by a woman, ‘a respected matron called Teuraggamimanai’, who related the same tale in her version – it was her favourite, heard from her mother, and she wanted to give the Dutchman the chance to hear it in her, preferred, form. Schefold, who had not been told stories by women until that point, compared the two accounts and found there were significant differences of emphasis in a turbulent story of two rebellious sisters and their suitors. The woman narrator stressed co-operation in work and alliance brought by marriage, the man lineage and the acquisition of dowry; the woman’s version enhanced the sisters’ activity, courage, spirit, determination, their control of their dowries and labour.20 In Spain, in the 1980s, the American James Taggart studied storytelling in Estremadura, and uncovered parallels and divergences between men’s and women’s ways with their versions of ‘Cinderella’, ‘Snow White’, ‘Cupid and Psyche’, and ‘Beauty and the Beast’.21 The differences are often obvious, and their development stands to reason, but attention needs to be drawn to them with regard to our own fairy tales, which have been all too easily perceived as immemorially traditional, unchanging, and pure. The archetypal image of the timeless old crone of course serves this camouflaging atavism.

  Instances and statistics of female storytelling are not however nearly as illuminating as internal evidence in the tales themselves. This yields a doubled aspect of femaleness: on the one hand the record of female experience in certain tales, and on the other the ascription of a female point of view, through the protagonist or the narrating voice. The male scribe of the literary monument of folklore, like Straparola or Lang or even Calvino, may be transmitting women’s stories, as they claim. Or, like the male tragedian in the Greek amphitheatre who wears the mask of a woman to utter the speeches of Medea or Electra, these authors and scholars may be impersonating a woman. If they are inventing, rather than acknowledging a known female source, how does this ascription contribute to the impact of the tales? Even if an actual voice of a female narrator is not emerging muffled or distorted by the male mask she wears, what meanings does the fantasy of her original voice allow to flower within the stories?

  The answer is composed of many strands: most obviously, storytellers the world over claim to know their material from an eye witness; the voice of the old nurse lends reliability to the tale, stamps it as authentic, rather than the concoction of the storyteller himself. More deeply, attributing to women testimony about women’s wrongs and wrongdoing gives them added value: men might be expected to find women flighty, rapacious, self-seeking, cruel and lustful, but if women say such things about themselves, then the matter is settled. What some women say against others can be usefully turned against all of them.

  The ravelled sleeve of these braided strands of male and female experience and wishes and fears can never be wholly combed out. If fairy tales are mere old wives’ tales because they are told by women, is then what they say necessarily false, a mere trifle, including what they say about women? Or does the lowness of the genre, assumed on account of the lowness of its authors, permit a greater degree of truth-telling, as the jester’s cap protects the fool from the consequences of his frank speech? Above all, if and when women are narrating, why are the female characters so cruel and the mother so often dead at the start of the story? Why have women continued to speak at all within this body of story which defames them so profoundly? Could they be speaking to a purpose? The poet Olga Broumas, in a poem which speaks in Cinderella’s voice, grieves for the part she has played in this process:

  … I am a woman in a state of siege,

  alone

  as one piece of laundry, strung on a windy clothesline a

  mile long. A woman co-opted by promises: the lure

  of a job, the ruse of a choice, a woman forced

  to bear witness, falsely against my kind …22

  Fairy tales like ‘Cinderella’ bear witness against women. But there are possible reasons for the evidence they bring, be it true or false (and it is both), which mitigate the wrongs they describe, not entirely, but in part.

  The absence of the mother from the tale is often declared at the start, without explanation, as if none were required; Beauty appears before us, in the opening paragraph of the earliest written version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ with that title, in 1740 (see here), as a daughter to her father, a sister to her six elders, a biblical seventh child, the cadette, the favourite: nothing is spoken about her father’s wife. Later, it will turn out that Beauty is a foundling, and was left by the fairies, after her fairy mother was disgraced by union with a mortal – not the father Beauty knows, but another, higher in rank, more powerful.

  This is the kind of romancing that earned fairy tale the scorn of the literati, both in the past and today. Fairy tales play to the child’s hankering after nobler, richer, altogether better origins, the fantasy of being a prince or a princess in disguise, the Freudian ‘family romance’. But this type of fantasy can also comfort bereaved children, who, however irrationally, feel themselves abandoned by their dead mothers, and even guilty for their disappearance. One English Cinderella story, called ‘Tattercoats’, perceptively focusses on this type of grief: the king figure mistreats his granddaughter ‘because at her birth, his favourite daughter died’.23 In this case, her ragged, starving, neglected state reflects his excess of mourning and her anguished guilt, and neither of them can be healed of the wound – the story has an unhappy ending.

  Paradoxically, the best possible intentions can also contribute to the absence of mothers from the tales. In the case of ‘Schneewittchen’ (Snow White), for instance, the Grimms altered the earlier versions they had taken down in which Snow White’s own mother suffered murderous jealousy of her and persecuted her. The 1819 edition is the first to introduce a stepmother in her place; the manuscript and the editions of 1810 and 1812 place Snow White’s natural mother at the pivot of the violent plot.24 But it was altered so that a mother should not be seen to torment a daughter. This is still the case in a version collected in the Armenian community in Detroit this century: having pursued her daughter with murderous rage, this mother finally dies of surprise when she hears from the moon that her daughter is still living and is more beautiful than her.25

  The Grimm Brothers worked on the Kinder- und Hausmärchen in draft after draft after the first edition of 1812, Wilhelm in particular infusing the new editions with his Christian fervour, emboldening the moral strokes of the plot, meting out penalties to the wicked and rewards to the just, to conform with prevailing Christian and social values.26 They also softened the harshness – especially in family dramas. They could not make it disappear altogether, but in ‘Hansel and Gretel’, for example, they added the father’s miserable reluctance to an earlier version in which both parents had proposed the abandonment of their children, and tur
ned the mother into a wicked stepmother.27 On the whole, they tended towards sparing the father’s villainy, and substituting another wife for the natural mother, who had figured as the villain in the versions they had been told: they felt obliged to deal less harshly with mothers than the female storytellers whose material they were setting down.

  Mothers, especially wicked stepmothers, abandon their children to the wolves. (The Babes in the Wood, tableau, Madame Tussaud’s, London, 1959.)

  The disappearance here of the original mothers forms a response to the harshness of the material: in their romantic idealism, the Grimms literally could not bear a maternal presence to be equivocal, or dangerous, and preferred to banish her altogether. For them, the bad mother had to disappear in order for the ideal to survive and allow Mother to flourish as symbol of the eternal feminine, the motherland, and the family itself as the highest social desideratum.

  Bruno Bettelheim has analysed this manoeuvre, using a Freudian principle of splitting, in The Uses of Enchantment. According to his analysis, the wicked stepmother acts as the Janus face of the good mother, who can thus be saved and cherished in fantasy and memory, split from the bad mother:

  While all young children sometimes need to split the image of their parent into its benevolent and threatening aspects to feel fully sheltered by the first, most cannot do it as cleverly and consciously as this girl [a case history] did. Most children cannot find their own solution to the impasse of Mother suddenly changing into ‘a look-alike impostor’. Fairytales, which contain good fairies who suddenly appear and help the child find happiness despite this ‘impostor’ or ‘stepmother’, permit the child not to be destroyed by this ‘impostor’ … These fantasies are helpful; they permit the child to feel really angry at the Martian pretender or the ‘false parent’ without guilt … So the typical fairytale splitting of the mother into a good (usually dead) mother and an evil stepmother serves the child well. It is not only a means of preserving an internal all-good mother when the real mother is not all-good, but it also permits anger at this bad ‘stepmother’ without endangering the goodwill of the true mother who is viewed as a different person … The fantasy of the wicked stepmother not only preserves the good mother intact, it also prevents having to feel guilty about one’s angry thoughts and wishes about her – a guilt which would seriously interfere with the good relation to Mother.28

  This theory is neat, satisfying and, as a convincing emotional stratagem, strikes home. It has consequently proved extremely persuasive: paediatricians have restored harsh fairy tales including the Grimms’ to children’s bookshelves, and endorsed the therapeutic powers of fictional cruelty and horror. The bad mother has become an inevitable, even required ingredient in fantasy, and hatred of her a legitimate, applauded stratagem of psychic survival. Bettelheim’s theory has contributed to the continuing absence of good mothers from fairy tales in all kinds of media, and to a dangerous degree which itself mirrors current prejudices and reinforces them. His argument, and its tremendous diffusion and widespread acceptance, have effaced from memory the historical reasons for women’s cruelty within the home and have made such behaviour seem natural, even intrinsic to the mother-child relationship. It has even helped to ratify the expectation of strife as healthy and the resulting hatred as therapeutic.

  This archetypal approach leeches history out of fairy tale. Fairy or wonder tales, however farfetched the incidents they include, or fantastic the enchantments they concoct, take on the colour of the actual circumstances in which they are or were told. While certain structural elements remain, variant versions of the same story often reveal the particular conditions of the society which told it and retold it in this form. The absent mother can be read literally as exactly that: a feature of the family before our modern era, when death in childbirth was the most common cause of female mortality, and surviving orphans would find themselves brought up by their mother’s successor (here).

  The chronicles of the Anglo-Saxon and Merovingian dynasties, before the establishment of primogeniture, are bespattered with the blood of possible heirs, done away with by consorts ambitious for their own progeny – the true wicked stepmothers of history, who become embedded in stories as eternal truths.29 Moreover, children whose fathers had died often stayed in the paternal house, to be raised by their grandparents or uncles and their wives. Their mothers were made to return to their natal homes, and to forge another, advantageous alliance for their own parents’ future. Widows remarried less frequently than widowers. For example, in Tuscany in the fifteenth century almost all men widowed under the age of sixty took another wife and started another family.30 In France, 80 per cent of widowers remarried within the year in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.31 When a second wife entered the house, she often found herself and her children in competition – often for scarce resources – with the surviving offspring of the earlier marriage, who may well have appeared to threaten her own children’s place in their father’s affection too.

  This antipathy seethes in the plots of many ‘Cinderellas’, sometimes offering an overt critique of social custom. Rossini’s Cinderella opera, La Cenerentola, shows worldly-wise indignation at his heroine’s plight – in her case, at the hands of her stepfather, Don Magnifico, who plots to make himself rich by marrying off his two other daughters, ignoring Cinderella. Tremendous buffoon he might be, but he treacherously pronounces Cinderella dead when he thinks it will help advance his own interests. And when she protests, he threatens her with violence. Dowries are the issue here, as they were in Italy in Rossini’s time; sisters compete for the larger share and Don Magnifico does not want to cut his wherewithal three ways. As it was gradually amassed, such corredo (treasure) was stored in cassoni, which were often decorated with pictures of just such stories as ‘Cinderella’.32

  The enmity of stepmothers towards children of earlier unions marks chronicles and stories from all over the world, from the ancient world to the present day; they exhibit the different strains and knots in different types of kinship systems and households, arising from patrilineage, dotal obligations, female exogamy, polygamy. One tale from Dahomey, written down in 1958, tells how a dead mother manages, from beyond the grave, to kill a wicked stepmother. The conclusion contains a threat and a boast, and conveys the full pathetic vulnerability of a motherless child far beyond polygamous households themselves:

  If a man has two wives and one dies leaving a child, you give that child to the second wife, and the second wife must look after the dead woman’s child better than after her own children. And this is why one never mistreats orphans. For once you mistreat them, you die. You die the same day. You are not even sick. I know that myself, I am an orphan.33

  This story invokes the ghost of the dead mother as a tutelary spirit in the manner of the neglected versions of ‘Cinderella’. But it also provides a precious and poignant clue to the function of stories for the narrator, not only for the audience, which can help to decipher the meanings of the most common fairy tales in which women are vilified. For the orphan from Dahomey is using the tale for his or her own protection; s/he is threatening with it any mother who maltreats a stepchild.

  The underlying cautionary message of fairy tales like ‘Cinderella’ – You see what happens if you …’ – is almost always taken from the protagonist’s point of view, because the prevalent view has seen fairy tales as unauthored and unanchored in specific circumstances. But another harvest of meanings can be gathered if the stories are analysed from the teller’s vantage.

  Psychoanalytical and historical interpreters of fairy tale usually enter stories like ‘Cinderella’, ‘Snow White’, or ‘Beauty and the Beast’ from the point of view of the protagonist, the orphaned daughter who has lost her real mother and is tormented by her stepmother, or her sisters, sometimes her stepsisters; the interpreters assume that the reader or listener naturally identifies with the heroine. Indeed, this is commonly the case. But that perception sometimes also assumes that because the narrator makes c
ommon cause with the protagonist, the narrator identifies with her too.34

  Fairy tales are not told in the first person of the protagonist, and though Cinderella or Snow White engages our first attention as well as the narrator’s, the voice of the storyteller may be issuing elsewhere. Imagine the characteristic scene, the child listening to an older person telling this story, and the absent mother materializes in the person of the narrator herself. John Berger, the art critic and novelist, has observed:

  If you remember listening to stories as a child, you will remember the pleasure of hearing a story repeated many times, and you will remember that while you were listening you became three people. There is an incredible fusion: you became the story-teller, the protagonist and you remember yourself listening to the story …

  Fusion perhaps does not quite convey the simultaneous occupation of different positions in relation to the tale, which a listener (or reader) can experience – including that of the storyteller. The audience is invited to take her part – or his – as well as identify with the mishaps and reversals in the protagonist’s life.35

  This angle of perception can yield a different set of meanings; if the storyteller speaks as a real ‘mother’ herself – even if her mouthpiece, on the page, is a man, like Perrault or the Grimms – what sort of a mother is she? If we read the famous stories of child abandonment and suffering and subsequent salvation from the point of view of the putative teller, not the solicited audience of the child, we can cast a new light on the material and its bitter, internecine struggles between women.

  If the storyteller is an old woman, the old wife of the old wives’ tale, a nurse or a governess, she may be offering herself as a surrogate to the vanished mother in the story. Within the stories themselves, the narrator frequently accedes symbolically to the story in the person of the fairy godmother. Mother Goose enters the story to work wonders on behalf of her brood. Good fairies are frequently disguised as hideous and ragged crones in order to test the heroine’s kindness, as in Perrault’s ‘Les Fées’ (The Fairies), Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier’s ‘The Enchantments of Eloquence’, some versions of ‘Cinderella’ (Pl. 1), and the Grimms’ ‘Frau Holle’ (Mother Holle). In a single blast, the evil-tongued sister of L’Héritier’s story calls the fairy in disguise ‘une vieille folle’ (an old fool), ‘vermine de villageois’ (village vermin), and connects her with procuresses and animals, particularly bitches – all descriptions that were applied to the storyteller herself by fairy tale’s detractors.36 Even when the fairy godmother is described in less disparaging terms, the perception of sympathy between storyteller and fairy need not be set aside; the claim reflects the wish-fulfilment of the storyteller herself as understood by her audience and disseminated through the printed versions of the tales: in ‘Donkeyskin’, the fairy helps the heroine to overcome the dangers her foolish/wicked mother has landed her in by her deathbed demand.