From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  When men adopt this material, they often introduce special pleading on their own behalf; Cocteau’s entrancing film, of 1946, for all its delicacy and dreamlike seductiveness, concentrates on awakening Beauty to consciousness of the Beast’s goodness (here). He does not have to change at all, except in outward shape; she has to see past his unsightliness to the gentle and loving human being trapped inside. The film presents a trial of her limits, not his. Christian Bérard’s designs intensify the Beast’s poignancy; he is not an animal, but a hairy anthropomorphic changeling, a Quasimodo, a pitiful Elephant Man whose male desire deserves to kindle a reciprocating love if only women would listen to the imperatives of the heart, not the eye. King Kong is one of his lineage too, as the last words of the film make plain: ‘It wasn’t the airplanes, it was Beauty killed the Beast.’72 This strand in the history of Beauty and the Beast consists of variations on the theme of the femme fatale, on men’s anguish in the face of female indifference, on the tenderness of masculine desire and the cruelty of the female response, rather than women’s vulnerability to male violence. Ironically, such interpretations make Beauty guilty of fixity, in a story that began as a narrative of a woman’s passionate progress. Underlying the static serenity of Josette Day’s La Belle in Cocteau’s film lies the Symbolist fetishization of impassive femininity, as defined by Baudelaire, of Beauty who speaks of herself as ‘un rêve de pierre’ (a dream of stone), with a granite breast on which men (poets) wound themselves and discover love ‘éternel et muet ainsi que la matière’ (eternal and mute as matter). Psyche/Beauty, as woman, is material, made flesh, however cool and otherworldly her appearance; Jean Marais’ Eros/Beast in the film belongs to the spirit world, and his enchanted castle, with its spellbinding moving sconces and speaking furniture, emanates from the higher realm of imagination, the dimension of dream and fantasy, where poets – like Baudelaire, like Cocteau himself – are sent through the love women inspire in them.

  In the Aesop story, a nurse threatens a crying baby that she will hand him over to the wolves; a passing wolf rejoices to hear this, but soon meets his death when he is discovered at the door. (F. Barlow, ‘The Nurse and the Wolf’, Aesop’s Fables, 1723.)

  Cocteau, as a Surrealist, was reinterpreting Symbolist doctrine of the feminine’s role in creativity. Not for nothing had the Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme attributed to Baudelaire their definition of La Femme: ‘She who casts the greatest shadow or the greatest light into our dreams.’73 The inflexion on ‘our’ here is obviously masculine. This does not prevent Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête from spellbinding a female spectator – the film profoundly affected Angela Carter, for instance, who specially remembered the way the Beast smouldered – literally – after a kill. But its masculine sympathy does divert the story from the female subject to stress male erotic hunger for beauty as the stimulus to creativity, as the vital principle. The ravishing aestheticization of the whole film, from the flying laundry at the start to the twilit luxuries of the castle magic, extends the function of the feminine as the Beast’s necessary lifeblood. And at the end, in an enigmatic twist, the disenchanted Beast turns out to have the same human face as Belle’s ne’er-do-well, aspiring lover Avenant, whom she rejected kindly, but firmly (the actor Jean Marais plays both). So La Belle et la bête traces a promise to male lovers that they will not always be rejected, that human lovers, however profligate, can be saved, and it withdraws at the last moment any autonomy in love from Beauty herself.74

  For their intentionally instructive film The Singing Ringing Tree, a family product made in the former German Democratic Republic in 1958, the screenwriters Anne Geelhaer and Francesco Stefani (who also directed), drew on different tales in the Grimm Brothers’ collection.75 It blended a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ type tale with another familiar figure: the Haughty Princess who considers herself too good for her flock of suitors. Princess High-and-Mighty’s punishment is ugliness: the live action film animates the grotesque collapse of her beauty and follows her slow and painful lessons in kindness, humility and love as she cares for the magical creatures she once spurned – a giant goldfish, a golden-maned and golden-antlered horse and a flock of doves. Her pilgrim’s progress eventually succeeds in freeing her mentor the prince, who himself has been changed into a bear by an evil magician. Once she has learned to love, her beauty returns.

  As fairy tales begin to aim more and more exclusively at the young, their stock-in-trade becomes more didactic. Disapproval of improper romancing feeds the ambivalence towards imaginative literature for children; but, as its popularity goes on growing, the chief effect of this anxiety is to make writers attempt to turn the unsuitable into the improving, the exciting into the punitive. Lullabies that threaten babies (‘Hushabye Baby on the tree top … / When the bough breaks the cradle will fall …’), nurses who warn that the wolf is at the door (left), have their counterpart in Enlightenment variations on the ancient romances, which teach the limits of a growing girl’s hopes. But it was that sensible and kindhearted governess, Mme Leprince de Beaumont, in the mid-eighteenth century who pioneered the use of the fairytale form to mould the young in this way. Her vision of female love and sympathy redeeming the brute in man has made ‘Beauty and the Beast’ one of the best-loved fairy tales in the world, and it has not stopped inspiring dreams of experiencing love’s power in little girls – and little boys.

  CHAPTER 18

  Go! Be a Beast: Beauty and the Beast II

  The beast abductor turned soft toy: a Victorian heroine enjoys life with a bear. (Richard Doyle, ‘Rose Red’, mid-nineteenth century.)

  Minnie loved her friend, but thought it to be a thing of horror that her friend should marry a tailor. It was almost as bad as the story of the Princess who had to marry a bear; – worse indeed, for Minnie did not at all believe that the tailor would ever turn out to be a gentleman, whereas she had been sure from the first that the bear would turn into a prince.1

  Anthony Trollope

  FOR A FABULOUS divertissement given at Versailles in 1664, the king’s troupes of dancers and musicians and artists and actors assembled for his entertainment and staged allegories of the seasons with the additional help of wild animals from the king’s menagerie: Winter was accompanied by a bear. A skit was included in an interlude. Written by Molière, it featured a bear-fight between a certain wild man of the woods, ‘Moron’, who is playing with an echo when a bear comes upon him. Trying to appease the animal, Moron exclaims: ‘Oh, my lord! How delightful, how lissom your highness is! Your highness has altogether the most gallant looks and the most handsome figure in the world! Oh! what lovely fur! What beautiful looks! … Help, help!’2

  Charles Perrault himself may have been involved in devising the tableaux, and in producing the sumptuous feast book of engravings which commemorated the occasion. No beast in fairy tale at the time would have excited anything less than Moron’s squirming terror; no courtier would have cooed and gurgled at the appearance of the bear in the manner of children today. The threat of animals was a real and frightening one in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in times of scarcity and hard winters, bears and wolves came in from the wild to prey on towns and villages.3

  The narrators of earlier versions of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ frequently avoid giving precise indications of the Beast’s horrible features, and generally describe his enchanted shape in the vaguest terms. D’Aulnoy is typically fanciful about her beasts; Villeneuve adds the unusual detail that Beauty’s father was terrified by ‘a horrible beast… It had a trunk resembling an elephant’s which it placed on the merchant’s neck’; as he approaches Beauty later, his scales clank.4 Beaumont confines herself to saying that he looked so dreadful, Beauty’s father felt he was going to faint.5

  In the literary fairy tale of the ancien régime, the Beast’s low, animal nature is more usually revealed by his muteness, uncouthness, inability to meet Beauty as a social and intellectual equal. In Villeneuve’s version, Beauty sighs that, though he treats her well,
she finds him boring because he can utter only a few words and repeats them endlessly.6 In these secular romances the valued arts of conversation and storytelling remain beyond him.

  Authors, often keen to emphasize the unreliability of outward appearances, could hardly press the disagreeable Platonic and Christian equation of deformity of body with deformity of soul. But the illustrators needed to choose an appropriate physical form: the Beast had to be represented. The word ‘monster’, from the Latin monstrare, to show, even suggests that monstrousness is above all visible.7 But monstrousness is a condition in flux, subject to historical changes in attitudes. One volatile current, carrying ideas of ugliness, abnormality, abominable deformation, converges with another, carrying ideas about nature and man, and in their confluence the beastliness of the Beast diminishes.8

  The earliest artists concentrate on his misshapenness, repellent to Beauty. Charles Lamb’s anonymous illustrator, probably recalling Circe’s punitive metamorphoses of Odysseus’ crew, envisaged a huge hog in one image, and a ferocious bear in another.9 One edition pressed the reference home, with the legend, ‘Circe: “Go, be a beast!”10 Homer’ inscribed on the back jacket.

  Richard Doyle’s bear dances winningly and casts doggily devoted looks at Beauty; while Walter Crane imagined a giant boar with tusks and overlapping canines.11, 12 Illustrators avoided lupine looks on the whole, because the stories stress the Beast’s docile and gentlemanly behaviour, and they were often working on ‘Red Riding Hood’ as well. Mere animal form begins as sufficient horror in itself, but the trend soon moved towards more anthropomorphic characteristics: two-legged, upright beasts, disfigured by elephant trunks, reptiles’ fangs, jowls and wattles and snouts. The less-than-human took the shape of mammals often equipped with terrific natural weaponry.13 In this the artists returned to Christian iconography of the Devil, multiplying phallic protuberances on face and limbs (here).14 But they stopped short, unlike their medieval predecessors, at blazoning monstrous organs in the site of the genitals themselves.

  Women illustrators – fewer in number – tend however not to stress the Beast’s aggressive arsenal, or to focus on his ferocity, but incline towards characteristics of creatures traditionally classed as lower than mammals, visualizing the repellent creature as toad-like, fishy, or lizard-like. From a female point of view, the repugnant sometimes looks less-than-masculine, a clammy, flaccid manifestation more like Gollum in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings than the male artists’ vision of a fallen angel of priapism.15 But both men and women do resort, frequently, to another very familiar animal in folklore and fairy tale: the bear.

  The bear was the king of the beasts in early medieval lore, the strongest and heaviest of animals in the western forests, and in consequence an emblem of power in feudal heraldry; it was the totemic royal symbol of the Celtic and Germanic West and dominated, alongside the wolf, the oral literature of forest peoples.16 Saint Augustine had likened both the bear and the lion to the Devil, ‘who is figured in these beasts, because the bear’s strength is in its paw and the lion’s in its mouth’.17 To the earliest audiences of fairy tales’ ancestors, the medieval romances, the bear figures as the totem of the wild man, the dweller in the untamed forest, all natural appetite and ferocity. A much-translated work like Valentine and Orson, which survives in a fourteenth-century English translation from an earlier French original, dramatizes the contest and reconciliation between twin brothers, one of whom is raised as a prince in the city, the other suckled by a she-bear and brought up wild in the forest (above).18 Emblematic of the strength as well as the savagery of nature, the bear child Orson is captured by his lost brother Valentine during a hunt, and submits as he must to civilization: baptism, table manners and crusading feats of arms. Interestingly, the frontispiece to Perrault’s translation of Gabriel Faerno’s animal fables, of 1699, shows a storyteller wearing a bear mask, emblematic of her role as the interpreter of ancient, wild – that is unadulterated – folk wisdom.19

  For its fierceness and its strength, the bear used to symbolize Rage – sometimes with martial grandeur, but sometimes with more pejorative overtones. (Claude Paradin, Devises héroïques, 1557.)

  Orson, a wild man of the woods in medieval romance, was brought up by a she-bear, who imbued him with her spirit; she was killed by his twin brother Valentine, ABOVE, and he turned on him in revenge. (Valentine and Orson, c. 1835.)

  The bear was called ‘the beast who walks like a man’ and thought to resemble human beings not only because the animal sometimes walks upright, but because bears are omnivorous, loving honey as well as meat. The berserkr, or ferocious Norse warriors may have been so called from the bearskins they wore, and they wrought such havoc they made ‘berserk’ a term for uncontrolled violence. Tales of women ravished by bears continued into the present century, possibly contributing to the identification of the fairytale Beast with bears above all.20

  Bears were baited in pits as well as paraded for entertainment in mock tournaments, such as one Perrault helped design. (Israel Silvestre and François Chauveau, Paris, 1670.)

  But anger, rather than lust, dominates the animal’s meanings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: it accompanied the vice of Wrath and proclaimed warlikeness (here); its ready anger in real life made it a rewarding victim, of course, in the right conditions for human safety: the bear pit.21 Queen Elizabeth I watched a troop of mastiffs savage thirteen bears in one day: ‘it was a sport very pleasant to see the bear … shake his ears twice or thrice with the blood, and the slaver about his physiognomy was a matter of goodly relief’, wrote one of her courtiers.22

  Bears were mocked too, and made to dance in chains, as at the king’s pageants (left); the lumbering, half-wit imitation of human agility made the bear a figure of fun, part of the jester’s crew, and hence an appropriate member of fairy lore’s cast of semi-comic characters designed for low, secular, hintingly erotic entertainment.23

  So, by the seventeenth century, the animal had fallen far below his early medieval stature as King of the Beasts. And it shared something else with donkeys: from the point of view of the human, it was an intermediate beast, not exactly docile, but nevertheless biddable; a performing bear was neither a wild beast nor a domestic pet; it could be made to serve its owner’s wishes – up to a point.

  For reasons both symbolic and empirical, bears survive as beasts of prey in many fairy tales; ‘Goldilocks’, for instance, echoes the lesson given by the wolf to Red Riding Hood, and warns little girls not to wander in the woods where they might encounter frightening beasts.24 The spectre of being devoured, which was raised in the mind of Psyche by her sisters, and recurs in the Bluebeard legend, returns to communicate the bear’s menace. Bestiality, cannibalism and eroticism are bound up together. ‘Who’s been lying in my bed?’ cry out the bears. In 1876, Walter Crane published an unsparing version of ‘Goldilocks’ (right), in which the adult bears appear, almost for the last time, as irrecuperably savage and vindictive and angry. Like the ogres in the Bluebeard type story, they plan to eat the little girl: ‘The mother bear saying, “For supper she shall be, and I will skin her”.’25

  Not so cuddly: Goldilocks is sleeping in his bed and his mother threatens to have her for supper. (Walter Crane’s New Toy Book: The Three Bears, London, 1873.)

  But a countervailing tendency, to find the bear a playmate, was growing throughout the nineteenth century. In the traditional Nordic tale ‘East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon’, a white bear comes to a poor man’s cottage and asks for his daughter’s hand; the threat adds a frisson to his courtship.26 In the folklore of many indigenous tribes in North America, the bridegroom bear similarly claims a human partner, and fears (dreams?) of such abductions still haunt tourists in Alaska today. In the Grimms’ ‘Schneeweisschen und Rosenrot’ (Snow White and Rose Red), the bear is a black variety.27 These widely distributed fairy stories possibly influenced the identity of the beast in other tales, where the species is not described; moreover, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ wa
s a popular theme for the stage, and a bear costume is an easy one for an actor to wear convincingly. One Victorian drama, written specially for children to perform, specifies that the beast should ‘look as rough and as much like a monster as possible. A covering for the head might be made of shaggy fur, and he should have coarse brown woollen gloves’. In the illustrations, he looks just like a great big teddy bear.28

  With the disappearance of bears from the wilderness, they began to be shown at the zoo; they were fed with buns in London by the public eager to see them performing. The animal began to lose its reputation for savagery, and the original, experiential menace of the fairytale conflict weakened. With the transformation of perception, the story’s impact changes, and the animal enchantment of the prince no longer appears to be such a curse. This shift in sensibility begins to happen around the turn of the last century; the affinity of the bear to the human becomes more marked, his monstrousness dissolves, he becomes less worthy of mockery: the gap begins to close. Richard Doyle drew the Grimms’ heroine dandling the dear little bear in her lap in the forest – a scene unimaginable to a medieval mind (here).29

  Orson was raised by a bear, and wolf or goat mothers stand behind many a hero, but the nursing of animal cubs by a human mother cuts across the animal-human divide in a different way. (William Lyman Underwood, Wild Brother, 1921.)

  In 1921, a remarkable volume called Wild Brother was published by a photographer, William Lyman Underwood. What would have been a tale of terror, of bestiality, sinfulness against God and nature and provoked moral outrage at almost any time before then, becomes a high-minded parable of harmony in creation. Wild Brother tells the story of a foundling bear cub, Bruno, and how he was brought back by a huntsman who had killed his mother, who then raised the cub in his family as his child. He called his own baby, born at the same time, Ursula (little bear), and his wife nursed both of them at her breast. The photograph of her nursing the baby bear and the little girl at the same time is inscribed: ‘Mr Underwood took this picture of Ursula and Bruno and me with my consent, and I am glad to have him use it in this book. Bruno’s Foster Mother’ (above).30 The cub then grew up to be a most enchanting character, the star of several delightful photographs, and eventually, when he became too large to handle, was turned loose.