From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  She replies by telling him to turn around so as not to see her take off her clothes, and when he obliges, she seizes him and throws him into the sea in her stead.

  In the Netherlands, a tragic medieval version of this ballad, called ‘Heer Halewijin’, communicates an acute degree of terror about the consequences of sex: the bride disrobes herself to enter the sea, which is invoked as a bridal bed in which she will be drowned, like all her predecessors.33

  This movement from the pious to the secular, from the struggle with good and evil to the struggle with true and false love, describes the same pattern as the emergence of the individual as author of the tales: as theocentric narrative fades, named writers of tales stamp the traditional material from ballads, hagiography, folk tales with their unique experience and imagination and begin to express personal moral viewpoints in defiance of the established view. Perrault was indebted to popular hagiography, and wrote saints’ lives himself, including a lengthy poem, ‘Le Triomphe de Sainte Geneviève’, which tells a story that belongs in the accused queen-Snow White cycle.34 Interestingly, the vignette illustrating Bluebeard in the first edition of Perrault’s Contes shows Bluebeard raising his scimitar above his hapless wife’s head, like the executioner in any number of female martyrdoms familiar from religious iconography. Some scholars believe that Perrault himself made the original sketches, from which the printing blocks were drawn.35 His sly humour may therefore be parodying, at one level, the earnestness of edifying tales in which he himself had dabbled.

  Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier’s ‘The Subtle Princess’, which appeared in 1694, has frequently been attributed to Perrault and collected with Mother Goose tales (though Perrault would never have created such an Amazonian trickster for a heroine).36 Comparing her version with Perrault’s famous ‘Bluebeard’, published three years later, reveals differences that offer sharp insights into ways of telling upbeat stories about a wicked husband. And as Perrault’s version postdates his cousin’s, his changes can be taken as emending hers, even teasing her for her treatment.

  L’Héritier gives the heroine Finessa two elder sisters, with equally telltale names: Nonchalante and Babillarde – Lackadaisy and Loquatia in Gilbert Adair’s recent translation.37 Lackadaisy is a lazybones who gets up ‘at one in the afternoon … her hair dishevelled, her gown hanging loose and unfastened, her girdle missing … no one could prevail upon her to go other than in slippers: she found the wearing of shoes unutterably fatiguing’.38 Her sister Loquatia suffers from ‘la démangeaison de parler’ (a frantic itch to talk); an example of the wrong kind of female prattler, a gossip, a telltale and – worse – a bore, she gets herself into trouble, too, coquetting with the young bloods at her father’s court so familiarly they take advantage of her. With that priggishness that L’Héritier can sometimes show, she contrasts the elder sisters’ worthlessness with Finessa the paragon’s industry, intelligence, polished art of conversation and other endowments.

  The three princesses are motherless (as usual), and the king their father has to leave them, so he consults a wise fairy, and on her advice locks them up in a castle on their own with three magic distaffs – that notorious and suspect emblem of womanhood – made of glass. Like the enchanted key Bluebeard gives his wife in the Perrault tale, the distaffs will reveal the young women’s behaviour to him on his return: in Perrault, blood appears on the key after his most recent wife has opened the door to the chamber where her predecessors are hanging, and it cannot be rubbed off; in Finessa, the glass distaffs, emblems of the female and of virginity, will shatter if their owners’ virtue fails.

  The king their father has an enemy, and his son, a prince called Riche-en-Cautèle (Richcraft), acts in the story as Finessa’s shadow side, her virtue a match for his evil assaults. Disguised as an old beggarwoman, Richcraft dupes Lackadaisy and Loquatia into letting him into the castle, though they have been forbidden all company whatsoever. Later, he reveals himself a prince, and first one sister, then the other, succumb to his flatteries and promises, marry him in turn, and suffer the immediate shattering of the magic distaffs. ‘The world is full of such dupes,’ comments the author.

  Finessa naturally has her wits about her, and she realizes his falsehood. When her turn comes, she agrees to become his wife, promising to take him to ‘a chamber in which there was a very soft and comfortable bed’. But when he tries to come near, she threatens him with an axe: ‘Richcraft was not the bravest of young princes; and, seeing Finessa still with her axe, with which her fingers toyed as though it were light and airy as a fan’, he desisted and ‘went away to give her time to meditate’.39

  She quickly builds a bed on a flimsy scaffolding ofbranches over a castle sewer; when the evil Richcraft climbs in eagerly, he drops several hundred feet through the drainage system of the castle: filth to filth, the impure shatterer of glass distaffs broken himself in the sewers.

  But he survives, and returns for vengeance. He leaves heaped baskets of juicy fruits within sight of the castle, and the sisters beg Finessa to go and fetch them some for they are subject to the cravings of pregnancy: both of them have instantly conceived. When she does so, she is captured by Richcraft, who heaps her with insults and then, showing her a barrel lined with knives, razors and hooked nails all around, declares he is going to roll her down in it from a great height. But as he leans over to gloat on the torments she is to suffer, Finessa ‘deftly kicked him inside and started to roll the barrel down the mountain’.40

  On his deathbed, this ogre makes his lovable younger brother Belavoir promise to marry Finessa and then stab her to death in bed on their wedding night. With a heavy heart, for he has fallen in love with Finessa’s beauty, wit, and other points, this perfect younger brother of fairy tale prepares to kill her. But she has anticipated danger, with the help of a fairy, and has put a dummy in her bed instead, made of ‘a bladder of sheep’s blood, a bale of straw and the insides of a few of the animals they’d eaten that evening’.41 She watches her prince stab the dummy instead, then give himself up to lamentations at his deed. Then she reveals herself, and they all live happily ever after. Except her sisters, for Lackadaisy dies of vexation at the work she is given as a punishment, and Loquatia breaks her skull trying to escape the austere penitentiary where they have been placed. L’Héritier does not waste a moment’s pity on them, nor tell us what happened to their two babies, except that they were smuggled by Finessa into their wicked father’s death chamber where their presence proved so vocal, it hastened his end. (Perhaps the babies survived to become the foundling protagonists of another story.)

  In Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’, the heroine arranges dowries for her sisters so that they can make good marriages with gentlemen of their choosing; L’Héritier shows much less interest in the worldly side of matters.42 Also, valiant intervention is not the only way for women to help themselves – and men; a critique of the conditions that set them against one another can emerge more quietly from depicting them without flamboyant gestures or even heroic action.

  Words are also effective and binding in this fairy tale: language and magic make and unmake reality. The sisters break their father’s command, they believe their seducer’s sweet nothings, and come to grief; the good brother keeps his word and has to attempt Finessa’s life against his better judgement. Finessa’s simulacrum in the bed is only one of her performances, most of which are verbal. L’Héritier is funny when she describes Finessa passing herself off as a doctor to gain entry to Richcraft’s bedroom with his babies: ‘Finessa arrived … tossing out the most obscure medical terms and signing the visitor’s book in a wholly indecipherable hand …’43 By contrast, Perrault’s heroine is a helpless victim, very given to tears.

  Pretences, ruses, riddles are the stuff of fiction, and in fairy tales they often become pivotal in the plot. L’Héritier made dramatic changes to her source, Basile’s ‘Sapia Liccarda’, which features three brothers and ends in a triple wedding; the death of the false bridegroom, his fury at the appearance of
the babies he has fathered, and the savagery of the traps and ordeals he dreams up for Finessa are all L’Héritier’s inventions – or borrowings from other sources – and they betray her relish for drama.44 In Basile, for instance, the heroine makes her dummy of sweet pastry, and when her assailant stabs it, he is overcome with regret because of the sweet fragrance of the girl he has tried to kill. This is soft stuff compared to L’Héritier’s gore. In the end, the dance Basile’s Sapia Liccarda has led her suitor turns out to be a mere chivalric trial of his love. L’Héritier’s sadism and her own implacable revenge on the wicked Richcraft reveal that she had far more at stake; and ‘The Subtle Princess’ is the most successful, pacey, controlled tale that she wrote.

  After all the practical measures dreamed up by her protagonist, it is sobering to read one of the tales L’Héritier based on a fait divers from the Gazette, in her last collection of stories, Caprices du destin, of 1718. Some of these stories are taken from the past, wonder tales filled with magic and fantastic invention, but four are modernes, and she has changed the names to protect the identities of the characters. ‘Le Jugement téméraire’ (The Bold Decision) is a tuppenny-ha’penny romance, rather tame and flat, and not a fairy tale at all.45 It would contain nothing of interest, except that it reveals the ordinary restrictions obtaining in a woman’s life at that time and discloses the context in which someone like L’Héritier was making up her fantastic stories. For the temerity – the boldness – that the real-life heroine shows in her ‘judgement’ consists in deciding to travel alone in a public carriage to Paris when something has urgently called her to the capital and her own carriage is for some reason unavailable to her. A nobleman travelling in the same public vehicle imagines – what else would he think? – that she is a lady of easy virtue bent on adventure, ‘une femme d’intrigue’, and behaves improperly. But when, in his mischievous lust, he continues, in Paris, to try and debauch her, he discovers her rank and status and has to stand by in shame when she turns the tables on him, receives him graciously and inspires his own son to fall virtuously in love with her and marry her.46

  No stirring deeds in the lists or bloody effigies in bed for this lady, just the complex tripping through the wires and snares of social prohibitions on women’s movement and conduct.

  Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy showed more confidence, in her spin on the medieval tale of misalliance with the Devil or his agents. ‘Le Nain jaune’ (The Yellow Dwarf), published as part of her novel Don Fernand de Tolède in 1698, features a haughty heroine, Toute-Belle, or All-Beautiful, so puffed up with her own perfections that she turns down twenty kings for husbands; her doting mother, on her way to consult the Fairy of the Desert about her delinquent daughter’s future, comes across terrifying lions which threaten to eat her alive.47 She then discovers that she has lost the special cakes made of millet, sugar candy and crocodile eggs she had brought with her to pacify them. The Yellow Dwarf materializes from an orange tree where he lives; he has red hair, a fairy characteristic, inherited from the demons of Christian superstition, and he promises to guard her in return for marriage with her daughter. When later they all forget this promise, though Toute-Belle is wearing his ring of a single diabolical red hair on her finger, and she is about to wed after all one of her sighing swains (the King of the Golden Mines), the dwarf makes a tremendous entrance riding in on the wedding feast astride a great cat, seizes the bride and escapes; the Desert Fairy meanwhile takes a fancy to the groom and carries him off for her own. The tale ends with the murder of the king by the dwarf; and Toute-Belle expires instantly over his body. They are then turned into intertwined palm trees, like Ovid’s faithful lovers Philemon and Baucis, by a kind-hearted mermaid who, as we have heard, is not quite powerful enough to bring them back to life.

  The gloomy ending did not impede the story’s attraction: it proved a popular subject for English pantomime in the early nineteenth century; but when Walter Crane retold it and illustrated it in 1875, he changed the morbid ending and gave the victory to the King of the Golden Mines. In another variation, he vanquishes the dwarf in the last scene, by cutting him in two with the enthusiastic assistance of the princess and a pair of magic scissors (here).

  D’Aulnoy and L’Héritier’s contemporary, the writer Catherine Bernard, in a characteristically mordant passage of her 1696 romance, Inès de Cordoue, added a more cynical twist to the problem of the importunate and repellent suitor with her story ‘Riquet à la Houppe’ (Ricky with the Tuft).48 Bernard draws on traditional topography when she describes her heroine’s first encounter with her diabolical suitor: ‘One day, when she was out walking by herself – a habit of hers – she saw a man hideous enough to be a monster emerge from the ground.’ He offers her a bargain, promising her intelligence, which she conspicuously lacks, on condition she marries him after a year (here). This is the conventional Faustian pact of the medieval morality play; so when Riquet’s promised bride marries someone else, Riquet comes to claim her according to her promise. But then, against the grain of both saints’ lives and fairy tales, Bernard simply allows her heroine two husbands. She lives bigamously, with her true love as well as the Devil to whom she so foolishly plighted herself. By a mischievous fairy’s enchantment, these two men in her life look exactly alike, and she never could tell ‘to whom she should address her lamentations for fear of mistaking the object of her hatred for the object of her love’. Catherine Bernard ends with a shrug: ‘But perhaps she hardly lost anything there. In the long run lovers become husbands anyway.’49

  The ill-favoured suitor tempts the beautiful but witless heroine with the gift of intelligence – in return for marriage. (‘Ricky with the Tuft’, Mother Goose Tales, Amsterdam, 1754.)

  Charles Perrault’s later tale, with the same title, is rather better known, as it appears in his famous collection, and it seems openly to rebut Catherine Bernard’s jaundiced view with his own brand of romantic idealism. A queen near by has given birth to twin girls, one of whom is ugly and clever and eloquent, the other beautiful but vacuous. The beautiful girl bitterly regrets her stupidity, and is bemoaning her fate when she meets Riquet by chance. Perrault’s Riquet is hideous, but exceptionally witty and fluent and charming withal; he promises her wit and wisdom if she will agree to marry him after a year. She tries to wriggle out of it, but he persuades her, telling her that if she will only love him, he will become the handsomest man in all the world. She agrees, and his transformation is wrought. Perrault draws the happy conclusion: ‘This is not a fairy tale but the plain, unvarnished truth; every feature of the face of the one we love is beautiful, every word the beloved says is wise.’50 He forgets to acquaint us with the fate of the ugly, clever twin sister.

  When fairy tales come to be seen as literature for children, and are expected to offer hope, not dash a reader’s spirits, this conclusion appears far more suitable than Bernard’s mutinousness. But Bernard was bitter about women’s lack of freedom of movement; Perrault by contrast complacent; Bernard has been reprinted only through Jack Zipes’s remarkable work in retrieving these writers, who have been so thoroughly eclipsed in later dissemination by Perrault.

  The Grimm Brothers’ variation, ‘Fichters Vogel’ (Fitcher’s Bird), was passed on to them by Dortchen Wild, wife of Wilhelm, and combined with another variation from another source.51 A wizard pretends to be a poor beggar, and spookily spirits away three sisters in succession to be his brides. When the first breaks the prohibition, she sees inside the forbidden chamber a ‘large bloody basin … filled with dead people who had been chopped to pieces …’; in her alarm, she drops a magic egg the wizard has given her into the basin, and when she retrieves it, finds that the spots of blood on it will not wash away. After the death of her sisters, it falls to the youngest to outwit the ogre: she contrives a sinister effigy of herself, made of bones and flowers, and places it at the window as his bride; she meanwhile covers herself in honey and then slits open an eiderdown and rolls herself in it, and so, tarred and feathered, turns herself i
nto the sinister ‘Fitcher’s bird’ of the story’s title in order to make her escape, for in this disguise the wizard lets her pass by without recognizing her.

  The tale feels on the page like a rummage bag of scraps for the making of a patchwork quilt – there are bits from several different stories here; it echoes L’Héritier’s ‘Finessa’ as well as Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’, but the effect is far murkier, for the bloody egg offers a queasy female symbol. The name Fitcher, interestingly enough, derives from the Icelandic fitfugl, meaning ‘web-footed bird’, so there may well be a buried memory here of those bird-women who rule narrative enchantments, and of the power of the story to effect the safety of its characters.52

  Again, a comparison with Italo Calvino’s recent recension reveals the porousness of stories to their tellers’ temper and beliefs. The Grimms’ tale is eerie, volatile and curiously unfocussed socially and politically; Calvino’s is bright with energetic rebellion and peasant cunning. Calvino mingled, as was his method, different elements of the tale as he found it in three anthologies edited by ethnographers in the nineteenth century; they had taken down the tales from traditional cantastorie. The basic structure and title of the story ‘Il naso d’argento’ (Silver Nose) came from Piedmont, while enlivening material and details were gathered from two of Calvino’s richest sources, the Venetian Domenico Giuseppe Bernoni, who published booklets of tales from 1873 to 1893, and Carolina Coronedi Berti from Bologna, who published in 1874.53 On the orature taken down by these editors, Calvino comments: ‘Though the names of the storytellers are not given, one is often conscious of a feminine presence, who tends at times to be sentimental, at others to be dashing.’54 Calvino’s tale springs back to the tale’s antecedents, among trickster folklore and miracle stories.

  Instead of a blue beard, his villain has a silver nose. The eldest of three daughters of a poor washerwoman sighs that she would sell her soul to the Devil if she could only leave home and put an end to all this laundry. Soon afterwards, a tall dark stranger with the silver nose appears and asks for one of her girls to work for him. The eldest leaps at the chance; they set off together, eventually reaching a magnificent palace; he gives her keys to every room, but forbids her access to one. He also fastens a rose in her hair – surreptitiously.