From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  II

  Mme d’Aulnoy opens ‘La Belle aux cheveux d’or’ with a joyful echo of Apuleius’ intense eroticism:

  Once upon a time there lived the daughter of a king, who was so beautiful that there was nothing quite so beautiful on earth; and because she was so beautiful, she was called Beauty with the Golden Hair, for her hair was finer than gold, and marvellously wondrously blonde, all curly, and fell to her feet. She was always covered by her wavy hair, and clothes embroidered with diamonds and pearls, so that you could not look on her without loving her.21

  The story develops into a classic, tender romance, about a poor, generous hero, who wins the love of the princess by his courage and trueheartedness. At the beginning, a great king wants to marry this Beauty, but she does not want to be married at all, and she refuses his suit as well as all his presents, accepting only a few English dressmakers’ pins – then considered a great luxury. The hero, a courtier, called Avenant (Comely), is sent as messenger to persuade her, and she sets him three impossible tasks – which, naturally, he accomplishes, with the help of animals whose lives he has saved in the course of his questing: a carp, who brings him a ring the princess has lost from the bottom of the sea; a crow, who helps him behead an ogre; and an owl who leads him through a dark, impenetrable grotto to find the water of eternal youth and beauty she has demanded. In the end, after a few of the usual setbacks and travails, the two lovers are united, and Beauty sets a crown of gold on Avenant’s head and makes him king at her side.

  Beauty with the Golden Hair is only one of the teeming population of blonde fairytale heroines. The etymology of the word ‘blond(e)’ is not known for certain, though it appears related to blandus, Latin for charming (as survives in ‘blandishment’), with later influence from Medieval Latin blundus and Old German blund, both meaning yellow. It enters French in the twelfth century, and is later used with affectionate diminutives for the young – and boys more than girls – as in blondin, blondinet. It appears in Chaucer as ‘blounde’, but then fades from view in English until the seventeenth century, when it was almost exclusively applied in the feminine, ‘blonde’; it still suggested sweetness, charm, youthfulness; only in the 1930s and 1940s, under the influence of Hollywood, did the word emerge as a noun, and acquire its hot, vampish overtones, based in the jaunty ironical reversals of meaning cultivated by popular media this century.

  The adjective’s double resonance – in French, Italian, German, Spanish – of beauty and light colouring corresponds to the English usage of ‘fair’ since the middle ages: the Old English meaning of beautiful, or pleasing, developed by the thirteenth century into ‘free from imperfections or blemish’ and by the sixteenth carried explicit connotations of ‘a light hue; clear in colour’.22 A ‘fair’ used to be a noun meaning a beauty, and indeed ‘La Belle aux cheveux d’or’ was translated in the eighteenth century as ‘The Fair with the Golden Hair’, thus revealing the association of fairies with fair ones. As we saw in Chapter Two, the root may be the same for the words ‘fay’ and ‘fair’, the Middle English ‘feyen’, and Anglo-Saxon ‘fegan’ which can mean to bind. Hair’s power can bind, as in spells and fate – and desire.23

  Blondeness and beauty have provided a conceptual rhyme in visual and literary imagery ever since the goddess of Love’s tresses were described as xanthe, golden, by Homer. The siren-like Whore of Babylon in the thirteenth-century Angers tapestry of the Apocalypse, for instance, looks at herself in Venus’ mirror and combs out her long fair tresses (Pl. 18); Botticelli’s Aphrodite rising from the sea wears nothing but her blonde hair; the planet Venus, in the sumptuous manuscript illuminations of a fifteenth-century treatise on astronomy, the De sphaera of the D’Este family, wears flowing golden hair down her back. Homer was not able to show the same enterprise in his epithets as shampoo and hair dye makers today, who have invented grades of blondeness from ash to honey to strawberry, and his translators overdetermined the text, rendering the same word xanthos as red-haired when it applies to Menelaus, a king, and golden-haired when used of a goddess or a beauty (Aphrodite, Helen). In Virgil, Dido’s hair is described as flavae, golden, but then, so are olive leaves. The vocabulary of colour in Greek and Latin does not register the range of sense perceptions; modern languages since continue to strain to denote nuance and shade as perceived by the eye and the brain. But, as Umberto Eco has pointed out, the perception of colour itself changes according to the surrounding culture and its needs: a sword can be fulva as jasper because the poet sees the red of blood it may spill.24 Some of the most precise and richest lexicons of colour developed among horse breeders and traders in order to describe their bloodstock: in Italy and Spain there were thirteen horse colours in use in the early middle ages, and in Byzantium eleven; more recently the Khirgiz of the Steppes use thirty different terms, while in central Russia sixty are in circulation.25

  Storytellers may have intended a shade or tint of blonde hair but it is unlikely; the colour fulfils a symbolic function, not a practical or descriptive purpose as in horse trading – though, as we shall see later, there is an element of horse trading in fairy tales, too. For fairness was a guarantee of quality. It was the imaginary opposite of ‘foul’, it connoted all that was pure, good, clean. Blondeness is less a descriptive term about hair pigmentation than a blazon in code, a piece of a value system that it is urgent to confront and analyse because its implications, in moral and social terms, are so dire and are still so unthinkingly embedded in the most ordinary, popular materials of the imagination. The Nazis’ Aryan fantasies were partly rooted in this ancient, enduring colour code which cast gods as golden boys and girls and outsiders as swarthy. A puppet film, made in 1935, two years after Hitler came to power, by the German Paul Dihe, told the familiar Grimm story about the boy who wanted to learn how to shudder; it followed his daredevilry as he sleeps under the gibbet, enters the spooky castle, defeats the demons and wins the princess.26 What looks like an ordinary children’s film about winning through turns out to be horrific when Hitler’s own relish for the cruelty of fairy tales is borne in mind. This short film tells a story that was favoured in the education of the Hitler Youth, because it inculcated fearlessness, imperviousness, manly violence; the Boy hero is tow-haired, his assailants hook-nosed, swarthy, hairy, dark, old. In the Grimms’ text, these monsters are great black cats and dogs, so the change to grotesque humans is significant, if not deliberate.

  Fairy tale and romance have carried this system of values in their bloodstream since Hellenistic times: in ‘Cupid and Psyche’, Venus sends Psyche down to the underworld to fetch her some of Persephone’s beauty cream; Psyche, afflicted as we have seen with all the conventional feminine faults, cannot resist opening the casket, whereupon a deep Stygian cloud rises out of the box and wraps her in sleep; in some interpretations this episode befouls her, turning her black – this functions, in the tale, as a sign of her lost beauty.27 In another of the Greek romances to influence the development of fairy tale, Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, the plot turns on a lost daughter, the child who was born fair-skinned to her royal Ethiopian parents after her mother during her conception contemplated a painting of the classical, blonde Andromeda. Much is made of the improbability of her belonging to them, until her unique birthmark is recognized and the right cradle tokens brought forth. This romance was translated into English in 1587 and was popular, so its values were circulated, however lamentably they may strike us today.28 In the fairy tale ‘Starlight’, where the heroine is magically changed into a Moor when a similar Stygian gloom descends, she fears that her beloved Izmir will no longer love her in this shape. But, as fairy tales also try and oppose prevailing prejudice, she is mistaken. Her prince finds her fascinating and lovable, and is disturbed only that he is being unfaithful to his true love in so doing.29

  Golden hair tumbles through the stories in impossible quantities. The Grimms’ Rapunzel lowers her long fair hair out of the high tower as a rope for her guardian witch to climb; Mélisande, in Maeterlinck and Debuss
y’s eerie opera, hangs it out of her window for Pelléas to wind around himself in ecstasy. The typical Cinderella of children’s literature has inherited, as the mark of her perfect loveliness, this characteristic of Venus. A musical version of around 1889 by Francis Davies, set in Merrie England, invokes Cinderella’s appearance:

  A maiden meek, and young, and fair;

  Her eyes were blue as flowers o’ lint,

  Her cheeks the roses’ bonniest tint,

  And streamed in golden waves her hair.30

  Cinderella’s hairstyle changes according to the fashion of the day – though her hair colour never does, or hardly ever. In 1966, a popular picture book imagined Cinders with the long fringe and bouffant height of Brigitte Bardot’s hairstyle.

  Among the heroines of fairy tale only Snow White is dark, because her story specifically opens with her mother’s wish, when she pricks her finger, looking out at the snow: ‘Would that I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the window-frame.’31 In some, more lyrical variations, she wishes for hair ‘the colour of a raven’s wing’. Recently, illustrators and animators have drawn back from the obligatory blondeness of the heroine (the Disney Belle in the recent Beauty and the Beast, discussed in Chapter Eighteen, is dark), but their attempts lever feebly against the long weight of the tradition. ‘If you desire to marry again after my death,’ says the mother in the Grimms’ ‘All-Fur’, ‘I’d like you to take someone who is as beautiful as I am, and who has golden hair like mine.’32 Goldilocks, whose name indicates her blondeness, began as an old woman, as we saw, turned into ‘Silver Locks’, and then settled down in the conventional fairytale heroic pattern. The legacy of the heroine is passed on in the coin of blonde hair; to generations of listeners and readers, it has naturally enciphered female beauty – inner as well as outer. In 1993, the actress Jane Asher designed a range of birthday cakes for children – the Sleeping Beauty lies on one, in a pink bed diapered with rose briars, her golden hair carefully piped to fall over the turned-down sheets.

  Disney’s Cinders too is blonde, her ugly sisters red-haired and dark respectively, while the wicked stepmother is raven-haired, or black as a crow. In their symbolism, Walt Disney and his artists were merely following tradition (Pl. 24). Judas was conventionally portrayed with a red beard; the word ‘ruffian’ in English and in Italian comes from the same root as ‘rufous’, meaning red-haired.33 In Tiepolo’s painting of the combat between Vice and Virtue, the goddess in the pure ether above has blonde hair; her enemy Vice below is a dark redhead; the polarity reproduces the conflict the same painter dramatized in Time Defacing Beauty, in which old Father Time carries off the goddess Venus – their enmity dialectically conveyed by lightness and darkness, which translates into the visual terms of fairskinned golden-haired whiteness and hirsute, dark-haired swarthiness.34, 35 The colour yellow, following red and orange in the spectrum, is freighted like them in Christian symbolism with the hot hues’ ambiguities, and it is telling that hair is almost never described as yellow in English or French or Italian or German; the category of blondeness demarcates the fair-haired human from the perilous and even devilish associations of yellow, carried for instance in the generic name for thrillers in Italy (gialli).36 (There are exceptions: W. B. Yeats’s poem says, Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone / And not your yellow hair.’ The ‘yellow’ here adds, however, to the acerbity of his tone.)

  Blondeness belongs within the richly layered symbolism of lightness rather than yellowness; Christian metaphysics of light contributed to a change in the associations of the Latin term fulvus – under the influence of ecstatic medieval conjurations of light, the embrace of gold sheds its classical kin of reds and yellows and cleaves closer to white; more distinct terms for both red and yellow begin to develop. This in turn tightens the identification of blondeness with heavenly effulgence, and heightens its value. It appears to reflect solar radiance, the totality of the spectrum, the flooding wholeness of light which Dante finds grows more and more dazzling as he rises in Paradise. In the twelfth century, liturgical spectacles relied on gold to dazzle the faithful: on the feast of Corpus Christi, the Body of the Saviour, in the form of a host (itself a solar disc), was emblazoned in monstrances shooting rays, carried in procession and then set up in a gold tabernacle. This psychology of excess and ostentation inspired the reaction of the Cistercians, and their great thinker, Bernard of Clairvaux, who sought to retreat into architectural severity and more modest rituals.37 Even he however recognized the power of dazzlement and allowed crusaders to wear gold or silver armour ‘when they enter battle, so that the sun may shine upon them and scatter the forces of the enemy with terror’.38 The symbolism remained untarnished by Cistercian strictures, carried on in verbal imagery. For Saint Bonaventure in the thirteenth century, color or splendor was one aspect of light’s threefold character (the others being lux, light as origin, and lumen, light travelling through space); though light was a substance, it could pass through glass, while color conveyed the light reflected by terrestrial bodies it struck, whose beauty was thereby made manifest. ‘Light was thus the principle of all beauty,’ writes Umberto Eco, ‘not only because it is delightful to the senses, but also because it is through light that all the variations in colour and luminosity, both in heaven and on earth, come into being.’39 The chronicler and man of letters Olivier de La Marche (d. 1502) marvelled at the beauty of sunlight playing in fair hair. Max Liithi, the scholar of folklore, adduces this effect of blonde hair as a vital aspect of beauty’s function in fairy tales: its capacity to awaken the senses also helps illuminate the truth – the accused queen’s innocence, the draggletailed skivvy’s goodness.

  Meteors were called comets after the Latin comes, hair, because watchers of the skies perceived golden flowing hair in the tail.40 After Berenice, Queen of Egypt in the third century BC, cut off a lock of her hair and offered it to Venus so that her husband should return safe from battle, it disappeared from the temple; whereupon the court astrologer discovered it in the sky, where it had been placed as a reward. He called the new constellation Comes Berenices, the hair of Berenice.

  Although blondeness’s most enduring associations are with beauty, with love and nubility, with erotic attraction, with value and fertility, its luminosity made it also the traditional colour of virgins’ hair. After the fifteenth century, the Virgin Mary herself, particularly under her apocalyptic aspect as the ‘Woman clothed with the sun’, is frequently depicted as a blonde, and not only in Northern countries, but in France and Italy as well, as for example in the Spinola Hours of around 1515 (Pl. 16). The visions of Saint Bridget of Sweden, who saw Mary as a woman of her own Northern climate, influenced representations of the Virgin after the fourteenth century (Pl. 17), but she was already described as blonde in the eleventh century. In a poem on Christ’s passion, for instance, the Virgin’s lament is introduced by a description that recalls the mourners of classical sarcophagi:

  Now his mother, wan with lament, approaching,

  her golden hair awry, strikes heaven with these words:

  O holy shoot of heaven, my only child …41

  Even Black Madonnas have golden hair, as in the cult statue of Montserrat in Spain, where the Byzantine original has been gilded under her wimple. The virgin saints and martyrs are represented blonde: Catherine, Agnes, Barbara. In her reliquary in Syracuse in Sicily, Saint Lucy, who tore out her eyes when a lover admired them and sent them to him saying her chosen, heavenly bridegroom had no need of eyes of the flesh, has hair cast in the metal gold while the rest of her is silver. The company of virgins in heaven, in the Spinola Hours, consists only of blondes, unless their hair is veiled. Blondeness is an index of the virgins’ youth as well as innocence, for many children are fair in infancy and grow darker with age. The company of male saints, on the facing page of the prayer book, are allowed different hair colours, on head and chin, in their segregated section of heaven.

  The tradition enfolds femininity,
and its conventional link with youth and beauty, as well as with privacy, modesty and an interior life in both senses – indoor pursuits and affective experience. For blonde hair implies pale skin, which in turn entails lack of exposure, again on a doubled level, either to the rays of the sun in outdoor work, or to the gaze of others. On Greek pots, for instance, the flesh tones of women are painted lighter than men’s – sometimes the goddesses will be rendered entirely white next to a god who keeps the burned earth colour of the vase itself.42 Cleopatra’s legendary baths of asses’ milk were intended to whiten her skin; the first recipe in Gianbattista Della Porta’s ‘How to Adorn Women, and make them Beautiful’, one of the sections in his compendium Natural Magick, proposes several complex recipes (honey, cummin, cabbage stalks amongst other ingredients) for bleaching hair and whitening the complexion.43

  The symbolic pressure bears down with a certain force: Joan of Arc’s hair colour for instance is not known, although for a long time it was thought that the single dark strand under a seal on one of her extant letters might have been from her head. But her haircut is famous: it was ‘cut round in the fashion of a boy’, as her accusers repeatedly charged her during her trial.44 The pressure of received ideas lies so powerfully on the imagination that illustrators of Joan’s story ignored the primary and well-disseminated historical evidence. In a manuscript illumination from the mid-fifteenth century, the Maid of France has not cut her hair, but wears it long, loosely coiled on her neck, and fair.45 In a printed strip version of her life, an image d’Epinal from 1894, printed for mass distribution to celebrate her new status as the Venerable Joan, she appears, in the last frame, at the stake. The phrase image d’Epinal has come to niean cliché in French – and in this image, quite properly, the cliché Joan of Arc has long wavy fair hair, like a medieval virgin martyr. The quality of the engraving means we cannot see the colour; though some stray tangerine colour around the incised lines suggests fair hair rather than dark. At the turn of the century, the French artist Maurice Boutet de Monvel created one of the most influential – and splendid – picture books for children, about Joan of Arc. He commented on his representation of the heroine: ‘[She] had such a tender breast, so much pity – I find in her so much of womanly grace in contrast with her decision in the hour of action – that I can see her only blonde. Side by side with the brutal soldier she appeared feeble and delicate.’46 Joan, in her sanctity and goodness, can only be blonde.