From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  Cast out on the streets by her thankless children, Mother Stork cries, until a fairy appears, who takes her part and changes her wicked offspring into windmills and a pack ass to work on her behalf. (‘La Mère Cigogne’, Image d’Epinal, c. 1900.)

  All these older malevolent women stand in some degree of parental or guardian relation to the young on whom they prey and whose romances they attempt to spoil. Perrault’s sprightly moralité, appended to his ‘Cinderella’, means more than might appear when he says that talent will never be enough for a young person’s advancement in the world: a powerful godparent is required.47 Godmothers acted as co-maters: they stood in loco parentis. According to the laws of affinity in the early medieval Church, even god-siblings committed incest if they married, as their spiritual generation of the child into the Christian family made them true kin, even if there was no blood relation.48

  Fairy power in the stories borrows the clothes of the romance and mythological pantheon and assumes the kinship patterns of an earlier social organization in order to mirror female power within the extended kinship and patronage systems of the contemporary élite: the Vicomtesse of Kernosy, who wants to marry off her niece to cancel a debt, may love listening to fairy tales of an evening, but only because, in her overweening self-regard, she fails to see her own face in their looking glass.49

  Murat identified fairies with informal, aristocratic female power in the ancien régime very clearly. D’Aulnoy made the connection even more explicit when she dedicated one volume of her fairy tales, Nouveaux Contes des fées, to Madame, the sister-in-law of Louis XIV She wrote: ‘Here are Queens and Fairies, who having made the happiness of all who were most charming and most commendable in their own times, have come to seek at the court of your Royal Highness the most illustrious and delightful aspects of ours …’ Flattery, perhaps, a courtier’s cunning, a smokescreen veiling the pullulating evil fairies of Mme d’Aulnoy’s tales who hamper true lovers.50 Her good fairies often fail to command enough magic to withstand the enemy’s evil machinations: at the end, the mermaid godmother in ‘The Yellow Dwarf’ cannot resuscitate the dead lovers, but only manages to turn them into intertwined palm trees.51 In the preamble to this same volume, D’Aulnoy describes walking with friends in the Parc de Saint Cloud, and sitting down by herself for a while. When her friends rejoin her, she describes how ‘une jeune Nymphe’ with ‘gracious and polite manners’, who was able to remember the bygone days when Rhea ruled, had approached her there. Her friends press D’Aulnoy to tell them a story. The implication is that the nymph was a messenger, and D’Aulnoy will pass on what she said. But our storyteller confounds this expectation; she produces a notebook, and coquettes with the circle around her, saying that it contains tales which are treasures. Then she adds: All my friends the Fairies have been niggardly with their favours towards me hitherto, so I assure you that I am resolved to neglect them, as they have neglected me.’52 Distinguishing herself from classical nymphs on the one hand, and fairies on the other, she begins to read a tale from the book she has written herself. A tiny detail of nomenclature becomes significant, in this respect: Mme d’Aulnoy’s first editions are entitled Contes des fées in the sense of ‘about’ not ‘by’(Latin de not a). Tales about fairies, from a point of view that may take issue with the patronage of the fairies themselves. It is only in later editions and translations that the phrase ‘tales of the fairies’ takes root, and implies broad agreement between story and subject in an atmosphere of benign and happy ‘fairytale’ enchantments. Many early literary fairy tales tell stories of the fairies’ undoing.

  Echoing the prevalent abuses of wardship, Villeneuve also rings complicated changes on the theme of deviant motherhood within the social, rather than the natural or biological, family; in ‘La Belle et la bête’, Beauty, the heroine, was brought up in a foster home, discarded by her biological mother, like many other protagonists, when the fairies cast her out (the fairies figure as thinly disguised Versailles mignons and schemers) and compelled her to give up her child.53 For his part, the Beast has been raised by his mother’s closest friend, and it is she who attempts to seduce him. In counterpoise to these wrongs, Villeneuve then multiplies different figures of female benevolence who make up for the false mothers’ failings: sisters, godmothers, female friends abound in her elaborately constructed extended family, and at the end it is the maternal, sacrificial act of a fairy on behalf of her sister’s child that brings about the completion of the story and the union of Beauty and the Beast. Improvised and entangled families of this sort were not uncommon in the ancien régime: Mme de Villeneuve herself lived under the protection of Crébillon père, and was writing at the same time as his son, the playwright Crébillon fils, was himself composing oriental fairy tales in a satirical, semi-licentious tone that became à la mode in the 1720s.

  The proliferation of mother figures does not only reflect wishful thinking on the part of children, though fantasies of gratification and power over parents play their part; the aleatory mothers of Mme de Villeneuve’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ reflect the conditions of aristocratic and less than aristocratic life in early modern France. In Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier’s apparently farfetched tales ‘Ricdin-Ricdon’ and ‘La Robe de sincérité’, the relations of wetnurses, foster parents, guardians, court patrons and godparents can be glimpsed as family networks interpenetrating and combining with the natural, biological family.54

  In English, French, and Italian, the very title ‘mother’ formerly designated many women who were not natural mothers, nor women acting directly in lieu of her, like a foster parent, but women who were occupied in some way with the care of other, often younger colleagues – sometimes including men: nuns on the one hand, like the celebrated Mère Arnault at the convent of Port Royal, brothel-keepers on the other, like the notorious real-life madam Ma Needham in Hogarth’s Progress of a Harlot, who welcomes young Kate Hackabout to London.55 As with Mother Goose and Mother Stork, midwives and layers-out were granted maternal status. Until the mid-nineteenth century wetnurses were the regular object of sentimental idealization, in spite of the abuses which flourished (and the high death rate of the children). In the mid-eighteenth century, when the fairy tale was being domesticated for the nursery, Greuze was also painting uplifting scenes like Le Retour au village, showing a young man arriving rapturously to visit a nurse; surrounded by a multiplicity of offspring, like an allegory of Charity, she appears a paragon of natural bounty and health. Jonathan Swift, as a year-old baby, was farmed out to England for three years, and was taught to read from the Bible by his nurse and to ‘spell’, just as in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) Gulliver is taught languages by his giant nurse, Glumdalclitch, and another servant, the sorrel nag.56 In the nineteenth century, George Sand passed her childhood, and laid the foundations of her fiction, in the company of her vieille confidente, her nurse. Freud was devastated by the disappearance of his nurse when he was two and a half. She was dismissed for stealing, and went to prison. In 1897, in the course of his self-analysis, Freud recalled her ‘an ugly, elderly but clever woman, who told me a great deal about God Almighty and hell and instilled in me a high opinion of my own capacities …’: Freud as Cinders, his nurse as the fairy godmother.57 Elsewhere, Freud added, ‘she was my teacher in sexual matters and complained because I was so clumsy and unable to do anything’: the secret enterprise of Mother Goose’s narratives.58 If any of these maternal substitutes had told their nurslings stories, the mother might well have been absent; again the differences in rank between the wetnurse in the village and the mother in the town are reflected in so many fairy tales’ frank assault on women with power over others and affection for others with less authority.

  In French, bawds were also called mothers: la mère maquerelle in colloquial speech.59 ‘Mother’ was used in English as ‘a term of address for an elderly woman of the lower class’.60 In usage, it also implies something subtly marginal, with a whiff of the comic, to do with taboo mysteries of the body and the associate
d matters of life and death. Mother Trot, for instance, as in ‘Tell-troth’s New Year Gift’ of 1593, would be related to Old Dame Trot, of nursery-rhyme witchery, and both are popular descendants of Trotula, the author of the midwifery manual of the middle ages, who may or may not be a historical figure, but certainly gave her name to venereal and obstetric lore of all kinds.61 In North London until recently two pub names recalled two such characters, Mother Red Cap and Mother Shipton, the last a byword in witchcraft and prophecy who was first mentioned in a pamphlet of 1641 and went on to an illustrious afterlife as a pantomime dame.62 Both pubs have changed their names: the one to The End of the World, the other to The Fiddler’s Elbow. The old names no longer held any meaning for their customers – a symptom of the historical forgettings that drain our culture, as well as a reflection of a deep shift in consciousness: the meanings of the word ‘mother’ are becoming more and more restricted to the biological mother in the nuclear family.63 Mothers cannot appoint themselves, or be assigned the role at will; they even need to be biologically proven by matching DNA. And with the coming of bottle-feeding, the practice of wetnursing has died out.

  Oddly, this intense focus on the legitimacy of the maternal bloodline and the flesh bond of mother and child has implications in the reading of fairy tales. Our understanding of the stock villain, the wicked stepmother, has been dangerously attenuated and even misunderstood as a result. In the stories, she may not even be a stepmother, and the evil she does is not intrinsic to her nature, or to the strict maternal relation, or to her particular family position. It cannot and should not be extended to all women, for it arises from the insecurity of her interests in a social and legal context that can be changed, and remedied.

  If the narrator’s ambition to influence her audience, as a licit or illicit surrogate mother, if the storyteller’s competition with a powerful woman in control of the household, emerge from the story, the targets of narrative hatred begin to fit in to the economy of family life. For although it does not appear clearly in the teller’s interest to insist on the wickedness of women, as she might be tainted by association, the instrumental character of storytelling means that scaring children can be useful, too. Nannies use bogeymen to frighten children into obedience, and a woman storyteller might well displace the harsher aspects of her command on to another woman, a rival who can take the blame.64 But this is a social stratagem, not an ineluctable or Oedipal condition, and mothers or stepmothers today need not be inculpated en masse. As remarriage becomes more and more common, stepmothers find they are tackling a hard crust of bigotry set in the minds of their new children, and refreshed by endless returns of the wicked stepmother in the literature of childhood.

  Fairy tale’s historical realism has been obscured. One of the reasons may be the change in audience that took place through the nineteenth century, from the mixed age group who attended the veillée or the nursery reading of the tales, as in the seventeenth- and eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century evidence, towards an exclusively young audience who had the great enterprises like marriage still ahead of them. Furthermore, certain tales which star children have gained worldwide popularity (‘Cinderella’ and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’), while the range of the familiar problems dramatized in the stories reflects the youth of the dominant target audience of recent times. The increasing identification of fantasy with the child’s mentality has also contributed to the youth of the protagonists.

  Stories collected in Alaska in the 1960s often deal frankly with matters sunk deep beneath the surface of European fairy tales destined for children to hear. In one example, a mother-in-law, in the absence of her son, provides her daughter-in-law with food – seals she has hunted – and in return asks for the attentions of a wife – grooming, delousing, and sex, making love to her with the help of a penis of sealbone. When her husband returns from fishing and spies on them, he fetches his mother such a blow he kills her; his wife is disconsolate: ‘“You’ve killed my dear husband,” she cried. And would not stop crying.’65

  This could be a concocted folk tale, and this brand of incest certainly remains undocumented further south. But its very anomalousness reveals how an alliance between a man’s mother and his wife does not spring easily from the soil of Western, exogamous, patrilocal marriage, especially when the mother is widowed, and both women are competing for their material welfare and the man’s attention. It is significant that when the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp analysed the wonder tale, he broke the form down into seven spheres of action, to which correspond different functions of the dramatis personae: the villain, the hero, the donor, the helper, the princess and her father, the dispatcher and false hero.

  When it came to the princess, Propp could not sever her function from her father’s but treated them as belonging to a single sphere of action: ‘The princess and her father cannot be exactly delineated from each other,’ he wrote, thus disclosing, unwittingly, the strictly patriarchal character of the traditional marriage plots, the steps by which the narrative moves, the dynamic of the contract made according to her father’s wish.66 Propp did not analyse the wonder tale’s function from the point of view of a mother, did not probe the structure for the inverse rubbing of the father-daughter design: the mother-son. Mothers are distributed according to their part in the plot, as donors or villains, rather than their place in the system of family authority, like the father. Their disappearance from the foreground of his taxonomy replicates their silencing and absence from some of the stories themselves. Yet the tales’ deeper, invisible structure can be differently anatomized, as a bid for authority on the part of women. Propp inadvertently reproduces the weight of male power in the wonder tale, and the consequent alliances which set women against women; the tension erupts within the stories as female dissension and strife.

  The experiences these stories recount are remembered, lived experiences of women, not fairytale concoctions from the depths of the psyche; they are rooted in the social, legal and economic history of marriage and the family, and they have all the stark actuality of the real and the power real life has to bite into the psyche and etch its design: if you accept Mother Goose tales as the testimony of women, as old wives’ tales, you can hear vibrating in them the tensions, the insecurity, jealousy and rage of both mothers-in-law against their daughters-in-law and vice versa, as well as the vulnerability of children from different marriages. Certainly, women strove against women because they wished to promote their own children’s interests over those of another union’s offspring; the economic dependence of wives and mothers on the male breadwinner exacerbated – and still does – the divisions that may first spring from preferences for a child of one’s flesh. But another set of conditions set women against women, and the misogyny of fairy tales reflects them from a woman’s point of view: rivalry for the prince’s love. The effect of these stories is to flatter the male hero; the position of the man as saviour and provider in these testimonies of female conflict is assumed, repeated and reinforced – which may be the reason why such ‘old wives’ tales’, once they moved from the spinning rooms and the nurseries on to the desks of collectors and folklorists, into the public forum of the printed page and the video screen, have found such success with mixed audiences of men and women, boys and girls, and have continued to flourish in the most popular and accessible and conventional media, like Disney cartoons.

  When history falls away from a subject, we are left with Otherness, and all its power to compact enmity, recharge it and recirculate it. An archetype is a hollow thing, but a dangerous one, a figure or image which through usage has been uncoupled from the circumstances which brought it into being, and goes on spreading false consciousness. An analogy – a harmless one – occurs in metaphors of sunrise and sunset, familiar metaphors which fail to represent the movement of the sun or the relation of the planet to it.

  In Greece, the women of the Thesmophoria rituals and the Eleusinian mysteries kept their disclosures to themselves, and forbade men access; they u
nderstood the risks involved in speaking of female matters.67 The open circulation of women’s experiences in fairy tales has certainly given hostages to fortune, handed ammunition to the very figures – the princes – who often cause the fatal rivalry in the first place. Women were trapped on the fine reverse-barbed hooks of allegiances and interests, on which like trout they became more and more ensnared the more they attempted to pull away. It is revealing that one or two of the peasant or artisan sources to whom the Grimms were alerted were highly reluctant to share their stories with the keen scholars; these women may have felt abashed at the difference in education, social status, but they may also have felt uncomfortable with the idea of broadcasting their contents beyond predominantly female and worker-class circles. In one case, Wilhelm resorted to using the children of the manager of the Elizabeth Hospital (the poorhouse) in Marburg in which one storyteller was living to learn two of the tales she had previously refused to pass on to either his sister Lotte or himself.68 One of these was ‘Aschenputtel’, the Grimms’ version of ‘Cinderella’, which includes of course some of the bloodthirstiest moments of interfemale vengeance of all the famous tales.69