From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  16 literature of forest peoples: Topsell, 1, 28–34; Pastoureau (1986), 163–6; P. Sébillot, Le folklore de France: Le Faune. (Paris, 1984), 72–73; Gaignebet and Lajoux, 79–87; cf. A. I. Hallowell, ‘Bear Ceremonialism in the northern hemisphere’, The American Anthropologist, 28 (1926), 51–202.

  17 ‘… lion’s in its mouth’: Sermon clxxix, quoted Herbert Friedmann, A Bestiary for Saint Jerome: Animal Symbolism in European Religious Art (Washington DC, 1980), 196.

  18 brought up wild in the forest: Valentine and Orson, tr. Henry Watson, ed. Arthur Dickson (Oxford, 1937); cf Valentine and Orson. Morris’s Cabinet of Amusement and Institution (London, 1822); Valentine and Orson, Aunt Primrose’s Library No. 8 (London, 1860); see Warner, Monsters, 49–52.

  19 unadulterated – folk wisdom: I. Mariette, Charles Perrault, Traduction des Fables de Faerne (Paris, 1699), reproduced in Loskoutoff, fig. XIX.

  20 bears above all: Rowland (1973), 31–2.

  21 proclaimed warlikeness: Claude Paradin, Devises Heroiques (1557), ed. Alison Saunders (Aldershot, 1989), 300; Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, engravings by Giovanni Zaratino Castellini (Venice, 1669), gives the personification of Malvagita (Wickedness), a bear as emblem, 385–7.

  22 ‘… goodly relief’: Thomas, 147.

  23 hintingly erotic entertainment: D’Ours en ours, op. cit., 28–77.

  24 encounter frightening beasts: Eleanor Mure, The Story of the Three Bears [1831] (Toronto, 1967); Robert Southey, The Doctor, iv (London, 1837); G. N., The Story of the Three Bears (1837) all featured a naughty old woman as the protagonist, who comes to grief at the end; Joseph Cundall, A Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children (London, 1850), changed the old woman to a little girl, ‘Silver-Hair’, who he claimed was more traditional. Walter Crane (1876) and Leslie Brooke (1904) published versions with ‘Silver-Locks’ and ‘Goldenlocks’. Tolstoy translated it into Russian in 1874–5. The name Goldielocks seems to have been estabished first by Flora Annie Steel, in English Fairy Tales (1918), illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Southey has often been credited with original authorship, but it was circulating orally before the Cl9th, and was collected for instance in a version called ‘Scrapefoot’ featuring a vixen (a cunning little vixen) in the title role (Jacobs, 1894). See the excellent anon, notes to the MS facsimile of Mure, op. cit., Osborne and Lillian H. Smith Collections, Toronto, n.p. See also Ober, v-xxiii.

  25 ‘…I shall skin her’: Crane, Goldenlocks (London, 1876).

  26 frisson to his courtship: Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe, Popular Tales from the Norse, tr. George Webb Darsent (Edinburgh, 1903), 22; VFT-I, 122–32.

  27 black variety: GZ, 516–21.

  28 great big teddy bear: Miss Julia Corner and Alfred Crowquill, Little Plays for Little People: Beauty and the Beast (London, 1854).

  29 dandling the dear little bear: ‘Rose-Red’, Richard Doyle and His Family (Catalogue), Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1983–4, fig.155, see p.298.

  30 ‘… Bruno’s Foster Mother’: William Lyman Underwood, Wild Brother (Boston, 1921), f.p. 18.

  31 common species: The reverse – a human child suckled by a bear, or other animal – is of course very frequent, however, in the myths of heroes, especially founders: Zeus, Romulus and Remus: see Shell, Children of the Earth, 267; Warner, Monsters, 52–4.

  32 ‘… discomfort and danger’: From Outdoor Pastimes, quoted American Bears: Selections from the Writings of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. and intro. Paul Schullery (Boulder, 1983), 15; cf. James-Oliver Curwood, The Grisly King (1885), which inspired Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film L’Ours (1988); see also ‘The thrill of the chase’, in Ritvo, 243–88.

  33 attitude to the colour bar: Schullery, op. cit., 10–11.

  34 Paddington, Sooty, and others: See Karen Hewitt and Louise Roomet, Educational Toys in America: 1800 to the Present (Burlington, 1979). Ophelia, who is one of the few female bear characters, works as a shop–girl in Paris, and travels to Japan, for instance. Anne Conover Heller and Michele Duckson Clise, Ophelia’s World (New York, c. 1985).

  35 £550, 000 in 1989: Evening Standard, 19 Sept. 1989; see also Pauline Cockrill, The Ultimate Teddy Bear Book (London, 1991).

  36 arm around its mate: Away Break, Happy Returns from Network SouthEast, British Rail leaflet, January–May 1992. The habitat of the last brown bears in Europe, in the Pyrenees, was recently threatened by a new road which would have bisected their foraging grounds; but the campaign to save them was fierce and successful, in spite of the road’s supporters, who argued that it would bring needed employment to the region.

  37 ‘… afford to live’: Thomas, 301.

  38 abandon or exchange it: D. W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional objects and the transitional phenomena: a study of the first not–me possession’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, xxxiv (1952), 88–97.

  39 through animals of human dreams: Marc Holthof, ‘To the realm of fables: the animal fables from Mesopotamia to Disney’, in Bart Verschaffel and Mark Verminck (eds), Zoology: On (Post) Modern Animals (Dublin and Antwerp, 1993), 37–53.

  40 ‘… beat your wooer dead’: ‘Snow White and Rose Red’ (no.161), G, 666; GZ, 516–22.

  41 ‘… the tender wolf’: ‘The Company of Wolves’, CBC, 118.

  42 ‘… forbidden boundary lines’: Lorna Sage, ‘Angela Carter’, Writers and their Work (British Council: London, 1994).

  43 ‘… the wide, tawny brow’: ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’, CBC, 50–1.

  44 furry, naked creature like him: ibid., 51–67.

  45 ‘… most lyrically beautiful …’: VFT-I, 238.

  46 ‘to house-train the id’: Angela Carter, ‘Beauty and the Beast by Betsy Hearne’, Folklore (1991), i, 123–4.

  47 embrace of a giant ram: Paula Rego, Nursery Rhymes (Catalogue), London, 1989, 23.

  48 yearning for him … reunion: Beauty and the Beast, directed by John Woods.

  49 ‘the monster of her dreams’: Harry F. Waters, ‘The Monster of her dreams’, Newsweek, 28 Dec. 1987, 58.

  50 ‘… our real lives’: Čapek (1990).

  51 ‘… as truly beautiful’: Bettelheim, 303–9.

  52 American buffalo: I am grateful to Dr John Beebe for his thoughts on the buffalo and other symbolic aspects of the film, in a letter to MW, 8 June 1993.

  53 ‘… than they’ve got planned’: I am very grateful to Katrina Forrester for deciphering the words for me.

  54 in touch with the Inner Warrior: See Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (Shaftesbury, 1990), in which Bly builds an interpretation of the Grimms’ fairy tale, ‘Iron Hans’ (no. 136), G, 612–20, GZ, 482–8, into a new myth of male regeneration: the rusty and shaggy devil–figure in the original story is perceived as a wise mentor who initiates the golden–headed hero into full, independent masculinity. This is a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in which the Beauty is a boy. Marina Warner, ‘A male order catalogue of errors’, Independent on Sunday, 22 Sept. 1991, 26; Jack Zipes, ‘Spreading Myths about Fairy Tales: a Critical Commentary on Robert Bly’s Iron John’, Zipes (1994), kindly lent by the author.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: THE RUNAWAY GIRLS

  1 Gautier de Coinci: ‘The Life of Saint Christina’, Cazelles, 138–50, lines 171–5.

  2 foundations of society are laid: Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, tr. James Harle Bell, John Richard and Rodney Needham (ed.) (London, 1968), 8–11, 29–51, 481–97; Shell, Children (1993), 148–53; id. Elizabeth’s Glass, 8–15; Rosemary Dinnage, ‘All in the family’, NYRB, 4 Dec. 1986, 39–40.

  3 exogamy and the incest taboo: J. Archer Taylor, ‘Riddles dealing with family relationships’, JAF, 51 (1938), 25–37; see also ch. 9.

  4 ‘The she-Bear’: B, I, 183–92; tr. Burton, 170–7.

  5 Cinderella’s stepsisters: B, I, 60–7; AT 510A.

  6 The she-Bear variant: AT 510B.

  7 ‘Peau d’Ane’ was written in verse: Grisélidis, nouvelle, avec le conte de Peau d’Ane et celui des Souhaits Ridicules (Paris, 169
4); P, 52–75.

  8 usual version … reprinted: e.g. Charles Perrault, Contes de ma Mère l’Oye, ed. André Coeuroy (Paris, 1948), 99–113. CF-I, I, prints both verse and prose versions.

  9 ‘pleasant trifles’: P, 57.

  10 chose a donkey: Calvino, two hundred years later, would confess in the preface to his collection of folk tales that he had become so obsessed with his quest for versions, that at one time he ‘would have given all of Proust in exchange for a new variant of the “gold–dung donkey”’. C-Eng, xvii.

  11 a copy of Basile: Soriano, 113ff.

  12 burlesque as a form: Tydaeus, the coachman is seen in Hades: ‘Qui, tenant l’ombre d’une brosse,/ Nettoyoit l’ombre d’un carosse.’ [Holding the shade of a broom, He was cleaning the shade of a carriage.] Quoted in Charles Perrault, Mémoires de ma vie, ed. Paul Bonnefon (Paris, 1909), 23.

  13 ‘almost unlimited neglect’: Physiologus, 82.

  14 than our Cinderella: Soriano, 446–7.

  15 gatherings of rural France: P, 53.

  16 donkey loses to … the lion: ‘The Ass, the Crow and the Wolf’, in Charles Perrault, Fables in English and French. Translated from Original Latin of Gabriel Faerno (London, 1741), 145–7; Perrault had also written verses for the fountains at Versailles, representing Aesop’s fables; see Le Labyrinthe de Versailles, Paris, 1677.

  17 ‘… ugliest animal one might ever see’: P, 68.

  18 and clever jibes: ibid., 66.

  19 they do not conspire: Shell, Children of the Earth, 153ff, argues, in a most original chapter, that the beast metamorphosis is necessitated by the rules against incest: only by becoming herself one who is not-of-the-human family, or, in the case of Beauty and the Beast finding a partner who is not-human, can the heroine fulfil the fundamental law of exogamy.

  20 Berthe … one variation: See ch.8.

  21 abused or rejected by him: AT 510B.

  22 poems, plays and hagiography: Elizabeth Archibald, intro, APT, 3–106; see also The Book of Apollonius, tr. into Eng. verse Raymond L. Grismer and Elizabeth Atkins (Minneapolis, 1936); I am also very grateful to Alan Deyermond for drawing my attention to his edition of the Spanish versions, Apollonius of Tyre: Two Fifteenth Century Spanish Prose Romances ‘Hystoria de Apolonio’ and ‘Confisyon del Amante’: Apolonyo de Tyro (Exeter, 1973), and the splendid contemporary (c. 1488) woodcuts illustrating the first of these texts.

  23 overtures of incest: Schlauch, 56–9; V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford and London, 1984), 297–358. This Tale is depicted in the 33 bosses in the vaulting of the Bauchon Chapel, Norwich Cathedral, carved c. 1475.

  24 interested in hagiography: Perrault wrote a long verse life of Saint Paulinus of Nola, Saint Paulin de Nole (Paris, 1686), for instance; and a paeon dedicated to Sainte Geneviève in the same year as ‘Peau d’Ane’, Le Triomphe de Ste Geneviève (Paris, 1694).

  25 the tale Cuir ‘d’Asnette’: Cox, 206–7.

  26 spared and vindicated: S, I, 40–9.

  27 ‘… help of little ants’: Nouvelles récréations et joyeux devis, 129; P, 55.

  28 ‘… belle Helaine’… abbreviated form: P, 54.

  29 chapbooks and ballads: Jacobs (1894), 240–1.

  30 tell it to her father: Molière, Le Malade imaginaire, II, 8.

  31 ‘… were told to me’: La Fontaine, Fables, VIII, 4; P, 53–4.

  32 ‘Allerleirauh’ (All-Fur): GZ, 259–63.

  33 ‘… tales which are still almost blue’: André Breton, Les Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris, 1946), 31.

  34 ‘… all born in sin’: Leach, 10–11.

  35 son who is a husband too: Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannos, in The Thebans, tr. Timberlake Wertenbaker (London, 1992); Graves, II, 10.

  36 episode … not usually cited: The Interpretation of Dreams, FSE, IV, 261–2, in this famous retelling does not mention the reason for the curse on Laius.

  37 and abducted him: Apollodorus, The Library, III, v.5., tr. J. G. Frazer (Cambridge and London, 1921) i, 338–9; see Mulvey, 191–200.

  38 boys as with women’: Plato, The Laws, VIII, C, tr. R. G. Bury (Cambridge and London, 1926), ii, 150–1; see Jasper Griffin, review of Jay Winkler, The Constraints of Desire, NYRB, 29 Mar. 1990.

  39 as in Lot’s daughters’ case: Myrrha was changed into a myrrh tree as a punishment for seducing her father, and Adonis, the child of their union, was delivered from her trunk, to grow into the beautiful youth whom Venus loved, OM, X, 233–9. Roberto Calasso, in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, tr. Tim Parks (London, 1993), tells the story of two more incestuous daughters, Pallene (29–30) and Hippodameia (177–80).

  40 the solution which cannot be proposed: On this point, I am very grateful to John Forrester, who wrote in a letter: ‘Question addressed to a mother, “What will you admit to being exactly like you but yet more beautiful?”’ Put it another way, a more Freudian way: what woman does every woman want both to be more beautiful than her, and less beautiful than her? (My) daughter (says the mother), (his) daughter (says the wife).’ Letter to MW, 30 June 1993.

  41 ‘… resolve it you’: Shakespeare, Pericles, I.i.

  42 their own identity and kinship: APT, 42–4, 162–9; see also Archibald, intro., APT, 24–6,; Dronke (1994), 72–5.

  43 Roman Charity: Valerius Maximus, ‘De pietate in parentes’ in Tracta et dicta memorabilia (Strasburg, 1470), 5:4.

  44 bars of his prison: John Walsh, ‘Amnon and Tamar: Paulus Morelsee as a History Painter’, Getty seminar, 15 May 1991, kindly lent by the author.

  45 ‘… husband of my mother’: Giorgio Cusatelli and Italo Sordi, Da Edipo alle nostre nonne: Breve stori dell’enigmatisca (Milan, 1975), 26.

  46 ‘… preemptive paternal bond’: Lynda E. Boose, ‘The Father’s House and the Daughter in it: the Structures of Western Culture’s Daughter–Father relationship’, in Boose and Flowers, 33.

  47 by solving a riddle: Henriette–Julie de Murat (attrib.), ‘Starlight’, tr. Terence Cave, in WT, 149–87.

  48 warns against the penalties of vice: One version is in the Louvre, Paris, the other in the Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

  49 flesh of his offspring: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, p.329.

  CHAPTER TWENTY: THE SILENCE OF THE FATHERS

  1 ‘… authoritie over you’: Mary Wroth, The Countesse of Montgomerie’s Urania (London, 1621), 207, quoted Krontiris, 127.

  2 ‘… set out more secretly’: The device also occurs in Le Roman de Silence, in which the heroine, Silence, is brought up as a boy in order not to forfeit her father’s fortune, and later escapes her destiny by staining her face with nettle juice and disguising herself as a jongleur. See Le Roman de Silence, A Thirteenth Century Arthurian Verse Romance, Heldris de Cornualle, ed. Lewis Thorpe (Cambridge, 1972). It is also known in history: before the battle of Brunanburgh in 937, a Danish warrior smuggled himself into the enemy camp as a minstrel and played to King Athelstan; John de Montfort escaped from Philip VI’s hostility in 1341, also in the disguise of a jongleur. See J. S. R. Matlock, The Legendary History of Britain, 346–7.

  3 ‘olim vulgari idomate scripta’: The principal source for Saint Dympna’s story can be found in the Acta Sanctorum (15 May): ‘De SS Dympna Virgine et Gereberno Sacerdote’ (Antwerp, 1680), 15 May, III, 477–97, (repr. Brussels, 1968). The Vita is preserved in a single Cl5th MS. See also the critical edn of Bollandist Godefridus Henschenius, 1680, and the redaction of C. de Smet, Acta SS, 1789. Jan L. van Craywinckel, in the mid C17th, published another, short Vita, in Flemish, which continued to be reissued in the next century: Een lelie onder de doornen, de h. maghet Dympna (Antwerp, 1652). Many accounts of miracles were also published, in a register kept from 1604–54. A record of pilgrims and petitioners, a Liber Innocentium, was kept from 1687–1797, then resumed in the mid Cl9th for a short period.

  4 invokes her protection: I am grateful to Marguerite MacCurtain for giving me a copy of this prayer.

  5 Gerebernus’ relics: T
he church in Xanten was another foundation of the Norbertian canons, whose principal possession, the great Abbey of Saint Michael in Antwerp, seems to lie at the heart of missionary operations to establish new holy places in Flanders and Germany.

  6 seriously neglected: W. P. Letchworth, The Insane in Foreign Countries (New York, 1889), 239–78.

  7 a certain Henri K.: See Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (London, 1984), 58.

  8 so please her: Anne-Thérèse, Marquise de Lambert, Avis à ma fille, Avis d’une mere à son fils, Oeuvres morales (Paris, 1824); ‘A Letter from the Marchioness de Lambert to her Son’, A Compendious Way of Teaching Ancient and Modern Languages, ed. J. T. Philipps (London, 1728); P, 293; Burke (1993), 129–31.

  9 ‘… her eyes and her face’: Gautier de Coinci, in Cazelles, 139, lines 134–6.

  10 pierces … the eye: ibid., 149.

  11 not be so obdurate: ibid., 145–6.

  12 ‘… with excruciating tortures’: Pizan, 232–3.

  13 ‘… sanctuary of Saint Martin’s’: The Croyland Chronicle (‘Historiae Croylandensis Continuatio’), Rerum Anglicarum Scriptores Veterum, ed. W. Fulmar, lines 557ff; see also Charles Ross, Richard III (London, 1981), 28, n.20; Michael Jones, ‘Richard III and the Stanleys’, in Richard III and the North, ed. R. Horrox (Hull, 1986). I am deeply in Michael Jones’s debt for referring me to this episode of English history.

  14 ‘… the essence thereof: Roy Porter, ‘Love, Sex and Medicine: Nicolas Venette and his Tableau de l’amour conjugal’, in Erotica and the Enlightenment, ed. Peter Wagner (Frankfurt, 1991), 90–122, 109.

  15 ‘… will not die’: P, 75.

  16 evil influence of a ‘Druid’: Perrault, Contes de ma Mère l’Oye, ed. André Coeuroy (Paris, 1948), 99–113, 102.

  17 absolve … responsibility: P, 60–1.

  18 no likelihood of offspring: Perrault, ed. Coeuroy, 113.

  19 the English Victorian stage: e.g. H. J. Byron, Cinderella or the Lover, the Lackey and the little Glass Slipper (London, 1861).