The filial action of Lot’s daughters, when they conceive by their father in order to perpetuate the species, becomes superannuated under the new covenant that a fairy tale like ‘Peau d’Ane’ proclaims. In a cluster of stories – hagiography and fairy tale – there recurs a figure of a wronged daughter, a young woman in flight from the unwelcome desire of a man, who is her own father or otherwise a man in power, an emperor, a prefect, a tyrant. The tenor of the stories never questions the status of the plot as truth: it is a characteristic of the fairy story or wonder tale that the material is presented as matter of fact, however fanciful. Do the fantasy transformations, the saints’ miracles, the wild swerves and unlikely incidents, the alternation of secrets and disclosures register at the same pitch of veracity as the incest motif? Basile’s asides about human nature being the way it is often return his wild fabulations to a circumstantial setting of recognizable behaviour; in comparison, Perrault’s blitheness tends to subsume everything into a gay nonsense rhyme: the magic donkey, the wicked lust, the fantastic palace, the happy ending. His final verses declare:
Le conte de Peau d’Ane est difficile à croire,
Mais tant que dans le Monde on aura des Enfants
Des Mères et des Mères-grands
On en gardera la mémoire.
[The tale of Donkeyskin is hard to believe, but as long as there are children, mothers and grandmothers in the world the memory of it will not die.]15
But even Perrault does not quite level all the story’s elements to the same plateau of implausibility; his last words, that mothers and grandmothers will continue to tell the tale of Donkeyskin, imply that there is something of absorbing consequence to tell.
III
‘Grandmothers, mothers and children’ could accept an incestuous father placed centre stage in full view, till the eighteenth century. But then he begins to stir anxiety in the disseminators of fairy tales, and this anxiety leads to tinkering, and eventuali, to evasions and suppression.
In the prose version attributed to Perrault, but which appears only in 1781, the father comes under the evil influence of a ‘Druid’, who persuades him that it would be ‘an act of piety’ to marry his daughter.16 Perrault makes a passing mention of a casuiste, which the paraphraser seized on to absolve the father of some responsibility.17 Later, when the father comes to the wedding, this author has him safely married off to a ‘very beautiful widowed queen’ with whom, moreover, we are told there is no likelihood of offspring.18 The story of a father’s unlawful love begins to fade from collections of fairy stories as well as from narratives dealing with actual experience. At the same time, stories of fathers’ excessive control of their daughters are also softened. The Cinderella story itself contains at its heart an unexplained mystery about her father’s role in her sufferings. Why does Cinderella’s father do nothing about her predicament? His part remains unspoken – neither complicity nor protest: a lost piece of the puzzle. In retellings of the fairy tale today, from pantomime and books, he either features as dead, so the women are wreaking havoc in the absence of male authority; or he too is suffering, yet another of the wicked women’s victims: the dear old duffer Baron Hardup or Baron Stoneybroke of the English Victorian stage, who is much too nice to stand up to the horrid schemers he has taken under his roof.19 George Cruikshank even puts him in prison as a result of his wife’s gambling debts.20
But as recently as Jacopo Ferretti’s libretto of 1816 for Rossini’s La Cenerentola, Cinderella’s poltroon of a stepfather, Don Magnifico, dreams, in a broad hint at the story’s progenitors, that he is a most tremendous ass, ‘un bellissimo somaro, un somaro, ma solenne’ (a beautiful ass, an ass, but dignified). This exuberantly comic opening aria again homes in on the lubricious associations of the donkey, and retains the social critique of Perrault against tyranny. Earlier ‘Cinderella’ variations also connect to the ‘Donkeyskin’ cycle – the daughter is too beautiful, she must be punished, she is dirty, she must be cast out. The most dainty and urbane retelling, Perrault’s ‘Cendrillon’, recalls the sexual plot of the related tales of wronged girls when, as we saw, he gives his heroine’s nickname as Cucendron (Cinder-bottom), and adds that the kinder of her sisters softened it to spare her.
Wicked fathers gradually drop from view in the fairytale tradition. The Grimm Brothers for instance collected a variation on ‘Peau d’Ane’ in their gruesome tale ‘The Maiden Without Hands’.21 (It had been dramatized in Philippe de Beaumanoir’s verse novel La Manékine, in the thirteenth century, and resumed, with a smitten brother in place of the unlawful father, by Basile in the Pentamerone.)22 In both these tales, the heroine – Joie – finds the day of her incestuous wedding approaching. In acute distress, she goes to the palace kitchen, and sees there a great carving knife: ‘With a single stroke of this knife, you could have severed a swan’s spine, even if it had been of an extraordinary size.’23 Joie seizes the knife, puts her left hand on the window sill, and cuts it off. It falls into the moat, where a fish swallows it. (Later, it will be miraculously restored to her by the same fish, served up on another kitchen table, in another place, under another knife.) Here maiming takes the place of the travesty in other tales – with a savage accent on the role of hands in sexuality.
The Grimms’ version of ‘The Maiden Without Hands’ describes the young girl mutilating herself in order to escape the claims of the Devil. The father acts like a villain and a coward, and offers his daughter to the Devil in order to save his own skin; he also willingly cuts off her hands himself when the Devil asks him to. But she weeps on the stumps so that they are too clean for the Devil to touch, and he has to give up the bride he desired. Only horribly disfigured in this way can she become inviolable and so resist on her own account, uncoerced by her father, just like her predecessor Donkeyskin. John Ellis has analysed the different editions of Die Kinder-und Hausmärchen to show how in their treatment of ‘The Maiden Without Hands’ the Grimms erased the motive of the father’s unlawful love from their source, because they simply could not bear it; they were too squeamish for the motive, though not for the mutilating itself.24
Similarly, the Grimms’ telling of ‘Aschenputtel’ includes unexplained pursuit and cruelty on the part of her father, who, using ‘an axe and a pickaxe’ together, hews to pieces the dovecote in which the prince tells him she has taken refuge; similarly, he cuts down her hiding place in a pear tree the second night.25 This Cinderella hides from both prince and father, though why the latter should pursue her so savagely has been scrambled and fallen out of the tale.26 Such silences help the stories to reverberate, however, as the father’s crazed conduct sends shivers through the listener or the reader.
From romance to Romanticism, a well-known shift of interest takes place: the interior motions of characters in fictions become salient. With a motif like incest, a romance like La Manékine simply takes the father’s passion for granted; the narrative focus holds the pattern of events in view, the swift shuttle figuring forth motifs in a rich peripatetic and picaresque weave, the structure of social disorder and the ensuing restoration of due order. Passions leading to adultery or murder or incest are dealt with often with compassionate intensity – as in the scene when Apollonius finds his daughter again – but the texts do not question and probe motive or seek to justify the developments on grounds of plausible and consistent character. This is obvious, but it is worth restating it here because it bears profoundly on the disappearance – the comparative disappearance or partially successful repression – of the ‘Peau d’Ane’ fairy tale and the whole cycle of the Apollonius romance from our culture. When interest in psychological realism is at work in the mind of the receiver of traditional folklore, the proposed marriage of a father to his daughter becomes too hard to accept. But it is only too hard to accept precisely because it belongs to a different order of reality/fantasy from the donkeyskin disguise or the gold excrement or the other magical motifs: because it is not impossible, because it could actually happen, and is known to have done
so. It is when fairy tales coincide with experience that they begin to suffer from censoring, rather than the other way around. They are not altered – or even dropped – by editors and collectors to shear them of implausibilities and foolish notions, but this pretext is invoked to justify changes which constitute responses to profound, known threats. Dympna’s situation, Peau d’Ane’s predicament are at one and the same time ridiculous, unsuitable extremes of invention which will give children ideas, and at the same time veracious and adult, and children are no longer to be exposed to such knowledge.
The history of Freud’s momentous change of mind about the status of paternal incest echoes, in thought-provoking ways, the gaps in transmission of the Donkeyskin fairy tale. In 1895, in his study of the ‘hysteric’ Aurelia, Freud purposively changed her molester from her father to her uncle for reasons of discretion. She was one of four cases in his Studies on Hysteria, but she was different from her three counterparts: Freud could write about her, ‘it was a lovely case for me’, because he was able to heal the young woman’s trouble (solve her riddle) in the course of a single conversation in August 1893. Aurelia Kronich, whom Freud called ‘Katharina’, was the daughter of a servant at a mountain inn in an Alpine valley where Freud stayed in the summers, and he fell into conversation with her, according to his account, when she told him she was suffering from nervous attacks. Prompted by Freud that she might have seen or heard something that ‘embarrassed’ her, she described how she had come upon her cousin Barbara in her father’s room, with her father lying on her. She had fallen ill after this, vomiting for three days on end. Further prompted by Freud, Aurelia then recalled that her father had acted in a similar way with her four years before.27
After these admissions, Aurelia’s face changed; ‘her eyes were bright, she was lightened and exalted’. Aurelia’s story – and her lightening after unburdening herself – became a crucial vertix where Freud’s newly developing theory of sexual trauma, memory, hysteria and talk therapy converged. In a letter, he described how ‘in the girl’s anxiety was a consequence of the horror by which a virginal mind is overcome when it is confronted for the first time by sexuality’ – the very passage which the Donkeyskin fairy tale negotiates.28
The singleminded emphasis on the sexual encounter in Freud’s account does however ignore the disruption of the Kronich family life after Aurelia told her mother, the guilt that the daughter felt at her part in the marriage’s breakdown, her fear that her father might take his revenge on her for the disclosure, as well as the possible anger of the mother both on behalf of and possibly against her daughter – all reactions which arise in other documented cases of incest.29 Nor did Freud give a full explanation of his evasion in 1924 when he admitted in a footnote that he had changed the abusive father into a molesting uncle. He made other alterations, as Peter Swales has discovered through patient research. Moreover, in the years between 1895 and 1924 he was developing the Oedipal theory and was eventually to concede the ground of his ‘seduction theory’ and decide that, in some cases, his patients’ accounts of paternal incest might be fantasies in their minds, stirred by their Oedipal desires, because memories and fantasies in the unconscious could not be disentangled.30 The later development of his thinking led him to propose that memories of incest tended to be rooted in forbidden, repressed desires. Nevertheless, he did not retract his account of Aurelia’s real abuse, nor throw suspicion on her truthfulness. She remains a contradictory figure in his case histories: an actual incestuous child. She offers a telling reminder of the connective tissue that binds personal experience with fantasy narratives.
In between, Freud had also written his personal – and moving – meditation on The Theme of Three Caskets, which conveys, using the fairytale marriage test found in The Merchant of Venice, his own choice of the lead casket, the least and youngest daughter, and his yearning for her, only to find that she heralds his own death. Freud’s denial, in psychoanalytic terms, of the father’s incest in the case of Katharina/Aurelia, speaks volumes about the sensitivity of the issue for him.31
The distortions that Freud’s interpretation of incestuous testimony have introduced cannot begin to be straightened out here. But it is not squaring the circle to say that the ‘Donkeyskin’ type of story yields a common insight into minds and experiences of young women growing up, and into erotic fantasies on both sides, the father’s and the daughter’s, conscious as well as unconscious. And that, at the same time as reflecting Oedipal desires, the fairy tale expresses fears of actual incest and actual violation, and that the disquiet it still can produce arises from its closeness to what the Chinese call speaking bitterness.
Perrault, from a circle of campaigning women, argued for the new ideal of companionate marriage and filial autonomy; the fairy tale has since mutated again, with female tellers – of fact as well as fancy – discomfiting male hearers to varying degrees by stirring uneasy identifications and distressed denials.
The history of transmission through literary texts shows intermittently more embarrassment than the oral tradition (though this has been recorded in literary media, too, and is never pure). Nevertheless, Chaucer, who knew the plot from Gower, preferred, as noted earlier, to keep the incest motif out of sight in ‘The Man of Lawe’s Tale’; Shakespeare challenged it with the alternative version in Pericles, and transformed it into tyranny in Lear, both of them preceding the pedagogical anxiety of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries over any open admission of the theme.
The oral evidence, in which I include cinema and television, evinces less reluctance. Jacques Demy made a film of Peau d’Ane in 1971 (The Magic Donkey), which retains the father-daughter plot without apology (here). Whimsical, pretty, and all the more unsettlingly amusing for its sugared almond appearance, it catches the perversely skittish spirit of Perrault’s original verses, while its sequences of bizarre, dreamlike enchantments pay homage to Jean Cocteau’s brand of cinematic poetics – the lover-father sits on a stuffed white cat for a throne, the slattern who puts Donkeyskin to work spits toads and serpents when she speaks. Catherine Deneuve’s sculptured angel face turns Donkeyskin herself into a fairytale vision to rival Josette Day’s ethereal Belle in the Cocteau film, and Delphine Seyrig as Donkeyskin’s godmother, the Lilac Fairy, brings a certain elegant and worldly irony to her counsels. Jacques Demy himself first presented fairy tales in a puppet theatre he had as a child – and he heard them from his grandmother.32
The Storyteller, a recent series of television films produced by Jim Henson and written by Anthony Minghella, also included a vividly realized variation on the tale, called Sapsorrow. Interestingly, the series framed each tale within a traditional storytelling scene – the actor John Hurt as an old man with his talking dog (live animation by Henson); the device enabled the film-makers to interpolate moral comments on the material they were showing, in order to muffle the shock of such a demand from a father. These however are rare contemporary versions that remain faithful to fairy tale’s power to speak of the unspeakable through its dreamlike distancing of the story with fantastic strokes of magic, articulate beasts, and fantastic settings. The Italian children’s edition of ‘Pelle d’asina’ – an illustrated booklet with accompanying tape – is characteristically toothless: it merely opens with an offer of marriage from a horrible man who is much too old for the heroine.
Not all storytellers suffer from the scruples – or the anxiety – shown by the Grimm Brothers over the tale of ‘The Maiden Without Hands’ or Freud in the case of ‘Katharina’. They do not rub at the tracing in the dust to obscure what it shows, but hold fast to the matter-of-fact tone of the fairy tale; the voice of the narrator is issuing to the circle of listeners a familiar warning, and a reassuring prohibition, as they use the tales to inscribe the laws of kinship in the minds of their audience. Perhaps the very presence of the narrator guarantees the possibility of survival: this person, who speaks of these things, has not been silenced. The American novelist Lynne Tillman, in ‘The Trouble with Beau
ty’, created a bitter tale: her heroine retreats into autism after her father, having used her sexually, hands her over to his friend, the Beast.33 In this Tillman follows the fairy tale’s rite of passage, through disfigurement and degradation, but in her case Beauty does not achieve revolt or reconciliation.
A much heartier Italian version, still told today, called ‘Maria di legno’ (Wooden Maria), begins with the familiar device that the daughter must take her dead mother’s place; her nursemaid helps her to set various conditions, but the king manages to meet them, and announces, ‘There’s no more time to lose, my daughter. In one week we will get married.’
But the nurse makes Maria ‘a wooden outfit which covered her from head to toe’, and in this coffin she casts herself into the sea to escape. She floats away. Later, in the country she reaches, she finds work as a goose girl; later still, she sets a prince riddles. He falls madly in love … The final riddle, the one he manages at last to solve, opens the box in which Maria is enclosed and he finds her – ‘the beautiful stranger’ – inside combing her locks.34 This tale itself floated to shore in Rome at the beginning of this century, was discovered and transformed and shaped later by Italo Calvino and proves to have preserved safe and sound inside its resilient structure many magical elements from a very old story about unlawful love, which touches on experience in different but profound ways.
From the Beast to the Blonde Page 43