From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  In 1819, the French inventor Cagniard de la Tour called an instrument which emitted sweet high sounds at a measurable frequency a sirène, and his invention was adapted half a century later to ships’ foghorns and mineworkings. The name ‘siren’ stuck and passed into usage for machines which warn by giving voice to the presence of danger.50 The usage follows the implications of the classical story of the sirens’ fatefulness, but reverses it: in Homer, the sirens lure hapless sailors on to the rocks with their song, whereas the sirens of the modern world call out in order to save ships, miners, passing cars and pedestrians from peril. The baying of police cars, the wail of air-raid warnings, the lowing of buoys, the frenzied tolling of fire engines, the screech of the vehicles winking and lapping at the scene of an accident do not make liquid music in quite the way Odysseus heard. But they do signal the dangers of an ordinary life: ‘Sirens … tell them, I went into the tomb a bride ….’

  III

  The Homeric fantasy that the siren brings death finds echoes in Andersen’s morbid reversal at the end of ‘The Little Mermaid’ when the heroine dies; to defeat death by sexual surrender, he himself deals death to the principle of desire. The marvellous kindles appetites – to know, to live, to experience – but that very principle of wonder, which drives the story, is crushed by its outcome. The recent film of the fairy tale, produced by the Walt Disney Corporation, has entered the ranks – alongside other Disney classics like Snow White and, now, Beauty and the Beast – of the most popular films ever made for children. The writer-directors John Musker and Ron Clements adapted the story to suit present sensibilities – giving the story a last-minute happy ending, above all. The issue of female desire dominates the film, and may account for its tremendous popularity among little girls: the verb ‘want’ falls from the lips of Ariel, the Little Mermaid, more often than any other – until her tongue is cut out.

  The Sea Witch, much the most successful creation of the film in graphic terms, expresses the shadow side of this desiring, rampant lust; an undulating, obese octopus, with a raddled bar-queen face out of Toulouse-Lautrec and torso and tentacles sheathed in black velvet, she is a cartoon Queen of the Night, avid and unrestrained, what the English poet Ted Hughes might call ‘a uterus on the loose’.51 Marine forms, like octopus and polyps, have prompted fantasies of female genitalia, as we saw in the case of the double-tailed siren on the Otranto pavement. Freud made explicit the association with Medusa’s tentacular hair (Méduse is French for jellyfish), as the poet Paul Valéry made clear in a magnificent and ferocious passage of prose-poetry written in the 1930s. Inspired by seeing a film of jellyfish, Valéry conjures a pneumatic, invertebrate, fluid world (not unlike the plastic ideal of the Disney studio):

  Point de solides, nonplus, dans leurs corps de cristal élastique, point d’os, point d’articulations, de liaisons invariables, de segments que l’on puisse compter…

  Jamais danseuse humaine, femme échauffée, ivre de mouvement, du poison de ses forces excédées, de la présence ardente de regards chargés de désir, n’exprima l’offrande impérieuse du sexe, l’appel mimique du besoin de prostitution, comme cette grande Méduse, qui, par saccades ondulatoires de son flot de jupes festonnées, qu’elle trousse et retrousse avec une étrange et impudique insistance, se transforme en songe d’Eros; et tout à coup, rejetant tous ses falbalas vibratiles, ses robes de lèvres découpées, se renverse et s’expose, furieusement ouverte.

  [No solids, either, in their bodies of crystalline elastic, no bones, no joints, or unchanging attachments, or segments which can be counted …

  No human dancer, no woman overheated and drunken with motion, with the toxic charge of her overextended energies, with the burning proximity of looks loaded with desire, ever conveyed so imperiously the offering of her sex, that beckoning pantomine of compulsive prostitution, as this great jellyfish who, by undulating shakes of her train of ruffled skirts, which she tosses up and tosses up again with strange and shameless insistence, transforms herself into a dream of Eros and suddenly, throwing aside all her vibrating petticoats, her dress of cut-out lips, turns herself upside down and exposes herself, terribly open.]52

  In the Andersen tale, the Sea Witch, an ancient bawd in direct line of Charite’s or Juliet’s nurse, bequeaths mature human sexuality on the young mermaid (dividing her legs) in return for her voice. In the Disney cartoon, she then imprisons the siren’s lovely voice in a shell around her neck, and uses it to enthral the prince and usurp the Little Mermaid’s place as his bride. It is voice, in the last analysis, that is more powerful than beauty – or even goodness. Only when the shell shatters and the Little Mermaid’s voice is spirited back into her throat does she prevail and win – in this version – human shape and the love of the prince.

  The sugary, luscious graphics of the animation, especially where the heroine is concerned, spoil the humour and high spirits of the Disney film as a whole, but the altered structure of the tale, doubtless produced after hours of script discussion and audience research, offers an illuminating angle of vision on current attitudes to gender. The seductiveness of women’s tongues still seems a paramount issue in the exercise of their sexuality; directing its force, containing its magic, is still very much to the point. Female eloquence, the siren’s song, is not presented as fatal any longer, unless it rises in the wrong place and is aimed at the wrong target. Romance constitutes the ultimate redemption, and romantic love, personified by the prince, the justification of desire. The Little Mermaid, in the film, defies her father the God of the Sea to follow the dictates of her heart; like Cordelia, this modern paragon of the animated film speaks of her bond – but whereas Cordelia halved her love and duty between her father and her husband, the modern mermaid, like Madonna in the song ‘Pappa, don’t preach’, teaches her father to listen to her desire: to love her man. This is the contemporary audience desire encapsulated; the message the circle of listeners wanted to hear. Like Belle, the Disney Little Mermaid Ariel is a fairytale heroine of our time. She now comes as a kind of Sindy doll, with various costumes: calypso ruffles as well as the more regulation shiny aqua sheath. She has red hair down to well below her fishtail; this compelling fetish of today’s toybox can be groomed and dressed – comb and mirror are provided.

  Beyond this mermaid’s call of love, however, rings of silence keep spreading out, whirring. The muteness of fairytale protagonists exists in relation to the circumstances in which they are told; there is always a meaning, a lesson. Sometimes the narrative contradicts tales of heroic mutism, or tragic self-immolation in dumbness, and they break the silence. In the tale of Sir Gawain’s marriage to the Loathly Lady, the most inspiring medieval Beauty and the Beast story, in which the sexes are reversed, the woman who has been bound by a spell cannot speak the truth of her state, and must wait for a true knight to release her – as Gawain does when he marries her and learns her secret, that she must be a loathly monster either by day or by night. She puts a riddle to him – she is another princess trapped in a riddle – and he answers it correctly, and breaks the spell, finding in his arms the most beautiful creature that there ever was. What she asks is the same question a baffled Freud would put, later: ‘What is it women really want?’ The knight says: ‘Sovereignty’.53

  Contemporary women writers have been attracted by the figure of the silent heroine who has not been enchanted, or taken a vow of silence, but just does not know how to speak or to laugh or to cry. Angela Carter picked up the ancient motif in The Magic Toyshop, in which the lovely Aunt Margaret, wife of the maleficent toyshop owner, is choked by a silver collar her husband has fastened round her neck; the plot obeys the fairytale function of dispelling silence, of releasing the laughter of hope and pleasure.54 When the puppet master’s powers are broken, Aunt Margaret is able to take off the silver choker and speak and sing again. In Jane Campion’s recent film The Piano, her romantic heroine Ada is mute; she is also unresponsive, taut with restrictions and unexpressed anger; the film contains multi-layered references to fairy
tales, and this must be a consciously adopted motif. ‘Bluebeard’ is much quoted in the course of the story, and Ada’s husband even chops off one of her fingers, mutilating her in jealous rage like so many frustrated and desiring patriarchs in the traditional tales.

  The film’s grandiloquent first scene shows Ada sheltering on a stormy beach under a makeshift tent made of her elaborate boned and beribboned stays and petticoats. Beside her, and her small daughter, the piano stands on the beach, a weighty symbol of her inner voice. She tells us, ‘The strange thing is I don’t think myself silent, that is, because of my piano.’55 From this extraordinary and atmospheric start, Campion establishes her twin motifs of repression, and rebellion: Ada resists and overcomes her constricted fate by her refusal to acquiesce, symbolized by her muteness. It makes no difference to her prospective husband that she cannot speak. She tells us he has written to her that God loves dumb creatures, so why not he!56 He has mistaken her for the Good Wife of Lustucru’s smithy, who cannot answer back. Her dumbness, even while marking out her singularity, represents her strangulated, muted, diminished state. Ada communicates through the music she makes; but the piano also embodies, like the underwear, the encumbrances of Victorian femininity. This is the voice Ada is allowed – a parlour skill (and parlour comes from parler, to speak). In the film’s dream-like climax, she slips her foot into the noose of the rope attached to the piano, as it is being shipped, and is dragged overboard and underwater and nearly drowned: she nearly hugs her prison cell to her, as it were, but finds the energy to release herself at the very last moment. In the happy ending she is living with her lover, and tells us, ‘I am learning to speak.’57

  The elemental union between the mute heroine and the watery wastes which first give birth to her, as it were, when she appears on the pounded beach, and which almost reclaim her, places The Piano – consciously or unconsciously on Campion’s part – within the body of mermaid legends to which both Mélisande and the Little Mermaid belong. The siren embodies, in her fascination, the configuration of voice, fate and eros; in classical myth she threatens loss of identity to her victims, and in the fairy tales she is herself erased when she wants to leap out of her in-between-ness and become a full human being. Mélisande dies in childbirth, the Little Mermaid dissolves into spume. But in The Piano, she survives, she begins to speak, falteringly (‘my sounds are so bad’), and though some critics have baulked at this rampantly romantic resolution, it follows in the tradition of revolt some women interpreters have shown to the prescriptions on virtue in fairy tales, and their advocacy of the virtue of silence.58

  It is not possible to pinpoint the moment or the place when and where the fishtailed mermaid becomes conflated with the bird-bodied siren of Greek myth, but the fusion was made possible by both creatures’ command of voice, by their siren song. In the Angers tapestry, from the thirteenth century, an emblematic enchantress like the Whore of Babylon has been given Aphrodite’s traditional comb and mirror (Pl. 18) – these pass swiftly to the mermaid as emblems of her irresistible form. The long hair which the mermaid combs out has been bequeathed to her by Venus, too, who traditionally rises from the sea and wrings out her long hair. But the mermaid’s hair also represents the toils in which she ensnares her prey, as well as the flowing abundance of her appetites, and it bears an interesting, complex relation both to voice and to water.

  The morphological echo between waves, between the motion of water and of hair, between the varieties of wave, of comber, of rill and curl, was famously explored by Leonardo in his notebook drawings; but the aural affinity between the element of water and the flow of a song, between the sea and music (sound-waves), determines the character of the siren in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fairy tales. The imagination’s response to the coupled figure hair/voice stirs memories of water, and, with water, of bliss of erotic engulfment, oceanic floating: Debussy’s music soars to raptures when Pelléas wraps himself in Mélisande’s tumbling tresses, which she has let down from the window of her bedroom. Invoking her ‘chevelure’ he strokes it and kisses it to a passionate serenade: a climactic moment in the turn of the century’s love affair with swirling eddies of women’s hair. This commingling of the lovers’ bodies, mediated through Mélisande’s hair, is seen by the jealous Golaud and leads to tragedy for them all.

  But the coupled image of voice and water also connects with another face of bliss, which may also have its being outside history, in the memory of the haven of the womb, and in the first sounds of the mother’s voice, that acoustic mirror. Fairy tales attempt to restore its resonance; they pretend to a world of nursery certainties. But they also often record that voice’s obliteration, and never more so than in the tales of silenced mermaids. The anxiety about word-music and its lure – the fear of erasure by the sirens’ spell – changes character and temper down the centuries, but the stories, in the midst of celebrating their heroines and mourning their tragic fates, also often mete out punishment to them for their enchantments. The situation of engulfment and loss is reversed, and the sirens, who threaten entanglement and erasure, are themselves done away with. In Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’, her sisters want to save her, and they cut off their hair and give it to the Sea Witch, begging for their sister’s restoration in exchange; they plead for her voice with their hair:

  Out of the sea rose her sisters, but the wind could no longer play with their long beautiful hair, for their heads had been shorn.

  ‘We have given our hair to the sea-witch, so that she would help you and you would not have to die this night … Our grandmother mourns; she, too, has no hair; hers has fallen out from grief …’

  But the Sea Witch determines that the Little Mermaid must plunge a knife into the heart of the prince in order to be turned back into a mermaid, and she refuses. Here, hair stands for life itself, and a surrogate for voice, with its connections to seduction and to love. In The Piano, too, Ada’s muteness is all of a piece with her scraped-back hair. The body’s mythopoeic potency does not generate a set of immutable symbols, embedded in an unchanging structure of the imagination. The changes to the siren’s voice alter the meanings she conveys; the social context of the story in which she figures, eloquent or silent, modifies the message. But natural symbols, as Mary Douglas has analysed, form a structure of relationships within which changes are rung in endless permutations.59 The body offers as it were an alphabet, or an eight-note scale, and the patterns of arrangement, though almost infinite, cluster in recognizable groups and figures, like chords, like certain syntagms in language. Fairy tales are of course only one form of narrative that has tackled the all-absorbing issue of sexual attraction, but they have constantly cast and recast the question of the love spell, and looked again and again at the beloved, and how she survives – her silencing, among other trials.

  Holding a pomegranate in one hand, and pipes in the other, a bird Siren in the shape of a vial for precious oils, gives support to the shade of a man on his last journey: will her song keep his memory? (Bronze, Southern Italy, 450–400 BC.)

  Conclusion

  Odysseus,’ said Alcinous, ‘we are far from regarding

  you as one of those impostors and humbugs whom this dark world

  brings forth in such profusion to spin their lying yarns

  which nobody can test…’1

  Homer

  The tea is poured, the stitching put down.

  The child grows still, sensing something of importance.

  The woman settles and begins her story.

  Believe it, what we lost is here in this room

  on this veiled evening…2

  Eavan Boland

  LIKE A STANDUP comedian, the tale must sense the aspirations and prejudices, the fears and hunger of its audience; like seaside pier palm-readers, fairystory-tellers know that a tale, if it is to enthral, must move the listeners to pleasure, laughter or tears; if they fail in this, nobody will want to hear their stories any more. The genre’s need of an audience forces the teller t
o enter that audience’s economy of beliefs; the memory of its oral origin makes fairy tale long to please. The sultan is always there, half asleep, but quite awake enough to rouse himself and remember that death sentence he threatened. In the kingdom of fiction, the tension between speaking out and staying silent never eases.

  The voice of the traditional storyteller, negotiating the audience’s inclination, may well entrench bigotry, if that is what is expected: how thrilling is the wicked queen; she loves her face in the looking-glass; let her dance in red-hot shoes. The contrary directions of the genre, towards acquiescence on the one hand and rebellion on the other, are all of a piece with its fabulism, intrinsic to its role of moral arbitration and soothsaying. Because the teller struggles to locate and find an audience who will receive the stories’ message with favour, children emerge as hearers, established in printed literature as the special audience by the mideighteenth century: they are still, in the lucrative market of mass entertainment that draws on fairytale material. Children are not likely to be committed to a certain way of thought; they can be moulded, and the stories they hear will then become the ones they expect. They do not present the same problem as the adult circle, at the veillée or in the preview film theatre, who might shuffle or heckle or boo.3

  Fairy tales often engage with issues of light and darkness – the plots represent struggles to distinguish enemies from friends, the normal from the monstrous, and the slant they take is by no means always enlightened. The tales often demonize others in order to proclaim the side of the teller good, right, powerful – and beautiful. Fairy tale’s simple, even simplistic dualism can be and has been annexed to ugly ends: the Romantic revival of folk literature in Germany unwittingly heralded the Nazi claim that ‘their’ fairy tales were racially Aryan homegrown products; in former Yugoslavia, the different factions are using folklore as one more weapon in their civil strife, raising heroes from the past, singing old ballads as battle cries, performing folk dances to a cacophony of competing regional music.4 Folk tales powerfully shape national memory; their poetic versions intersect with history, and in the contemporary embattled quest for indigenous identity, underestimating their sway over values and attitudes can be as dangerous as ignoring changing historical realities.