From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  The fairy godmother, disguised as a blind beggar, prepares to change the rat, the mice and the pumpkin. (Chapbook, Cinderella, London, c. 1820.)

  Illustrators unconsciously grasped the affinity between the teller who knows from the beginning the heroine’s hidden virtue and the fairy godmother who brings about her happy recognition, and they disclosed it in their illustrations, even when little in the text openly proclaimed the identity, picturing the fairy godmother as bent, raddled, bespectacled and lame, the mirror image of the witchy storyteller who figured on the cover or the frontispiece (above). In George Cruikshank’s original drawings for ‘Cinderella’, the fairy godmother is herself transformed and revealed to be a beautiful enchantress: the heroine’s recognition reflected in her own.

  If the narrator/good fairy is bidding to replace the mother whose death she announces in the story, if she is offering herself as the benevolent wonder-worker in the lives of the story’s protagonists, she may be reproducing within the tale another historical circumstance in the lives of women beside the high rate of death in childbirth or the enforced abandonment of children on widowhood: she may be recording, in concealed form, the antagonism between mothers and the women their sons marry, between daughters-in-law and their husbands’ mothers. The unhappy families of fairy tale typically suffer before a marriage takes place which rescues the heroine; but her situation was itself brought about by unions of one kind or another, so that when critics reproach fairy tale for the glib promise of its traditional ending – ‘And they all lived happily ever after’ – they overlook the knowledge of misery within marriage that the preceding story reveals in its every line. The conclusion of fairy tales works a charm against despair, the last spell the narrating fairy godmother casts for change in her subjects and her hearers’ destinies.

  The stories concentrate on unions made by law, on the reshaping of families from the biological order to the social: on mothers and sisters bestowed by legal arrangement, as well as the husbands. The plots characteristically strive to align such social fiats with the inclinations of the heart. In many variations on ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Donkeyskin’, the enemies of love are patriarchs; but in many fairy tales the tyrants are women and they struggle against their often younger rivals to retain the security that their husbands or their fathers afford them.

  CHAPTER 14

  Wicked Stepmothers: The Sleeping Beauty

  Venus was the first – and maybe the worst – of tyrant mothers-in-law, and she had Psyche beaten for daring to sleep with her son. (The Master of the Die after Michel Coxie, c. 1530.)

  This is the world we wanted.1

  All who would have seen us dead

  are dead. I hear the witch’s cry

  Break in the moonlight through a sheet

  of sugar: God rewards.

  Her tongue shrivels into gas …

  Louise Glück

  THE WORD IN French for stepmother is the same as the word for mother-in-law – belle-mère. Latin, Greek, Italian, German, have distinct words for the two relations, and both feature in their romances and fairy tales. In English usage, ‘mother-in-law’ meant stepmother until the mid-nineteenth century, while the term ‘daughter-in-law’ was used for stepdaughters as well. Although the term ‘stepmother’ was not used, it seems, for a husband’s mother, there was clearly some confusion. The Oxford English Dictionary gives examples occurring from Saint Bridget’s visions (translated in 1516) to Thackeray, who, as late as 1848 in Vanity Fair, is still using the word in the sense of stepmother.

  ‘Mother-in-law’ is of course the mot juste for a stepmother: the new wife becomes the mother of the former wife’s children by law, not by nature. It is still the custom for orphaned stepchildren to call the new wife of their father by whatever name they called their mothers, and in England today it is quite common for daughters-in-law to call their husband’s mother Mum, or whatever diminutive is used in his family.

  The mother who persecutes heroines like Cinderella or Snow White may conceal beneath her cruel features another familiar kind of adoptive mother, not the stepmother but the mother-in-law, and the time of ordeal through which the fairytale heroine passes may not represent the liminal interval between childhood and maturity, but another, more socially constituted proving ground or threshold: the beginning of marriage.

  The absent mother may not have died in fact, though many did; she may have died symbolically, according to the laws of matrimony that substitute the biological mother in a young woman’s life with another. Taking the story from one vantage point, and imagining that the storyteller is remembering her own life, and is speaking as a daughter-in-law, we can hear her venting all her antagonism against the older woman who as it were bewitched her and her potential allies, including the man she married: stories of the Beauty and the Beast group conjure a spouse to whom the young woman has been sacrificed at her father’s wish, and then relate how an old and wicked fairy, usually with some kind of family hold on him – in Villeneuve’s version, she is his foster mother and his mother’s best friend – has cast the spell on him that makes him hideous and stupid, and unable to express his love to his bride until that spell is broken.2

  The weddings of fairy tale bring the traditional narratives to a satisfying open ending which allows the possibility of hope; but the story structure masks the fact that many stories picture the conditions of marriage during the course of their telling. It is clearly a late, conventional moral reflex on the part of Mother Goose to make marriage the issue between Beauty and the Beast: Beauty is living alone with the Beast from the moment she agrees to save her father by leaving home. The issue is not sex, but love, and the pledging of lifelong mutual attachment. Similarly, the Sleeping Beauty’s enchanted sleep or Rapunzel’s magic imprisonment may not represent the slow incubation of selfhood, of consciousness of the Other and eventual sexual fulfilment.3 Rather, it may stand for the dark time that can follow the first encounter between the older woman and her new daughter-in-law, the period when the young woman can do nothing, take charge of nothing, but suffer the sorcery and the authority – and perhaps the hostility – of the woman whose house she has entered, whose daughter she has become.4

  Perrault’s ‘La Belle au bois dormant’ (Sleeping Beauty) resembles, as many of his fairy tales do, a story in Giambattista Basile’s collection of sixty years before, and both of them ring changes on a tale which appears in a vast Arthurian prose romance of the fourteenth century, Perceforest.5 Perceforest was first printed in 1528 and appeared in Italian as soon as three years later; it may have been known to Basile in this version.6 With regard to the familial conflicts represented in fairy tales, Basile and Perrault diverge, and are in turn reinterpreted by later retellings of ‘Sleeping Beauty’; the changes are almost funny, they are so revealing of social prejudices and expectations.

  In Basile, the saviour hero is already married to someone else at the start of the story; out hunting, he comes upon the sleeping beauty Talia, who has pricked her finger on a sliver of flax.7 When she will not wake up, however much he shouts, he ‘plucked from her the fruits of love’ (as Basile puts it), fathering two children on her in the act, twins called Sole and Luna. One of the babies, trying to nurse on the body of his comatose mother, sucks her finger instead of her breast, and so draws out the splinter of flax that has caused her to fall into her enchanted sleep. She wakes. The king, who had meanwhile forgotten about his little adventure, finds himself a year later riding in the same woods and it comes back to mind; he discovers his second family awake and flourishing.8 His wife suspects him, and she takes the steps that prefigure the manoeuvres of other ogresses, like Snow White’s (step)mother: by a ruse, she summons the twins to court, then orders the cook ‘to butcher them and turn them into various delicacies and sauces to give them to their vile father’. The cook, like the huntsman in ‘Snow White’, is too softhearted to kill the twins, and picks two goat’s kids instead, which he serves ‘in a hundred different dishes’; the king tucks in,
exclaiming all the while with relish at the deliciousness of it all, while the queen grimly comments, ‘Eat up, you’re eating what’s your very own.’ To which he responds, in anger, ‘I know very well I’m eating what’s my own, because you have brought nothing to this house.’ This taunt on the childlessness of their union does not excite Basile’s pity for her; and is not intended to stir ours.

  The queen is a Medea, a Lady Macbeth, a murderous and unnatural, unsexed anomaly, who then tricks Talia into coming to court to visit her, and berates her furiously, and will not listen when Talia protests she was fast asleep throughout the escapade and therefore blameless. A huge pyre is prepared for Talia’s burning, but the queen, at her rival’s entreaties, allows her to take off her clothes beforehand – partly, says Basile sourly, because she coveted her fine embroideries and jewels. Like Bluebeard’s wife, Talia screams as she plays for time, taking off each garment one by one, until at the very last moment, as she is being dragged across to the cauldron now boiling on the fire, the king at last answers her yells for help. He asks for his children; his wife tells him that, like Titus Andronicus, he has eaten them. He instantly orders that she be thrown into the flames instead, along with her accomplices. But the cook pleads for his life, when it comes to his turn to die, by revealing the children he saved. The children, found again, are reunited with their father, who promotes the cook to gentleman of the bedchamber and marries Talia.

  Basile’s cheerful cynicism and often scabrous immoralism continues the tradition of Boccaccio; though so much closer to Perrault in time, Basile is far distant from him in spirit. In Perrault’s version of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, the vengeful wife, who is herself destroyed by the fire she prepared for her rival, changes into the adventurous prince’s mother, who, says Perrault baldly, ‘était de race Ogresse’ (was of the Ogre race) and, according to the tendency of ogres, liked eating the fresh meat of little children.9 The story follows the lines of Basile’s version except that the queen mother specifies to the cook that she wants little Aurora dished up with a particular gourmet sauce – Ha sauce Robert’. A few days later, it is the little boy’s turn. But in both cases, the tender-hearted cook has switched them, for a lamb and a kid respectively. The queen then expresses a desire to eat their mother, her daughter-in-law, as well. The once sleeping Beauty agrees meekly to her own death, as she imagines her children have preceded her. Again, the cook spares her, and serves a hind in her place; but a few days later the queen overhears one of the children crying in her hiding place, and, furious that they have escaped her, she orders a cauldron filled with toads and vipers and eels and snakes for her daughter-in-law, the babies, the steward and his wife and their servant into the bargain. The king arrives, in the nick of time, and his mother, enraged at being baulked, throws herself headfirst into the pot and ‘was immediately devoured by the horrible creatures she had had put into it’. (As if the boiling water were not sufficient to kill her.) Perrault concludes, with his customary dryness: ‘The king did not fail to be cross about it: she was his mother; but he soon consoled himself with his beautiful wife and children’.

  Basile told of adultery; in his harsh tale, the first wife, in her infertility, commits a crime against the family. Perrault adapted the tale to speak of a more palatable crime: cannibalism seemed then much less scandalous than rape, adultery and bigamy, and more suited to the childish fantasy of the invoked audience. But Perrault’s modified, still gruesome coda to the fairy tale no longer appears, after the eighteenth century, in children’s editions. The story follows instead the Grimms’ more romantic and innocuous account, ‘Dornröschen’, (Little Briar Rose), and ends with the prince’s famous saving kiss that wakes the sleeping beauty and leads to their wedding.10 Sometimes, for propriety’s sake, the kiss is left out, too. The macabre excesses of Basile and Perrault were dismaying to the same Victorian editors who, aiming at children, also dropped Perrault’s ‘Peau d’Ane’.11 The story’s leading character, the terrible queen, migrated instead into the pages of the Grimms’ ‘Snow White’ – as a wicked stepmother. It took Disney’s film to make her face a familiar terror – her double face, for she appears twice over as an unsexed woman, endangering and destabilizing due order. First as the ravenhaired queen (‘Mirror, mirror on the wall …’) and then disguised as the old beggarwoman who gives Snow White the apple which chokes her. Basile’s villain was a jealous wife, Perrault’s a jealous mother-in-law; in our times, bad women come in the form of (step)mothers.

  The doubling of negative female power has become very interesting to modern interpreters of fairy tales: in the recent English National Opera production of Hansel and Gretel, the opera by Engelbert Humperdinck, the witch doubled the part of the mother, following a Bettelheimian reading which envisaged the children’s point of view and identified the mother who could abandon them with their persecutor in the woods.

  Critics of both approaches – the Victorians’ bowdlerizations, the twentieth century’s appetite for maternal violence – are placed in a quandary by the matter of fairy tale when children are the presumed audience. The space and time of marriage and its problems – however farfetched – which were of crucial concern to the earlier, adult or mixed circle of listeners, have been pushed out of the narrative and replaced by courtship – the time before the wedding – as the generic theme of fairy tale.

  Persinette, the heroine of a fairy tale of 1697 by Charlotte-Rose de La Force, is held captive in the tower by an old witch to whom she has been handed over, as in the Grimms’ later version, the more famous ‘Rapunzel’.12 (Persinette is called after the parsley from the witch’s garden which her mother craves; Rapunzel after the rampion, another savoury herb, which her mother also desires so much that she promises the witch her baby in exchange.) Is Little Parsley-flower or Little Rampion the victim of a rapacious and cruel foster mother, who wants to keep her for herself, or has the old woman been allowed to take the daughter away from her real mother, install her in her own house to do her bidding, and then rob her of her freedom and denyed her lover access to her? This is what the story relates, and such a reading tallies with common experience in medieval and early modern society, when a daughter-in-law worked under the direction of her husband’s mother, to whom she had been handed over often by family arrangement in tender youth, even childhood. The historian Janet Nelson gives a good Merovingian example, from the Vita of Rusticula: as a child, Rusticula was taken by her promised husband to his natal household, and brought up by his mother. This ‘private arrangement’ was effectively wardship, and underlined Rusticula’s legal incapacity.13 In Shakespeare’s King John, the conflict between France and England is patched up by bestowing Blanch on the Dauphin, but on the wedding day itself, the peace is shattered and the bride left centre stage, between her new husband, her father, her uncle the king and their competing claims on her allegiance. She cries out:

  The sun’s o’ercast with blood; fair day, adieu!

  Which is the side that I must go withal?

  I am with both …

  They whirl asunder and dismember me …

  Whoever wins, on that side shall I lose …14

  Shakespeare’s audience would have understood her feelings, and not only against a medieval backdrop. At the level of less exalted households, the conflicts in Basile’s early collection of Italian fairy tales arise from the same divided loyalties; his stories seethe with married women’s domestic turbulence.15

  The wicked stepmother who has become the stock figure of fairy tale makes her first literary appearance as a mother-in-law, in ‘Cupid and Psyche’ by Apuleius’, where Cupid’s mother, the goddess Venus, orders her son to destroy Psyche, her rival in beauty. But instead Cupid falls in love with her. Though Apuleius does not say so in so many words, Cupid’s mother’s antagonism inspires his furtive behaviour: her envy of Psyche, his foreknowledge of her furious disapproval of his relations with her, require the clandestine, unseen lovemaking: his mother turns him into a mystery presence, which Psyche, goaded by
her sisters, then suspects of monstrous, beastlike form. When Venus does discover the truth about their ‘marriage’, she blazes with fury, against Psyche for her unworthiness, against her son for his choice. The rhetoric is comic, the accents all too familiar:

  She found Cupid lying ill in bed … As she entered she bawled out at the top of her voice: ‘Now is this decent behaviour? … A fine credit you are to your divine family … You trample your mother’s orders underfoot… you have the impudence to sleep with the girl … at your age, you lecherous little beast! I suppose you thought I’d be delighted to have her for a daughter-in-law, eh?’

  Venus pursues Psyche with her vengeance and, when the girl is eventually brought before her, she shrieks at her with hysterical rage, and orders the cruellest punishments: ‘she flew at poor Psyche, tore her clothes to shreds, pulled out handfuls of her hair, then grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her until she nearly shook her head off…’ (here).16 She then sets her various impossible tasks – to sort lentils and millet wheat, barley, beans, poppy and vetch seeds, just as the wicked stepmother in medieval retellings and, later in Grimm, orders Aschenputtel as a condition of going to the ball (here). And just as doves come to Aschenputtel’s rescue, and peck the grain and seed into separate piles, much to the stepmother’s astonishment, so Venus is horrified when she finds that Psyche has also managed the tasks.