From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  Lot’s daughters ply their (willing) father with wine as they prepare to seduce him for the benefit of the human race. (Hendrik Goltzius, Lot and His Daughters, 1616.)

  None of these relations conjugates according to the prevailing rules of sexual conduct. In the small space of the narrative, no one even achieves congress at all, until Lot and his daughters lie together. Structurally, the various elements function in the baffling manner of a riddle, in which nothing makes sense until the solution is found. Clues in riddles also occupy two areas of meaning, simultaneously, patent and latent, and the answer changes the way the question reads and uncovers the hidden metaphorical meaning. A riddle contains negative terms that turn into positives as soon as they are decoded: riddling means to defy logic in peculiar couplings of like and like. In family relations, incest becomes an analogous activity.

  The family of Lot mirrors the condition of the riddle, and so can become itself material for riddling, because the members in the group occupy two distinct sites of meaning: Lot is father and spouse, in the same way as in a riddle a distaff is a distaff, but the unspeakable other thing as well. Mutually exclusive terms become one in the verbal game. It is a form which abolishes linguistic logic, just as incest cancels kinship law.

  The most celebrated myth of incest begins with a riddle, which Oedipus solves: the Sphinx’s rather simplistic question, ‘What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon and three feet in the evening?’ Oedipus’ ability to give the correct answer, A Man, does not save him from becoming himself a term in a riddle, a son who is a husband too.35 It is interesting to set the father-daughter incest of Lot’s family in Genesis beside the Oedipus myth: Oedipus is a parricide; Lot’s wife necessarily dies before her daughters sleep with their father; plague devastates Thebes on account of the sinner in its midst, as the oracle informs the Thebans; the biblical cities of the plain are destroyed by God’s anger against their unnatural vices; the son, Oedipus, is accounted responsible for his desire for his mother and the myth presents her as the passive partner; the daughters actively seduce their father in full consciousness while he – in the texts at least – lies lost to the world.

  Even more significantly, the Oedipal tragedy begins with an episode that is not usually cited, because it does not figure in the Sophocles trilogy.36 It is, however, referred to by Plato: Oedipus’ father Laius, before Oedipus was born, fell in love with Chrysippus, the young son of his host Pelops, and abducted him.37 The boy committed suicide out of shame, and his father cursed his seducer Laius that he should either die childless, or be killed by his own son. Hera, as goddess of marriage, heard the father’s grief, and sent the Sphinx in retaliation to prey on Thebes, Laius’ kingdom. Plato refers to this, in the Laws, when the Athenian, talking to two non-Athenians, mentions ‘that law which held good before the days of Laius, declaring that it is right to refrain from indulging in the same kind of intercourse with men and boys as with women’.38

  The Oedipus story, in one of its variations, thus gives an aetiological myth for homosexuality: like the story of Lot and his daughters, the consequences of sodomy are destruction on the one hand, incest on the other. The structures are not identical, of course, even enantiomorphically – in mirror reversal – for the daughters do not kill their mother; she brings death on herself by her own disobedience, her inability to let go, her hankering, which is a form of desire and of curiosity, the vices of Eve. Yahweh is a judge, he metes out revenge on sinners, according to a punitive moral code, unlike the Greek gods who oversee Oedipus’ tragic destiny from the moment of his birth, speak through the oracle of his double crime and predestine him to the full atrociousness of his fate, regardless of his ignorance and his innocence. Incest in Lot’s story is open-eyed on the part of the daughters, but blind in Oedipus’ (and Jocasta’s, in Sophocles, at least); in the Bible, it is rewarded by healthy progeny and the participants apparently survive unscathed. Both stories, however, convey the premise that desire for the prohibited parent will flourish when unchecked, either through ignorance, as in Oedipus’ case, or through a lack of decorum, an instinct for species survival, a conscious flouting of taboo, as in Lot’s daughters’ case.39

  The folktale material continues the traditional association of incest and riddling. The dying queen’s demand that her husband should never marry anyone who is not her like in beauty and goodness itself constitutes a riddle: this Other he can marry must be her like. The only figure who can collapse this contradiction is the forbidden daughter, the solution which cannot be proposed.40 Shakespeare literally dramatizes the ineffability of this correct answer, when he opens Pericles with the riddle of the incestuous king, Antiochus. On pain of death, anyone who wants to marry his daughter must answer this enigma she puts to them:

  I am no viper, yet I feed

  On mother’s flesh which did me breed.

  I sought a husband, in which labour

  I found that kindness in a father.

  He’s father, son, and husband mild;

  I mother, wife, and yet his child:

  How they may be, and yet in two,

  As you will live, resolve it you.41

  Pericles the suitor sees the answer, that the daughter who speaks lives with her father the king as his wife. He flees the court in horror, before Antiochus can seize him to kill him like his predecessors for the princess’s hand.

  In Pericles, the father-daughter incest also takes place in full cognizance of the guilty pair; and the daughter again is represented as consenting, even keen. But the sacrilege of their union, which opens the romance, inaugurates a story in which the proper love of a father and daughter – of Apollonius and Tarsia in the medieval romance; in Shakespeare, of Pericles and Marina – can unfold; it is as if the tale first sets out the worst case, then makes reparation by overstitching the rents and wounds on the social body it has disclosed. Riddles again play a crucial part in establishing structural relationships between the characters; in the romance, when the long-lost daughter and her father at last meet again by chance, they remain strangers to each other until Tarsia begins setting him riddles. These are ostensibly intended to rouse the bereft and wandering king from suicidal despair, but they are organized in a sequence which cryptically relates his own story to himself, or at least stirs memories of its stages, and this access of memory ultimately unleashes the moment of peripeteia, the happy mutual recognition between them. Unknotting the puzzles she poses guides them both to solving the secrets of their own identity and kinship.42 Shakespeare does not close his plot with the riddles, but he does arm his orphaned daughter with verbal wit which actually succeeds in protecting her against all comers in the brothel where she is placed. The language of the imagination, in Pericles as well, acts as the guardian of real bodies, and cerebral logic, encrypted in enigmas, deflects improper conjunctions in the world of sexual relations.

  The earliest manuscripts extant ofApollonius of Tyre date from the ninth century, but it was circulating before that in written as well as recited forms. Its vanishing from the collective body of European story constitutes one of the most glaring examples of thinning in our culture. Meanwhile, another celebrated incestuous trope – Roman Charity – with similar, long roots into ancient folklore, has survived more vigorously from the version of Valerius Maximus into the iconography of the seventeenth century of much favoured Northern artists.43 This prurient anecdote develops a narrative of virtuous incest which also titillated: a father who has been condemned to death by starvation is saved when his daughter visits him and feeds him at her breast through the bars of his prison.44 In the Italian folk tradition, this story acquired a riddling element, too: the daughter challenges the king who has condemned her father to answer the puzzle she sets him. Like the Queen of Sheba, she puts a hard question to him, on condition that if he cannot reply, he will free a prisoner of her choice. She asks:

  Oggi è Vannu mi fu patri

  Ed aguannu mi fu figghiu

  E figghiu chi nutricu

  e
maritu di me’ matri.

  [A year ago he was my father, and for a year he has been my son, and the son whom I am nursing is the husband of my mother.]45

  This king’s wisdom does not suffice, and her father is set free.

  The American critic Lynda Boose has perceptively commented:

  The daughter’s struggle with her father is one of separation, not displacement. Its psychological dynamics thus locate the conflict inside inner family space. Father-daughter stories are full of literal houses, castles, or gardens in which fathers such as Danaë’s or Rapunzel’s … lock up their daughters in the futile attempt to prevent some rival male from stealing them. The motif also occurs through riddles of enclosure … which enclose the daughter in the father’s verbal labyrinth and lure her suitors to compete with and lose to the preemptive paternal bond.46

  Several of the fairy tales by L’Héritier, Murat, D’Aulnoy and others of their generation include these metaphors of patriarchal control: Lackadaisy and Loquatia come to grief with the wicked Richcraft in spite of their father’s best efforts in ‘The Subtle Princess’; the orphaned princess Starlight is imprisoned by her guardians, but manages to be reunited with her beloved Izmir after he has found her by solving a riddle.47

  The prevalence of these plots suggests that it is frequently and even generally supposed that desire between father and daughter is stirred as it were by nature if the ban on incest is lifted or somehow effaced, intentionally or not. In post-Reformation paintings of Lot and his daughters, both Catholic and Protestant – the subject does not figure at all frequently before the sixteenth century – the unspecified lapse of time between the destruction of the cities of the plain and the daughters’ seduction of their father merges into the selfsame moment; their lascivious attentions unfold against an infernal backdrop of fire and brimstone and represent the daughters like wantons in a brothel with a client past his prime. More popular in the Netherlands and Germany than in Italy, the theme inspires appetitious meditations on the wiles of women while pretending to warn against the calamities of war: it offers a perfect excuse for pleasurable puritanical reproofs. In the two versions Lucas van Leyden painted, the burning town, the foundered vessels in the bay, the bivouac where Lot besports himself, the drinking jars and brazier are realistically rendered in contemporary early sixteenth-century detail: the daughters resemble camp followers and the image warns against the penalties of vice.48 Hendrik Goltzius, in 1616, stresses with histrionic sensuality the guilt of the women (here): he includes an emblematic vixen appearing from behind a tree with a suitably crafty look as Lot succumbs, fully awake, to the lusciously rendered flesh of his offspring.49

  What these paintings reveal is that, in Christian family structure, exogamy, or marrying outside the clan, is functioning as a far more forceful imperative in early modern Europe than keeping the bloodlines pure and the family impregnable as in biblical Judaic family culture. The exemplary parable of Lot and his daughters, as they survive while ‘foreigners’ are blasted, as they mate against inclination for the good of their family, begins to preach an entirely different lesson: against incest. And fairy tales, adapting different materials which also tell of transgressive family unions, encode a story of cultural and social change in this respect as well as contributing profoundly to its establishment as the norm.

  First in the middle ages, and then in the literature of the ruelles in the seventeenth century, the emphasis in incest tales shifts from the daughter’s responsibility to the father’s, the point of view revolves to consider her actions, her motives and her rights in a most interesting proto-feminist way. Genesis 19 portrays the daughters of Lot doing their duty by patrilineage and sustaining their father’s line by bearing his children; medieval and later incest stories by contrast strike a new note. They uphold the daughter, by dramatizing, often violently, her refusal to become a term in the riddle, to consent to be knotted into the skein of the paternal family, to be held prisoner in the verbal labyrinth. These stories mark awareness that a young woman may step out from paternal control and be praised for it. Such texts become important documents of social history, incorporating prevailing prejudice and morality and opening fundamental questions about them.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Silence of the Fathers: Donkeyskin II

  Saint Dympna, like a virgin martyr, holds the instruments of her passion: the sword with which her father beheaded her and crouching in chains at her feet, the hobgoblin devil who inspired his perverted passion. (Cult statue, Geel, fifteenth century.)

  I besought him to remember his promise, which was, never to force me against my will, to marry any. Will (said he) why your will ought to be no other than obedience, and in that, you should be rather wilfull in obeying, than question what I appoint … if you like not as I like, and wed where I will you, you shall never from me receive least favour, but be accompted a stranger and a lost childe … Who is this fine man hath wonne your idle fancy? Who hath made your duty voide? Whose faire tongue hath brought you to thefoulnesse of disobedience? Speake, and speake truely, that I may discerne what choice you can make, to refuse my fatherly authoritie over you.1

  Mary Wroth

  SAINT DYMPNA IS a seventh-century princess, the daughter of a king of Brittany, Britain, or Ireland, and of a beautiful mother who inevitably dies. A splendid polychrome sculptured altarpiece in the Northern Flemish high Gothic style, finished by Jan van Wavre in 1515, and still preserved on the high altar in the church of St Dympna in Geel, Belgian Flanders, illustrates the sequence of the saint’s misadventures and subsequent glory (Pl. 22); her life is a fairy tale, except in the matter of the ending, yet her cult has been kept fervently in this part of Catholic Europe since the fourteenth century at least, spreading from there through Belgium, Holland and Westphalia.

  Bluebeard in turban, brandishing a scimitar finds ‘his sanguinary arm’ halted by the arrival of his wife Fatima’s brothers in the nick of time. (Alnwick, early nineteenth century.)

  The official Vita, or Life, of the saint was written in Cambrai, Flanders, around 1237–48; it tells how Dympna was secretly baptized a Christian, and dedicated herself to her heavenly spouse. But soon, as is only to be expected in such a story, her lovely mother dies, having extracted the usual riddling promise from the king never to remarry unless his bride comes up to the standards of beauty and goodness that she has set in her own person. The king is griefstricken, but his courtiers – evil counsellors, inspired by the Devil – plead with him to remarry for the sake of the kingdom. He refuses, until he notices that his daughter resembles her lost mother in everyway. This remarkable likeness inspires, as is traditional in the narrative cycle, the ‘unlawful passion’ in her father, and he declares his desire to marry her. Dympna then consults her confessor, Gerebernus, who advises flight. He is a saintly and very old man – in case there should be any misunderstanding of an ulterior motive. With the help of the court fool and his wife, they disguise themselves as travelling minstrels, since ‘under the guise ofjongleurs, they could set out more secretly’.2 They embark, and eventually, owing to God’s providence, they cross the Irish Sea and the Channel safely and drift ashore in Belgium, near Antwerp. There Dympna makes her way deep into the forest, and, on the outskirts of the village of Geel, with Her companions, clears a space and builds a hut of trees and branches, in order to embrace the sweet solitude of the hermit’s life.

  But in her absence, her father’s passion does not abate. He sends after her, and his spies track her down when an innkeeper remarks that the coins they are using are the same as she was given earlier by a young woman and her party – an interesting piece of material and circumstantial evidence in the fanciful tale. Once she has been traced, the king her father arrives in pursuit, and repeats his demand. She refuses, and he orders his men to kill her, together with her priest. They obey, in the case of Gerebernus; but they cannot bear to touch Dympna. So her father beheads her himself.

  An unbeliever who insists on denying the faith, Dympna’s fat
her sometimes appears as a Turk, like Bluebeard, as he prepares to kill her; in the background, one of his men despatches her confessor. (B. Janssens, Geel, 1935.)

  Dympna does not metamorphose into animal shape, or put on filthy animal hides to escape her father’s demands, but she does choose to be exiled from society as she knew it, to be disguised as a lower – and consequently more mobile – member of court society, a jongleur in the company of a fool, whose cap of bells often sported asses’ ears (here, here). Her forest hut symbolizes this voluntary outcast state and corresponds to the fairytale heroines’ various disguises, all of them natural in different ways: the rashin coatie of Scotland, the wooden cloak of some Italian sources, the bear, the ass, the many-furred creature of the Grimms’ version.

  But of course in one prima facie aspect, the hagiographical story alters the folk source: animal disguise, animal metamorphosis, controlled until the moment has come to make the act of self-revelation, form the prelude to a mariage d’amour in the folk tales, as collected by Basile and Perrault; in the related life of Dympna, the only wedding takes place after torture and martyrdom with the Son of Heaven as bridegroom.

  The author Peter of Cambrai, known in Flemish as Petrus van Kamerijk, was a canon regular of the church of St Aubert in that town. He expressly declares in his preamble that he is basing the story on vernacular sources: ‘olim vulgari idiomate scripta’.3 This Life was given a critical edition in 1680. Saint Dympna’s Vita was retold by the Jesuit Pedro Ribadeneyra in his Flos sanctorum, first published in Madrid in 1624, then translated and reissued no fewer than six times in French, including an edition in 1686 in the widely distributed Compagnie des Libraires, which is where Perrault could have come across it. Before Perrault wrote his burlesque fairy tale, the related perils and ordeals of Saint Dympna were thus being related in a story which enjoyed a wide circulation in different languages and was directed at audiences of different social registers and occupations, from the tavern to the parish church. This migration, from the vernacular to Latin and back again, itself casts doubt on glib distinctions between high and low culture, and warns against notions about Latin’s chronological priority. The scholars were working up folk materials to add gravitas; they were annexing highly flavoured legend to make it serve pious ends. The fairy tales do not represent degraded remnants of a lost high epic. The court jester who helps and accompanies Dympna, and who suggests she runs away disguised as one of his kind, presents a most interesting, unusual, and revealing clue: he figures in the story as an eye witness, the storyteller who was there when the great deeds, fair and foul, were done, and who survived to relate them afterwards in songs and stories. He appears, with his lute, sitting in the boat with Dympna, in one of the carved panels of the polyptych altarpiece in Geel, and again, in a painting, helping to build her forest hut on the shrine: he represents a hyphen in the tale between the sacred exemplum and the fairytale romance. When Dympna chooses his occupation for her escape, she is in effect concealing herself in a riddle, the image of an artist skilled in just such word puzzles.