From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  Her heroine is cursed at birth with ‘perfect’ ugliness by the wicked fairy Magotine; as a result, she is dubbed Laidronette (Little Ugly One, Hidessa) and shunned, even by her family. She withdraws from the world, and in her solitude amuses herself by writing ‘several volumes of her thoughts’. (Costiveness was not a problem Mme d’Aulnoy understood.) When she returns to pay a visit to her parents, they are celebrating her beautiful sister’s wedding, ‘but when they saw Hidessa, everyone looked upset’. Mme d’Aulnoy catches accurately the pathos of being unlovely in the marriage economy of the time; it is regrettable that her many exquisite princesses have obscured her ill-favoured heroines in the circulation of her tales.50

  Back in her forest fastness, Hidessa meets the Green Serpent of the title; but his sighs are hisses, and his own looks so frightful she runs from him, until advised by a good fairy not to trust in appearances, but to discover the inner spirit of her lover. He transports her to the enchanted realm of Pagodia, where the inhabitants, the pagods, wait on her hand and foot as in Cupid’s castle, and provide her with every ornament and diversion, including the most spicy conversation, plays by Corneille, and, yes, stories like ‘Cupid and Psyche’, ‘retold in elegant words by a fashionable author’. Meanwhile her mysterious suitor remains invisible, a disembodied voice speaking amorously only at night, until she becomes bored with the constant round of pleasure in the day and longs only for his sweet words in the dark. So she agrees to marry him; in return he imposes the condition that she must not give in to curiosity, like Psyche, and look at him.

  Of course she fails in the test, and sees the horrid Green Serpent with his long, bristling mane … she faints, everything vanishes, and her ordeals begin. Forced by the evil fairy Magotine to wear tiny iron shoes, spin spiders’ webs, wear a millstone and climb a mountain in order to gather water from a bottomless well in a pitcher full of holes, as well as fill a basket with four-leafed clover, she eventually – with the help of a good fairy – succeeds in these impossible tasks and is rechristened Queen Discretion for her pains. She still remains exiled, however, in a grove full of beasts. They have all been changed from their former, human, state by the fairies as a punishment: tattlers have become parrots, those who mocked their friends, monkeys, hotheads have been changed into lions and, most significant of all, a jealous lover who ‘overwhelmed [his sweetheart] with unjust accusations’ and ‘beat her so cruelly as to leave her almost dead in the arms of her waiting-women’ was at last changed into a wolf by fairies who appeared before him to stop him assaulting her again.51 Thus, in the pages of her own narrative, Mme d’Aulnoy opens up one set of meanings that fairytale animal metamorphosis expresses: this wolf has not been unjustly persecuted like the Great Green Worm; nor does his beastliness present a test of a true heroine’s goodness and trust, as in ‘Cupid and Psyche’ and its direct descendants. Rather, it makes his inner nature manifest as an outward shape, like the parrot prattlers and the monkey jokers, or the sinners in Dante’s Inferno with their congruous punishments. In the same way, the companions of Odysseus whom Circe enchants have been made to own up to their own swinishness and folly.

  At last, when the three years of her solitude have elapsed, Hidessa returns to Magotine with her cribbled pitcher duly full of water, her basket brimming with four-leafed clover, the millstone, the iron shoes. A few more vicissitudes intervene, but finally she is reunited with the Green Serpent and finds him to be a splendid prince. With heroic optimism, Mme d’Aulnoy comments, And whatever Magotine’s powers, alas for her, what could she do against the power of Love?’52 Her ugly heroine’s true beauty is restored, but only after the prince has committed himself to his staunch, chivalrous girl who has learned to love him and has crossed so many bridges of knives for him.

  Perseverance wins Hidessa her happiness, after showing the cruelty of society towards unattractive young women, and their loneliness; Mme d’Aulnoy spiritedly fantasticates on the scale of female heroism.

  D’Aulnoy’s Beauty and the Beast fairy tales precede the classic tale actually entitled ‘La Belle et la bete’, Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot Gallon, known as Mme de Villeneuve (1695–1755), included it in her novel Les Contes marins ou la jeune Américaine, in 1740, and it was reprinted as a discrete narrative in Le Cabinet des fées some fifty years later.53 Angela Carter has made the point that while it exhibits connections to the ancient cycle of animal bridegroom tales, it must be seen as ‘a literary fairy tale of the same order of invention as the stories of Hans Christian Andersen or Oscar Wilde’.54 Nearly a hundred pages long, intricately plotted in a series of episodes spoken by different characters in turn, which nest one inside another (mise-en-abyme), this founding text of one of the most popular fairy tales of the modern world has defeated almost all readers; it has hardly ever been reprinted uncut, or unrevised. Jack Zipes, in his anthology Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment of 1989, provided the first full translation into English.55

  Villeneuve portrays the Beast as the victim of an aged and malignant fairy who laid the terrible curse on him when the handsome youth turned down her amorous advances; the story encrypts the corrupt and vicious intrigues of court life, of fortune-hunting and marriage-broking, pandering and lust in the eighteenth century, and, like so many of the first literary fairy tales, campaigns for marriages of true minds, for the rights of the heart, for the freedom of the true lovers of romance. At one point Beauty muses, ‘How many girls are compelled to marry rich brutes – much more brutish than the Beast, who’s only one in form and not in his feelings or his actions?’ She conjures up a dream place, the Fortunate Island, where everyone, ‘even the king’, is allowed to marry ‘according to their inclinations’.56, 57 The force of this wishful thinking tends to be lost on the reader today.

  The surface moral of the fairy tale offers the enchanted victim of a cruel fairy redemption from his degraded, mute, coarse animal condition: he learns to speak in the gracious cadences of ‘The Land of Tenderness’; he begins to act as a human being, to express the motions of his heart and mind; in other words, to love. The condemned Other returns to Selfhood, and recovers his ‘I’.

  Until the most recent, twentieth-century revisions of the tale, the Beast was in fatal exile from the human, and his plight was terrible. The animals chosen for his punishment constitute a diabolical bestiary: snakes, frogs, cats, donkeys are traditional witches’ familiars as well as the ingredients of their potions, their love potions at that. They are guises of the Devil: the subtle serpent from Eden, and the priapic ass of antiquity. The fairies – good and bad alike – control these metamorphoses, for the supernatural shares something in common with the animal; in early modern fairy tale, both categories converge in the realm of the monstrous.

  In Mme de Villeneuve’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’, she even devises an aetiology for their connection: according to fairy law, her principal good fairy informs her audience, a fairy must be a thousand years old before she can dispute the orders of her elders, unless – and this is where the power of the uncanny proves superior even to those who can call upon it at will – a young fairy submits to a change of shape and lives as a snake or a bear. ‘We call this condition the “terrible act” because it is fraught with danger,’ she explains. Surviving the animal condition, however, increases a fairy’s powers, as it can a human heroine’s, too.58

  The ambiguous position of the Beast confers mastery of magic. The surface moral of the tales offers the enchanted victims redemption from their reduced, animal condition: as in a Christian miracle play or saint’s legend, the heroine vanquishes the tempter, triumphs in heaven after heroic resistance, or converts him. On awakening, he is somehow the better for his ordeal; that the Beast has learned something is often the underlying message of the tale. In Villeneuve’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’, the Beast falls into a mortal swoon when he thinks she has abandoned him for ever; Beauty then revives him by pouring water on his face.59 He comes to, and his disenchantment takes place only on the morning after their wedding night; not
for this scrupulous lady the erotic escapades – the pregnancy! – of Psyche before her wedding.

  Villeneuve’s hint at the saving waters of baptism was taken up and fully developed in the concise, popular epitome which Mme Leprince de Beaumont published in 1756 and which became one of the widely distributed sources of the famous fairy tale. There, the Beast returns to ‘his proper figure’ (as the 1818 English translation puts it) when Beauty pours the water from a stream on his forehead.60 He is released from evil to emerge a new man, fit to be loved and to give love in return, like the cleansed soul after the sacrament.

  IV

  Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–80) included her polished abridgement in an anthology for young people – a pioneering work of the kind – called Le Magasin des enfants; it is this version of the tale that has become canonical (it inspired Cocteau’s classic film, for instance).61, 62 Beaumont published it in London, during the fourteen-year spell she worked as a governess (a Mam’zelle) in England. She had left an unhappy marriage in France ten years before. The arranged union with M. de Beaumont, ‘a dissolute libertine’, had been annulled after only two years – fortunately – and in England she found a second husband, and had several children.63 Industrious and very high-minded, she issued a stream of pedagogical writings, often translating her own French into English for the edification of an aristocratic female pupillage under the age of eighteen. When she returned to her own country, in 1762, she produced no less busily – her bibliography numbers more than seventy volumes.

  In the case of Mme de Beaumont, the figure of the élite, lettered lady of the salon merges with the proverbial storyteller of the nursery for the first time on the social plane, when she ceases to be a member of the idle nobility and becomes a working woman in a household commanded and owned by another.

  Beaumont composed her stories with her pupils in mind, and sometimes invited their collaboration. The results appeared in English collections such as the Young Ladies’ Magazine or Dialogues between a Discreet Governess and Several Young Ladies of the First Rank under Her Education, published in four volumes in 1760. Describing her teaching methods, the governess defended with the heated asperity of a Miss Jean Brodie her girls’ capacity to think for themselves:

  they will tell you very gravely of a book they are reading: ‘The author has taken leave of his subject; he says very weak things. His principle is false; his inferences must be so.’ What is more my young ladies will prove it. We don’t frame a true judgement of the capacity of children; nothing is out of their reach … Now-a-days ladies read all sorts of books, history, politics, philosophy and even such as concern religion … They should therefore be … able to discern truth from falsehood.64

  With such determination, it is not surprising that many of the stories are openly didactic, very far in atmosphere from D’Aulnoy’s flippant perversity, or even Villeneuve’s intricate romancing. Mme de Beaumont holds out rewards and punishments: she tells of suffering saints, like the put-upon skivvy Saint Zita, a Cinderella of the early thirteenth century, and concludes with overtly Christian messages: in one story, for example, she relates how a poverty-stricken man called Perrin is rewarded when he returns a sack of gold and silver he has come across by accident; his beneficiary makes him a gift of a farm in return for his honesty.65 She also adduces the terrible case of Mme Angélique Ticquet, Mme d’Aulnoy’s friend who attempted murder against her brutal husband. She blames her unequivocally, saying that even though she was a rich heiress, she was covetous of wealth, and thought her husband much wealthier than he was when he gave her a diamond spray brooch as a wedding present. When she discovered her error, she conceived a hatred for him, and fell for ‘un cavalier fort aimable’ – one thing led to another, to the (almost) fatal pistol shot, and her beheading. ‘You see, my children,’ writes Mme de Beaumont, after this partial and improving account, ‘the terrible extremes to which the passions may carry us!’66 This example from recent history, occurring so close to home, is cited in an imagined conversation, which uses fables, cautionary tales, allegory – and fairy stories – to tutor the moral sense of her girls.

  It is easy to catch, in Mme de Beaumont, the worried tone of a well-meaning teacher raising her pupils to face their future obediently and decorously, to hear her pious wish that her pupils should obey their fathers and that inside the brute of a husband who might be their appointed lot, the heart of a good man might beat, given a bit of encouragement, that no extreme measures will be needed – no scissors will be used on the Yellow Dwarf. In the altered attitudes to Mme Ticquet, between D’Aulnoy’s possible abetting in 1699 and Mme de Beaumont’s anxious advice sixty or so years later, between D’Aulnoy’s unpredictably resolved tales and Beaumont’s exemplary outcomes, it becomes possible to perceive ancien régime raffishness on the turn, and the romantic cult of sentimentalité and bonne volonté taking hold.

  Mme de Beaumont, like many before her, tackled the quandary posed by romance itself. She was well read in the English novel, and commented on Richardson and the problems his material posed for a woman concerned with other women’s morals and the care of their spirit. In 1774, she wrote:

  The good and honest Mr Richardson, author of Pamela, Clarissa, etc., has come to grief, and however much he may want to foster love of virtue, has carried into more than one heart the knowledge of vice – enlightenment that is always fateful (lumière toujours funeste). I could go into some great detail, and prove what I say by examples, but it would be falling into the same mistake that I reprove …67

  Pamela may well have inspired feelings of identification in Mme de Beaumont, for Richardson’s heroine is employed like her in an ambiguous position in her pursuer’s household, having fallen on hard times and been compelled to seek work as a nursemaid. A painting by Joseph Highmore, Pamela Tells a Nursery Tale, made shortly after the book’s appearance in 1741, singled out this aspect of the heroine’s duties.68 Mme de Beaumont even undertook the rewriting of Clarissa, improving Richardson’s original for her pupils.69

  The sacramental character Mme Leprince de Beaumont gave to the moment of the Beast’s redemption was therefore no accident: he is transfigured, as the civilized, pretty, moral fairy tale of this sort transfigures the teller from a witch to an angel, and brings her back within the pale. By crossing the Channel with the fairy tale, Beaumont also echoes the change from élite women’s pre-revolutionary protests in France to comparative acquiescence, after the revolution in England, among émigrées and natives alike, and the comparable shift in the use of such stories from the social arena of the salons to the domestic interior of the home, the nursery and the schoolroom.70 We can see foreshadowed, already, the Victorian angel of the house, whose task it is to tame and gentle male lust and animal instinct. We also see an intelligent governess preparing her charges for this wifely duty, readying them to find the male spouse a beast at first, but, beneath the rough and uncivilized exterior, a good man. The fairy tale emerges in its modern form, as an instrument of social adaptation, spoken and circulated by women to cast themselves as civilizers in the tabooed terrain of sexuality, turning predatory men into moderate consorts. The mischief and wantonness of Psyche’s troubles and discoveries, still captured by D’Aulnoy’s bizarreries, fade before the moral enterprise of the Enlightenment. The stories begin to attempt to console young women beset by fears of marriage, of ogre husbands who might bring about their destruction in one way or another. And these functions – of steadying and training the young – have gradually gained ground over the critical and challenged rebelliousness of the first generation of women fairytale writers and become identified with the genre itself, establishing its pedagogical, edifying character.

  Didactic intentions have influenced fairy tales increasingly strongly since the nineteenth century; the Brothers Grimm led the way, as they re-edited and reshaped successive editions of their famous Household Tales to improve their message. Their predecessors had been less anxious about the possible effect on children of tal
es of incest, adultery or murder, with the exception of Mme de Beaumont who had anticipated their anxieties. For in her lessons, we can also perceive cross-identifications, that the terror of the Beast – carnality, transgressive nature – lies in the mind of the beholder, female as well as male. The fairy tale told by women acts optatively to undo all such prejudice.

  In the anonymous, characteristic version of 1818, Beauty delivers a truly Christian speech to the Beast:

  ‘You are very obliging, (answered Beauty;) I own I am pleased with your kindness: when I consider that, your deformity scarce appears.’ Yes, yes, (said the Beast,) my heart is good, but still I am a monster.’ Among mankind, (says Beauty) [note ‘said’ changes to ‘says’, from the past tense to the universal present], there are many that deserve that name more than you, and I prefer you, just as you are, to those, who, under a human form, hide a treacherous, corrupt, and ungrateful heart.’71

  Beauty’s goodness inspired some idealistic lessons; fairy tales, with their generic commitment to justice, frequently enclose a simple notion of retribution.