From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  Both the polyptych by Jan van Wavre and the shrine unfold the saint’s dramatic story with mannered delicacy and luxuriousness, belying the macabre and violent incidents portrayed and the unworldly moral of her life. In the panel depicting her father’s proposal of marriage, Dympna appears with the lofty shaved brow, wimple and diapered full high-waisted dress of courtly fashion in the late fifteenth century, while her aberrant father turns as slim a waist and as trim a hosen leg as any delectable hero of chivalric legend. Similarly, the two episodes which occupy the focal point of the entire construction strike a secular note: the king is shown discovering from a mounted spy the whereabouts of his runaway child, while above, the artist evokes the fugitives’ rustic existence in their hiding place – an odd emphasis in a hagiographical narrative, drawing the viewers’ attention away from the edifying aspects of the tale to its secular character, its turbulent plot, its tricksters and its villain, in the manner of the minstrel lay rather than the sermon.

  The cult objects associated with the town of Geel redress the balance, borrowing motifs from routine iconography of virgin martyrs. A fifteenth-century statue in the church, for instance, shows Saint Dympna with a sword in her hand, with a monster chained at her feet (here). Dympna thus carries the weapon that won her the crown of martyrdom, and holds captive the sin of her father – incarnate in devilish form. Beast in body, goat-horned, with long canines and a tail, he represents the demon who took possession of her father, and bears a close resemblance to other furry creatures of the wilds, personifying satyriasis and other sexual evils. As a conqueror of sin, in its particular aspect of concupiscence, Dympna has many counterparts: Saint Margaret, who overcame the fiend, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who withstood the lechery of the emperor Maxentius and tramples his beastliness under her righteous feet in many a medieval statue and illumination.

  Saints are sometimes given certain areas of supervision for skittish reasons: Saint Barbara became the patron of barbers, with porcupine quills, combs and brushes for her emblems, through a pun on her name; Saint Blaise was deemed to cure sore throats because he freed a wolf from a ticklish fishbone. But in Dympna’s case, she became the patron saint of the insane.

  This leap, from the father-daughter incest tale to the care of the mentally ill, arises from a profound medieval perception of the affinity between mental distress and incestuous transgression. Not based on a poor pun like Barbara’s sphere of interest, not quite related to her life by direct cause-and-effect, Dympna’s patronage of madness reveals imaginative associations at work in the minds of her votaries. On account of the mad, diabolical lust of her father, who wanted his daughter and then killed her, Dympna was allotted the care of ‘demoniacs’, as the mentally ill are called in her Vita. Incest in her tale does not belong in a tribal chronicle about appropriate partners for carrying on the line. Nor does it inscribe a philosophy of fate and divine justice. It tells of a private fantasy of omnipotence which does harm; the passage of the story about an incestuous father into a healing cult represents a vital moment in the history of attitudes to such passions. Migrating from folklore into religious cult, the story of the fugitive daughter gained a material reality which also cancelled any residue of jocularity and fancy from the fairy tale. This is a case of fairy tale passing over into hagiography and thence into belief with effects on the lives of real people and the developments of history. Dympna is still venerated; she is popular in Ireland, for instance, as well as among the Irish Catholic community in the United States, and a special prayer, for use by those distressed in mind, invokes her protection.4

  The bodies of Dympna and Gerebernus were allegedly unearthed in Geel some time in the thirteenth century; her relics remained miraculously rooted to the spot where the church dedicated to her name was founded. Building began around 1450. Gerebernus’ relics on the other hand were stolen and taken to Xanten on the Rhine, where they are still kept.5 Stone fragments of their sarcophagi are preserved in Geel, as well as Dympna’s bones, which are enshrined in the wooden funerary monument, raised on stone columns and painted with scenes of her life, which stands behind the altar. Her relics brought about numerous cures in a specialized area – of epileptics, schizophrenics and other mentally sick pilgrims, who were brought to the shrine. Jan van Wavre’s altarpiece of 1515 also represents the procession during which Dympna’s relics were displayed, and the miracles and acts of mercy attendant upon it.

  The Gospel reading for her feast day (15 May) is taken from Matthew 25, on the Seven Acts of Mercy, because her cult was socially concerned from the start. In the fifteenth century, a Sieckkammer, or sickroom, was incorporated in the church itself, in a chamber on the south side, which can still be seen. But as numbers swelled, a hospital grew up to house the patients, and Augustinian canonesses of St Norbert nursed the sick, and were painted at their task in 1639 by an anonymous artist (here). They are shown operating on the stone, trepanning skulls and otherwise relieving – or attempting to relieve – mental distress. One large surviving ex voto depicts a patient, one Peter van Put, who in the eighteenth century was miraculously cured, the grateful inscription relates, of his deaf and dumb condition. In effect, the town of Geel was operating as an open asylum for the mentally ill; it still practises home care for the sick who are registered at the hospital, but lodged with families in the town. Though Catholic clergy and nuns help with the patients, the hospital was taken over by the state in 1850 after abuses were discovered (however shining the intentions of the shrine, the ‘mad’ were being exploited as free labour, and many were seriously neglected).6 The Augustinian canonesses moved away to a small building trimmed to their present needs.

  By far the most famous patient at Geel was a certain Henri K., who fell in love with a parrot because it had been given to him by the woman he loved and could say her name.7 As his wits turned, his obsession deepened, and he came to believe he had become a parrot himself; he roosted in a tree and could only agree to come down when a parrot cage was produced. He was then sent to the Maison de Santé in Geel; Flaubert read the account of his capture in the paper, and drew on it for ‘Un Cœur simple’ about Félicité and her parrot, whom she sees at the end in a kind of ecstasy, transfigured into Christ her beloved.

  A hospital for pilgrims looking for cure, or at least solace for their mental problems, grew up next to St Dympna’s church. Here, nuns are caring for patients by bleeding and trepanning and other measures. (Flemish School, The Hospice at Geel, 1639.)

  Child abuse could be placed under Dympna’s patronage too. The Epistle reading for her Mass comes from the First Letter of John, the one that repeatedly invokes his listeners as ‘God’s children’; Dympna acts as a symbol of child innocence, and of the sinlessness of the simple-minded. Her cult gives us an interesting insight into compassion and understanding in the medieval past. Incest connected with madness; the Devil was at work exciting the impulses of fantasy, and the victims could suffer death. Derangement could be a contagion, like temptation; it affected both perpetrator and victim. Her cult, whatever its deficiencies in practice, admits that such an ‘unlawful passion’ happens, has consequences for all around it, that it cannot be quarantined and causes acute distress; that the object of the passion cannot but be involved in its madness, however much s/he pulls away. The factor of relationship is recognized by implication in the imagined power of Dympna’s intercession; her story acknowledges the harm done and constitutes an early attempt – weak, inadequate, wishful – to repair it.

  II

  Perrault dedicated ‘Peau d’Ane’, his fairy tale about a runaway daughter, to the Marquise de Lambert, one of the noblewomen in whose house in the rue Colbert were regularly gathered philosophically-minded men and women, to discuss just such issues as the obligations of love and the freedom to choose a partner. She herself was to write advice manuals to her children, and Perrault judged that his jaunty squib at the expense of an overweening father would coincide with the interests of the marquise and so please her.8

&nb
sp; The ‘Peau d’Ane’ fairy tale dramatizes the subjection of daughters to their fathers’ authority, and under the pretence of flippancy Perrault delivers a harsh critique of current abuses in the area of matrimony. His story even bears traces of the earlier, medieval clerical campaign to preserve the dignity of marriage through love. The Church paradoxically gave its fervent support to men and women’s autonomy in desire – principally because virginity usually conflicted with dynastic interests, but also because they struggled against expedient annulments and remarriages. Besides the Vita of Saint Dympna, there were dozens of supposedly edifying stories about young women who resist their family’s plans for them. Without firsthand knowledge of these materials, it would be hard to credit the ferocity of Christianity’s opposition to the biological family’s claims, the intensity of the otherworldliness hagiography proposes. When cults today point to the Bible in support of their ‘kidnapping’ of young adepts, they act within a fully attested, mainstream Christian tradition which envisaged a life dedicated to Christ in violent conflict with familial and social interests. The daughters who disobey in the name of faith include Saint Christina, whose Life was written in verse by the Benedictine Gautier de Coinci around 1218. Gautier could be charming, as in his Miracles de Nostre Dame, but Saint Christina stimulated the sadistic side of his imagination and he describes her prolonged torments at the hands of her father, who ‘felt a deep love for his daughter,/And could not spend a day without kissing her eyes and her face’.9 He builds a tower to enclose her (to hide her, to encipher her), but when she persists in her sacred vow of virginity, he begins a series of public tortures, which culminates in throwing her out to sea with a millstone round her neck. It turns light as a feather, and she survives, only to face another round of persecutions, at the hands of the Roman emperor’s representative. Her breasts are cut off, she is bitten by serpents, burned on a pyre, and finally has her tongue torn out. She throws the mangled piece at her torturer; and it pierces him in the eye.10 A symmetry is here implied, between her subversive tongue and his transgressive eye, and she has the last word, of course, as the tale is hers, and hers the body, which in death becomes even more richly wonder-working.

  Daughters defy family arrangements in the name of Christ in many legends of the virgin martyrs: Saint Barbara is another who provokes murderous rage by her recalcitrance. (Peter Paul Rubens, Saint Barbara Fleeing from Her Father, 1620.)

  Gautier’s Life of Saint Christina includes another remarkable scene, when her mother intercedes, frantically – and touchingly – pleading on her breasts which nourished her daughter that she should not be so obdurate.11 Mothers rarely make any kind of appearance in these father-daughter stories, except in the opening deathbed scene, and Christina’s highminded rejection of maternal love brings home powerfully the force of her story’s ascetic message.

  The legend of Saint Barbara also illustrates the social significance of fairytale sources as resistance to patriarchal tyranny and to marriage. In 1405, in The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan gave this account of Saint Barbara:

  Because of her beauty, her father had her shut up in a tower … [He] sought a noble marriage for her, but she refused all offers for a long time. Finally she declared herself a Christian and dedicated her virginity to God. For this reason her father tried to kill her, but she was able to escape and flee. And when her father pursued her to put her to death, he finally found her, and brought her before the prefect, who ordered her to be executed with excruciating tortures …12

  After appalling cruelties, which Barbara resists with miraculous strength, her father, as in the case of Dympna, beheads her himself.

  Besides being the patron of barbers, Saint Barbara also has care of thunder and lightning, and of artillery and cannon, because as he was returning home from his crime her father was struck down by a thunderbolt, and reduced to ashes.

  Christine de Pizan mentions that Barbara’s father wanted a noble marriage, that the prefect ordered the torture because she had disobeyed her father. Unlike the legend of Dympna, which focusses on incest, Barbara’s concentrates on authority; Barbara’s refusal makes a bid for autonomy. The folk tales in which a daughter resists her father and is then punished may contain memories of actual bodily violation. But the narrative is often presented in such a way that the independent integrity of the victim as the inheritor of the family wealth becomes the issue, not her chastity. The stories focus on the daughter revolting against her father, and develop a plot to justify her action; the rebel is presented as a virtuous heroine rather than an unfilial child. In order to achieve this, the father’s act must be seen to be an outrage precisely because daughters were decreed to obey their fathers by the fourth commandment. To be vindicated, the disobedient daughter must be wronged. The father’s transgression against the universally held taboo against incest furnishes a sufficiently shocking pretext, as does, in a medieval context, his attempt to force a pagan husband on a Christian girl.

  An episode which took place during the Wars of the Roses in England gives precious historical evidence that, when such pressure was put upon young marriageable women by men in authority over them, stratagems were adopted that, echoing the motifs of the fairy tales, help us to read the experiences in which they originate. When Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the future Richard III, showed a desire to marry Lady Anne Nevill, daughter of the Earl of Warwick and the heiress to a great estate, his brother the Duke of Clarence tried to prevent the match. Clarence was married to Anne’s elder sister and he feared – rightly as it turned out – that Richard had designs on her portion of the fortune as well. ‘Such being the case,’ wrote the chronicler in 1471,

  he caused the damsel to be concealed, in order that it might not be known by his brother where she was … Still however the craftiness of the Duke of Gloucester [Richard] so far prevailed that he discovered the young lady in the City of London disguised in the habit of a cookmaid; upon which he had her removed to the sanctuary of Saint Martin’s …13

  Here, in Lady Anne, Richard Ill’s queen, we find a real-life girl of the fifteenth century, flying from an abhorred union by being disguised as a servant. The chronicler talks of her as a pawn in the hands of great men; but it is possible that she was a willing accomplice. Her reasons may have been different from her father’s; Warwick wanted to control the family wealth, not to pass it on to a son-in-law whom he could not command.

  Perrault makes this fundamental point when Donkeyskin kills her father’s source of wealth – the magic donkey – and refuses to marry him at the same time. When she runs away, she literally takes her father’s fortune with her.

  Such coincidences between concealed heiresses and fairytale princesses support the argument that such tales as Beauty’s and Donkeyskin’s and Cinderella’s are women’s stories; they can be seen to reflect women’s predicaments and stratagems from their point of view. The dissemination of fairy tales and the virtual disappearance of the gory martyrdoms of saints like Dympna from any widely circulating Catholic literature has coincided with a softening and sweetening of the character of the Beast whom the heroine flees, as in the case of the much more popular fairy tale ‘Beauty and the Beast’, as we saw. ‘Donkeyskin’ has proved the least-known of Perrault’s tales; the Catholic stories for many complex reasons are no longer related with the intense admiration that Christine de Pizan – who was no credulous masochist – brought to their retelling. The ferocious father, the lustful suitor, have been transformed or made to disappear; the Cinderella stories we are familiar with now portray the father as virtuous and dead, or weak and henpecked, as we shall see, and she radiates feelings of dutiful and tender loyalty towards him.

  Neither ‘L’Orsa’ nor ‘Peau d’Ane’ portrays the heroine’s plight as deserved, and both tales rejoice in her escape from her father. However, at the end of Perrault’s tale he is handsomely forgiven rather than pilloried. The Frenchman’s romantic assertion of the goodness of choice and love in marriage conforms to the principles t
he women in his literary circle were struggling to establish.

  Their efforts coincided with the wide distribution of a semi-erotic, semi-scientific manual by Nicolas Venette, called Tableau de l’amour conjugal, published in French in Amsterdam in 1686, and in English as The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Revealed in 1703. This volume of practical advice gained immense popularity very quickly; it was a pioneering work, partly because Venette did not concern himself at all with vice or vice’s penalties like venereal disease, did not linger on prohibitions against incest, but concentrated on the naturalness of the sexual urge, the healthiest ways to assuage it and find happiness, and throughout accepts, without reproof, women’s desires as equally forceful as men’s. In the opinion of Roy Porter, the historian of medicine, Venette’s book constitutes a watershed, because he was able to acknowledge for the first time ‘the empire of love’ over the human being, and to articulate the need to translate the chaos of passion into the social order of matrimony in order to achieve sexual gratification for both man and woman. ‘Conjugal caresses are the ties of love in matrimony,’ he wrote, ‘they make up the essence thereof.’14 This was published around the same time as the first romantic fairy tales about princesses finding true love with the prince of their liking.