From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  Saint Dympna disguised herself as a jongleur, or jester, to make her escape. Stories and songs offer hiding places for troubles, and ‘La Sote’ (The She-Fool) is danced off by the reaper last of all. (Paris, 1508.)

  CHAPTER 21

  The Language of Hair: Donkeyskin III

  A medieval nymph, in all other respects a candidate for the angels’ ranks, reveals her kinship with animality in the down that covers her baby’s body as well as her own. (Martin Schongauer, Wild Woman, Augsburg, late fifteenth century.)

  What joy it is to see hair of a beautiful colour caught in the full rays of the sun, or shining with a milder lustre and constantly varying its shade as the light shifts. Golden at one moment, at the next honey-coloured; or black as a raven’s wing, but suddenly taking on the pale blueish tints of a dove’s neck-feathers … oh, when hair is bunched up in a thick luxurious mass on a woman’s head or, better still, allowed to flow rippling down her neck in profuse curls!… unable to restrain myself a moment longer, I now planted [there] a long passionate kiss.1

  Apuleius

  WHEREAS MALE BEASTS are cursed by some malignant force, the heroines of fairy tales are willingly bound by a spell; they frequently agree with alacrity to the change of outward form, in order to run away from the sexual advances of a father or other would-be seducer.2 Their metamorphosis changes their problematic fleshly envelope, which has inspired such undesirable desire, until a chosen, more suitable, more lovable lover can appear who will answer the riddle, undo the animal spell, disclose their identity and their beauty and release them to speak again. In Estremadura, in Spain, in the twentieth century, the fugitive girl of the fairy tale hides herself in a cloak of pelican skins, which the anthropologist James Taggart, who collected these versions, perceptively – and poignantly – connects to the prevalence of goitres among women in the area. Only a true lover will be able to see past the disfigurement to the real beauty of the person beneath the outer, pelican skin.3

  As the male beast in Beauty and the Beast stories suffers from his condition, so do his enchanted and disguised female counterparts. But the meanings and value of beastliness drift differently when young women are at issue, and, surprisingly perhaps, they can often be combed out of the tales through the language of hair and hairiness, of pelt, fur and hide.

  Mme d’Aulnoy, in ‘La Chatte blanche’ (The White Cat), portrays a heroine’s animal metamorphosis as an evil enchantment laid upon her by a wicked and jealous witch; as a cat princess, she is still entrancing, still irresistible. The prince, in order to win her, has to prove his mettle and obey her utterly, even to the point of cutting off her head to release her from her animal form.4 By contrast, in ‘L’Oiseau bleu’ (The Blue Bird), the fairy tale made famous by the Ballets Russes, her heroine Fiorine dirties her face and body in order to struggle on her own account for her lover’s disenchantment; as Mie-Souillon (Dear-Slattern) she abases herself to work the magic to restore him to human shape.5 The bodily transformations of fairytale heroines take them across thresholds which could not otherwise be crossed, as in the case of Princess Hawthorn, in ‘Bearskin’, the tale attributed to Murat; in this form, covered in her paradoxical cloak of invisibility, she can pass from her wretched state of marriage to Rhinoceros to another, happier life of relative freedom.6 This phenomenon of metamorphosis as liberty saturates the imagery of the tales and the language in which they are conveyed; the animal disguise of the heroine equips her to enter a new territory of choice and speech; the apparent degradation works for her, not against her. Being a beast – a she-bear – can be preferable as a temporary measure to the constrictions of a woman’s shape. Animal form marks a threshold she passes over, before she can take control of her own identity.

  The wronged daughter of fairy tale takes creaturely shape and keeps company with creatures, because, in the midst of repudiating a crime she finds abhorrent, and which excites her bitter reproaches and confusion, she changes into a beastlike form that simultaneously seals her connection with nature and splits her off from the society in which such an offence as marriage with her father was proposed and urged. The change of appearance casts the heroine out of family, out of the fold, and even out of society. The action in such fairy tales looks forward to the young woman’s future; the father’s unlawful demand opens the daughter’s eyes to the choice ahead, now that she is no longer a child but a nubile woman. The particular animal forms or degradation she accepts, the insults she bears, as she is reviled in her sluttish condition as stinking and filthy, anticipate the pollution of virginity’s loss. The stories express the difficulties experienced by young women entering a sexual life in a social context where the pattern of sinful woman is Eve, who had carnal knowledge and was fatal to humanity, and the pattern of goodness is Mary, the Virgin.

  The appetites of Voluptas, or Lust, are shared by goats, one of the devil’s beasts; sometimes she rides on a live goat, but here she drapes herself in its hide. (Freiburg Cathedral, thirteenth century.)

  As an outcast, spurning the sexual demand made upon her, her disguises – donkey, cat, or bear – reproduce the traditional iconography of the very passion she is fleeing. Animal hairiness, tails and beards identify the phallic satyrs of Greek myth, embodiments of lust; they lent their features, their donkey-like and goatish parts, to conventional Christian representations of the Devil, as in the sculpted scene showing the Devil tempting a woman in the thirteenth-century allegory of Luxuria (Lust) at Chartres Cathedral.7 At Freiburg Cathedral, the thirteenth-century figure of Lust or Voluptas (here) is shown with the ‘Prince of this World’, a smiling, courtly tempter, who conceals toads and vipers behind his back; she is leaning towards him, glad of his attention, with only a goat’s hide draping her nakedness, its horns, head and hooves still attached and dangling.8

  The chosen animals of female fairytale metamorphosis – the hearth cat of ‘La Gatta Cenerentola’ (The Cinderella Cat), the donkey of ‘Peau d’Ane’, and the bear of ‘L’Orsa’ and ‘Bearskin’, who offer the wronged daughter her means of escape – were animals to which were ascribed a particular predilection for pleasure, in perceptions current before the fairy tales were printed. They are all three thought to possess carnal knowledge: hearth cats were witches’ familiars, of course. They also frequented the Garden of Eden, curling up at the foot of the Tree of Good and Evil and intimating the night secrets and sensual pleasures that Adam and Eve will discover when they eat the apple. Dürer’s famous engraving of The Fall includes a large sleepy cat, as does a woodcut illustration of the Bible in 1504 by his pupil Hans Baldung Grien. Cornelisz Cornelisz. van Haarlem, in 1592, painted the scene of the Fall, and showed just between Adam and Eve the naughty hugs of a monkey and a cat, both shamelessly amorous creatures, inviting and welcoming caresses and cuddles.9

  The she-bear does not belong in a witch’s crew, but the animal is also associated with Eve and the Fall. In Baldung’s Creation of Woman of 1502, for instance, the bear appears as one of four creatures: on Eve’s side the bear and the fox, on Adam’s the stag and the hare, suggesting the pride and instinct of the male, the cunning – foxiness – of the woman, and her connection with pleasure, with trickery, with play. According to Aelian, ‘bears … do not copulate by mounting; the female lies on the ground …’10 The Physiologus, again, repeats this distinguishing characteristic of the bear. Baldung, with his sexual obsessiveness, may have been hinting at the immediate consequence of Eve’s coming into the world, or even making a Reformation point that part of the helpmeet’s task was to give sexual pleasure to Adam.

  This morbid parody of a reclining Venus personifies the vice of Lust: emaciated with her excesses, naked except for her abundant and unruly hair, she is attended by a rabbit, a harlot’s familiar on account of its mating proclivities. (Pisanello, Luxuria, fifteenth century.)

  ‘A brazen sensual woman [who] infests the street and plies her trade,/ Inviting every amorous blade/ To come and practice fornication’, the personification of Sensual Pleasure wears the ass’
s ears of folly.11 (Master of the Bergmann Shop, in Sebastian Brant, The Ship of Fools, 1498.)

  In images circulating during the period when the first explicit references to the story ‘Donkeyskin’ are made, the metaphor of animal nature recurs to characterize social outcasts, practising vice. In Sebastian Brant’s satire The Ship of Fools of 1498, for instance, the woodcut illustrating Sensual Pleasure shows a prostitute working the street: she is wearing a cloak made of an ass-hide and herding an odd flock, which includes a goat and a ram, animals which often make a significant showing in scenes of saints’ temptations (above). Illustrated retellings of ‘Peau d’Ane’, following Perrault’s description of his heroine as a swineherd, uncannily echo this symbolic iconography of the middle ages, though it is unlikely the artists had the model of personified Lust consciously in mind.

  At a time when tales were circulating about young girls disguised as animals in order to escape desires they found repugnant, the figure of the fugitive girl in animal disguise stood not for the rejection of sexuality but the condition of it. The wronged and runaway daughters wear the pelts of beasts, coats of rushes, and other ‘natural’ disguises because they have been violated, by their father’s assault or by another’s, and it has contaminated them, exiled them. Although they have suffered wrong in all innocence in the fairy tales, they accept the taint and enact it on their own persons. Shame and guilt do not prompt different reactions, and in this the victims behave exactly like penitents. Coats of skins covered the nakedness of Adam and Eve after they had eaten of the fruit of knowledge and marked their fallen condition; saints who have forsaken the world or repented pleasure-loving life assume wild clothing: John the Baptist in the wilderness is covered only in a camel’s hide, the anchorite Saint Onufrius appears girdled in a loincloth of leaves, while the holy whores Mary Magdalen and Mary of Egypt strip themselves of the finery which gave them worldly status and wander naked out into the wilderness, where by divine providence their hair grows miraculously long to cover them.12, 13 These figures of repentance accept their sinfulness, by performing it over and over in gesture and dress.

  Modestly veiled in hair, Mary Magdalen or Mary of Egypt can receive communion from a priest without giving offence, as in many sequences which tell the story of their expiation in the desert. The nakedness of the penitents signifies their conversion: they have recognized the folly of the world, and shed all former vanities and trifles. Donatello’s famous statue of Mary Magdalen, in the Baptistery in Florence, could easily be mistaken for Saint John the Baptist, the voice crying in the wilderness, so thickly carved are the tresses of her hair; Tilman Riemenschneider’s Mary Magdalen, a compellingly virtuoso limewood carving of 1490–92, shows the saint suspended in ecstasy among seraphim. Their bodies are covered in tightly overlapping feathers, hers in curly lamb’s fleece all over (right). In Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, the figure of Compunctio (Shame) is given a symbolic tunic woven of rushes.14

  The motif of bestial hairiness characterizes the Devil himself: conventionally he has a furry face (that blue beard) (Pl. 21), as well as goatish, donkey-like parts – horns, tail, hooves. Saint Jerome translated the demons of Isaiah as pilosi, the hairy ones, in the Vulgate version of the Old Testament (Isa. 13:22). Hairiness indicates animal nature: it is the distinctive sign of the wilderness and its inhabitants, and bears the freight of Judaeo-Christian ambivalence about the place of instinct and nature, fertility and sexuality. Martin Schongauer, the Augsburg goldsmith and artist, responsible for some of the most exquisite devotional images of the fifteenth century, also engraved, some time before his death in 1491, a Wild Woman sitting with her baby at her breast (here). A maiden with a sweet, wistful demeanour, long fair wavy hair, she is also covered in a coat of fur all over. Jacopo de’ Barbari’s Satyr Family of c. 1503–4 shows the mother with furry thighs, giving suck to her baby while her priapic husband serenades her. In spite of his cultivated entertainment, he still appears with cloven feet, shaggy nether parts, goat’s horns and erect penis: all traditional signs of the appearance of the Devil and of the Devil’s offspring, the Vices. In Mantegna’s painting of almost the same date, 1502, the complex allegory The Vices Expelled from the Garden of the Virtues, the evil followers of Venus also appear hairy and hooved, including their babes in arms, one of whom has a plumed penis.15

  Fur and fleece, scales and feathers: angels sheathed in plumage bear aloft the penitent Magdalen in ecstasy. After she repented of her worldliness and stripped herself of all her finery, her hair grew miraculously to protect her modesty. (Tilman Riemenschneider, Saint Mary Magdalen, limewood, 1490–2.)

  The Elizabethans had a proverb, ‘Bush natural, more hair than wit’, which associated abundant locks with the primitive and the inferior, hence the sexual, the beastly. In The Comedy of Errors, two wags banter:

  ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE: Why is Time such a niggard of hair, being (as it is), so plentiful an excrement?

  DROMIO OF SYRACUSE: Because it is a blessing that he bestows on beasts: and what he hath scanted [men] in hair, he hath given them in wit.

  The maxim was credited beyond England, and specifically related to women, whose imagined carnality naturally invited the connection; a pair of young women, the predecessors of many a children’s book fairytale heroine in their medieval grace and charm, as well as their tumbling tresses, were engraved in Augsburg in 1475–1500 and captioned, ‘Long-haired but Short-witted Maidens’.16 Hair constantly reminds us of the closeness of the dumb animal in us, and we reveal our changing sympathies and values in the way we treat the relation, now relishing the animal in the human, now sternly denying it.

  In the case of the virgin martyr Uncumber, or Liberada, or Kummernis, she was spared an unwanted marriage when she grew a beard, but she was crucified for her rebellion. (Saint Kummernis, Bavaria, seventeenth century.)

  In one parallel story to Dympna’s and Barbara’s and Christina’s martyrdoms, the legend of Saint Wilgefortis, or Uncumber, hairiness in the wrong place returns as a motif, to mark the sinful flesh and its claims, which she in her firmness of purpose and with the help of her chosen lover, Christ, insists on denying.

  According to the popular medieval narrative, which spread through Europe in the thirteenth century, the saint was one of seven twins born to an overbearing father, a king of Portugal and yet another dedicated heathen, who wanted her to marry another non-Christian like himself. But, like Dympna, Uncumber has been secretly converted to Christianity and pledged herself to a life of virginity in the love of Christ. When she realizes that she is going to have to submit to her father’s authority and marry the Saracen he has chosen for her, she prays for help, and immediately God sends her a covering of hair all over her body, including her face, in answer to her pleas. When the future bridegroom suitor sees the ‘bearded virgin’ he is being offered, he declines. Uncumber’s father, in a rage at her insubordination, has his daughter crucified (left); on the cross, this female martyr invokes Heaven to remember ‘the passion that encumbrance all women’.17 For this reason, Uncumber, who is also venerated as Livrade, Liberata, Liberada and other names all suggesting freedom, became a specially powerful holy agony aunt, the patron saint of unwilling brides and unhappy wives all over Europe until the Reformation – there is still a statue of Saint Uncumber in the Henry VII chapel of Westminster Abbey, at which the faithful used to offer oats. Thomas More commented scornfully on this cult practice:

  Whereof I cannot perceive the reason, but if it be because she should provide a horse for an evil husband to ride to the devil upon, for that is the thing that she is sought for, as they say. Insomuch that women … reckon that for a peck of oats she will not fail to uncumber them of their husbands.18

  The hairiness round the saint’s mouth, with its reminiscence of the nether female ‘mouth’ and its aureole of hair, makes another hint, like the asshide and the catskin, at the lustfulness inside woman that has to be faced and dealt with.19 (The odd stigma may also reflect the physiological symptom of lanugo, or body ha
ir, which can be caused by refusing to eat and the cessation of menses, as in anorexia.)20

  Many commentators, Bruno Bettelheim among them, have accepted the tradition that the glass slipper in Perrault’s ‘Cinderella’ was originally made of vair, fur or ermine, and that his innovatory masterstroke – as indeed it is – arose from misunderstanding what he heard. Be that as it may – the tradition of Cinderella stories stipulates many kinds of shoes in many kinds of material. But Cinderella’s element, in the wake of Perrault’s reading, has become glass, and the logic of the symbolism, whether he chose it or happened upon it, is perfect. When the story became one of the chief ornaments of the pedagogue’s bookshelf, the hairy animal was shed, sent into exile, put behind her, and beauty, distilled and purified, brought forth. When Cinderella puts off her rags, everything about her sparkles. In illustrations to stories, in films, on stage, the ballroom glitters, the floor is even made of mirror, its ceiling hung with crystal chandeliers. Her perfections find themselves materialized in the immaterial dazzlement of light. The glass slipper works to dematerialize the troubling aspects of her nature, her natural fleshiness, her hairy vitality, and so to give a sign of her new, socialized value. The slipper becomes the glass in which a princess sees her worth brightly mirrored. As the beast is to the blonde, so the webbed foot or ass’s hoof of the storyteller is to Cinderella’s glass slipper. This is the conversion classic fairy tales bring about, and the lesson they teach.

  But what is applauded and who sets the terms of the recognition and acceptance are always in question, and a closer look at the meanings of blondeness can help turn the key to the answers.