From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  The she-bear variant, which itself appears in hundreds of metamorphoses in Western texts and imagery, deals with tensions that arise from possessiveness, rivalry, ownership, procreation and usurpation, in the triangle composed of mother, father and daughter, and its historical changes themselves reflect the way different moments have dealt with this central question.6 The wronged daughter in the folk tale known as ‘Unlawful Love’ embodies many of fairy tale’s crucial functions, including speaking of the unspeakable and negotiating a rite of passage through story. She also takes on herself the character of an enchanted animal, and, as a she-beast, she carries very different meanings from her male counterparts.

  Perrault spun a tale of the she-bear type, and it was one of the first fairy tales he wrote. ‘Peau d’Ane’ (Donkeyskin) was written in verse, a kind of jaunty doggerel, and was published in pamphlet form in 1694, three years before the famous group of fairy tales in Contes du temps passé.7 It remains the least reproduced fairy tale from Perrault’s much-loved and much reproduced oeuvre; it was not included in his collection until 1781, when a much less sprightly prose version made its first appearance, a paraphrase by another, anonymous hand which inflates the ornament at the same time as flattening the wit (this is still the usual version to be reprinted).8

  In his preface to the story, this académicien, scholar, courtier and defender of the Modern school of French literature against the Ancients’ emulators, confided to his readers that there were times when He grave et le sérieux’ (serious, weighty matters) were not as valuable as ‘agréables sornettes’ (pleasant trifles): he was wrapping himself in jocularity as in a magic cloak.9 With his nonsense-rhyme style poem, Perrault was tackling a stock fairy tale – a conte de Peau d’âne – about a father who wants to marry his daughter. But he braided this material with another, durable folk motif: a magic animal whose excrement is made of gold (below). Among the bestiary available from his sources – fish, geese, cows all produce-magic fortunes in fairy tales – Perrault chose a donkey.10

  The donkey that drops golden dung, like the goose that lays the golden eggs, is a familiar dream in folk tales, which Perrault adapted for ‘Donkeyskin’. (Amsterdam, sixteenth century.)

  Perrault may have lighted upon the reference to the father as ass in ‘The She-Bear’, and his immediate source for the tale of the ass that shits gold may have been another of Basile’s tales from Naples. (No critic or scholar has been able to decide whether Perrault had a copy of Basile.)11 However, the donkey served his purposes. Throughout his career, Perrault’s work had alternated between the overweeningly pompous and the jest: he could apostrophize the timbre of his beloved’s voice, and write sonnets on her being afflicted with a cold, but when he was a young man he had also composed a mock version of Aeneas’ descent into the underworld, as in Book VI of the Aeneid, and in 1653 had written Les Murs de Troye, an absurdist essay on the origins of burlesque as a form.12 By introducing the magic donkey into the story of the unlawful love of a father, Perrault mocked, in the style of the Milesian tale, the atmosphere of enchantment.

  Once upon a time there was a king, the greatest king there ever was on earth,’ begins Perrault’s ‘Peau d’Ane’, already slyly teasing fairy tale’s love of hyperbole. This king has everything kings have, but in addition he keeps in the royal stables a donkey which every day provides a fortune in gold dung. But the king does suffer one of fate’s blows: his beautiful and charming wife falls ill, and on her deathbed she asks him to swear that he will only marry again a woman who is more beautiful than she. He does so gladly. Time passes, and he searches high and low. Only one woman meets the conditions of his vow: his daughter. But she is reluctant, and seeks out her godmother, a marvellously powerful fairy, who does her best for the distressed young girl. Three times, on her godmother’s advice, the daughter asks her father for an impossible gift: a dress the colour of Heaven, another the colour of the Moon, a third the colour of the Sun. Each time, in his unfailing potency, the father produces it, until, at last, the fairy advises the princess to demand something the kingly father surely cannot part with: the hide of the magic donkey, the source of his wealth.

  The moment of epiphany: when her finger fits the ring she had cunningly slipped into the only cake the sick prince could eat, the skivvy in her filthy ass hide is recognized to be the radiant girl for whom the prince is languishing. (‘Peau d’Ane’ (Donkeyskin), Le Cabinet des fées, Paris, 1785–9.)

  Of course, the king does not refuse his daughter: to her utter dismay, he goes ahead and kills the donkey, and offers her the skin as his clinching wedding gift. She has no alternative: she must marry her father, or flee. Her godmother advises flight, in disguise, so she wraps herself in the stinking pelt, dirties her face and hands till she looks like the lowest slattern.

  She wanders, meets with abuse and insult, and eventually takes a job as a skivvy in the laundry and sty of a neighbouring prince’s castle. She is known only by her nickname, ‘Peau d’Ane’, until one day, when she thinks nobody is looking, she tries on one of her magic dresses in secret in her pigsty, and is glimpsed through a chink by the prince. One thing leads to another, and after various ordeals Donkeyskin is recognized to be a true princess (here), and she marries her prince. Her father comes to the wedding, purified of his odieuseflamme (his odious passion), and Perrault concludes first that virtue will be rewarded, and second, in his throwaway mondain manner, that bread and water are quite sufficient to a young person’s needs – as long as she has some pretty clothes.

  Donkeyskin’s disguise confers on her the particular long-suffering character of the jennet, or she-ass, described in medieval bestiary lore, the popular Physiologus, as putting up with work and ‘almost unlimited neglect’.13 But, interestingly, Perrault specifies that the enchanted, gold-producing animal is a jackass. Perrault often identifies the transitional stage of his main character with a reverse sex name: as Marc Soriano has pointed out, Cendrillon, for instance, ends with a common masculine form – on, rather than our Cinderella; by contrast, Noël du Fail, in his Propos rustiques of 1547, mentions the tale ‘Cuir d’Asnette’ (Little Donkey Leather) as one of the repertory of stories told at the veillées, the evening gatherings of rural France; Asnette is the feminine diminutive.14, 15

  Perrault picked the ass for effect; he was well acquainted with the vast Aesopian folklore about the jackass as fall guy in the market economy of the fabulist’s harsh world. In 1699, Perrault was to translate into French verse the sixteenth-century Latin anthology of Gabriel Faerno, who had drawn on Phaedrus as well as Aesop, and included nearly a dozen of the famous harsh tales in which the donkey loses to the fox or the lion.16 In one, particularly bitter vignette, the pack-ass in question has open saddle sores to which a crow fastens itself and pecks savagely, and will not be shaken off by the poor howling, kicking animal. A muleteer, passing by, witnesses the scene and laughs wholeheartedly at the donkey’s antics; a wolf, observing, envies the crow which provokes only merriment whereas he, the wolf, is always reproached when he shows his nature.

  Her disguise degrades his heroine utterly: Perrault writes that the donkey was and her predicament invites the ridicule of all around her:

  La beste en un mot la plus laide

  Qu’on puisse voir après le loup.

  [In a word, after the wolf quite the ugliest animal one might ever see.]17

  On la mit dans un coin au fond de la cuisine

  Où les Valets, insolente vermine,

  Ne faisaient que la tirailler,

  La contredire et la railler;

  Ils ne savaient quelle pièce lui faire,

  La harcelant à tout propos;

  Elle était la butte ordinaire

  De tous leurs quolibets et de tous leurs bons mots.

  [She was put in a corner at the back of the kitchen where the valets, that insolent vermin, did nothing but plague her and cross her and mock her; they could never decide what trick to play on her next, harassing her at every turn; she was the usual butt of al
l their witticisms and clever jibes.]18

  But her day will come, whereas for the ass of fable there is usually no hope, aside from canonization in the Christian fellowship of paragons. The fairytale princess wears a skin of shame, but the pathetic degradation of her condition contains a kind of Christian grace of humility, forbearance and lack of vanity, like the fool who wears asses’ ears because he knows himself to be a fool. Like the fables, which by ironic and invisible subtexts take the part of the ass, the fairy tale often feels for the least of all – A. A. Milne’s Eeyore stands in direct line of descent from this classically pathetic figure of fun.

  The absurd priapism of the jackass is not altogether obscured in the fairy tale, however, but underlies Perrault’s choice of beast. For in this early fairy tale, he marks the daughter with her father’s sin: the sign of the donkey conveys his lust. She becomes a beast, after her father has behaved like one. In ‘Beauty and the Beast’, the father and the Beast bridegroom collude to dispose of the heroine’s desires; in the ‘Donkeyskin’ cycle, her rebellion means she chooses between father and lover, and they do not conspire.19

  Significantly, Perrault published ‘Peau d’Ane’ with ‘Grisélidis’, a sister parable of female degradation and forbearance rewarded, which Perrault also treated with flippant irreverence. Both tales belong to two immense groups of traditional stories: Patient Griselda is another type of Accused Queen, related to the historical stories of medieval heroines and saints like Geneviève de Brabant, Godelive of Bruges, Elizabeth of Hungary. To the wider circles of this group of tales also belongs the seminal story of the False Bride, of which ‘Berthe aus grant pié’ is only one variation.20 ‘Donkeyskin’ also sits in another great tangled web of stories spun in the middle ages around the figure of the loving daughter whose father loves her ‘unlawfully’ in return and who is then abused or rejected by him.21

  The late-antique romance ofApollonius of Tyre circulated in many different editions from the tenth century onwards, as well as being told again and again, in poems, plays and hagiography.22 John Gower’s Confessio amantis of around 1390, a thesaurus almost as plundered as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, contains a version which, for instance, inspired Shakespeare’s incestuous pair at the beginning of Pericles – King Antiochus and his nameless daughter. Chaucer based his ‘Man of Lawe’s Tale’ about Constance on the story, though he disinfected it of the initial overtures of incest.23 The Vita of Dympna, a virgin martyr who became the patron saint of the insane in the fifteenth century, could have inspired Perrault, as he was interested in hagiography.24 According to Marian Cox, the folklorist who at the turn of the century collected 345 variants of ‘Cinderella’, a sermon of 1501 given in Strasbourg referred to a story called ‘Peau d’Ane’; Noël du Fail mentions the tale ‘Cuir d’Asnette’, as we have seen, in 1547; Straparola’s collection of 1550 includes the tale of Doralice, daughter of the Prince of Salerno, who escapes from her father shut up in a wooden wardrobe and cast adrift on the sea, only to meet with horrendous misadventures and horrors at his hands in England, until she is at last spared and vindicated.25, 26 Bonaventure des Périers, writing in the 1570s, gave a different spin to the story, but called it Of a Young Girl named Donkeyskin and how she got married with the help of little ants’.27 The reference to the ants returns us to Apuleius as an early origin, for in the tale of Cupid and Psyche, Venus sets Psyche the impossible task of separating grains of millet and wheat and is furious when she accomplishes it overnight – with the help of ants. The chapbooks of the Bibliothèque bleue included, from 1641 onwards, numerous issues of ‘Le roman de la belle Helaine’, yet another variation on the tale, in an abbreviated form.28 In the British Isles, the fugitive’s favoured disguise is more often a coat of rushes or a catskin, and her story is told in forms other than prose narrative, including chap-books and ballads.29

  It is not impossible, however, that Perrault knew the story from hearing it himself; Pierre de La Porte wrote in his Mémoires that Louis XIVs nurses had lulled him to sleep with ‘contes de Peau d’Ane’, one of Molière’s child characters offers to tell it to her father, and La Fontaine, who never wrote a version but in many ways hovers as the inspiration of Perrault’s tongue-in-cheek moralizing, implies that he had heard it as a child:30

  Si Peau d’Ane m’était conté

  J’y prendrais un plaisir extrême.

  [It would give me the utmost pleasure / If ‘Donkeyskin’ were told to me.]31

  In 1812, the Grimm Brothers published the oral version they had collected, from Dortchen Wild, ‘Allerleirauh’ (All-Fur), in which the heroine escapes from her father in a coat made of the skins of all the creatures in the world.32 This is a magical dress, which hides her successfully until she finds a king she can love. All-Fur’ may represent a storyteller’s ingenious and trenchant solution to the confusing discrepancies about bears and donkeys and other fauna whose fur and form the heroine takes.

  The extreme peculiarity of the tale and its breaching of taboo made it appeal to the Surrealists. It was mentioned in the First Manifesto of the movement, in 1924, when André Breton lamented that children are weaned from the merveilleux (the wonder) of fairy tales like ‘Peau d’Ane’, and then writes: ‘There are tales to be written for grownups, tales which are still almost blue.’33 ‘Donkeyskin’ is indeed almost blue, and has been considered on the whole suitable for adults only.

  II

  A ‘childish intellectual puzzle’, as Edmund Leach has written, lies at the heart of myth: how is it that incest forbids relations within families, yet at the beginning there were only Adam and Eve who were flesh of their flesh? Leach comments:

  Every human society has rules of incest and exogamy. Though the rules vary, they always carry the implication that for any particular male individual all women are divided by at least one binary distinction, there are women of our kind with whom sex relations would be incestuous, and there are women of the other kind, with whom sex relations are allowed. But here again we are immediately led into paradox. How was it in the beginning? If our first parents were persons of two kinds, what was the other kind? But if they were both of our kind, then their relations must have been incestuous, and we are all born in sin.34

  The nub is that mating with your own kind is considered the lesser evil to mating outside your kind, however that is defined: pure ancestry corresponds to pure minds and hearts in the Judaeo-Christian perspective. The beast must turn into a man, the enchanted cat into a princess, because permitted sexual relations must take place between members of the same species who are not close kin; the drawing up of definitions of interdicted degrees constitutes, in Lévi-Strauss’s striking formula, the ‘first writing’ of society. This writing produces some of the first and hence oldest stories as well as the stories of human origin in myth, from Christian to Aborigine.

  In Genesis 19, Lot’s seduction follows upon an enigmatic sequence of events that take place in Sodom itself: two angels enter the city and meet Lot who is sitting by the gate; he begs them to be his guests, and they decline, but he presses them to come home with him and at least have a meal, which they do. Before bedtime, the men of the town, young and old, surround the house and call to Lot to send out his guests ‘so that we may abuse them’ (Gen. 19: 5). Commentators have always taken this to mean that the Sodomites wished to violate the two angels in the manner of their name. Lot, in order to spare his guests according to the law of hospitality, offers his rowdy visitors his virgin daughters instead, ‘to treat as it pleases you’ (Gen. 19: 8).

  The biblical narrative is disjointed and fragmentary, but it seems that this offer enrages the crowd, who berate Lot for a ‘foreigner’ and beat at his door to break it down. The angels blind the attackers, who then ‘never found the doorway’, and they recommend to Lot that he leave, with his daughters and their future husbands, as Yahweh is angry and they, his angels, are to destroy this place.

  At dawn, the angels take Lot by the hand and lead him out of Sodom with his wife and his daughters. (The fu
ture sons-in-law do not believe in the danger – in spite of the angels’ manifest power to blind – and remain behind.) Yahweh rains fire and brimstone on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Lot’s wife looks back on the destruction, though the angels have forbidden it, and, in consequence, she is turned into a pillar of salt. Lot then looks out over the cities of the plain and ‘lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace’ (Gen. 19: 28). Later, after Lot has been living with his daughters in a cave, the elder confides her worries to the younger: Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us … Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.’ On the first night, the elder daughter conceives Moab, father of the Moabite tribe; on the second night, the younger does likewise, and she becomes the mother of the Ammonites. The progeny – enemy tribes of Israel – remain equivocal, though the daughters’ act is not proscribed as such in Genesis.

  The biblical narrative moves through a series of flouted prohibitions: the Sodomites demand a breach of hospitality when they ask Lot to hand over his guests; though Lot holds firm to his obligations as a host, he panders his own virgin daughters in exchange; his wife disobeys the angels’ command; he himself is violated in turn in his drunken sleep. Severe penalties follow almost all these transgressions: blindness for the Sodomites, followed by incineration, death for the unbelieving sons-in-law who stayed behind in Sodom, metamorphosis for Lot’s wife who, it is implied, regretted their leaving their home and its annihilation. The only sin that is not blasted is the incest: the nameless daughters succeed in their avowed intention to perpetuate the human race.