From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  Likewise, Lady Jane Grey, who was queen for ten days in 1553, was writing to Mary Queen of Scots that her hair had fallen out in prison; at her execution, she was nearly bald. Her story follows a martyr’s pattern: harshly treated at home, then married to a man against her will to promote the interests of the male members of his family and her own, she was finally killed. Concomitantly, in the refashioning of her story, she grows the long blonde hair of the ideal heroine – as in the nineteenth-century pompier Paul Delaroche’s maudlin icon of her beheading, now in London.47 The imagination works history to its grain; fairy tales could hardly be spared its improving drift. Even Snow White undergoes a change: in a garden of the village of Sauzet in the Quercy, France, a set of gnomes has been repainted by their owner, and Snow White’s raven hair turned blonde.

  Punished with baldness, Blonda learns to forgo caprices and is rewarded by the return of her thick, long, golden hair. (Image d’Epinal, France, reprinted Kansas City, c. 1900.)

  CHAPTER 22

  From the Beast to the Blonde: The Language of Hair II

  Crack the glass of her virginity; and make the rest malleable.

  Pericles, IV, vi

  SOMETHING MOMENTOUS WOULD have taken place, it would be clear – that there had been a revolution – if a presenter on Iran television pulled the kerchief from her head and showed her hair to us, or if one of the mullahs, by the same token, unravelled his turban, shaved his beard, and appeared in a silvery brush top, à la Clinton. Joan of Arc died for cutting her hair like a boy’s, among other things. The charges of witchcraft were dropped as they could not be proven, but her heretical cross-dressing and close-cropping were there for all to see, and she refused to renounce them. Frida Kahlo in her paintings presents her irreducible identity through protean selves, adorned as well as despoiled: when her husband Diego Rivera left her, she cropped her hair, put on his suit, tie, spread her legs in a sitting posture, and made a self-portrait with the clippings strewn around her, looking uncannily snaky. As in an inscription on a Catholic ex-voto, giving thanks for a miracle cure, or a wish granted, she impersonated his voice with bitter irony, writing over a musical stave as if to a popular song: ‘Look, if I loved you, it was for your hair. Now that you are bald, I don’t love you any more.’1

  The language of the self would be stripped of one of its richest resources without hair: and like language, or the faculty of laughter, or the use of tools, the dressing of hair in itself constitutes a mark of the human. In the quest for identity, both personal and in its larger relation to society, hair can help.2 The body reveals to us through hair the passage of time and the fluctuating claims of gender; strangers offer us a conspicuous glossary of clues in the way they do the hair on their head, for in societies all over the world, callings are declared through hairy signs: the monk’s tonsure, the ringlets of the Hassidic scholar, the GI’s crewcut, the sansculotte’s freeflowing mane, the flowerchild’s tangled curls, the veil.3, 4

  Hairstyles continually perform a drama about the beastly and the human selves present within each individual, and mark off degrees of identification and repudiation in a form of animal mimicry. Our capillary arts borrow and build on the physiology of hair, which we humans share with other creatures of fur and fleece. The affective behaviour of our pelt inspires dramatic variations: the stiff spikes of punk styles imitate the bristling of aggression, and reproduce literally the hair-raising thrills of terror, both given and received: these are hackles, raised in emphasis. Peroxide blondes, like Marilyn Monroe in her winsome dumb babyish act, recall the fluffy down of some children’s heads, or baby chicks, or ducklings. The conflict between this pretence at innocence and knowing sexiness creates the special effect of the Hollywood blonde, the woman in the picture, the motive in the plot. Madonna provokes one of her perverse frissons by simultaneously mimicking the blonde bombshells of Hollywood in all their rampant, in your face sexuality, and at the same time singing from the position of a little girl, who is still only on the verge of womanhood, with the pale golden hair of childhood in glaring contradiction to the emphasized thighs, breasts, crotch.

  Blonde hair shares with gold certain mythopoeic properties: gold does not tarnish, it can be beaten and hammered, annealed and spun and still will not diminish or fade; its brightness survives time, burial, and the forces of decay, as does hair, more than any other part or residue of the flesh. It is hair’s imperviousness as a natural substance that yields the deeper symbolic meanings and warrants the high place hair plays in the motif repertory of fairy tales and other legends. For although it is one of the most sensitive registers of temperature, and a single human strand is used in museum hygrometers in order to measure humidity for the purposes of conservation, hair does not register pain, except at the roots.5 It can be cut and curled, sizzled with hot tongs, steeped in chemicals and dyes without apparent suffering, and will go on growing, even abundantly in some cases, and is not even stopped by death. This phenomenon, noted in the case of great heroes like Charlemagne (d. 814) and Saint Olav, King of Norway (d. 1030), stimulated the cult that grew up round their tombs.6

  Such quasi-magical properties make it a symbol of invulnerability, and have helped to nourish the rich mythology of hair as power, as in the stories of Samson, and also, as we have seen, in ‘Bluebeard’ to a lesser degree.7 Above all, its imperishability must count as the intrinsic and material quality of hair that most inspires its symbolic meanings. Hair is organic, but less subject to corruption than all our organs; like a fossil, like a shell, it lasts. (We know the colouring of some pharaohs, of their queens and – even – their slaves.) In spite of its fragility, lightness, even insubstantiality, hair is the part of our flesh nearest in kind to a carapace. Its mythic power, its centrality to body language, and its multiplicity of meanings, derive from this dual character: on the one hand, hair is both the sign of the animal in the human, and all that means in terms of our tradition of associating the beast with the bestial, nature and the natural with the inferior and reprehensible aspects of humanity; on the other hand, hair is also the least fleshly production of the flesh. In its suspended corruptibility, it seems to transcend the mortal condition, to be in full possession of the principle of vitality itself.

  As such, hair is central to magic; clippings have long been effective in curses and love charms alike. In Britain, the Devil could be kept at bay by offerings of pubic hair, because he has no power to straighten it.8 In some fairy tales, plucking hairs from the Devil’s head gives power over him.9 Hair partakes of the body and transmits that body’s special powers: Dindraine, in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, has vowed herself to a life of chastity. Only she can weave a girdle strong enough for Galahad to use to wear the sword of Solomon: from her hair she makes a belt for his blade. Together in chastity, both their sexual energies converted into an invincible holy syzygy.

  Like a fetish, hair can be used to represent loss: it has been used the world over in rituals of fertility and of mourning. The Greeks cut locks or tufts to throw them on the funeral pyre; hair relics of Charles I after his beheading were set in rings by the disconsolate, and among the Trobriand islanders, a widow in full mourning wears a necklace of balls woven from her husband’s hair, while her own head is shaven and braided into a gorget.10 Knotted in bracelets and lockets, it also pledges indissoluble love: La Fontaine mentions a gage of a bracelet of hair, the Victorians set their dear ones’ hair into lockets and rings and exchanged them as tokens of eternal plighting, and as recently as in the Western The Outlaw Josey Wales, Clint Eastwood’s girl, the loving young daughter of pilgrims from Kansas, gives him a watchchain she has woven from her hair to bind him to her – it is indeed fay, and proves effective.11 These ornaments possess the power of the uncanny: neither dead nor alive, they make the beholder’s flesh creep, like the human remains incorporated into sorcerers’ wands, or the straggling locks still adhering to the shrunken heads of the Jivaro Indians’ enemies.

  The variety of profane, ritual uses to which hair has been
put possibly helped ban it from the catalogue of Christian relics. For although every kind of remnant of the Virgin, Jesus and the saints was venerated, the colour of Mary’s or Jesus’ hair has not been demonstrated by firsthand evidence.12

  Characteristically, though, the hair in Victorian tokens and memento moris was braided or coiled or otherwise set to rights. In hairdressing, whether on the scalp or off it, dishevelment is always at issue, and the magic of hair seems more closely directed, controlled and contained when the hair is groomed than when it is unkempt (wild). Liberty characteristically wears her hair loose, Order pins it up. In Mendocino, in northern California, an anonymous sculptor carved from a redwood trunk a remarkable work of folk art, representing a variation on the theme of Death and the Maiden. Father Time does not seize the modest young woman to rape her or otherwise snatch her away, in the style of Hans Baldung Grien or Holbein, but instead stands calmly behind her, braiding her hair, like a good father sending his young daughter off to school. Here, hair stands for the flow of life, and plaiting it stands for the delimitations imposed on the human course by the hand of time.

  Maidenhair can symbolize maidenhead – and its loss too, and the flux of sexual energy that this releases, as we know from fairy tales, like Persinette/Rapunzel who pulls her lover up her hair into her tower (right). There is a German proverb, ‘A woman’s hair pulls stronger than a bell rope’, or, ‘A woman’s hair is stronger than a hempen rope’, and in the story, in the punning manner of dreams, Rapunzel enacts this belief literally. Similar cascades of golden hair dominate illustrations of fairy tales from the late nineteenth century onwards, tumbling in unselfconscious, golden superabundance from the heads of hundreds of exemplary Victorian heroines. One of the inspirations of the Dada movement’s name was a hair cologne from Zurich, which showed on the label a young girl with a luxuriant mane of golden waves that stirs in the breeze as she holds up a bottle of the magic stuff called Dada; it guarantees just such crowning glory – to men as well as to women, no doubt (right).13

  II

  The astrological sign Virgo also appears blonde; as the symbol for August to September, she is connected with the season of harvesting in the Mediterranean, where the first representations of her as a young woman occur.14 Comparative iconography can help to decipher the obsessive persistence of this sign of value; by comparing the traditional virgin martyr and the fairytale heroine with the sign Virgo, some clues emerge to develop the meaning of this dominant motif in the representation of valuable feminine gender.

  Artists frequently create a correspondence between the maiden’s hair and the corn she carries, emblematic of the chief star in the constellation, Spica (Wheatear).15 In a manuscript of the influential Arabic astronomical treatise by Abu Masar, finished before 1403, the plaited shape of the wheatear echoes the braids around her head; in a later, richly gilded illumination from a northern French book of hours of the early sixteenth century, the same gold pigment has been used for the wheat on the threshing floor as for the hair and aureole of Virgo behind them – the artist’s brush moved from one to the other without hesitation in applying the precious paint to those three different elements in the image (Pl. 19). The abundance and ripeness of her hair promises fertility: she is Virgo in the pagan sense of nubile, eligible, and young (‘almah, as the girls were called in the harem of King Solomon in the Bible), rather than immaculate and impregnably celibate, like the virgin goddess Athena. The sun, source of light, has ripened the gold of her body into goodness. At the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, the sign Virgo may have been assimilated to Proserpina, goddess of spring, in the humanist circle of the court of the d’Este, and again, her tumbling golden hair flickers with vitality like the unruly wheatsheaf in her hand (Pl. 15).16

  Rapunzel is enclosed in a high tower, but she lets down her hair – literally – to find a way out and a new life; in Zurich, the Dadaists’s name picked up a local echo of the fin-de-siècle adoration of hair. (H. J. Ford, in Andrew Lang, The Red Fairy Book, London, 1890 LEFT; ABOVE Dada, hair lotion advertisement, Zurich, c. 1917.)

  In a manual on the care of horses, the star sign of the Virgin can be seen in the centre, ruling over the belly, or site of the womb. (Bonifacio di Calabria, Libro de la Menescalcia, Venice, 1400–15.)

  In astrological microcosmic schemae, Scorpio rules over the genitals; Libra over the lower abdomen, and intestinal functions; and Virgo over the upper abdominal region, where the organs of gestation were believed to lie. The early medieval treatise on the zodiac shows the star signs linked to the areas of the body which they influence. Virgo is attached, almost by an umbilical cord, to the figure’s navel, the last vestige of the mother on every human body. Even a fifteenth-century manuscript on the care of horses shows the signs arranged in their spheres of influence on a horse’s body: the sequence from genitals to womb runs Scorpio, Libra, Virgo (left). The famous astrological microcosmic man of Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, painted at the beginning of the fifteenth century, disposes the signs in similar fashion, with Virgo emblazoned in the centre of his body. The male gender of the youth himself can distract us from the connection clearly made by the sign between parturition and virginity. The Limbourg Brothers’ Virgo, as shown in the miniature in the margin, could be a female virgin martyr, with her long blonde hair, and her palm fronds of glory.

  The sight of uncovered hair at this period and later in Western Europe signifies innocence on the one hand, youth and its promise. Eligibility follows closely from these qualities in a woman: the blonde maiden promises herself. The Dance of Death in Simon Vostre’s Book of Hours, defines the departed women’s station in life by their demeanour and their dress, but above all by the styling and concealment of their hair, as noted in Chapter Three. Only the bride – la espouse – at the top, who wears a garland of flowers, la fille pucelle, or virgin girl, and la jeune fille, the young girl, at the bottom of the ladder of life, have their heads uncovered and their hair loose (right).17

  Typologically, the maidenhair of Virgo and young unmarried girls corresponds to vegetation. Hair is to the body as flowers and other growth are to the earth. In a peculiar group of fairy tales, hair and good fortune are dramatically connected in a magic way, as we saw. George Peele’s The Old Wives’ Tale, with its cantrip rhymes, dramatizes the harvest of golden sheaves and precious jewels that fall from the hair of the three heads in the well. Mme de Villeneuve, in one of her fairy stories, described how the bad sister grew stinking weeds and rushes on her head ever after her refusal to do as the heads asked.18 Italo Calvino collected a variation on the story in which the sister who was kind to an old woman finds that, whenever she combs her own hair, roses and jasmine pour down one side, pearls and rubies down the other. You shall be beautiful,’ says the old woman. Your hair shall be golden …’ She returns home rich, with a star on her forehead. The wicked sister rushes off to seek a similar fortune, but treats the old woman roughly; she grows a donkeytail on her forehead, and whenever she cuts it it grows longer.19

  Maidenhair is loose and long and promises plenty: ‘La fille pucelle’ (The virgin girl) shows her state in the fashion and abundance of her hair. (Paris, 1508.)

  The reward matches the favour asked: when it is a drink of water, the visitor from the other world grants a boon to the mouth of her or his benefactor, or a curse, the diamonds and toads. When the kindness consists of combing and grooming, as the peasants performed on one another at Montaillou, and as we see in Dutch seventeenth-century paintings of mothers delousing their children’s hair, the benefit falls from the same place.20, 21

  In stories like ‘Three Heads in a Well’, hair’s connotation with luxuriance and fertility becomes material wealth, literal gold and jewels and riches. Fertility used to be considered a treasure of great price, valuable to society as its future prosperity, valuable to the family too. Blondeness, a particular manifestation of hair, with its much noticed sensuous association with wholesome sunshine, with the light rather than the dark, evoked untarnishable
and enduring gold; all hair promised growth, golden hair promised riches.22 The fairytale heroine’s riches, her goodness and her fertility, her foison, are symbolized by her hair.

  In both Basile and Perrault, the moment of epiphany occurs when she abandons her animal disguise and is seen combing her hair. Basile specifies her trezze d’oro, her golden tresses. In Perrault, Donkeyskin has been summoned by the prince. The court is ready to scoff at the mere sight of her, but then she appears: the ladies of the court are instead roused to joyful marvelling by

  …ses aimables cheveux blonds

  Mêlés de diamants dont la vive lumière

  En faisait autant de rayons …

  [Her lovely blonde hair intermingled with diamonds, whose lively light turned it into a sunburst of rays.]23

  Perrault uses the adjective ‘blond’ in only one other place in the same tale, embedded in a similar vision of dazzling light: when he is describing the magic donkey. In an exact reflection of the sight of Donkeyskin shooting rays of light from the gems mingled in with her golden hair, he describes the magic donkey’s stall each morning: