From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  The cruel dealings of masters and mistresses in the tales possibly encrypt known procedures of authority at different stages in history; the bleeding fingers of the heroine at her endless task would not jar for instance on the ears of an audience of textile workers in the Huguenot community of Hesse, of which Kassel was the capital. Similarly, the patience and perseverance of the heroine under the injunction to silence acquires a different patina when one thinks oneself into the circumstances in which disadvantaged workers were struggling for their livelihood. Silence could be a stratagem of survival for women; men in fairy tales are often cheeky and cunning and high-spirited (women are too, sometimes), but keeping your head well down – Payin’ low and sayin’ nuffin’ as the English motto goes – has been an immemorial survival technique of the groundlings – of the powerless. As the Irish graffito puts it: ‘Whatever you say, say nothing.’15 The silence of the heroine presents as heroic a common, defeatist response which the audience listening to such a tale would perhaps recognize as one of the few paths open to them. With the essential heroic optimism of fairy tale as a genre, the story snatches victory from the jaws of defeat, eloquent vindication from the sentence of silence, triumph from the degradation of voicelessness.

  Mutiny can be conveyed in silence: the military crime of dumb insolence. The journey fairy tales and other stories have taken, from confidential gossipings around women’s beds or in their work rooms to the open circulation of the printed book, has in itself breached the secrecy of some of the contents.16 The private injunctions, the sotto voce warnings, the intimate exchange of experience have been brought into full public view. In one sense, and one sense only, the mutism of fairytale heroines indeed forms a defensive strategy. ‘A proverb,’ wrote Walter Benjamin, ‘… is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening like ivy around a wall.’17 Discretion as the better part of valour stands on the ruins of tales about the powerless paradoxically grasping that speechlessness can be their only strong line of defence. When he is not jesting, the Fool puts his finger to his lips.18

  But this very speechlessness can also intersect with the desires of the more powerful; the desirability of silence, or at least reticence, and of women’s silence in particular, lies enmeshed in a web of other ideal criteria held up for the sex, as was discussed earlier.19 It is even possible that an additional, buried reason for the vanishing mothers of fairy tale is that perfection in a woman entails exemplary silence and self-effacement – to the point of actually disappearing out of the text.20

  The more loquacious a (female) character in popular culture, the more likely she is to be up to no good. Curiosity was a characteristic Plutarch lambasted in the Moralia, immediately following his diatribe against Garrulity; he recommended the example of Pythagoras, who had taken a vow of silence for five years.21 These ancient moral and philosophical arguments have had a hard time dying.22 Sometimes, a contemporary story will reverse received values, with conscious irony, as in the fine film, based on the life of Anja Rosmus, significantly called The Nasty Girl, about a schoolchild in post-war Germany who will not be quiet until she has found out what went on in her calm and perfect home town Passau during the Nazi period.23 This bad girl, like Red Riding Hood, like Goldilocks, is impelled by curiosity to enter forbidden territory; but her trespass is not reproved by the narrative, though it was fiercely opposed – and she was punished – by characters in the story who wanted to keep silent and wanted her to follow their example. In refusing, she flouted deep strictures on female behaviour.24

  II

  The beautiful and virtuous sister saves her brothers by her toil and sacrifice; the Little Mermaid, in the famous fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, saves her beloved prince from death by drowning, and then, yearning to acquire an immortal soul like a human and win his love as one of his own kind, maybe even his equal, she exchanges her siren’s voice for human form.25 In ‘The Twelve Brothers’ and its analogous tales, the offering of silence redeems another – or several others – from the zoomorphic enchantment which binds them, as in tales of Beauty and the Beast. In ‘The Little Mermaid’, the diabolical bargain requires that the heroine lose her tongue for ever in return for human shape and life on earth. Andersen elaborated his disturbing story in 1836–7, from varied strands of oral and written tales in Eastern as well as Western tradition, about undines and selkies, nixies, Loreleis and Mélusines, in which the fairy creature appears on earth and stays with a mortal as his bride only on certain conditions.26 The story of ‘Julnar the Sea-born’ in The Arabian Nights opens with the motif of the mysterious silent bride who comes from the sea; La Motte Fouqué’s earlier German fairy story ‘Undine’ (1811) – in which a man loses his heart to a mermaid – also partly inspired Maurice Maeterlinck’s poetic drama Pelléas and Mélisande to which Debussy wrote the music in his opera, begun in 1893.27 A few years later, Jaroslav Kvapil wrote the libretto for Dvorak’s powerful, lyrical opera Rusalka (1901), which also tragically unfolds the cost of silence: the selkie, Rusalka, loses the love of her prince to the human princess who can speak (and sing).28 When he becomes bored with her, and rejects her, the conditions of the bargain she made begin inexorably to work: she becomes outcast from both earth and water, and can survive only if she kills her beloved. She refuses; when he comes to find her again, he insists on a kiss, which deals him his death wound. Rusalka’s beauty is fatal, in the tradition of opera; Mélisande, her predecessor in the Debussy, is found by water and will not speak of her enigmatic origin or past, and throughout her mysterious short life she is connected with wells, pools and watery depths around the gloomy moated castle of her husband Golaud. Both continue to refract legends of the siren’s fatal attraction through the prism of Symbolist and decadent worship of Woman.29 But like one of her story’s sources, the medieval legend of Mélusine, the Little Mermaid is a fairy queen, an enchantress who lives in a magical elsewhere (in her case under the sea, in the Sibyl’s or Venus’s case inside the mountain) whence she beckons to her lovers to enter her paradise.

  ‘She came now to a big, slimy clearing in the forest, where big, fat water-snakes romped about and showed their nasty, whitish-yellow bellies … There sat the sea-witch and let a toad eat out of her mouth, just the way humans let a little canary eat sugar.’ (J. Leech, in Hans Christian Andersen, ‘The Little Mermaid’, London, 1846.)

  Andersen’s powerful, morbid tale helped establish his fame – in 1913, the city of Copenhagen commissioned the bronze statue that has become the Danish national monument.30 But his telling it specifically for children changes its character, intensifying its moral preachiness about feminine love and duty, self-sacrifice and expiation. The very first illustration done, by J. Leech, for the English translation of 1846, showed the mermaid’s visit to the Sea Witch (above). Andersen relates the episode with the affectless, matter-of-fact tone that has come to seem a hallmark of the children’s fairy tale. The Little Mermaid has asked the Sea Witch to help her:

  ‘But then you must pay me too!’ said the witch, ‘and it is no small price I ask. You have the loveliest voice of all down here at the bottom of the sea, and you think you will be able to enchant him with it all right, but your voice is just what you have to give me … Come, stick out your little tongue so that I can cut if off for my payment, and then you shall have my powerful potion!’31

  Sister to Philomel, and to Lavinia from Titus Andronicus, and to other raped and mutilated figures of myth and tragedy, the silenced mermaid of Hans Andersen instantly became an approved and much-loved nursery character.32 In the Andersen version, her transformation into a human girl brings her explicit pain: the witch tells her: ‘your tail will part and shrink into what humans call nice legs but it will hurt just as if a sharp sword were passing through you … every step you take will be like treading on a knife sharp enough to cause your blood to flow’.33 When she dallies with the prince later, her new feet bleed; some of his attendants notice, but he does not, and she does not complai
n, of course, not even in sign language. At the end, the mermaid’s sisters cut off their magically beautiful hair to give to the Sea Witch in return for a sword which, when used to kill the prince, will restore the Little Mermaid to her original form and to safety in the sea once again. But she refuses to turn against him, and instead throws herself, her heart breaking, into the ‘deadly cold sea foam’ and dissolves into air.

  Andersen’s story brings quick tears, but not in any pleasurable way, as it seems to gloat on the morbid outcome. The story’s chilling message is that cutting out your tongue is still not enough. To be saved, more is required: self-obliteration, dissolution. Unlike Philomel, who metamorphoses into a nightingale, so that out of dumbness may come forth strength and sweetness, the Little Mermaid sacrifices her song to no avail – except for the story which keeps faith with her memory. Her siren song condenses all inherited belief in women’s sexual powers; the Little Mermaid surrenders them when she becomes bifurcated and bleeds, as if, once the innocence of childhood has passed, that very sexuality turns against its possessor and makes the young woman herself a victim. David Pountney’s imaginative, intense production of Rusalka for the English National Opera (1983) insisted on this underlying story with piercing contrasts of dazzling white and blood-red in the costumes and décor.34 Neither in Rusalka nor in Andersen can reconciliation be achieved, contrary to the characteristic upbeat conclusion of the fairy tale. The mermaid’s seductiveness remains under interdiction; the only redemption death through self-sacrifice.

  Homer calls the sirens’ song ‘liquid’ and says that anyone who listens to them will be lost, so Circe gives Odysseus practical advice, and he makes his men stop up their ears with wax so that they cannot hear them. He has himself tied to the mast, and when he signals, frowning, that he wants to be unbound so that he can join the sirens, his deaf men cannot hear his pleas and go on rowing.35 The end the sirens bring is not identified as fatal pleasure in Homer, though in Christian Europe the passage has been read with these (sexual) overtones. The content of the song is knowledge, the threefold wisdom possessed by beings who are not subject to time: knowledge of the past, of the present, and of the future.36 Cicero stressed this, introducing the sirens into his argument that the human mind naturally thirsts after knowledge. ‘It was the passion for learning,’ he strives to persuade his audience, ‘that kept men rooted to sirens’ rocky shores.’37 He then went on to give a free verse translation of the Homeric episode into Latin. From their flowery meadow by the sea the sirens sing to Odysseus: ‘We have foreknowledge of all that is going to happen on this fruitful earth.’ It is for this the hero struggles to join them, not for their personal charms. Yet, however promising that sounds, it means that they can give warning of disaster, too, and their meadow is strewn with the mouldering remains of their prey. Cicero, in the transmission of sirens’ mythology, failed to prevail over the more popular, Christian folklore portraying them as femmes fatales.

  The names of the sirens in different traditions are often connected to speech in some way – this is the era before writing was common practice. Aglaophonos (Lovely Voice), Ligeia (Shrill), Molpe (Music), Thelxepeia (Spellbinding Words), Thelxiope (Enchanting Face), implying lullabies and scoldings and confidences and persuasion, a taxonomy of oral rhetoric which must indeed have drawn the hero of the Odyssey, himself no slouch at wordsmithery.38 And, as voices, Homer’s irresistible sirens are bird-bodied, as are enchanted musicians of one kind or another the world over since, until sonic devices could record the conversations of dolphin, birdsong was nature’s only voiced chorus.39 But they live by the sea and lure sailors; they are amphibious, and have birds’ claws as well as wings, and women’s faces with two feathers for a diadem on their brows. Hybrid between worlds in more ways than one, they ceaselessly seek connection, turning their faces and their calls outwards, to bring others to them. Like the enchantress who lures knights into her grotto, they beckon. Some say they have ‘hungry’, even ‘starving’ faces as they wait for their prey, but this may have passed from folklore about Harpies.40 They can no longer fly, however, because the Muses stole their pinions for their own crowns. But this must be a later legend, as on a famous Greek pot in the British Museum the sirens appear plummeting and swimming around Odysseus’ galley, like ospreys after fish (above). Sometimes they stand like court musicians called in to sing and play at a nobleman’s banquet.41

  Sirens as songbirds tempt Odysseus, tied to the mast: ‘Draw near, ‘they sang, ‘illustrious Odysseus …No seaman ever sailed in his black ship past this spot without listening to the sweet tones that flow from our lips, and none that listened has not been delighted and gone on a wiser man. ‘(Attic red-figured jar, Vulci, c. 480 BC.)

  Ovid tells the story that the sirens in their former incarnation were Persephone’s friends, so distressed when she was abducted that they prayed to be given wings to search for her over the seas, and were granted their wish by the gods, finding golden plumage growing all over their bodies except their faces.42 In the form of bird-women, they are often confused with the Harpies, through their bird-like hybridity and their association, on funerary monuments, with the rituals of death. But this is a mistake. The sirens carried mortals to the underworld, the place where all is indeed known, though by then nothing can be done about it, and knowledge has become futile, even bitter. Surviving vessels and carvings show enigmatically smiling women with stiff braided hair bearing the souls of the dead in their feathered arms in the form of small human beings; they sometimes carry the corpse on their backs, where it can seem an Icarus bound to a flying machine, giant classical hang-glider, or they clasp the tiny bodies tenderly to their plump pigeon breasts, and row with their wings upwards. In one embrace, the siren appears to be steadying the inertly dangling legs of the dead mortal (a woman, too) with her bird claws. There is no suggestion in such artefacts that this classical order of angels seize the dead like prey, in the way of the filthy, vindictive, greedy and foul monsters of the storm in the Iliad, whose name, Harpy, means snatcher.43 Such sculptures of the sirens’ role suggest that death is but a sleep, and the deceased pillow themselves languidly on their aerial psychopomps in their voyage to the beyond – Hypnos, in Homer, brother of Thanatos, and winged, too, like the sirens. Later sarcophagi from Magna Graecia from the third century BC show the souls of the dead similarly clinging to the sirens who are ferrying them across the river dividing the earth from the Isles of the Blessed – the journey to the other side is no flight, but a watery passage.44

  But the sirens above all possess ‘utmost music’, these web-footed, hybrid women were mouthpieces for others’ stories.45 The dead pleaded with the sirens, their companions on the other side, to sing for them:

  My gravestones, and sirens, and you, pain-bringing urn

  that holds the paltry ashes which belong to Hades,

  Give greeting to those who pass beside my mound,

  Whether they are native or of another city …

  Tell them, I went into the tomb a bride …46

  So said the verses written by Erinna in memory of Baucis in the late fourth century BC: a poem which imagines the farewell of a girl who died young. Speaking in her voice, the poem invokes the keepers of her memory: the funerary monuments themselves and their allies in this task, the mythic birds who can negotiate the passage between the land of the living and the land of the dead. That passage is enduring knowledge, the memory of storytelling. In the poem, the sirens, as vocal muses of death, replicate the medium of the epitaph and the poem itself. The sirens are to speak for the dead girl, and this is of course what Erinna the poet is herself doing. The Muses robbed the sirens of their wing tips in the later legend because they are sister spirits, both of them voices caught by the ear and internalized by the poet who has heard them.

  The Greeks were ambivalent about the sirens’ song because they both feared and valued ‘things that come into the mind’. As Ruth Padel writes:

  Innards can be damaged by what comes in through sight and he
aring, wounded by emotion. But ‘what comes in’ also stimulates, and gives innards skill and power.47 The innards’ vulnerability is precious, and makes them a source of power and knowledge. ‘What comes in’ moves them.

  Passion and poetry: bane and boon. The anxiety about word-music and its lure – the fear of seductive speech – changes character and temper down the centuries, but the sirens’ reputation does not improve. Their connection with carnal danger, with moral breakdown, with potent fictions, with bewitchment, deepens, and, under the influence of the rich Northern mythology about undines and selkies, mermaids and sea-nymphs, they shed their relation to wisdom and retained only their oneness with sex and death – though knowledge of these is a form of wisdom. ‘You who are living think about it now,’ warns one from the wall of a house in Saint Rémy. ‘Is your end going to be heaven, or hell without end?’48

  The middle ages still remembered the sirens’ bird-likeness: the Hortus deliciarum follows the imagery on Greek vases when it depicts Odysseus’ boat attacked by birds like sea eagles. In Christian interpretations, the encounter became an allegory of the soul’s struggle with vice – a Psychomachia.49