From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  More than cool reason ever comprehends …

  And as imagination bodies forth

  The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

  Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing

  A local habitation and a name …

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V, i

  THE FIRST BEAST of the West was Eros, the god of love himself. In the romance of Cupid and Psyche, Eros/Cupid makes love, unseen in the dark, to a mortal Beauty – Psyche – who rivals his own mother Venus in seductiveness; Psyche is forbidden to look at him. When she can resist no longer and breaks the prohibition, lighting a candle to look at her lover while he sleeps, he vanishes, and with him all her enchanted surroundings. But Eros, mysterious, unknown, feared, exceeds all imaginable degree of charm when Psyche sees him in the night:

  There lay the gentlest and sweetest of all wild creatures … his golden hair, washed in nectar and still scented with it, thick curls straying over white neck and flushed cheeks and falling prettily entangled on either side of his head … soft wings of purest white … the tender down fringing the feathers quivered naughtily all the time. The rest of his body was so smooth and beautiful that Venus could never have been ashamed to acknowledge him as her son.1

  Psyche’s failure to trust, and to obey, has cost her his adorable presence and his love.

  Apuleius’ tale is the earliest extant forerunner of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale in Western literature, and a founding myth of sexual difference.2 It includes episodes the fairy tale ‘La Belle et la bête’ has made famous, from children’s versions and films: the mysterious menacing lover, the jealous sisters, the enchanted castle where disembodied voices serve every wish and ‘nectarous wines and appetizing dishes appeared by magic, floating up to her of their own accord’.3 It echoes stories of Pandora and Eve when it relies on female curiosity as the dynamic of the plot, and the overriding motive force of the female sex. Punished for her disobedience, Psyche then has to prove her love through many adventures and ordeals; pregnant by Cupid, she struggles through one test of her loyalty after another until, finally, this Beauty is reunited with her Beast and adapts him, the god of love, to the human condition of marriage, and they have a daughter, called Voluptas – Pleasure.

  The role of Eros/Cupid in the second-century romance echoes the manifestation of beast bridegrooms in much more ancient stories, not only in numerous classical myths of metamorphosis, but also in Chinese and Indian tales, like ‘The Girl who Married a Snake’, from the Panchatantra.4 Its progeny are numerous, scattered in all the great Renaissance collections like Straparola’s and Basile’s and the translated Arabian Nights; though entertainingly heterogeneous, the tales still bear a strong family resemblance.5 Such a divine erotic beast as the hero of the popular fairy tale has offered writers and other artists – painters and film-makers – a figure of masculine desire, and the plot in which he moves presents a blueprint for the channelling of erotic energy – both male and female – in society at any one time. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream manages both to guy this romance of enchanted love, with Titania and Bottom at the very extremes of beauty and beasthood, but at the same time to extend and deepen the reach of the fairy tale of benign metamorphosis in all its serious, spellbinding powers.

  In Apuleius, which was one of Shakespeare’s sources, it is Psyche who has to strive, just as it is Titania who is deluded. ‘Cupid and Psyche’ represents Eros biding his time, waiting for his bride to prove herself and earn him. The story is her journey, she has to expiate her error; like the knight in the fairy tale of the Sibyl’s cave or the enchanted mountain, she has experienced love and lost it. Unlike that tale, however, in which the fairy wife proves a false image, an occasion of sin to be resisted, Psyche’s suspicions turn out to be groundless. Her lover is no beast, but only concealed from her, and she is wrong to fear him. Her journey towards true knowledge of her hidden lover became perceived as the journey of the soul towards the concealed godhead, ‘deus absconditus’, in the writings of the Neoplatonists who adopted the story as a form of secular gospel; fairy tales have carried this philosophical interpretation into domestic settings.6 Psyche remains in the foreground, as the protagonist who functions as the chivalrous questor. It is her activities which catalyse the plot – at first harmfully, at last triumphantly. Though she is lachrymose and given to the vapours (as are all the heroines of Greek romances), she nevertheless voyages purposefully to recover the object of her desire.

  The tale consistently leaves in place the Eros figure as the goal, again, in a reversal of the more expected pattern of chivalry. In widespread contemporary popular quest narratives, it is still more common to find knights errant rather than maidens in pursuit of their loves. The Super Mario Brothers computer game gives the two heroic plumbers from Brooklyn the dominant motive of rescuing a damsel in distress in all their adventures.

  Psyche’s false perception, gradually modified, finally arrives at the truth: the radiant beauty of the god of love. In many ways, the inner structure of the Beauty and the Beast tale reverses the roles defined by the title: she has to learn the higher (human) wisdom of seeing past outward appearances, to grasp that monstrousness lies in the eye of the beholder, while the beast turns out to be irresistibly beautiful and the highest good. The Beauty and the Beast story is a classic fairy tale of transformation, which, when told by a woman, places the male lover, the Beast, in the position of the mysterious, threatening, possibly fatal unknown, and Beauty, the heroine, as the questor who discovers his true nature.7

  Apuleius’ storyteller, the ‘drunken and half-demented old woman’ whom the author adopts as his mouthpiece in this exemplary and hopeful section of his comic romance, gives him authority in the traditionally female preserve of romantic or sexual expertise. But it also achieves, almost by accident, a crucial switch of viewpoint: the unknown is seen from Psyche’s point of view. Cupid, the god of love and the personification of the masculine erotic principle, appears as a fantasy, a monster, a powerful threat. The postulated crone storyteller makes this vantage point seem logical in a way that the narrative voice of the hero Lucius or the author himself would have failed to do. Apuleius shows more storytelling wiles later: he first confirms the message of his fairy tale, telling how the abducted bride Charite escapes the horrible torments proposed by the bandits and is reunited with her lost husband, but he then undermines this happy ending, and metes out violent deaths to both bride and groom.8 Charite (Love/Grace) in the larger novel mirrors Psyche in the tale as a smitten heroine beset by troubles, and in her subsequent tragedy Apuleius perversely reopens the potential tragic outcome of romance in his real-life story as opposed to an old wives’ tale. In this, he gainsays the normative, controlling aspect of the fairy story, which gives the male Beast the beau rôle and blames his female lover’s folly for nearly ruining everything.

  The perspective of Psyche/Charite nevertheless chimes with the female storytelling voice, and offered an opportunity to many women writers who identified themselves with romantic heroines through the medium of the scorned old gossip’s advice. They too seized on Apuleius’ mask to reverse the thrust of such shafts and deal with the question of opposites, embodied in the male. The beast stood for the crucial choice in a growing woman’s life: to leave family (as the word implies, the familiar) for the unknown and unfamiliar. The question of exogamy, or marrying out, and its accompanying dangers lies at the heart of the romance. For boy heroes, leaving the father’s house to find a princess to marry, as in so many fairy tales, like ‘Puss-in-Boots’ by Perrault or the Grimms’ ‘Die drei Federn’ (The Three Feathers), there is no anguish, only adventure, and reward. But daughters’ leave-takings inspire powerful and contradictory passions, which ‘Beauty and the Beast’ explores.

  Fairy tale as a form deals with limits, and limits often set by fear: one of its fundamental themes treats of a protagonist who sets out to discover the unknown and overcomes its terrors. ‘The Tale of the Boy who Went Forth to
Learn What Fear Was’ (‘Märchen von einem, der auszog, das Fürchten zu lernen’), about a hero who knows no fear, one of the Grimms’ most famous fairy stories, sets out the theme in its stark simplicity: after various ordeals in which the boy plays cards with corpses, bowls skulls at skittles with skeletons for playmates, meets and subdues various hell-cats and ghouls, he at last encounters the princess, and in bed with her learns how to shudder when she tips a pail of live fish over him – perhaps a metaphor for the overwhelming power of physical passion.9 (In the compelling Freudian interpretation, shuddering euphemistically replaces orgasmic spasms.)10

  When women tell fairy stories, they also undertake this central narrative concern of the genre – they contest fear; they turn their eye on the phantasm of the male Other and recognize it, either rendering it transparent and safe, the self reflected as good, or ridding themselves of it (him) by destruction or transformation. At a fundamental level, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in numerous variations forms a group of tales which work out this basic plot, moving from the terrifying encounter with Otherness, to its acceptance, or, in some versions of the story, its annihilation. In either case, the menace of the Other has been met, dealt with and exorcized by the end of the fairy tale; the negatively charged protagonist has proved golden, as in so many fairy tales where a fierce bear or loathsome toad proves a Prince Charming. The terror has been faced and chased; the light shines in the dark places.

  As a female pilgrim’s progress, a common rite of passage, with a heroine moving at its centre, the tale of the feared animal groom has attracted numerous women interpreters. They form a long and distinguished line which includes ancien régime rakes, French governesses, English bluestockings. In Victorian England, women were specially attracted to the fairy tale: Mary Lamb published a version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ with her brother Charles in 1806; the fairy painter Richard Doyle illustrated his sister Adelaide’s translation of around 1842 (it was not published until this century), and in 1889, The Blue Fairy Book, edited by the scholar and enthusiast Andrew Lang with the help of his wife Leonora Alleyne, disseminated Miss Minnie Wright’s splice of two French texts, the one by Mme de Villeneuve and another by Mme de Beaumont, to create the most widely read version in English.11, 12, 13 An interesting case has been made for Jane Eyre as a variation on Apuleius (Rochester as blind Cupid) inspired by the Brontes’ reading of the Blackwood’s Magazine publication of the Latin tale.14 In film, too, women have been strongly represented, with screen-writers like Ruth Rose (King Kong), Caroline Thompson (Edward Scissorhands) and Linda Woolverton (the Disney Beauty and the Beast) taking different approaches to various monster bridegrooms. More recently, the artist and writer Leonora Carrington (b. 1917) and her younger contemporary Angela Carter have continued, in a spirit of Surrealist devilry, exploring the erotic possibilities for the heroine.

  But it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the French fairytale writers invented the pattern familiar today, and from it cut dozens of different, inventive variations. The story of Cupid and Psyche was well-known in courtly circles: Psyché, a spectacle with song and dance, commissioned to celebrate the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle of 1668, was performed for the king three years later; tepid stuff, it shows little of the deft hands of its creators, a remarkable trio – Molière, Corneille and Quinault.15 La Fontaine produced a punchier version, filled with deliciously malign shafts at the follies of the age, in Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon, a novel, which was published in 1669.16 Writers and friends of Mile L’Héritier like Henriette-Julie de Murat and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, contemporaries like Mlle de La Force and Mile Bernard, struggling against prevailing Christian conceptions of women’s contagious lustfulness, against the traditional blaming of Eve, adduced in women’s defence certain social exactions upon them: they especially attacked the custom of marrying off daughters at very young ages (fourteen or fifteen was not uncommon) to strangers.17 In this regard, women of high rank suffered from total powerlessness, and there was not much change in matrimonial matters until the Revolution ushered in a new era of comparatively free choice.

  When Perrault sprang to the defence of fairytale romancing, he specifically joined battle over the question of love-in-marriage, writing heatedly:

  I don’t doubt at all that several people of the higher ranks find it strange that I deem it such great happiness to enjoy conjugal friendship, those who ordinarily only regard marriage as a path towards establishing themselves in society, and who believe that if you must take a wife in order to have children, you must pick a mistress in order to have pleasure.18

  The ancient fairy tale of Cupid and Psyche had become a secular myth, held in common, which could be used to contest or elaborate ideas about choice and eros, modern love and romance.

  Beneath the literary wrangle in the capital lay a vital moral issue, about the character and purpose of marriage and the different needs of women from men, and the different experiences of women within the institution. Conjugal friendship was not an aspect of many women’s lives, the testimony of fairy tale would seem to be telling us. Romance – love-in-marriage – was an elusive ideal, which the writers of the contes sometimes set up in defiance of destiny. As Gillian Beer has so succinctly put it: ‘Revolution is one function of the romance.’19 When the revolutionary situation is past, readers then come to interpret the subversion it expressed in its texts in a spirit of docile nostalgia. The fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast assumed a female audience on the whole who fully expected to be given away by their fathers to men who might well strike them as monsters. The social revolution which has established both romantic and companionate marriage as the norm has irreversibly altered the reception of such romances, and ironically transformed certain women’s examination of their matrimonial lot into materialistic propaganda for making a good marriage. The partial eclipse of those fairy tales which criticize marriage in favour of ones which celebrate it has arisen partly from the new, comparative freedom to choose a partner – or partners. The pact with the Beast at the beginning of the fairy tale, when Beauty’s father hands over his daughter, actually narrates a common circumstance, and Beauty’s wholehearted obligingness in the matter was increasingly emphasized. But the fading of fairy tales in which Beauty or her counterpart resists the arrangement her father has made on her behalf also follows from the growing control of printers, publishers, editors and writers who were themselves fathers and husbands, and may have felt threatened by the earlier redactions’ forthright attacks on male tyrants. And, thirdly, the changing value of the Beast as a symbol, and the displacement of the animal as the chief site of a hostile and repressed Other, has also contributed to an important degree to the changing meanings of the tale.

  The historical and social context of the printed versions alters the message and the reception of the lovers’ perennial conflict and quest; remembering the changing background in which the tellers move constitutes a crucial part in understanding the sexual politics of the tale. The theory of archetypes, which is essentially ahistorical, helps to confirm gender inevitability and to imprison male and female in stock definitions. By contrast, attitudes to the Beast are always in flux, and even provide a gauge of changing evaluations of human beings themselves, of the meaning of what it is to be human, and specifically, since the Beast has been primarily identified with the male since the story’s earliest forms, what it is to be a man.

  II

  Tales of animal bridegrooms hold out the dream that, although the heroine’s father has given her into the keeping of a Beast, he will change – into a radiant young man, a perfect lover. At the start of the story, the Beast rampages in various misshapen and monstrous forms, demonic, ogreish, cannibal. His reluctant brides deal with him to different ends, sometimes by recognizing his inner qualities (so that he does not need to be changed), sometimes by effecting his disenchantment, but now and then by outwitting him, and even on occasion by doing away with him altogether and living happily ever after with the prince of the
ir choice.

  Joining a Madame Récamier-like Beauty for an elegant supper on his empire style furniture, a huge Beast pleads for love. (In Popular Tales of the Olden Time, c. 1840.)

  Beauty comes flying back to the Beast’s side just in time as he sprawls near death in longing for her. (’The Absence of Beauty Lamented’, in Charles and Mary Lamb, (attrib.), Beauty and the Beast, c. 1811.)

  Far harsher stories than today’s rosy romances were circulating in the eighteenth century, collected in Le Cabinet des fées, and translated and distributed beyond France, appearing in English in the editions of Robert Samber and other printer-publishers before they fade from view in the nineteenth century, giving way to reassurances about male conversion, future love and happiness. In these tales, the Beast’s savagery is no illusion, but an aspect of his nature which the heroine has to confront.

  One dominant curve can be discovered in the retellings from the seventeenth century to the present day: at first, the Beast is identified with male sexuality which must be controlled or changed or domesticated through civilité, a code chiefly established by women, but later the Beast is perceived as a principle of nature within every human being, male and female, young and old, and the stories affirm beastliness’s intrinsic goodness and necessity to holistic survival.20 The variations in the ways of telling ‘Beauty and the Beast’ offer us a text where this fundamental change of mentalité can be deciphered; the representations of the Beast circulating in other forms, in films and toys for instance, especially teddy bears, also illuminate one aspect of what the historian Keith Thomas in Man and the Natural World has termed one of the most profound changes in human sensibility in modern time: the re-evaluation of animals.21

  Happy endings have also come to be expected of children’s stories. Red Riding Hood’s father – or a passing huntsman – now regularly springs her and her grandmother safe and sound out of the wolf’s belly. Changing ideas about children’s sensitivity may be yet another reason for the fading of Beauty and the Beast stories which end badly for the Beast. Notions of decorum for young women affected the selection of editors, too: the process by which the Grimms gradually made their heroines more polite, well-spoken, or even silent, from one edition to the next, while their wicked female characters become more and more vituperative and articulate, was replicated in mass children’s publishing of the nineteenth century, and tales of plucky or disaffected young women who baulk their suitors, defy their parents or guardians and generally offer opposition to their lot often had to wait until, in the renewed feminist mood of the 1970s and 1980s, they were reclaimed by pedagogues with other views of appropriate female conduct.22, 23