From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  14 anything can happen: Wonder ‘has no opposite and is the first of the passions’. Descartes, Philosophical Works, tr. E. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (2 vols, Cambridge, 1911), I, 363, quoted by Stephen Greenblatt in Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 1991), 20; see also, Marina Warner, Intro., WT, 3–17.

  15 Wallace Stevens believed: See Helen Vendler, ‘Posthumous Work and Beautiful Subjects’, New Yorker, 12 Nov. 1990, 124–33.

  16 do not … enter unnegotiated areas: See Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, tr. Richard Howard (Ithaca, 1975) on ambiguity and the uncanny.

  17 ‘… even if it won’t last’: Angela Carter, Intro., VFT-I, XVIII.

  18 Panchatantra (The Five Books): tr. Franklin Edgerton (London, 1965).

  19 a volume by Bidpai: Bidpai, Livre de Lumières, ou la Conduite des roys, composé par le sage Pilpay, indien, traduit en français par David Sahid d’Ispahan (et Gilbert Gaulmin) (Paris, 1644); see CF-I, XVII-XVIII.

  20 fairy story in the Caribbean: See Spufford, 13–24, on communications in the seventeenth century; Velay-Vallantin, Fille en Garçon, for a fascinating collection of different versions.

  21 leave [no] trace in medieval narrative: Michael Reeve, ‘Are there such things as folk-tales?’ delivered in British, Academy conversazione, 20 Nov. 1992, kindly lent to MW.

  22 surviving manuscript is recovered: Henriette-Julie de Murat, ‘Starlight’, tr. Terence Cave, WT, 149–87.

  23 recognition to their audiences: See Dollerup et al. for an excellent analysis of this polymorphousness of meaning in relation to the context of the telling.

  24 ‘selfish word-string’: Irwin, 234–5.

  25 plea of extenuating circumstances: See Davis, passim.

  PART ONE

  1 ‘… a little better’: A, 96.

  2 ‘… beguile them’: Pindar, Olympian 1, lines 42–4, adapted from Maurice Bowra (tr.), The Odes (Harmondsworth, 1969), 65, with the kind help of Peter Dronke.

  CHAPTER ONE: IN THE CAVE OF THE ENCHANTRESS

  1 ‘The devil in disguise’: Anon., tr. J. W. Thomas, in Richard Wagner, Tannhäuser: Opera Guide 39, ed. Nicholas John (London, 1988), 58–9.

  2 their total destruction: Parke, 136–43; 190–215.

  3 contenders for this title: Among them, Hermes, and Palamedes, hated by Odysseus who was jealous of his wisdom. See Graves, I, 182–5; Calasso, 351–4.

  4 The ‘Grotta della Sibilla’: I consulted the edition of 1521 in the British Library and used the versions edited by Werner Söderhjelm, 101–67 and by F. Desonay, La Sale (1930), 1–53; also La Sale (1963), 125–68, and F. Desonay, ‘Le Fonti italiane della leggenda di Tannhäuser’, in La Sale (1963), 17–58; Gaston Paris, ‘Le Paradis de la Reine Sibylle’, Légendes du Moyen-âge (Paris, 1903), 67ff; J. Neve, Antoine de La Sale, sa vie, et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1903); Luigi Paolucci, La Sibilla Appeninica (Florence, 1967); Giuseppe Santarelli, Le Leggende dei Monti Sibillini (Montefortino, 1988), 19–38; Romano Cordella and Paolo Lollini, Castelluccio di Norcia II Tetto dell’ Umbria (Castelluccio, 1988), 205–15; Domenico Falzetti, Alla Ricerca della Dea d’amore nella Grotta della Sibilla di Norcia (Milan, 1991).

  5 ‘… courtesy in her beyond measure …’: Desonay (1963), 21.

  6 ‘… seemed to be made of ivory …’: ibid.

  7 ‘God would … and took flesh’: F. Neri, ‘Le tradizioni italiane della Sibilla’, Studi Medievali 4 (1912–13), 213–30.

  8 ‘salad one puts many good herbs’: Antoine de La Sale, La Salade (Paris, 1521); Söderhjelm, 101.

  9 ‘chatter of the common people’: La Sale (1930), 17; The lake was also called II Lago di Pilato (and still is). La Sale tells the legend of Pilate’s death by drowning, after he had been tied at his own request to a cart drawn by buffaloes and dragged from Rome to the mountains – his punishment for his part in Christ’s death.

  10 ‘… afeared of any mortal fear …’: Söderjhelm, 112.

  11 The writer in La Sale … his own: One was Hans Van Bamberg, and his squire Thomin de Pons. See La Sale (1963), 156–7, for facsimiles.

  12 ‘… peacock which seemed very far away’: La Sale (1930), 15; Söderjhelm, 114.

  13 Mélusine: Jean d’Arras, Le Roman de Mélusine [1387], retold in F. Nodot, Histoire de Mélusine (Paris, 1697 – the same date as Perrault’s Contes), 1–271; id., ed. Edmund Lecesne (Arras, 1888); see also Harf-Lancner, 85–113; also Jean Markale, Mélusine (Paris, 1993) for a study of the legend.

  14 Lamia: ‘The Phairie or Larnia’, Topsell, 1, 352–5; Rowland (1973), 115–6: see also Warner Monsters, 5–6.

  15 ‘… snakes and serpents all together’: La Sale (1930), 28–9; Söderhjelm, 121.

  16 ‘… though love is hell’: Clive Bell, The Legend of Monte della Sibilla or Le Paradis de la Reine Sibille (London, 1923).

  17 ‘… welcome and feast you in very great joy’: La Sale, Salade, 168. La Sale believed in literature for therapy and pleasure: some years later, in 1457, he gathered together another album of tales and fables to cheer up Catherine de Neufville, Dame de Fresne, after her first child had died. See Le Réconfort de Madame de Fresne, ed. Ian Hill (Exeter, 1979).

  18 all pagan devilry to an end: La Sale (1930), 51; Söderhjelm, 133–4.

  19 Venus herself: In a letter to his brother in 1431, he mentions how he described the cave to a Saxon astronomer who wanted to brush up his skills and had heard that a certain Monte di Venere – the mountain of Venus – was the right place to do it. Pius II linked this with the Sibyl’s grotto near Norcia, where the astronomer could talk to devils and polish his necromancy. Paris, 93; Cordelia and Lollini, op. cit., 206ff.

  20 oral, learned and popular: Leandro Alberti, Descrittione de tutta Italia (Bologna, 1550), 248, quoted Santarelli, 130. See also Paris, 95.

  21 enchanted sleep in the cave: Ginzburg, 108.

  22 ‘… devil in disguise!’: ‘The Tannhäuser Ballad’, tr. J. W. Thomas, in Richard Wagner, Tannhäuser, op. cit., 58.

  23 torments about love and lust: See Stewart Spencer, ‘Tannhäusere, Danheuser and Tannhäuser’, ibid., 17–24.

  24 ‘… voice I shall be known’: OM, XIV, 314–15.

  25 moaning that … wanted was to die: Petronius, The Satyricon, tr. J. P. Sullivan (Harmondsworth, 1977), 67.

  26 ‘… I have not lost my sovereignty’: Pausanias, I, 436.

  27 buried, even secret matters: Since writing this prologue, I have come across Mary Shelley’s Introduction to The Last Man, her utopian novel of 1826, in which she describes a visit – with Shelley – to the Sibyl’s cave at Cumae, and how they found there drifting leaves on which messages were traced. She was able to decipher these ‘scattered … divine intuitions which the Cumaean damsel obtained from heaven’. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer in the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, 1979, 1984), 93–104, develop the image of this cave and women’s imaginations, culture, and muffled memory.

  CHAPTER TWO: THE OLD WIVES’ TALE

  1 ‘Men Talk’: Liz Lochhead, True Confessions and New Clichés (Edinburgh, 1985), 134–5.

  2 ‘… cockell bread’: Peele, lines 599–602; see also OCFT, ‘The Three Heads in the Well’ and ‘The King of Colchester’s Daughters’, 156–61; cf. ‘Bushy Bride’, Lang (1890), 322–8; C-It, 1, 409–11; C-Eng, 353–5.

  3 ‘… without his weapon …’: Peele, ibid., lines 596–7.

  4 ‘… a goulden tree’: ibid., lines 735–42.

  5 double entendres … local superstitions: See Edmund Colledge and J. C. Marler, ‘Céphalologie: a recurring theme in classical and medieval lore’, Traditio 37 (1981), 411–26, for a fascinating discussion of the speaking head in Christian tradition; see also Anne Ross, ‘Severed Heads in Wells: An Aspect of the Well Cult’, Scottish Studies 6, 1962, 31–49.

  6 William Stevenson: Gammer Gurton’s Nedle [sic] in Representative British Comedies from the beginning to Shakespeare, I, ed. Charles Mills
Gayley (London and New York, 1903).

  7 ‘… heap of old wives’ tales’: Quoted in Charles Deulin, ed., Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye avant Perrault (Paris, 1879), 12.

  8 reference to the genre: Plato, Gorgias, ed. E. R. Dodds (Oxford, 1959), 527a4; Plato also called them tithon mythoi, old wetnurses’ tales, a phrase which translates into the German Ammenmärchen in the eighteenth century. See Rainer Wehse, ‘Past and Present Folkloristic Narrator Research’, in Bottigheimer (1986), 245–58.

  9 distract them from their grief: Plutarch, Theseus, XXIII, in Plutarch’s Lives, tr. Bernadette Perrin (London, 1914), 50–1; Graves, I, 98e, 337.

  10 The Golden Ass … second century AD: See ‘Cupid and Psyche’, in The Golden Ass, tr. William Aldington (1566), ed. S. Gaselee (London, 1915). See also Thomas Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity (Oxford, 1983), 177–90; Swahn, passim; Perry, 236–42.

  11 ‘fairy tale or two … little better’: A, 96.

  12 ‘Milesian’… later retellings: Perry, 90–1

  13 ‘… spindle, as the present … to the past’: ‘Fatum autem dicunt esse quicquid dii fantur, quidquid Iuppiter fatur. A fando igitur fatum dicunt, id est a loquendo … Tria autem fata fingunt in colo et fuso digitisque filum ex lana torquentibus, propter tria tempora: praeteritum, quod in fuso iam netum atque involutum est; praesens, quod inter digitos neentis traicitur; futurum, in lana quae colo implicata est, et quod adhuc per digitos neentis ad fusum tamquam praesens ad praeteritum traiciendum est.’ Isidore of Seville, Eymologiarum Sive Originum Libri, VIII, XI, ed. W. M. Lindsay (2 vols, Oxford, 1911) 90–2; quoted (an unedited, slightly corrupt version) Jacob Grimm, Dictionary of Teutonic Mythology, tr. J. S. Stallybrass (London, 1883–8), I, 405ff. I am very grateful indeed for Peter Dronke’s guidance here, and help with the Latin.

  14 response to a desire, a need: See ‘fair’, ‘fay’, and ‘fang’ in The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, 12 vols (New York, 1911), III, 2119–2120, 2137, 2160. I am grateful to Lori Repetti for help with this research.

  15 female … storyteller: See Karen Rowe, ‘To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale’, in Bottigheimer (1986), 53–74, for an article which examines this theme in an inspiring way. Wehse, op. cit., covers the research which has been done in this area, principally in Russia and Finland.

  16 adapted cited female sources: C-Eng, XVIII, XXII-XXIV; Hartland is one of the few to remark earlier on the importance of this aspect, 8–11.

  17 ‘… memory so never forgot them’: C-Eng, XXIII.

  18 folk material in her head: Andrew Porter, ‘Stone and Fire’, New Yorker, 16 March 1992.

  19 ‘… tale within a circle of listeners’: Karel Čapek, ‘Towards a Theory of Fairytale’, in Čapek (1951), 59–60.

  20 intimate or domestic milieux: See Dollerup et al., on circumstances of transmission.

  21 ‘princess grew up … beautiful than the day’: To Mme de Grignan SC, II, 516. Mitonner also means, according to Furetière, to caress, to pamper.

  22 governesses as his true predecessors: ‘une fiction toute pure et un conte de vieille …’ P, 4.

  23 ‘… we should pay them attention’: ‘Ces fables milésiennes sont si puériles, que c’est leur faire assez l’honneur que de leur opposer nos contes de Peau d’âne et de ma Mère l’oye, ou si pleines de saletés comme l’asne d’or de Lucien ou d’Apulée … qu’elles ne méritent pas qu’on y fasse attention.’ Charles Perrault, Parallèles des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les sciences et les arts, II, 126, quoted Jacques Marx, ‘Perrault et le sommeil de la raison’, Cahiers internationaux du symbolisme, 40–1 (1980), 83–90.

  24 ‘… death of us for the last year or so …’: ‘Ils ont rempli le monde de tant de Recueils, de tant de petites Historiettes; et enfin de ces ramas de Contes de Fèes, qui nous assassinent depuis un an ou deux.’ Pierre, Abbé de Villiers, Entretiens sur les Contes de Fées et sur quelques autres outrages du Temps. Pour servir de préservatif contre le mauvais gout (Paris, 1699), 69.

  25 ‘…to entertain children’: ‘Contes à dormir debout, que les Nourrices ont inventés pour amuser les enfants.’ Ibid, 74.

  26 ‘… ignorant folk and women’: ‘le partage des ignorans et des femmes’, ibid, 77.

  27 ‘… extreme pleasure in them – as does every child’: ‘Cent et cent fois ma gouvernante/ Au lieu de Fables d’animaux,/ M’a raconté les traits moraux/ De cette Histoire surprenante … /Oui, ces Contes frappent beaucoup/ Plus que ne font les faits et d’un singe et du loup/ J’y prenais un plaisir extreme,/ Tous les enfants font de même …’, LHBI, 169ff.

  28 ‘… trifles and mere old wives’ tales’: Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (1590), v, 133.

  29 sisters passed on forty-one of the tales: GZ, Notes, 728–43.

  30 area of Westphalia: ibid., GZ, XXIV, 728–43.

  31 Leonora Alleyne: There is no entry in the British Library catalogue under her name, a symptom perhaps of the disappearance of women’s work in this field.

  32 ‘… dies, a whole library disappears’: Héliane and Roger Tousmon, ‘Interview with Simone Schwarz-Bart: Sur les pas de Fanotte’, Textes, Etudes, et documents, 2 (Paris, 1979), quoted Ronnie Scharfman, ‘Significantly Other’ in Significant Others, ed. Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron (London, 1993), 215.

  33 ‘Donkeyskin’ and ‘Cinderella’: du Fail, 35–7; Edward Shorter, ‘The “Veillée” and the Great Transformation’, in Beauroy et al., quotes Abel Hugo, La France pittoresque (Paris, 1835), I, 238, scorning the veillées as excuse to gossip, 127–40; Vaultier, 111ff.

  34 bottling and pickling: Roche-Mazon (1935), 5.

  35 ‘… community of listeners disappears …’: Benjamin, 91.

  36 ‘… milieu of craftsmen’: ibid., 101.

  37 ‘… into the storyteller’s night’: ‘The Storyteller Poems: “1 The Storyteller”’, Liz Lochhead, Dreaming Frankenstein (Edinburgh, 1984), 70.

  38 ‘… or to meet her about the house’: Henriette-Lucy, Marquise de la Tour du Pin, neé Dillon, Mémoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin, tr. and ed. Félice Harcourt (New York, 1971), 22; quoted Darrow, 44.

  39 nurse and her nurse’s family: Louise-Marie-Victoire de Chastenay, Mémoires de Madame de Chastenay (2 vols, Paris, 1896), I, 16–17, 29–30, quoted Darrow, 44.

  40 ‘… righteous man encounters himself: Benjamin, 108–9.

  41 Lawrence’s famous dictum: It continues: ‘The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.’ So my enterprise here runs counter to Lawrence’s definition of the critic’s function as well as to his epigram about the tale. Studies in Classic American Literature (1924), ch.l.

  CHAPTER THREE: WORD OF MOUTH

  1 ‘… those lips together’: Olga Sedakova, ‘Old Women’, in The Silk of Time, tr. Catriona Kelly (Keele, 1994), 30–1.

  2 make them into properly docile wives: J. Avalon, ‘Lustucru, médecin céphalique’, Pro Medico, 1933, X, 141–7; E. Fournier, Variétés historiques: Description du tableau de Lustucru (Paris, 1855); Champfleury, Histoire de l’imagerie populaire (Paris, 1869), 248–55; Jones (1990), 70–1; Mistier et al, 33.

  3 henpecked husbands, a hero among men: Avalon, op. cit., 146, lists seven separate contemporary works – all facetiously titled and plainly misogynist in tone.

  4 Silent Woman was an accepted ideal: See Jones, ‘Silence’, Garland Encyclopaedia; Coates, 31–3; cf. Youth’s Warning-Piece, or, the tragical History of George Barnwell who was undone by a strumpet’, which quotes Proverbs 5:2–3 under a woodcut of the ‘strumpet’ Sarah Millwood who did the deed, in CBK, 431.

  5 ‘… not equally the glory of man’: Aristotle, Politics, 1.13 [1260a20], quoted Maclean (1980), 54.

  6 provoked much nodding of pious heads: See Maclean (1980), 16–17.

  7 Church Fathers and classical authorities had set in: Rudolf M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago, 1985), 149–79; Mathilde van Dijk, ‘Speaking Saints, Silent Nuns: Speech and Gender in a Fifteenth Century Life of
Saint Catherine of Alexandria’, Beyond Limits: Boundaries in Feminist Semiotics and Literary Theory, ed. Liesbeth Brouwer, Petra Broomans and Riet Paasman (Groningen, 1990), 38–48.

  8 ‘Misogyny … doing something to, women’: Bloch, 4.

  9 ‘our symbol is a representation of it’: I am most grateful to John Pretty, the founder of Miller’s Damsel at Lower Calbourne mill on the Isle of Wight, for information about the mill’s history. Correspondence, 1993, 6 May 1994.

  10 ‘… And spake right meekly’: The Book of the Knight of the Tower, tr. William Caxton, ed. M. Y. Offord (London, 1971), 62–70. I have modernized the spelling.

  11 ‘… shall speak thereof to your lord’: ibid., 63.

  12 ‘…I say to you roundly’: ACA, fig.129, 129–33.

  13 brazenly parodies holy pictures: ibid., fig.29.

  14 sluggards (Sinte Luyaert; Sainte Fainéante): ‘Bonne Sainte Fainéante, Protectrice des Paresseuses’, Image d’Epinal, 1825, in Mistier et al.: Her special prayer beseeches: ‘O you who possess the kingdom free from care, grant us, through our little caprices and devices, the happiness of living and doing nothing. Amen.’

  15 prattlers (Sainte Babille): Choirstall, Church of St Maurille, Ponts-de-Cé, Cl6th, illus. Gaignebet and Lajoux, 34.

  16 ‘… never has anything good to say …’: Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Reproduced in Kunst voor de beedldenstorm, ed. J. E. Filedt de Kok (The Hague, 1986), 278–9; tr. ACA, ibid., 64–76.

  17 sex’s propensity to foment riot: Rudolf Dekker, ‘Women in Revolt: Popular Protest and its social basis in Holland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Theory and Society 16 (1987), 337–62. This account of the Dutch aspects also contains an excellent and full bibliography on the theme; see for example, Max Gluckman, ‘Gossip and Scandal’, Man, NS, IV: 3 (June 1963), 307–16; Robert Paine, ‘What is gossip about? An alternative hypothesis’, Man, NS, II:2 (June 1967), 278–85; Ralph L. Rosnow and Gary Alan Fine, Rumor and Gossip (New York, 1976).