From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  Oppenheim was playing knowingly on this metonymy, substituting shoes for carnal knowledge. She was recognizing, with a certain mordancy, that the matched footwear leads to the true bride’s recognition and thence to her wedding. The imagery of an ill-fitting shoe for an unhappy union has a long history: the Wife of Bath, admitting she took merciless revenge on her philandering fourth husband, says, ‘in earth I was his purgatory … he sat full oft and sung,/ When that his shoe full bitterly him wrung’.35 Bruno Bettelheim analysed the symbolic substitutions in ‘Cinderella’, reading menstruation in the bleeding toes, the bleeding heels of the ugly sisters, and virginal prepubertal purity in the glass slipper. But the symbolism of footwear has also taken its place in the social language of ritual: in Judaism, for instance, when a man dies childless, and his widow does not wish to marry her husband’s brother, and vice versa, thus going against the prescription of Levirate marriage, he may ‘undo her shoe’, that is, take off rather than put one on, in order to dissolve the bond and be free to marry elsewhere.36

  In Ma Gouvernante, Oppenheim, through the symbolism of a pair of shoes, proposed an acerbic gloss on the preconditions the fairytale bride has to fulfil; she began to reverse the terms of value, to reject the groomed beauty (the golden blonde) for the dishevelled beast she recognized and affirmed inside herself.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Silence of the Daughters: The Little Mermaid

  ‘The Wonder of Wonders’: ‘a Mermaid, that was seen and spoke with, on the Black Rock nigh Liverpool, by John Robinson, Mariner, who was tossed on the Ocean for six Days and Nights.’ (Chapbook, eighteenth century.)

  I was in one hour an ashen crone

  A fair-faced man, a fresh girl,

  Floated on foam, flew with birds,

  Under the wave dived, dead among fish,

  And walked upon land a living soul.1

  Old English riddle

  GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH, in his History of the Kings of Britain, written around 1136, tells a familiar folk tale, known as ‘Love Like Salt’: an old and widowed king calls his three daughters to him and asks them how much they love him. The two older girls protest their undying love; they will love him till China and Africa meet, they will prize him as riches above pearls, above rubies, they will be true till the stars fall down, till salmon jump in the street. But the youngest, when it is her turn to speak, merely says she loves her father as meat loves salt. He feels himself slighted by this answer. It is an enigma, and he does not yet love wisely enough to divine its meaning; his daughter is testing him with her wisdom, she is acting like a riddling figure of cryptic truth, a kind of Zen master who sets a koan and waits three-score years for the slow-witted acolyte to catch up and grasp it.

  The daughter will not say anything more, she will not explain her mysterious simile, and the purblind king lets fly at her, casting her from him, disowning her altogether. He does not understand that the great passions can lock the tongue, that some thoughts lie too deep for words. Then, many years later, when he has himself been beggared by his elder children’s treachery, and is wandering, alone, he chances upon a wedding feast; he goes in and sits down at the table. The bride notices him, and recognizes her father; he does not see that it is the daughter he lost. She gives an order to the servants: to serve all the food without salt. It arrives, and the guests taste it and push it aside; one by one they put down their cutlery and refuse to eat, crying out in disgust that the meat has no flavour. Then the old king realizes the meaning of his daughter’s image of long ago, and he begins to cry.2

  The folk tale has a happy ending, unlike the tragedy of King Lear, which opens with the famous scene when Lear asks Cordelia how much she loves him. Her sisters have been effusive, but Cordelia, his youngest and most dear, does not answer her father’s question. Lear presses her; he orders her to declare her love and allegiance to him:

  ‘Now, our joy,

  Although our last and least …

  Speak.’

  And she answers, ‘Nothing, my lord.’

  He echoes, ‘Nothing?’

  And she repeats herself, again saying, ‘Nothing.’

  Lear retorts, ‘Nothing will come of nothing.’

  Some actors speak this as raillery, disbelieving, almost chaffing; other Lears rage already.

  When Cordelia does begin to speak, she cannot talk of her love for her father before she has placed herself in relation to utterance itself:

  Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart

  Into my mouth: I love your Majesty

  According to my bond; nor more nor less.

  Lear urges her again, and she continues:

  Why have my sisters husbands, if they say

  They love you all? Happily, when I shall wed,

  That lord whose hands must take my plight shall carry

  Half my love with him, half my care and duty.

  Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,

  To love my father all.

  With this eloquently measured dose of filial love, Cordelia refuses the empty show put on by her sisters, and the external trappings of loyalty Lear mistakes for truth; but she also formulates, with steady wisdom, the law of exogamy which qualifies the relationship of father and daughter and puts a term to its duration. But Lear does not accept it; he explodes, strips Cordelia of her birthright, banishes her, and forswears her. Later in the tragedy, amid all the fooling, the snatches of song, the babble of madness both real and feigned, and all the word-spill around Lear’s disintegration, the figure of silent Cordelia haunts the king’s memory, a figure of staunchness, love and truth.

  Lear was produced the same year as Pericles (1608), and the troubling question of incestuous love and loss hangs over both plays.3 Cordelia’s refusal to defend her speech is shocking, enigmatic, and the audience fears for her. But when Lear sentences her, he says, ‘Let truth be thy dower …’, acknowledging, for all the irony of his bequest, that in her taciturnity she has retained a special lien on truthfulness. He too knows the ambiguities of silence – its latent virtue. As Shakespeare expresses it: ‘The silence often of pure innocence / Persuades, when speaking fails.’ Cordelia indeed shines out of Shakespeare’s heroines as a pattern of womanly, and heroic, grace and devotion, of trueness of heart and unflinching goodness. Lear is reconciled to her, and at the end, when he finds her hanged, he keens over her body, saying,

  Her voice was ever soft,

  Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.

  The epitaph to Cordelia’s perfections returns to the issue of her speech: what had been dumb insolence turns out to have been model honesty as well as modesty.4 Cordelia stands at the opposite pole of the garrulous old woman, the gossip; but simultaneously she represents the tale itself, operating according to the first convention of wonder, that it never offers an explanation, a rationale for the events and passions it recounts.

  In The Theme of Three Caskets of 1912, Freud commented on the relationship between Cordelia and Cinderella:

  Cordelia makes herself unrecognizable, inconspicuous like lead (the lowest of metals), she remains dumb, she loves and is silent. Cinderella hides so that she cannot be found. We may perhaps be allowed to equate concealment and dumbness …5

  Freud goes on to identify Cordelia/Cinderella with the Goddess of Death, herself disguised in the form of the goddess of love and beauty, and he concludes the short paper movingly with the words:

  It is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death, will take him into her arms.6

  We do not have to follow Freud that far in his identification with the figures of great and tragic old men, Lear and Oedipus, and perceive Anna Freud, his devoted daughter, in the role of his Cordelia and Antigone; we do not have to accept that Love and Beauty personified by a young girl shield the Goddess of Death, mortality itself; if we return to the cycle of stories from the point of view of the female protagonist, we can inte
rpret the death of which Freud speaks metaphorically, and take it as the closure of a certain period in her life, her death to the past of her childhood. The child can protest that she loves her father all; but the wise young woman who has become aware of her eligibility and stands on the threshold of marriage knows that her bond to her father has limits; that husbands or lovers will take a measure of the love that in innocence she might have once given to her father.

  In wordlessness lies sincerity; as a mute subject, Cordelia speaks from the heart, as even her name suggests. Words are lies – Hamlet, too, curses their fraudulence; he hears speech as ‘promise-crammed’ and knows it to be insubstantial as air; imagery is a counterfeit fabric deployed to deceive. This paradox of language torments Shakespeare’s protagonists; it has long been a Neoplatonist conundrum, a snag in the fabric of literature itself, and one that continues to halt the hand of contemporary poets. Derek Walcott, for instance, yearns for ‘a wide page without metaphors’, a space of truth blank like the sea, in the very midst of a book-length poem, Omeros, itself of necessity a tissue of metaphors.7

  Shakespeare folded into the single figure of Cordelia in the opening scene several paragons of folklore who prove their virtue by their silence. This type of paragon in popular narrative seems to have begun as a boy, but since the middle ages, and in fairy tale and folklore today, the type is almost always a woman: sacrificial dumbness does not appear to be any longer as praiseworthy in a man or boy, and indeed the proverbial dummling of folklore, the simpleton, is not dumb, in the English sense of mute.8

  Unlike King Lear, the folk tale ‘Love Like Salt’ ends happily, with the survival of the reconciled father and his daughter. The motif of absence works both ways in this folk tale: the heroine does not trick out her sentiments with false words, but lacking salt, the ingredient that denotes integrity (‘the salt of the earth’), aboriginal and unadulterated authenticity, love can have no flavour. Silence is not entirely absence, but another kind of presence; the trace of salt tastes not of itself, but enhances the life of another organism, of other matter. Cordelia’s lack of words generates truth, as will be borne out in the course of the tragedy, in a way that outpourings like Goneril’s and Regan’s mask it. But is it that ideal area of truthfulness, the page beyond metaphors? Or does even silence, and in particular the silence of Cordelia and her sisters in muteness, whirr and hum? Do history and morals and values and prejudices interrupt the silence – ‘interrupt’ hardly being the mot juste – do they rather make up the silence? Is there something scrawled even on the page beyond metaphors, something ringing in the blankness of the heroine’s true speech?

  Cordelia protests her innocence before she leaves the stage; in this Shakespeare dramatizes her more realistically, less emblematically than her counterparts in folklore with whom he was familiar: the accused queens like Constance from Chaucer’s ‘Man of Lawe’s Tale’ or Patient Griselda, who bear with the false accusations and vicious punishments of their lords and masters uncomplainingly. Part of Donkeyskin’s plight after her father’s assault becomes silence: in her disfigurement, she never speaks again, in her own defence or to any other purpose, except to herself, in private. Before her transmutation and flight, she enunciated her horror of the proposed marriage, she made her three wishes for the magic dresses, and finally, demanded the donkeyskin itself. Once she has put it on, she becomes mute, and in her muteness, her fate recalls many other fairytale heroines who were defended by the stories told about them while they were scorned and degraded within them. The heroine who suffers wrongs in silence and is eventually triumphantly vindicated appears in two of the Grimm Brothers’ tales, ‘Die Zwölf Brüder’ (The Twelve Brothers), and ‘Die Sechs Schwäne’ (The Six Swans); she figures in Hans Christian Andersen’s version of the same tale, ‘The Wild Swans’, and in numerous later retellings from all over Europe and further afield.9

  In this fairy tale a girl child is born, and all her brothers – there are usually several of them – are immediately cursed: they either die or are turned into birds (right). When their sister discovers the horror her birth has brought about, she agrees to all manner of ordeals to restore them to life in human shape. The evil genius of the story, usually a wicked witch or other wardress, sets her sadistic tasks – spinning nettles with her bare hands to make them shirts and similar tortures – but one of the conditions of her brothers’ redemption is always silence. She must not weep or laugh or speak until she has finished the appointed labour or her brothers will remain swans or ducks or dead or whatever for ever. At this point in the story, her beauty attracts a roaming king or prince who marries her in spite of her silence; the story then merges with the cycle of Cinderellas and Accused Queens, and the heroine becomes the victim of her mother-in-law, or other evil stepmother figure, who switches her newborn babies for whelps or worse monsters and brands her as a witch. The story often ends at the stake, with the heroine, still silent, spinning or knitting the last of the shirts for her brothers as the flames leap up, or the executioner prepares to toss her into the boiling oil, and the sound of wingbeats breaks over the scene, the brothers descend to save their sister, she throws her completed shirts over them – and they turn back into men. In the nick of time. She regains her voice, and, laughing and weeping, proclaims her innocence. Only one brother retains the wing of a bird, for she did not complete the last sleeve of the last shirt in time.

  This rapid recension merges several different versions, but by and large this was the story which, when I was a child, was one of my favourites. Sometimes the woman at the centre of the story is the transformed men’s mother, not their sister, and sometimes she does not escape the vindictiveness of the evil female nemesis; the latter usually receives great emphasis.10 But it still seemed to me to tell a story of female heroism, generosity, staunchness; I had no brothers, but I fantasized, at night, as I waited to go to sleep, that I had, perhaps even as many tall and handsome youths as the girl in the story, and that I would do something magnificent for them that would make them realize I was one of them, as it were, their equal in courage and determination and grace. Sewing was a skill my mother possessed – as did the nuns who taught the more nimble pupils at my school invisible mending – so it was easy to identify with the descriptions of the heroine’s fingers as she spun the nettles or the thistles or the flax, whatever cruel stuff the witch insisted she used to weave for her brothers’ shirts. Women’s capacity for love and action tragically exceeded the permitted boundaries of their lives – this self-immolatory heroism was one of the few chivalrous enterprises open to them.11

  ‘The Twelve Brothers’, in the Grimms’ Kinder-und Hausmärchen, was taken down by them from the sisters Julia and Charlotte Ramus, friends in Kassel; the tale of ‘The Six Swans’, which resembles ‘The Twelve Brothers’ in many ways, was passed on to the Grimms by Dortchen Wild. Many of the tales the brothers collected were transcribed in the Low German of the vernacular. Such a dialect – now almost died out – belongs intrinsically to precise locales and domestic milieux; it is a language of private life, of women and children – and of men, too, in their homes – of people when they are living and working together in the economic unit of the family. Though the Grimms – Wilhelm especially – selected, edited, combined and buffed the published tales, it is not farfetched still to catch from the stories the female voices of one generation raised to instruct the next, stressing different qualities for boys and girls.

  ‘Hardly had she plucked the flowers when her brothers were turned into twelve ravens …’ The youngest child, the little sister, who causes such disaster to fall on her brothers, proves her love through a vow of silence. (H. J. Ford, ‘The Twelve Brothers’, in Andrew Lang, The Red Fairy Book, London, 1890.)

  The proper housewife from the propaganda prints of the Reformation who wears a padlock on her lips still hovers in the tales as the model heroine. But the ideal was not restricted to German fairytale circles. Mme de Beaumont had earlier included in one of her collections for young peopl
e a story about a wife (‘de basse condition’ – of the lower orders) who was continually beaten by her husband. She goes to find help from a neighbour, reputed locally to be a wise woman, maybe even a witch. The old woman listens, and gives her a remedy: a jug of water, which she puts on the table and makes three turns around, and then sprinkles with salt. When her husband comes home, she must take a swallow, keep the water in her mouth. ‘As long as you’ve got it in your mouth,’ she says, ‘I promise you that your husband will not beat you.’12 At the end of eight days, when she has not been beaten and the jug is empty, the wife goes back to the witch, for she is now convinced that she has marvellous powers, and the old woman tells her that the water was just plain water, and that all she need do, if her husband comes home drunk and raging, is not to heap reproaches on him, but to keep quiet, as if she had water in her mouth. And you will see, his anger will pass.’13 The story ends with the reform of the husband: the implication being that her bitter tongue had spurred him on in his bad habits.

  Ruth Bottigheimer, in her study of the Grimms’ fairy tales, Bad Girls and Bold Boys, has analysed the speech patterns of female heroines and villains, and found that, as the editing progressed, virtue spoke up less and less, while villainy became more loquacious, with the witches and wicked stepmothers far surpassing other women in articulacy.14 The equation of silence with virtue, of forbearance with femininity, does not only hold up an entrancing ideal of loving self-abnegation, harmony and wisdom; as transmitted in fairy tales told to children, the ideal also meets certain particular socio-cultural requirements of family equilibrium in the climate of early nineteenth-century Germany which persist as desiderata. It is a paradox frequently encountered in any account of women’s education that the very women who pass on the legacy are transgressing against the burden of its lessons as they do so; that they are flouting, in the act of speaking and teaching, the strictures against female authority they impart: women narrators, extolling the magic silence of the heroic sister in ‘The Twelve Brothers’, are speaking themselves, breaking the silence, telling a story.