From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  il ne faisait jamais d’ordure

  mais bien beaux Ecus au soleil

  Et Louis de toute manière,

  qu’on allait recueillir sur la blonde litière

  Tous les matins à son reveil.

  [He never made manure, but only very beautiful golden Sun coins and Louis of all kinds, which were gathered from his blond litter every morning when he awoke.]24

  In the engraving illustrating the appearance of the restored Peau d’Ane in Le Cabinet des fées, her breasts are bare, her hair loose, to emphasize her unsullied promise of plenty.

  Perrault’s version discloses the value of the heroine: her status as the repository and security of her father’s wealth. Her golden hair reveals to the prince that she is not the beast – the she-bear – or the slatternly donkey everyone knows and despises; she becomes available to him as a bride, she sheds her animal lowness to become his equal. When she marries him, she consigns her worth to his care: as we saw in Chapter Twenty, she takes her father’s fortune with her, in the form of the asshide that used to excrete his fortune every morning, and she makes it over to the prince she marries. Ideas of eligibility and female fertility and women’s worth are once more entangled together. Her blonde hair becomes the symbol of her status as treasure, safely transferred from the control of one paternal household to another, marital home. Perrault was taking the side of his friends, the précieuses who wanted control of their own fortunes, legacies, dowries. But the story reads differently in a context where that issue is no longer pressing. The literary fairy tale reinterpreted Christian ascetic teaching about young women’s rights to withhold their fertility, and reformulated the chivalrous ideal of emotional and erotic fulfilment with a partner of their choice. The old battles now look like materialist ambition and romantic naivety; the passing years have blunted the radicalism of Perrault and his friends among the women writers who were attempting to redraw the map of tenderness to give themselves a stake in it, materially as well as emotionally.

  In the case of the virgin martyrs, their choice of bridegroom also sets a seal of approval on their conduct: they have kept their treasure safe for another reaper. Virginity literally cannot scatter paternal wealth, but locks it up. The iconography of the sign Virgo also enfolds this social, and earthly, meaning: for Virgo presides over the threshing of the corn, the process that gathers up the useful part of the harvest, as can be seen in any number of illuminations, like the Book of Hours painted by the Master of Guillebert de Metz in Flanders around 1450–60. This particular aspect of virginity, nuanced towards production, positioned with regard for the harvester rather than the tiller, lies concealed within the immediate erotic appeal of the virgin’s bridal blondeness. In another, French manuscript, of 1480–85, the imagery remains constant; however, here the Zodiac sign of Virgo stands, like a saint, with the bound sheaves on either side of her. They are standing to dry in the fields before being threshed. Like the corn that will feed human beings, she promises fruit, nourishment and wealth. Her purity guarantees that the riches will not be scattered.

  The bridal connotations of blonde hair persist, and in surprising places. Bakers tend to offer wedding cakes with exclusively fair brides to this day – in Los Angeles, for instance, where the population is mainly dark, a leading catalogue of wholesale cake ornaments offered, in 1988, page after page after page of blondes. In this the wedding confectioners were conforming to an ancient canon of beauty and the conventions of bridal iconography, which has carried into fairy tale. Only one page, called ‘Ethnic’, represented the brides and grooms as dark-haired and dark-skinned.

  The banishment from the contemporary Angeleno wedding cake of the dark-haired bride corresponds to certain historical forgettings we also find in folklore and hagiography – disjunctions between experience and symbol, the breeding ground of ignorance and bigotry. In Joan of Arc’s familiar story, several attested historical features – her rebellion against her parents, her attempted suicide and, as we have seen, her short boy’s hair – are usually omitted, and she is presented instead as an exemplary female saint, devout daughter, unshaken believer; in this, her historiography corresponds to the loss of certain topoi in the ‘Donkeyskin’ cycle of folk tales, like the father’s incestuous desire. When such stories are aimed at a reading rather than a listening public, and angled at children especially, they no longer seem suitable material, and undergo alteration in order to edify and instruct and elevate. Historical circumstances, Joan’s dark colouring, Lady Jane Grey’s griefstricken baldness, are lost in the retellings.

  Two current fairy tales offer eloquent illustration of the changes in the genre. Goldilocks, as we saw in Chapter Ten, begins life in print as an old woman: the antic behaviour of the old is reproved and the young audience trained that decorum and caste must be observed. However, the child called ‘Silver-Hair’ and eventually Goldilocks enters the tale and takes the old woman’s place to drive home without question the specific lesson against curiosity in little girls. To deserve her name, this blonde beauty should be good. Similarly, the cautionary tale of ‘Blonda’, another image d’Epinal from the turn of the century, reprinted as an American strip cartoon in the 1900s, illustrates the moral enterprise of the fairy tale, conveyed again through the symbol of a potentially good (blonde) child (here). Set in a medieval countryside, with a shift to a sixteenth-century palace, ‘Blonda’ draws on the illusory authenticity of a fictive past; and by creating a heroine who belongs to fairy tale and to pious literature, the story is intended to provide a lesson for its contemporary youthful audience.

  Blonda’s fairy godmother, whose name is Caprice, grants the beautiful young girl every wish, but warns her that for each one she will lose a hair of her head. Blonda is wicked, and asks only for riches and vanities, luxuries and follies, till she hasn’t a single hair left. Then she repents, and begins to do good. Her hair grows back, one strand at a time. She works hard at home, at household tasks. The medieval cauldron, a must in the life of a Cinderella, makes its appearance with Blonda scouring it. At last, she regains her lost glory; one day, when she takes off her cap, she sees that her hair has grown as heavy and long and blonde as it was before. So she marries a nice boy and grows up in wisdom and kindness with her children around her: a naughty beauty who has learned into whose keeping she should consign her golden hair.

  The literary fairy tale mixed hagiography with romance to pioneer a new heroine, a proto-romantic champion of the truth of the imagination and the holiness of the heart’s affections. But this kind of tale, which D’Aulnoy and L’Héritier perfected in the late seventeenth century, no longer issued any kind of challenge to the established code of femininity in the nineteenth-century nursery. By forgetting that fairy tales interact with social circumstances, we miss seeing how the copybook blonde princess becomes instead a stick with which to beat young women, as in ‘Blonda’. The conventions of fairy tale, including the shining beauty and goodness of the heroine, become clichés, used by moralists to enforce discipline (and appearance) on growing girls. Good behaviour earns a reward: beauty, sex appeal, the very desirability the stories used to dramatize as so painful and problematic. In Blonda’s baldness, we find the derogatory equivalent of Cinderella’s rags, Donkeyskin’s hide, the she-bear’s animal metamorphosis, Rashin Coatie’s coat of grass. Blonda regains her loveliness only by giving up Caprice. In this nineteenth-century version of a type of ancient story, the heroine is crowned with the outward sign of her return to obedience, the garland of her newfound conformity: the blonde hair of the goddess of love.

  III

  Blondeness as a trophy has been worn with knowing mockery, since the 1920s, while the hairiness of the Beast has exercised greater and greater appeal, not only as the alluring opposite (as in Chapter Eighteen) but as the alter ego of the female subject. The Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (b. 1917) returns again and again to the theme in her perverse and comic fairy tales of the late 1930s and early 1940s; her contemporary, the artist
Meret Oppenheim, was also possessed by hairy motifs in fairy tales from the German tradition to make her own feline assaults on convention.

  Carrington was writing her tales chiefly between the ages of seventeen and twenty from the midst of a circle of writers and artists in France centred on André Breton and Max Ernst, and she responded to their Surrealist dreams of young women – femmes enfants – as the innocent, and therefore pure, mediums of erotic power.25 She voices the movement’s dream of sexual freedom for men and women, intertwining the macabre English nursery-rhyme tradition with avant-garde transgressiveness in a sequence of replies – retorts – both written and painted, which challenge the male Surrealist idea of women’s place.

  Max Ernst’s collage novels of the 1920s and early 1930s folded together the matter-of-fact tone of the German fairy tale with the florid style of penny catechisms and other improving literature. In La Femme 100 Têtes (The Hundred Headed Woman) of 1929, he gleefully adopts the Lustucru emblem that the best woman is all body, no head, and consequently tongueless; in Une Petite Fille rêve d’entrer au Carmel (A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil) a year later, he took the motif of a nun’s sacrifice of her hair, and made clever mischief of its erotic undertones: the pope calls to little Marie-Madeleine, ‘Baldness lies in wait for you, my child!’ The Holy Father needs her hair, he beseeches her, for his own sumptuous, yet invisible, adornment.26 She protests, she begs him not to touch her hair, but he insists: ‘Dearly beloved child, heaven is covetous of your hair.’ One of the most resolved formal images of the novel then follows, showing the hair of the heroine sailing away, ‘majestueusement’. Throughout the work, Ernst plays on the analogies of hair with water, with flux, with turmoil and erotic outpouring. When, later, the lost hair addresses the little girl, he uses the phrases of the wolf from ‘Red Riding Hood’, embodying the threat – the delicious, pleasurable threat – of being engulfed. The artist was also mocking, with brilliant economy, the preceding generation’s obsession with female hair, with tentacular, suffocating, prehensile locks of the femmes fatales of Gustav Klimt, or Aubrey Beardsley, or Edvard Munch.

  The third of these profane fables in pictures, Une Semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness), followed in 1934, three years before Leonora Carrington and Ernst met. It adopts with glee penny-dreadful commonplaces of women mauled, ravaged and possessed by various winged and monstrous hybrid beasts, finding in misogynist excess a potent weapon against bourgeois decorum (above). Ernst drew on steel engravings from lurid serials and stuck them together with cut-out scientific illustrations in imitation of the savage couplings and violence of the Victorian serial.

  Surrealism satirized at the same time as relishing the lurid fantasies of popular illustrated narrative. Leonora Carrington RIGHT with a mermaid at St Martin d’Ardèche, c. 1937–8, explored animal metaphors in her writing and art, identifying strongly with a range of hybrid beasts; LEFT Max Ernst, ‘Le Lion de Belfort’, in A Week of Kindness, 1934, where he dramatized erotic dreams.

  Carrington’s tales respond in kind, but take the monstrous figures for her own purposes, and conjure equally fierce, hostile matings of her feral heroines and their lovers. In ‘As they rode along the edge …’, the heroine, Virginia Fur, lives in a forest and travels at the head of a procession of a hundred cats, riding on a wheel. She has a huge mane and ‘enormous hands with dirty nails’, and ‘one couldn’t really be altogether sure that she was a human being. Her smell alone threw doubt on it – a mixture of spices and game, the stables, fur and grasses.’ Virginia makes love tempestuously with Igname, a boar, after he has presented himself to her in apparel worthy of a wooer: ‘a wig of squirrels’ tails and fruit hung around Igname’s ears, pierced for the occasion by two little pikes he had found dead on the lakeshore. His hoofs were dyed red by the blood of a rabbit … He hid his russet buttocks (he did not want to show all his beauty at one go).’27

  In this world of the imaginary the conventional hierarchy of values is turned upside down in a spirit of rebellion: the animal (hairy) world is seen as wild, sensual and free and is valued higher than the world of civilized, indoor humanity. Unbridled sexuality itself becomes a mark of liberty – setting aside the consequences for the women themselves.

  Significantly, the Carrington heroine’s beast friends and partners are not always male: in the most famous of her macabre, witty tales, ‘The Débutante’, the Beast is a she-hyena, with whom the heroine makes friends at the zoo. Something of an alter ego, the hyena goes to the heroine’s coming-out ball in her stead after eating her maid in order to borrow her face (the only bit left of her) and take her clothes.28 The Beast within is a good beast, but he isn’t only male; he can live within Beauty too. In a self-portrait, painted around the same time, she shows herself with a tousled mane of black hair, attended by two animal familiars – a hyena leaking milk from her swollen dugs, and a white horse leaping out of the window of her room behind her.29 The wildness and freedom of horses made them the creatures she identified with most closely, but she also returned to their bridling, taming, and even killing: her novel Little Francis describes how the heroine, abandoned by her lover, metamorphoses into a young horse – a colt – whose head is cut off in a solemn public ritual; Carrington also painted herself as a horse.30

  Leonora Carrington’s stories throw important light on the development of the beast symbol in the literature of women, for women. Generally speaking, her beast represents the inner dynamic of desire, creativity, self-expression inside her heroines’ spirits, which is so often crushed by conventional forces. In ‘The Oval Lady’, a story later dramatized for the stage as well as interpreted on canvas, Lucretia’s father rages against her love of Tartarus, a rocking horse that comes alive, and eventually storms up to her nursery and strangles him.31 This force within, in the manner of post-Freudian optimism, is erotic in character: in the wake of early utopian revolutionaries, the Surrealists believed that the liberation of sexual energy would lead to wider freedom and fulfilment.

  Meret Oppenheim was born in 1913 in Berlin, the daughter of a doctor who practised in Zurich and attended sessions at the Jung Institute in nearby Kusnach.32 He influenced his daughter to record her inner fantasies, waking and sleeping, in journals – a habit she kept most of her life; her grandmother wrote and illustrated a folk tale which is a children’s classic in Switzerland.33 Thus Meret Oppenheim was raised in the German folklore tradition on the one hand and in the Jungian field of dream symbolism and archetype on the other; later, in Paris, she became part of the Surrealist circle and friends with Carrington and Ernst, amongst others. Her work reveals a richly imaginative use of the fabulous, continually questioning the relation of humanity and nature, of the cultivated and the wild, the tame and the savage, the tranquil and the violent. Some of her quick, nervous drawings of the 1930s also introduce herself in the persona of a child spectator, who confronts the horrific without flinching, as in a tiny, disturbing esquisse, One Person Watching Another Dying.

  In 1935 she began consciously identifying with the protagonist of the story ‘Genoveva’. Geneviève or Genoveva is the virtuous queen of a jealous king, who casts her out and orders a huntsman to kill her. He takes pity on her, and she lives on in the forest, in the wilds, and there bears the king a child, whom she calls Schmerzereich (Kingdom of Pain). At length, the king discovers her again, while out hunting one day, recognizes her true worth and takes her, and his son and heir, back again. Meret Oppenheim made a series of works inspired by the story, including a laconic poem, which opens, ‘At Last! Freedom!’ In it she describes how, after the birth of the baby, Genoveva swaddles him in her hair, since in her forest state that is all she has to clothe herself and her child.34

  Meret Oppenheim’s Le Déjeuner en fourrure (The Fur Luncheon) of 1937 has become, rightly, one of the most celebrated objects of the Surrealist movement. The teacup and saucer and spoon of Chinese antelope hide wittily combine erotic innuendo, the outrageous and bristling inversions dear to Surrealist humour, and a deadpan
comment on polite society’s manners. It makes visible, with quite remarkable economy, the problematic presence of the wild in the civilized, the place of the animal in society, and the containment and ordering of female sexuality. It was not her first work to draw on the power of animal hair to unsettle and invite and amuse: her Project for Sandals of the preceding year consisted of a high-heeled shoe with a furry foot and toes; she also designed a pair of gloves, a highly comic, tingling, slightly sinister evocation of a bear or werewolf’s paws, like the costume of Native American shamans. These fashion accessories, conceived in high spirits, act as a reminder, in a spirit of mischievous fairytale humour, of the Beast within.

  But Oppenheim even surpassed her own achievement with the fur pieces in her most brilliantly achieved challenge to the conventions of fairy tale: Ma Gouvernante, My Nurse, Mein Kindermädchen of 1936 (Pl. 25). It too, like the Fur Luncheon, makes a tight visual pun on the twin themes of sex and food, but it also suggests another theme, through the connections of its title with its materials. For the sculpture shows a pair of white high-heeled shoes trussed on a dish, like a chicken, with butcher’s frills on the heels. The shoes were purloined – to her fury – from Max Ernst’s wife, Marie-Berthe Aurenche, and it is not impossible that Oppenheim was burying a protest at the thraldom Ernst exercised over his women. But the title directs the viewer in another direction. Ma Gouvernante, My Nurse, Mein Kindermädchen invokes the voices of the different women – governesses and nannies – who had told Meret stories when she was a little girl, maybe in three languages. These stories pointed to the future that lay in store for her: they prepared her to be a young woman, they introduced her to the idea of being handed over to the Beast, to that Other and his appetite. Hence the combination of the title with the bridal white shoes, which trussed and dished up offer another image of the female body apt to be consumed. Oppenheim was creating the piece in a spirit of revolt against the bourgeois expectations of her class and her time, and she saw in the white wedding a metaphor of virgin flesh surrendered, as in the dénouement of fairy tales in which the heroine escapes one kind of sexual ordeal for another, finds her way out of the woods into the kitchen and the bedroom. But she also rang a consummately witty change on the bridal hope chest with its warning images, using the recurrent fairytale image of the shoe.