From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  The idea of awakening, sometimes erotic but not exclusively, goes to the heart of fairy tale’s function. But Sleeping Beauty’s angle of vision, when she opens her eyes, is different from the point of view of the prince. Of course Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, and the new executives of The Disney Corporation did not imagine a similar world or indeed see it in a similar way – but they would agree that the uses of enchantment are extremely powerful, and that what is expressed and what is denied, what is discovered and what is rejected, form a picture of the possible world to which Sleeping Beauty, say, will be waking up.

  Who tells the story, who recasts the characters and changes the tone becomes very important: no story is ever the same as its source or model, the chemistry of narrator and audience changes it. Karel Capek puts it valiantly:

  Every narration is a creative and superlatively free story-creating activity … I cannot conceal my satisfaction that the word ‘epos’ [epic] in its origin means, and in truth is, the spoken word.18

  Angela Carter puts the same thought more modestly:

  Ours is a highly individualized culture, with a great faith in the work of art as a unique one-off, and the artist as an original, a godlike and inspired creator of unique one-offs. But fairy tales are not like that, nor are their makers. Who first invented meatballs? In what country? Is there a definitive recipe for potato soup? Think in terms of the domestic arts. ‘This is how I make potato soup.’19

  Both Čapek and Carter have written ‘marvellous tales’ of their own which defy rules of sexual and social conduct in a spirit aglow with mischief. Capek’s simple honest peasant comes into a fortune, but does not get to marry the princess and become a king because he loses it all through a hole in his pocket.20

  The French thinker Félix Guattari, in a powerful historical essay, has asked some fundamental questions about the direction in which the century and its achievements in technology are taking us; he calls for a new vitality in the relations between individuals and the language of the culture they inhabit: ‘Unconscious figures of power and knowledge are not universals. They are tied to reference myths profoundly anchored in the psyche, but they can still swing around toward liberatory paths / voices.’21 He too sketches the possibility of a utopia, dreaming of ‘transforming this planet – a living hell for over three quarters of its population – into a universe of creative enchantments’.22

  The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity, can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.

  1 The fairy godmother as benign witch: gnarled and lame, with beaky nose, steeple hat, and pantomime-dame buckle shoes, she points a Sibylline finger as she reminds Cinderella of the midnight curfew. (Arthur Rackham, Cinderella, 1933.)

  2 Saint Anne sits up in bed to receive her visitors, as the happy midwives prepare to bathe her newborn daughter, Mary; Domenico Ghirlandaio sets the scene as if among his contemporaries and family in fifteenth-century Florence.

  3 A ‘gossipping’ was an old word for a christening feast, as depicted in Jan Steen’s bustling painting, at which family and friends – chiefly women – gathered to congratulate the mother and call down blessings on the baby, though the man in the doorway is making an ambiguous sign over its head. (Celebrating the Birth, 1664.)

  4 The polarized meanings of female old age: the Cumaean Sibyl, wrinkled deep in time on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, is one of the wisest of all the prophets, who told Aeneas how to reach the underworld.

  5 But the disfigurements of ageing were invoked as the penalties of sin, and crones also signified lewdness. Though historical brothel-keepers in Amsterdam were at most in their thirties, Dirck van Baburen portrayed ‘The Old Procuress’ as a hag. (Early seventeenth century.)

  6 A master wizard, King Solomon summoned the Queen of Sheba to his court; he was curious about her because he had been told a rumour that she had hairy legs or ass’s hoofs, and as she approached, he conjured a stream made of glass so that she would lift her skirts to ford it. The gratified king looks on with his djinns, hiding their smiles, in a sixteenth-century Persian illuminated manuscript. (Sultan Husayn Mirza, The Assembly of Lovers, 1552.)

  7 The beloved in the Song of Songs, who says of herself, ‘Nigra sum sed formosa’ (I am black but comely’) was identified with the Queen of Sheba; different traditions placed her realm in Arabia or Ethiopia. In this manuscript, the artist has combined the conventional golden-haired maiden of the Christian heaven with the Biblical imagery. (From Conrad Kyeser, Bellifortis, Bohemia, before 1405.)

  8 In Piero della Francesca’s fresco in Arezzo (1452–66), the Queen of Sheba on her way to visit Solomon refuses to set her pagan foot on a bridge made of the holy wood of the cross and kneels down to worship it.

  9 The popular medieval legend of the True Cross travelled, chapging and growing, from the Middle East: the Queen of Sheba, with one shoe off, shows her anomalous foot on the mosaic pavement by the monk Pantaleone in the cathedral of Otranto, in southern Italy (1163–5).

  10 Beside her, a mermaid, a classical figure of women’s seduction, of fatal voices and the lure of sexuality, grasps her own unusual limbs in a witty, possibly apotropaic pun.

  11 The god of Autumn had no success with the lovely Pomona, who was determined to remain a virgin, until he hit upon the ruse of disguising himself as one of the honey-tongued nurses of myth and stories; in this persuasive shape, he found Pomona’s qualms easy to overcome. (Jan van Kessel, Vertumnus and Pomona, mid-seventeenth century.)

  12 The crone storyteller TOP casts a prophetic shadow against the screen as she keeps her mixed audience enthralled: Daniel Maclise, born in Ireland, worked very successfully in Victorian England, specializing in evocative, imaginary historical reconstruction. (A Winter Night’s Tale, c.1867.)

  13 The comic old woman – Mother Goose and her counterparts – also emerged then as a jolly figure of fun, mischievous and unruly, in this respect a child herself. (W. W. Denslow, Mother Goose, 1902.)

  14 A harsher, bullying undertone sometimes recurs, threatening to muzzle old women ‘who could never be quiet’. (Postcard, Chapala, Mexico, c. 1985.)

  15 The Zodiac sign of Virgo, in a fresco depicting the month of August, with her hair tumbling down her back in golden abundance, borrows some of the attributes of Proserpina, daughter of Ceres who presides over the harvest: she offers a pomegranate of fruitfulness in one hand, while above her head, she holds a wheatsheaf, emblematic of Spica, the brightest star in an auspicious constellation that promises fertility, plenty and ripeness. (Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de’ Roberti, Triumph of Ceres and Astrological Symbols, detail, Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara, 1469–72.)

  16 The symbolic connotations of fairness overrode the historical likelihood of diverse colouring: virgin martyrs and other female saints in heaven consist only of dazzling blondes. (Spinola Hours, c. 1515.)

  17 The Virgin Mary was associated with the celestial colours of white and gold and blue, and identified with the Woman Clothed with the Sun from the Apocalypse; in the fourteenth century, the influential visions of Saint Bridget of Sweden, which inspired Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity, confirmed that the Mother of God had the ideal maiden’s golden hair.

  18 The Whore of Babylon inherited the mirror and comb and blondeness of Venus, goddess of Love and Beauty; in the Apocalypse, her accursed kingdom is synonymous with lust and luxury, fornication and vanity. (The Angers Apocalypse, tapestry, thirteenth century.)

  19 Some virgins in Christian culture retained Venus’ rich promise: in this traditional cycle of the months, the sign Virgo presides over the threshing of the harvest, and the artist has used the same gold paint for her hair and the grain on the gr
ound. (Book of Hours, Rouen, 1520–5.)

  20 Though in the scroll the wild maiden laments her life, the luxuriance of flowers and fruit all around her, her unusual blue fleece, and her power over the unicorn’s horn convey the magical potency of her exile in the woods. (Tapestry, Upper Rhine, 1475–1500.)

  21 Bluebeard inherits the features of the satyr and his close kin, the devils, who in the Bible are called ‘pilosi’, the hairy ones, and sometimes appear ambiguously coloured blue. (The Last Judgement, detail, stained glass window, Fairford, England, c. 1495.)

  22 Saint Dympna ran away from home because her father wanted to marry her, and hid herself in the woods in a hermit’s cell; but he pursued her, and when she still refused him, he had her confessor killed, left, while he cut off her head himself. In Jan van Wavre’s altarpiece of c. 1515, still in the shrine where she died, her father seizes her by her long plume of golden hair, symbolic of her inestimable worth, while the devil hovers overhead.

  23 Fairytale heroines, like Cinderella, inherit the ancient symbolic sign of youth, purity and desirability, as in this children’s illustration. (Nineteenth century.)

  24 Popular imagery still draws on the ancient language of symbolism: a redhead and a brunette respectively, the ugly sisters bawl out a tawny-haired Cinderella, in the Ladybird version of Disney’s 1950 film. (© Disney.)

  25 The white shoes trussed like a chicken on a dish were given the title Ma Gouvernante, My Nurse, Mein Kindermädchen by the artist Meret Oppenheim, who was commemorating, in a spirit of mordant rebellion, the voice which in childhood points a girl towards love and marriage.

  26 The dual aspect of sexuality at the core of fairy tale’s concerns, here rendered as a disturbing visual oxymoron: spirals of bright hair interwined with gleaming pink pig gut. (Helen Chadwick, Loop My Loop, original title Quite Contrary, 1991.)

  ABBREVIATIONS

  A Lucius Apuleius, The Transformations of Lucius, otherwise known as The Golden Ass, tr. Robert Graves (Harmondsworth [1950] 1988)

  ACA Christine Megan Armstrong, The Moralizing Prints of Cornelis Anthonisz. (Princeton, 1990)

  AHA Aristotle, Historia animalium, tr. A. L. Peck, 2 vols (London, 1965, 1979)

  APT Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations, ed. Elizabeth Archibald (Cambridge, 1991)

  AT Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folk Tale: A Classification and Bibliography (Helsinki, 1964)

  B Giambattista Basile, Il Pentamerone, tr. B. Croce, ed. N. M. Penzer (2 vols, Bari [1932] 1982)

  BB Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Beauty and the Beast (Glasgow, 1818)

  BN Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

  C-Eng Italian Folk Tales, selected and retold by Italo Calvino, tr. George Martin (Harmondsworth, 1982)

  C-It Italo Calvino, Fiabe Italiane (2 vols, Turin, 1956)

  CAG Angela Carter, American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (London, 1993)

  CBC —, The Bloody Chamber (London, 1979)

  CPB F. J. Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads (5 vols, London, 1882–98)

  CBK John Ashton (ed.), Chap-Books of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1882, repr. 1992)

  CF-I Le Cabinet des fées (41 vols, Amsterdam and Paris, 1785–9)

  CF-II Le Cabinet des fées, ed. Elisabeth Lemirre (3 vols, Arles, 1988)

  DA The Fairy Tales of Madame d’Aulnoy, tr. Annie Macdonnell and Miss Lee, intro. Anne Thackeray Ritchie (London, 1892)

  EQ Les Evangiles des quenouilles, ed. and tr. Jacques Lacarrière (Paris, 1987)

  FSE The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey with Anna Freud (24 vols, London, 1953–74)

  G The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, tr. anon., commentary by Joseph Campbell (London, 1975)

  GL Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, or Lives of the Saints, tr. William Caxton [1483] (7 vols, London, 1900)

  GZ The Complete Tales of the Brothers Grimm, tr. and ed. Jack Zipes (New York, 1992)

  HCA Hans Christian Andersen, The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories of Hans Andersen, tr. Erik Haugaard (London, 1975)

  JAF Journal of American Folklore

  JFH Journal of Family History

  JWCI Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes

  LCL Loeb Classical Library

  LHBI Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon, Bigarurres Ingénieuses, ou Recueil de diverses pièces galantes en prose et en vers (Paris, 1696)

  LHCD —, Les Caprices du destin, ou Recueil d’histoires singulières et amusantes arrivées de nos jours (Paris, 1718)

  LHTT —, La Tour ténébreuse et Les jours lumineux. Conte Angloise, accompagné d’Historiettes, et tirez d’une ancienne Chronique composée par Richard, Coeur de Lion (Paris, 1705)

  LPB Marie-Jeanne Leprince de Beaumont, Le Magasin des enfants, ou Dialogues entre une sage gouvernante et plusieurs des ses élèves de la première distinction (London, 1757)

  LRB London Review of Books

  M Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Comtesse de Murat, Les Lutins du Château de Kernosy in Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions, et romans cabalistiques, vol. 35 (Amsterdam and Paris, 1789), 153–423

  MCF —, Les Contes des fées [also called Les Nouveaux contes des fées] (Paris, 1698)

  MHS —, Histoires Sublimes et allégoriques (Paris, 1699)

  MC Merveilles et Contes Marvels & Tales (Boulder, Colorado, 1987)

  MGM Mother Goose’s Melodies, ed. E. F. Bleiler, facsimile edn (Monroe and Francis: Boston 1833; New York, 1970)

  NOEV The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1950, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1972)

  NYRB The New York Review of Books

  OM The Metamorphoses of Ovid, tr. Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth, 1973)

  OCFT Iona and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford, 1974)

  ONC —, A Nursery Companion (Oxford, 1980)

  ONR —, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford, 1977)

  P Charles Perrault, Contes, ed. G. Rouger (Paris, 1967)

  PAC The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, tr. Angela Carter (New York, 1977)

  S Giovan Francesco Straparola, Le piacevoli notti, ed. Giuseppe Rua (2 vols, Bari, 1927)

  SC Madame de Sévigné, Correspondance, ed. Roger Duchêne (3 vols, Paris, 1972)

  TLS Times Literary Supplement

  VFT-I The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, ed. Angela Carter (London, 1990)

  VFT-II The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales, ed. Angela Carter (London, 1992)

  WT Wonder Tales: Six Stories of Enchantment, ed. Marina Warner (London, 1994)

  ZBB Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment: Classic French Fairy Tales, ed. and tr. Jack Zipes (New York, 1989)

  ZSE Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture, ed. and tr. Jack Zipes (New York, 1991)

  ZVFT Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves, ed. Jack Zipes (London, 1987)

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1 even sultans: Jan Knappert, Myths and Legends of the Swahili (London, 1970), 132; VFT-I, 215.

  2 ‘… image of desire’: Beer, 79.

  3 Baronne d’Aulnoy: D’Aulnoy’s publication history is very complicated; I consulted a varied group of editions, including The Diverting Works of the Countess d’Anois: (I) Memoirs, (II) All Her Spanish Novels and Histories, (III) Her Letters, (IV) Tales of the Fairies in 3 parts compleat (London, 1707); Les Contes de fées par Mme. d** (3 vols, Amsterdam, 1708); History of the Tales of the Fairies (London, 1708); Les Illustres fées – Contes galans (Amsterdam, 1710); Le Gentilhomme bourgeois (Paris, 1710–15); Le Nouveau Gentilhomme bourgeois, ou les fées à la mode (Paris, 1711); Les Nouveaux contes de fées (Paris, 1719); A Collection of Novels and Tales Written by that celebrated Wit of France, the Countess D’Anois (3 vols, London, 1721–2); Mother Bunch’s Fairy Tales (London, 1790). See for a full bibliography of her Englished works, Palmer (1975).

  4 ‘La Reine fantasque’: CF-I, XXVI; tr. Jack Zipes, ZSE, 160–71.
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  5 ‘Voyages imaginaires’: 36 vols (Amsterdam and Paris, 1788).

  6 ‘… willingly become children again’: ‘Lettre à La Motte’ (22 Nov. 1714), quoted Delaporte, 33.

  7 ‘… silly and idle imaginations’: Anon., A History of Genesis, 1690, quoted Gillian Avery, Child’s Eye: A History of Children’s Books Through Three Centuries (Oxford, 1989), 4.

  8 love of fantasy and excitement: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, ou de l’éducation, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1969), 287ff.

  9 ‘…trash of preliterate peoples …’: John Updike, Hugging the Shore (New York, 1988), 661–2.

  10 girl’s ultimate goal: See Marcia K. Lieberman, ‘“Some Day My Prince Will Come”: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale’, in Zipes (1986); Karen E. Rowe, ‘Feminism and Fairy Tales’, ibid., 207–24; Kay Stone, ‘Things Walt Disney Never Told Us’, Women and Folklore, ed. Claire R. Farrer (Austin and London, 1975); Colette Dowling, The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence (New York, 1981); Madonna Kolbenschlag, Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye: Break the Spell of Feminine Myths and Models (New York, 1979); see Kay Stone, ‘Feminist Approaches to the Interpretation of Fairy Tales’, in Bottigheimer (1986), 229–36, for an overview of the changes.

  11 ‘it really seems to pay’: The Children’s Musical Cinderella (London, 1879).

  12 the term ‘wonder tale’: Propp (1968).

  13 donkeytail sprouting: ‘Lacqua del cestello’, C-It, I, 409–11; C-Eng, 353–5.