From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  The collapse of boundaries between the animal and the human is not altogether complete in this story, because the book itself – and the permission the foster mother was asked to give – attests to the shock which I, for one, certainly felt. Despite fairy tales’ and folklore’s intermingling of creatures, the talking and helpful animal familiars, despite continuing advances in ecology and changing attitudes to animal rights and human domination, it is startling and feels uncomfortable, even prurient, to look at a woman feeding a bear cub, as if she and he belonged to a common species.31

  The tale of Wild Brother, existing in the world of actual events, still has the power to inspire a sharp frisson, seventy years later, even though the symbolism of everyday life contains a wealth of animal imagery in which beasts are thought of as human, and at the same time favourably compared to the human. Again, animals are good to think with, as Lévi-Strauss famously commented. And in this regard, no bears are better to think with than the teddy bear.

  The American president Teddy Roosevelt was a keen hunter, especially of grizzly bears, the symbol of native America. He wrote essays about his sportsmanship, which were collected in several volumes, with titles like The Wilderness Hunter (1893) and Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter (1905). His struggle against his own physical sickliness carried a wider political message: ‘No nation facing the unhealthy softening and relaxation of fibre,’ he wrote, ‘which tend to accompany civilisation, can afford to neglect anything that will develop hardihood, resolution, and the scorn of discomfort and danger.’32 One of the ways he demonstrated his own fibre of vigorous hardness and masculinity was on the hunting trip, especially big-game hunting. And there was – then – no fiercer or bigger game in America than the grizzly bear, no creature more manly for a man to hunt. One such expedition, in 1902, took the president to the politically sensitive Southern state of Mississippi, where he had no luck finding bear to shoot. At length, a mangy black specimen was captured, and tied up by its captors; Roosevelt was fetched and offered the bear to kill. He refused, in high indignation, as it was against his vaunted rules of sportsmanship to kill a creature in cold blood. The incident was reported, and the cartoonist in the Washington Post, Clifford Berryman, used it to comment on Roosevelt’s attitude to the colour bar, calling his cartoon ‘Drawing the Line in Mississippi’ and showing the president covering his eyes as a policeman holds a bear in collar and chain.33

  The future founder of the Ideal Toy Company, Morris Michtom, used the incident to christen the novelty he was producing that Christmas: ‘Teddy’s bear’ was marketed. It was not considered as manly to kill female animals even before regulations forbade it, and it is possible that this was one of the reasons Roosevelt scorned the victim that had been brought to him. Hunters preferred their animal to be male, even of species in which the females were just as ferocious and powerful, as among the big cats, and indeed, the bears. In the midst of massacring animals, anthropomorphism is never far away: the beast as victim holds up a mirror to human values. It is interesting that Teddy Roosevelt’s thirst to contend with great beasts in the American wilderness produced the most domesticated of toys, the cuddly bear; but the contradiction is not as deep as it first appears. The president saw himself as ‘the apostle of the strenuous life’. He was questing in the American wilderness for virtue, he brought it back as dead beasts, and inspired the toy that symbolically returns the wilds to the nursery. At the turn of the century, he was performing a ritual sacrifice, and as the leader of the country was taking on a priest-like role in so doing; fortunately, with the change in sensibility, we prefer today to perform the sacrifice symbolically, through images, and fetish objects, soft toys.

  The success of the teddy bear defies belief: in 1907, soon after the German manufacturer Steiff started producing teddy bears in Europe too, they sold nearly a million. Many famous characters in children’s literature since have been teddy bears: Rupert Bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, Paddington, Sooty, and others.34 Their popularity is not confined to children: the English poet John Betjeman wrote poems to the bear of his childhood, Archibald; Evelyn Waugh immortalized Aloysius, Sebastian Flyte’s bear in Brideshead Revisited. Since then, manufacturers have created Mummy bears in aprons and Daddy bears in jeans. There has even been a machine-gun-toting Rambear. Thirty-five thousand collectors of teddy bears compete for treasures in America alone; early versions sell for thousands of pounds in the salerooms. A Steiff example from the 1920s – Richard Steiff is also credited with the toy’s invention – fetched £550,000 in 1989.35

  Just as the rise of the teddy bear matches the decline of real bears in the wild, so soft toys today have taken the shape of rare wild species. Some of these are not very furry in their natural state: stuffed killer whales, cheetahs, gorillas, snails, spiders and snakes – and of course dinosaurs – are made in the most invitingly deep-pile plush. They act as a kind of totem, associating the human being with the animal’s imagined capacities and value. Anthropomorphism traduces the creatures themselves; their loveableness sentimentally exaggerated, just as, formerly, belief in their viciousness crowded out empirical observation. Bear-baiting, once upon a time; now British Rail offers an Away Break reduction to families with a documentary photograph of a brown bear with its arm around its mate.36 The distinction between humans and beasts is yearningly cancelled: soft toys wear clothes and perform human tasks, even going deep-sea diving. By giving a toy in the shape of a wild animal, the giver encourages the goodness of the wild in human nature, male and female. For mankind is still the issue; Keith Thomas comments, ‘[Such] fantasies … enshrine the values by which society as a whole cannot afford to live.’37

  The transitional object was defined by D. W. Winnicott in the 1950s as something chosen by a child to give comfort, kept for a year or more since infancy, usually soft, and irreplaceable except when the child chooses to abandon or exchange it.38 Children themselves pick on blankets and rags and old nappies and odd bits of cloth that disintegrate; it is the parents and other adults who offer teddy bears and other animals, for the view has gained very wide currency that we have to put our animal side behind us as we grow up, and that children are lucky to be close to it. Though Walt Disney never originated a bear character, his squashy, irrepressible gallery of furry beasts, who are, like Mickey Mouse, much larger than life, continue the Aesopian tradition of speaking through animals of human dreams.39

  Tapping the power of the animal no longer seems charged with danger, let alone evil, but rather a necessary part of healing. Art of different media widely accepts the fall of man, from namer and master of animals to a mere hopeful candidate for inclusion as one of their number.

  II

  The attraction of the wild, and of the wild brother in twentieth-century culture, cannot be overestimated; as the century advances, in the cascade of deliberate revisions of the tale, Beauty stands in need of the Beast, rather than vice versa, and the Beast’s beastliness is good, even adorable. Or at least, this has become the drift of the story. She has not mistaken a human lover for a monster, like Psyche, or failed to see a good man beneath the surface, like Belle; on the contrary, the Beast’s beastliness will teach her something. Her need of him may be reprehensible, a moral flaw, a part of her carnal and materialist nature; or, it can represent her understanding of love, her redemption. He no longer stands outside her, the threat of male sexuality in bodily form, or of male authority with all its fearful amorality and social legitimacy, as in D’Aulnoy’s stories, but he holds up a mirror to the force of nature within her, which she is invited to accept and allow to grow. In one sense the Beast has returned to define Beauty in the early medieval feminine character of seductive concupiscence; only now, the stigma has been lifted. The Beast as a beast has become the object of desire.

  In a fantastic scene of metamorphosis, inspired by Angela Carter’s mix of gothic and baroque in her fairy tales, the wedding guests in Neil Jordan’s film. The Company of Wolves, 1984, sprout lupine hair and claws and grow fangs and jaws as the
y reveal their inner animal natures.

  Part of Angela Carter’s boldness – which made her unpopular in some quarters of the feminist movement in the 1970s – was that she dared to look at women’s waywardness, and especially at their attraction to the Beast in the very midst of repulsion. The early novel The Magic Toyshop, already tells the story of a beast’s defeat: the puppet master makes a monstrous swan automaton to assault his niece in play-acting. But she rejects him, refuses the part in his puppet show, and eventually escapes, with the whole family, from his designs. The Bloody Chamber followed two years after a dry and adept translation she made of Perrault, and offers her answer to Perrault’s vision of better things. Angela Carter returned to the theme of Beauty and the Beast again and again, turning it inside out and upside down; in a spirit of mischief, she was seizing the chance to mawl governessy moralizers. Rather like the heroines of the Grimms’ animal bridegroom tale, ‘Snow White and Rose Red’, her Beauties choose to play with the Beast precisely because his animal nature excites them and gives their desires licence:

  They tugged his hair with their hands, put their feet on his back and rolled him about, or they took a hazel switch and beat him, and when he growled, they laughed. But the bear took it all in good part, only when they were too rough he called out, ‘Leave me alive, children. Snow White, Rose Red, will you beat your wooer dead?’40

  Deliberately flouting conventional ladylike aspirations (the love of the prince), with which, since the nineteenth century, fairy tales had been identified, Carter places her protagonists in the shoes of Red Riding Hood, of Beauty, of Snow White, of Bluebeard’s bride. ‘The Courtship of Mr. Lyon’, ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, ‘The Werewolf’, ‘The Company of Wolves’ lift the covers from the body of carnal knowledge usually more modestly draped in fairy tales. For ‘The Company of Wolves’, she re-imagined familiar tales in a spiny, springing prose which borrows elements from Symbolism and pornography, Gothic romance, street slang and Parnassian preciousness all at once, to conjure young girls’ sexual hunger and the lure of the wild. The wolf stirs desire here far more profoundly than would the pattern of princes:

  Carnivore incarnate, only immaculate flesh appeases him.

  She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put the lice into her mouth and eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony.

  The blizzard will die down …

  See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.41

  As the English critic Lorna Sage writes:

  [Carter] produced her own haunting, mocking – sometimes tender – variations on some of the classic motifs of the genre … in retelling these tales she was deliberately drawing them out of their set shapes, out of the separate space of ‘children’s stories’ or ‘folk art’ and into the world of change. It was yet another assault on Myth … done caressingly and seductively. The monsters and the princesses lose their places in the old script, and cross forbidden boundary lines.42

  But Carter could also be love’s votary in more traditional fashion. Another of the tales, almost an ekphrasis of the Cocteau film, describes the Beast’s rescue:

  ‘I’m dying, Beauty,’ he said in a cracked whisper of his former purr. ‘Since you left me, I have been sick …’

  She flung herself upon him, so that the iron bedstead groaned, and covered his poor paws with her kisses.

  ‘Don’t die, Beast! If you’ll have me, I’ll never leave you.’

  When her lips touched the meat-hook claws, they drew back into their pads and she saw how he had always kept his fists clenched but, painfully, tentatively, at last began to stretch his fingers. Her tears fell on his face like snow and, under their soft transformation, the bones showed through the pelt, the flesh through the wide, tawny brow …43

  The narrator’s voice can be urgent, addressing the reader in the first person: ‘My father lost me to the Beast at cards’ is the opening line of ‘The Tiger’s Bride’; this story ends with the heroine’s own transformation, under the Beast’s caresses, into a furry, naked creature like him.44

  ‘East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon’ was invoked by Carter as ‘one of the most lyrically beautiful and mysterious of all Northern European fairy tales’.45 It closely reworks the Cupid and Psyche material, and in it a White Bear taking the role of Eros abducts the heroine, asking as he does so, ‘Are you afraid?’ She says, ‘No,’ and climbs eagerly on to his back to go forth into a new life with him. Carter also noted the hypocritical evasions of so many modern versions of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, commenting caustically that the tale had been increasingly employed ‘to house-train the id’.46

  A contemporary artist who also shows Surrealist affinities, Paula Rego, has been inspired by seemingly innocuous English nursery rhymes to plumb darker sides to women’s fantasy life than is openly admitted. She too manages to stir some of the same depths when she illustrates ‘Baa baa black sheep’, for instance, with an image of a little girl provocatively accepting the embrace of a giant ram as she waves to the little boy in the lane (right).47

  Beauty’s attraction to the Beast before his regeneration inspires fantasies about abduction in pulp fiction, and echoes pornography’s conjuration of sadism and rape. The territory is thickly sown with land mines; both Angela Carter’s and Paula Rego’s work excites contradictory and powerful feelings in their audience, because, while openly challenging conventional misogyny in the very act of speaking and making images, they also refuse the wholesome or pretty picture of female gender (nurturing, caring) and deal plainly with erotic dominance as a source of pleasure for men – and for women.

  In 1982, the poet Ted Hughes dramatized ‘Beauty and the Beast’ for television. His script developed the fantasy, implicit in the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche, that Beauty’s passionate desiring summons the Beast to her side, and that, after she has lost him, her yearning for him brings about their reunion.48 The Hughes version, though it was made for children, does not scant the heroine’s erotic fantasy as the dynamic of the story. It begins with the father crazed with worry that every night his beloved daughter the princess is visited by a monstrous and unnameable terror which takes possession of her; invisible, with a huge voice, this phenomenon occupies her dreams and her bed. Doctors are put to watch by her side, and they too are overcome with horror at what they feel, though they see nothing – one specialist’s hair turns white overnight. Then a wandering musician with a performing bear comes to the palace at the king’s wish, to entertain the melancholy and even mad princess – and the bear charms her. She dances with the beast, and the king her father rejoices that the bear seems to have lifted the mad darkness that was oppressing her. But then, as they are dancing, the bear seizes her in his arms and carries her off.

  When, after a long search, the hunting party tracks them down, the princess begs them not to hurt her bear. They wound him, and she weeps – and then, as in other versions, her tears, the proof of her love, fall on his pelt and he stands up, transfigured.

  Childish things are not always so childish: Paula Rego taps the mysteries concealed in the innocuous sounding light verse of the nonsense rhyme. (Nursery Rhymes, London, 1989.)

  Ted Hughes’s intuition that Beauty is stirred by love for the Beast, even when he terrorizes her in the night, reappeared in a more definite form in the popular 1987 CBS series for television, which was also shown in Britain, in which the Beast never casts off his hybrid form. A roaring, rampaging half-lion, half-human creature, he reigns over the subway system of New York as a defender of women and beggars, an urban Robin Hood, who was born from an immaculate virgin and the seed of two fathers, the double lord of the underworld, one a good magus, the other a wicked wizard. Beauty in this case works as an investigator in the District Attorney’s office, but communicates secretly with her saviour Beast; their love is passionate, chivalrous and … illicit. He is ‘the monster of her dreams’ and s
he likes him just as he is.49

  The disenchantments of the Beast take many forms, not all of them benign; women have remained consistently intrigued. As Karel Capek has commented: ‘The same fiction of evil which quickens events in fairy stories also permeates our real lives.’50 It would be easy to dismiss these visions of the Beast’s desirability as male self-flattery, and female collusion with subjection, or, even more serious, as risky invitations to roughness and even rape. But to do so misses the genuine attempt of the contemporary versions of the fairy tale, in certain metamorphoses of its own, to face up to the complicated character of the female erotic impulse. From the post-Utopian vantage point of the 1990s, we cannot rejoice unequivocally in the sexual liberation Surrealism and its aftermath offered women: the experiences of the last decades have given former flower children pause. But what threatens women consumers – and makers – of fairy tale above all is the identification of the Beast with some exclusively male positive area of energy and expression.

  The journey the story has itself taken ultimately means that the Beast no longer needs to be disenchanted. Rather, Beauty has to learn to love the beast in him, in order to know the beast in herself Beauty and the Beast stories are even gaining in popularity over ‘Cinderella’ as a site for psychological explorations along these lines, and for pedagogical recuperation. Current interpretations focus on the Beast as a sign of authentic, fully realized sexuality, which women must learn to accept if they are to become normal adult heterosexuals. Bettelheim argues: