From the Beast to the Blonde
Page 28
Apuleius is jocular, trifling, wears his dislike of the vanity, snobbery and ruthlessness of Venus with a flourish, though at the concluding wedding feast, he relents enough to show the goddess relenting too: ‘The music was so sweet that Venus came forward and performed a lively step-dance in time to it.’17
In the fifteenth century, before the first extant variations on the tale were written down as fairy stories, ‘Cupid and Psyche’ was chosen by cassone painters as a fitting tale for the trousseau chests brides took to their new home; alongside other stories of wronged daughters and difficult unions, like the sufferings of Patient Griselda, the false witness of Potiphar’s wife, or Paris’ abduction of Helen of Troy, Psyche’s troubles and eventual happiness could suitably furnish the room of a bride and help her keep in mind the pitfalls and the vindication of her predecessors in wedlock. Francesco di Giorgio (on a cassone panel in the Berenson Collection at I Tatti) chose the scene where Venus’ vicious sidekick is dragging Psyche by her hair into the goddess’s presence.18 ‘Cinderella’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ‘Snow White’ have directly inherited features from the plot of Apuleius’ romance, as we have seen – Psyche’s wicked sisters, the enchanted bounty in her mysterious husband’s palace, and the prohibitions that hedge about her knowledge of his true nature. At a deeper level, they have also inherited the stories’ function, to tell the bride the worst, and shore her up in her marriage.
The steep stair, the plunging angle, the raked shadows, those eyebrows, that raven hair: the stepmother from Hollywood stalks her prey. (Walt Disney, Cinderella, 1950 © Disney.)
The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth. Like ‘pardon tales’, written to the king to win a reprieve from sentence of death, fairy tales sue for mercy.19
The wicked stepmother makes a savage appearance as a mother-in-law in the Vita of Saint Godelive, patron saint of Bruges, a historical figure who, according to a certain Drogo, the priestly author of her Vita, was born around 1050 and married to the nobleman Berthulphe de Ghistelles. Hagiography and fairy tale are often intertwined, and Godelive’s story develops along familiar lines. It relates how she gave away food and goods to the poor against her mean husband’s wishes and behind his back, and how angels saved her from detection, replacing the supplies she had taken. Berthulphe’s mother was furious at the match, and Berthulphe himself neglected his wife by his frequent absences and maltreated her when they were together, until finally mother and son conspired to murder her: she was held head down in a pond and throttled by their servants. She was then put back to bed to make out she had died in her sleep. Berthulphe remarried, but he later repented, made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and returned to become a monk. Godelive was canonized in 1084, very soon after her death, for miraculous cures had taken place: the blindness of one of her successor’s children was suddenly lifted, and this was attributed to Godelive’s intercession – a kind stepmother in this case working wonders beyond the grave and making amends for the wickedness of the rival mother in the story.
In one of Straparola’s tales, yet another malignant mother-in-law substitutes three snapping curs in the childbed of her daughter-in-law for the beautiful triplets, with gold stars on their foreheads, to whom she has given birth. She orders their death, by drowning, and publicizes the disgrace of her hated daughter-in-law and her monstrous litter.20 Her plan is foiled, of course, though only after much suffering, and she herself is burned to death on a huge pyre built for her by her son. This is only one of dozens of fairy tales and other fictions which belong in the rich cycle of accused queens.
When a blind woman storyteller gave her account of the story set down by the Grimms as ‘Das Mädchen ohne Hände’ (The Maiden without Hands), at the turn of the century in Scandinavia, she included a poisoned letter written by the hapless heroine’s mother-in-law denouncing her, in the usual fairytale terms, for giving birth to a dog; interestingly enough, a male storyteller at the same time attributed this wickedness to the Devil himself. The recent musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, Into the Woods (1988), assumes the possessiveness of a perverted mother-love between witch and captive in the Rapunzel story; a more historically based view would see that the old woman’s desire for the baby girl corresponds to material needs for helping hands at home, and reflects the arranged transfer of girls to other families as prospective wives, or surrogate domestic servants.21 Her furious intervention between the girl and her suitor would then relate the conflicting, simultaneous fears of redundancy growing in a widowed woman whose son’s marriage has made her insecure in what used to be her home, under her control. The vilification of older women in such interpretations belongs in a long tradition, as discussed in Chapters Two and Three; they bring to mind the medieval fabliau, in which a son-in-law performs a mock ‘nutting’ and pulls out from the body of his mother-in-law the bull’s testicles which have made her so unfeminine.22
Fairy stories relate the tensions between competitors for a young man’s allegiance; they reflect the difficulty of women making common cause within existing matrimonial arrangements.
II
Hatred of the older woman, and intergenerational strife, may arise not only from rivalry, but from guilt, too, about the weak and the dependent. The portrait of the tyrant mother-in-law or stepmother may conceal her own vulnerability, may offer an excuse for her maltreatment.
Reversing the angle of approach, and coming at the matter of fairy stories from another vantage point, imagining that the teller speaks instead as an older woman, as herself a grandmother or a mother-in-law, we can then discover in the tales the fear she feels, the animus she harbours against her daughter-in-law or daughters-in-law: when the mother disappears, she may have been conjured away by the narrator herself, who despatches her child listeners’ natural parent, replaces her with a monster, and then produces herself within the pages of the story, as if by enchantment, often in many different guises as a wonder-worker on their behalf, the good old fairy, the fairy godmother. Thus the older generation speaks to the younger in the fairy tale, prunes out the middle branch on the family tree as rotten or irrelevant, and thereby lays claim to the devotion, loyalty and obedience of the young over their mothers’ heads. This structure underlies the classic Cinderella story; this ancient tussle has contributed to the misogyny in such tales.
Authority at home inspires dreams of revenge: the old woman who plans to cook the children is drowned just in time. (David Hockney,’ Fundevogel’, Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, London, 1970.)
A mother-in-law had good reason to fear her son’s wife, when she often had to strive to maintain her position and assert her continuing rights to a livelihood in the patrilineal household. If she was widowed, her vulnerability became more acute. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, the historian, uses the chilly phrase ‘passing guests’ when she describes the condition of wives in the households, both symbolic and geographic, which they had married into in fifteenth-century Florence.23
The divergent claims on women of their paternal, natal home on the one hand and their later, marital households on the other would begin when they first left their parents and continue throughout their lives. These conflicting demands could greatly exacerbate women’s insecurity, kindling much misery and hatred in consequence. Although the patterns of inheritance and household obviously vary – and in highly complex ways – at different times and in different places, the burden of evidence points to the relation between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law as the acute lesion in the social body (’la Tormenta’ is the name for mother-in-law in Spanish comedy).24 English wills of the seventeenth century show that widowed parents were customarily cared for in the household of their eldest child: the continuing right to shelter, to a place by the family hearth, to bed and board, was granted and observed.25 However, as King Lear reveals, even in the case of a powerful king the exercise of such a right could meet feroc
ious resistance and reprisals. Just as Cordelia is a fairytale heroine, a wronged youngest child, a forerunner of Cinderella, so Goneril and Regan are the wicked witches, ugly sisters; the unnatural women whom fairy tales indict.
But women lived longer than men, then as now, and there were more old female dependants needing bed and board, if not the hundred knights King Lear demands. In Florence, some widows who wished to return to the family of their birth, as they had a right to do, were forced to bring suits against their children in the marital household in order to wrest back the dowry which was also theirs by right and necessary to their survival outside.26 The Court of Chancery, established in England in the mid-fifteenth century, was set up to deal with abuses of widows’ inheritance by heirs. Stepsons featured prominently among those who flouted their legal obligations.27 Chancery’s attempts made matters worse, and widows’ rights of inheritance were only effectively smoothed out by the Dower Act of 1833.28 The legal complexities are very great indeed, but in this respect England conformed more to Catholic, continental Europe than to another Protestant country, Holland, which offered unmarried and widowed women much greater independence.29
Demographic change has affected the condition of old people.30 In a census taken in the small community of Eguilles, near Aix, in Provence, in 1741–70, and carefully analysed by David Troyansky in his book Old Age in the Old Régime, the figures show that many more widows survived and lived with their children – married and unmarried – than widowers, that half the marriage contracts notarized stipulated co-residence with the parents on one side or the other, and that the widowed mother of the husband – the mother-in-law in relation to the incoming wife – lived with her son and his wife in 25 per cent of cases. By contrast, the wife’s parents lived with a married daughter only in 5 per cent of unions, the wife’s mother on her own lived with the couple only in 16.7 per cent of the marriages. Thus a widowed woman had to get along with her daughter-in-law, and vice versa, rather more commonly than with her own daughter. Troyansky sums up: ‘In the day-to-day fact of co-residence, the husband’s family took precedence … Of 111 cases of co-residence [in the sample], 100, or 90 per cent, lived with the husband’s parents and only 11 families (10 per cent) lived with the wife’s [parents].’ Almost a decade passed before the younger couple could expect to live on their own: the average length of time between their marriage and the death of (his) parents living with them was 9.8 years.31
This interval could represent exactly that time of trial, of forged alliances, of varied struggles, which many fairy tales told by women across the generations record in code.
In France, after the Revolution, a widow did not retain her keys to the household or to the family’s business.32 Thus dispossessed by her husband’s death, she was often only grudgingly provided for by his legatees; co-residence declined as the population moved to the cities to work, and destitute and homeless old women became a feature of nineteenth-century society. At the same time, the rights of grandparents began to be considered: in 1867, for instance, an important law was passed in France allowing the mother’s parents to visit children who had remained in their father’s custody after a divorce. This sign that the grandparents’ role in a child’s upbringing was being recognized and valued coincides exactly with the publication of dozens of editions of contes in which an old woman is telling children tales by a fireside, both in France and England.33 Through the medium of children’s literature, the old were shown to be entitled to continuing respect in society and a place in the family, and the fairy tales in which they play a part did not attempt to conceal the bitter conflicts within the romance of marriage that fairy tale spins.
Like gossip, fairy tales defame their objects in their attempt to establish – and extend – the speaker’s influence.
III
The kind of woman who threatens society by her singleness and her dependency was not always a clinging mother, or a desperate or abusive widow. She could be a spinster, an unmarried mother, an old nurse or servant in a household – any woman who was unattached and ageing was vulnerable.34 In the centuries when the image of Mother Goose was being disseminated through numerous editions of fairytale collections, ‘there was,’ writes the historian Michelle Perrot, ‘in a radical sense, no place for female solitude in the conceptual framework of the time’. She quotes Michelet: ‘The woman who has neither home nor protection dies.’35 Yet there were many such, and they had to survive, however precariously. The census of 1851 in France showed that 12 per cent of women over fifty had never married, and 34 per cent were single; this ratio remained the same nearly fifty years later.36 The parish churches of England reveal, in the pious record of donations made to the ‘oldest poor widows or single women living in the [said] ward’, the chronic indigence of this social group in the same era: in 1824, in St Nicholas’s church, King’s Lynn, a bequest of £60 was made by Francis Boyce for the distribution of Ad. loaves on certain feast days to these needy women.37
The old wives who spin their tales are almost always represented as unattached: spinsters, or widows. Mother Goose appears an anomalous crone, an unhusbanded female cut loose from the moorings of the patriarchal hearth; kin to the witch and the bawd. It is not difficult to see that such a storyteller may be speaking from a position of acute vulnerability, the kind that makes enemies in the heart of the family. In one of the most powerful scenes in The Three Sisters, Chekhov dramatized the old nurse Anfisa’s plight when a new woman is brought into the family. Natasha, who marries the three sisters’ brother, is the classic daughter-in-law head of household of fairytale nightmares, in that she does not feel she owes the family nurse anything – neither board nor lodging. Natasha comes in and adjusts her hair in the mirror, then notices that Anfisa is sitting by the fire. She turns on her ‘coldly’, say the stage directions, and bursts out, ‘How dare you sit in my presence? Get up! Get out of here!’ The old woman obeys, and Natasha then says to Olga, one of her sisters-in-law, ‘I can’t understand why you keep that old woman in the house.’ Olga defends the old woman: ‘Forgive me for saying it, but I can’t understand how you …’ But Natasha interrupts her. ‘She’s quite useless here. She’s just a peasant woman, her right place is in the country … I don’t like having useless people about.’38 In the end, Olga has to leave home, too, and she moves her old nurse in with her so that she will be looked after.
In fairy tales, such a useless old woman reappears in the form of the beggar whom the heroine meets by chance, and who turns out to be a powerful fairy in disguise. She has the secret power to reward virtuous sweet-talking girls (the Olgas of this world), who perform acts of kindness like giving her food and drink, and to punish the wicked mother and her unkind daughter (the Natashas) who scorn old women as useless. Again, paying attention to the internal structure of this story, one can assemble a picture of strain across three generations, in which the old struggle to survive and plead for the mercy of the young.
‘La Mère Cigogne’ (Mother Stork), for instance, a woodcut strip fairy tale from the Imagerie Pellerin at Epinal of around 1900 (here), reveals the full pathos of wishful thinking on the part of the old, as well as familiar moral instruction to the young to be good: ‘Mother Stork had had from three dead husbands, over time, some thirty or more children, girls and boys.’39 But they have driven her out to beg for her wherewithal on the street. There a good fairy finds her who announces: ‘May your sons who have wicked hearts change instantly into windmills!’40 No sooner said than done: the windmill–sons have to work on their mother’s behalf, grinding flour for her bakery – as they should have in the first place. The worst offender of all becomes an ass, and provides her with the transport she was previously denied. She becomes rich, and distributes her cakes only to good little children. Eventually her own see the error of their ways, and all is forgiven. The story reproduces transparently an old woman’s protest that she can be of use, directed past the next generation to the more sympathetic young who come after.
Such a band
e dessinée literally tells an ‘old wives’ tale’, full of threats, fear, and pathos. It provides a hinge between the instrumental use of literature to form the young, a process that has long been recognized, and the earlier annexation of narrative by speakers who were trying to help themselves.
The protagonist here, bearing one of the traditional names for a storyteller, talks about her indigence. Walter Crane, in ‘My Mother’ (1873), using the same Toy Book format as his illustrated ‘Beauty and the Beast’, turned to remind his readers of their future duties in characteristic Victorian fashion. Mother is pictured through the stages of life, first young and vigorous and playful (‘Who dress’d my dolls in clothes so gay? My Mother’), then ageing and weakening, until she lies in bed dying: ‘And when I see thee hang thy head,/ ’Twill be my turn to watch thy bed.’41 If this book was read by a mother to her child, its injunction carried a special force.
The hostility shown towards the mother figure in modern fairytale interpretations narrows its sights too sharply; other women besides stepmothers, mothers-in-law and guardians were placed in loco matris and excited the powerful emotions pupillage always arouses. In ‘Peau d’ours’ (Bearskin), one of the tales attributed to Henriette-Julie de Murat, Princess Hawthorn’s godmother makes intermittent, dazzling appearances arrayed in jewels and flowers, but she trifles capriciously with her godchild, putting her to the test to discover the strength of her love, punishing the lovers for failing, or sometimes just for the pleasure of it, at whim, like her classical precursor the goddess of love. She refuses to help Hawthorn after her unwanted marriage to the predatory ogre Rhinoceros, for instance, because she was not consulted by her father earlier.42 In this she resembles the fairies in Murat’s tales in general, as well as her contemporaries’: arbitrary, tyrannical, self-interested and untender, they have djinn-like powers of life and death over their charges’ movements, prospects, wealth. These powers are defined as social and economic: when the father hands over the heroine to be brought up by a fairy, Murat writes, ‘The power of the fairies does not extend to the qualities of the heart.’43 The fairies, not knowing gentleness or, in this particular story, constancy, cannot bestow it on their protégés. In some tales, fairies in loco matris have explicit designs on humans: in Villeneuve’s ‘La Belle et la bête’, the Beast has come to this pass because he turned down his guardian’s propositions. Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s stories deal obsessively with these powerful, indeed fateful figures of female authority who are abusive of their position: Hidessa is plagued by Magotine’s perverted desires, the Blue Bird is metamorphosed by another wicked fairy.44 In Murat’s stories equally malign termagants bear self-explanatory names: Formidable, Danamo, Mordicante.45 Louise, Comtesse d’Auneuil, another aristocrat who put her hand to the writing of fairy stories, encapsulated the general antagonism against these designing females in the title of her one extant tale, ‘La Tyrannie des fées détruite’ (The Fairies’ Tyranny Destroyed), which appeared in 1702.46 There, the lovers are kept apart, in hideous animal shapes, by the jealous fairy, Serpente.