From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  20 wife’s gambling debts: Cruikshank (1853).

  21 ‘Maiden Without Hands’: GZ, 118–23; ‘La Fille aux mains coupées’, in Velay-Vallantin (1992), 95–134; Tatar, (1992), iv.

  22 smitten brother: ‘La bella delle mani mozze’, B, I, 251–63.

  23 ‘… extraordinary size’: Philippe de Beaumanoir, La Manékine; Roman du XIIIe siècle, tr. Christiane Marchello–Nizia (Paris, 1980), 46–7.

  24 not for the mutilating itself: Ellis, 78; see also Tatar (1992), iv.

  25 cuts down … pear tree: ‘Cinderella’ (no.121), G, 121–8, GZ, 86–92.

  26 fallen out of the tale: See Ben Rubenstein, ‘The meaning of the Cinderella Story in the Development of a Little Girl’, in Dundes (1988), 219–28.

  27 Aurelia then recalled … years before: Peter Swales, ‘Freud, Katharina, and the First “Wild Analysis”’, in Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals, Contributions to Freud Studies, III, ed. Paul E. Stepansky (Hillsdale, 1988), 78–164, gives a remarkably detailed account of the case, and I am grateful to the author for sending me the offprint; see also Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud’s Women (London, 1992), 104–8.

  28 Donkeyskin fairy tale negotiates: Correspondence between Breuer and Freud, 1893–95, 127, quoted Swales, op. cit., 121.

  29 documented cases of incest: ibid., 116–20.

  30 could not be disentangled: Otto Rank is likely to have contributed to Freud’s shift from an experiential to a symbolic interpretation of incest confessions. See The Incest Theme in Literaure and Legend [1912], tr. Gregory C. Richter (Baltimore, 1992). See also J. M. Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York, 1984).

  31 the issue for him: John Forrester argues that Freud was very matter-of-fact about incest, did not react to it with horror, and ‘took it very much in his stride – a day to day occurrence, certainly for him in his practice, but also – and this should not be forgotten, in the conventional mores of Jews just out of the ghettos: he did himself marry his sister’s sister-in-law …’ Letter to MW, 30 June 1993.

  32 from his grandmother: Agnes Varda directed Jacquot de Nantes, a biographical tribute to her husband, in 1991, in which his productions of ‘Cinderella’ and other fairy tales are dramatized.

  33 a bitter tale: Lynne Tillman, ‘The Trouble with Beauty’, in Absence Makes the Heart (London, 1990), 85–90.

  34 combing her locks: ‘Maria di legno’, C–It, I, 437–41; C-Eng, 378–82.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: THE LANGUAGE OF HAIR I

  1 ‘… long passionate kiss’: A, 45–6.

  2 father or other would-be seducer: OCFT, 121.

  3 outer, pelican skin: Taggart, 94–5.

  4 release her from her animal form: CF-II, WT, 39–40.

  5 magic to restore him to human shape: CF-I, 132. Agathe Moitessier translates Mie-Souillon as Darling-Dirty Face, in ‘Three Fairy Tales by Madame d’Aulnoy’, tr. with commentary (unpublished thesis, Bard College, 1982). I am grateful to the author for letting me read the typescript.

  6 life of relative freedom: WT, 103–7;

  7 satyrs … of lust: Lynn Frier Kaufmann, The Noble Savage: Satyrs and Satyr Families in Renaissance Art (Philadelphia, 1979).

  8 attached and dangling: See Wolf Hart, Die Skulpturen des Freiburger Munster (Freiburg, 1981).

  9 caresses and cuddles: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

  10 ‘… lies on the ground’: AHA, 338–9.

  11 Sensual Pleasure: woodcut by the Master of the Bergmann Shop, in Sebastian Brant, The Ship of Fools, [1944] tr. Edwin H. Zeydel (New York, 1962), 178.

  12 anchorite Saint Onufrius: Williams, part II, 81–5.

  13 long to cover them: ibid., 107–10; Velay-Vallantin (1992), 303–35.

  14 symbolic tunic woven of rushes: Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Amsterdam, 1644), 422.

  15 a plumed penis: In the Louvre, Paris.

  16 ‘… Short-witted Maidens’: in Hugo von Trimberg, Der Renner, (Austria, c. 1475–1500), repr. Mediaeval and Renaissance Manuscripts: Major Acquisitions of the Pierpont Morgan Library 1924–1974 (New York, 1974), fig.50.

  17 ‘… passion that encumbrance all women’: J. Gessler, La Vierge barbue (Brussels and Paris, 1938); G. Schurer and J. M. Ritz, Sankt Kummeris und Volto Santo (Düsseldorf, 1934).

  18 ‘… uncumber them of their husbands’: Farmer, 404.

  19 lustfulness inside woman … dealt with: In Memling’s painting in Bruges, golden wisps are discreetly visible on her chin; but in numerous anonymous cult crosses and statues from Germany, this Saint is more heavily bearded than Jesus. See the exceptionally rich collection of votive images, made by Dr Rudolf Kriss, in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich.

  20 … as in anorexia: J. Hubert Lacey, ‘Anorexia Nervosa and a bearded female saint’, British Medical Journal, vol.285, 18–25 Dec. 1982.

  21 ‘… without loving her’: ‘La Belle aux cheveux d’or’, CF-II, I, 261–74; ‘The Fair with Golden Hair’, was used by J. R. Planché in his translation (London, n.d.), 22–34.

  22 ‘… clear in colour’: C. T. Onions (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford 1969), 342.

  23 fate – and desire: See ‘fair’, ‘fay’, and ‘fang’ in The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, 12 vols, III (New York, 1911), 2119–20, 2137, 2160. I am grateful to Lori Repetti for help with this research.

  24 blood it may spill: Umberto Eco, ‘How Culture Conditions the Colours We See’, in On Signs, ed. M. Blonsky (Baltimore, 1985), 171; on the symbolism of colour, see also Linda Woodbridge, ‘Black and White and Red All Over: The Sonnet Mistress Amongst the Ndembu’, Renaissance Quarterly, XL, 2 (Summer 1987), 247–7. Gage is the most recent, definitive study on colour symbolism and use.

  25 sixty are in circulation: Gage, 79.

  26 a puppet film, made in 1935: Warner, ‘Uses of Enchantment’, in Petrie, 18–20; I am grateful to Kathleen Davies for her information about Nazi uses of fairy tales.

  27 sign of her lost beauty: ‘Cupid and Psyche’, 130–1; La Fontaine, Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon (1669), Oeuvres complétes (1858), I, 568–682, 670.

  28 lamentably they may strike us today: cf Heliodorus, Aethiopica (An Aethiopian Romance), tr. Thomas Underdowne (1587), rev. F. A. Wright (London and New York, 1928). See McGrath, ‘Black Andromeda’ JWCI, LV, 1992; Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa, 1991).

  29 unfaithful to his true love in so doing: Murat, ‘Starlight’, tr. Cave, WT, 185–6.

  30 ‘… golden waves her hair’: Francis Davies, A Musical Cinderella, music arr. B. Hobson Carroll (London, c. 1885), Renier Collection.

  31 ‘… the window-frame’: ‘Little Snow–White’ no.53, G, 249; GZ, 196–204.

  32 ‘… golden hair like mine’: ‘All–Fur’ no.65, GZ, 259.

  33 with a red beard: Ruth Mellinkoff, ‘Judas’s Red Hair and the Jews’, Journal of Jewish Art, ix, 1982, 31–46.

  34 Vice below is a dark redhead: Norton Simon Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

  35 Tiepolo’s Time Defacing Beauty: in the National Gallery, London.

  36 hot hues’ ambiguities: On yellow, as the colour of folly, buffoonery, madness, disorder, see Pastoureau (1986), 23–34; Mellinkoff, I, 48ff. for representations of Synagoga, Judas, the impenitent thief in yellow clothing.

  37 more modest rituals: I am grateful to Conrad Rudolph for this perception.

  38 ‘… scatter … enemy with terror’: Bernard of Clairvaux, De Consideratione, bk 2:10. Again, my thanks to Conrad Rudolph for this reference.

  39 ‘… come into being’: Umberto Eco, ‘The Aesthetics of Light’, in Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages., tr. Hugh Bredin (New Haven, 1986), 50.

  40 hair in the tail: Michel Tournier explores in Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar (Paris, 1980) the symbolism of blackness and whiteness from the point of view of the black king, Gaspard, who has bought a blonde concubine. Michel Tournier, The Four Wise Men, tr. Ralph Manheim (New York, 1982), 25–6.

  41
‘… my only child’: ‘Illius adveniens planctu iam livida mater/ Et flavas disiecta comas his ethera pulsat:/ O celi sacra stirps, o proles unica …’, Eupolemius, Messias; quoted Peter Dronke, ‘Laments of the Maries’, Dronke (1992), 483.

  42 colour of the vase itself: Jean-Thierry Maertens, Ritanalyses, I (Paris, 1987), 35–7. I am very grateful to Henri Colomer for this reference and for his help over many aspects of colour symbolism.

  43 whitening the complexion: [John Baptist Porta], Natural Magick in XX Bookes (London, 1658), 233–4.

  44 ‘… the fashion of a boy’: See Marina Warner, Joan of Arc, The Image of Female Heroism (London, 1981), 143.

  45 coiled on her neck, and fair: Vigiles de Charles VII (1484), BN MS, Fr. 5054.

  46 ‘… appeared feeble and delicate’: Boutet de Monvel, ‘The National Hero of France’, The Country Magazine, liii, 17, 119–30.

  47 Delaroche’s maudlin icon: Guildhall Art Gallery, Corporation of London.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: THE LANGUAGE OF HAIR II

  1 ‘bald, I don’t love you any more’: ‘Mira que si te quise, fué por el pelo, Ahora que estás pelona, ya no te quiero.’ Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940, Museum of Modern Art, New York. See Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (New York, 1983), 285–6.

  2 hair can help: See Edmund Leach, ‘Magical Hair’, in Journal Royal Anthropological Institute, 88 (1958), 147–63; C. R. Hallpike, ‘Social Hair’, Man, NS, 4, 2 (1969), 256–64; Ann Charles and Roer De Anfrasio, The History of Hair (New York, 1970); Wendy Cooper, ‘Hair’, Sex, Society, Symbolism (New York, 1972); Brook Adams and David R. McFadden, Hair, Cooper–Hewitt Museum, 1980; Hair Raising (Catalogue), Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 13 Mar. – 9 May 1987; Marina Warner, ‘Bush Natural’, Parkett, 27, 1991, 6–17.

  3 the monk’s tonsure: See Louis Trichet, La Tonsure Vie et mort d’un pratique ecclesiastique (Paris, 1990)

  4 flowerchild’s tangled curls, the veil: e.g. The flavour of the Protestant tradition is captured by the tract: Thomas Wall, Spiritual Armour to defend the head from the superfluity of naughtiness; Being a loving and Christian tender, humbly offered to the pious and serious consideration of the ministers of the Gospel and to all others it may concern: wherein is proved that it is unlawful for women to cut their hair polled or shorn and men to wear the same to cover their heads: together with how men and women ought according to the written law of God and nature to wear their hair (London, 1688).

  5 museum hygrometers: I am grateful to Jacqueline Burckhardt for her help in this area.

  6 cult … round their tombs: P. I. Robert, Les Saints rois du moyen-âge en occident, 6–13e siècles (Brussels, 1984), 67. Patricia Morison kindly informed me of these cults.

  7 stories of Samson …: Dale Alexander, How I Stopped Growing Bald and Started Growing Hair (New York, 1969), is only one of many books to address the anxiety some men feel about this issue.

  8 power to straighten it: I am indebted to Jacqueline Simpson for this superstition, reported in Nancy Arrowsmith and George Moorse, A Field Guide to the Little People (London, 1978).

  9 gives power over him: ‘The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs’, no.29, G, 151–8; GZ, 109–16.

  10 braided into a gorget: Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages (London, 1931), f.p. 131.

  11 fay, and proves effective: La Fontaine, Joconde’, Oeuvres Complètes (1991), 561; Pamela A. Miller, ‘Hair Jewelry as Fetish’, in Objects of Special Devotion. Fetishes and Fetishism in Popular Culture, ed. Ray B. Browne (Bowling Green, 1982).

  12 Mary’s or Jesus’ hair: Patricia Morison has passed on to me this story, about the English hermit Saint Godric [d. 1170]: ‘An abbot came to converse with him; his monk-companion noticed a hair about to descend from the holy man’s beard, and asked if he could pluck it. Godric agreed but self-consciously said he must look after it. The monk used it, steeped in water, when he was ill some time later – and recovered.’ Liber de vita et miraculis S. Godrici, heremitai de Finchale, Surtees Society 19 (1847), 126, p.263. Some hair and beard relics appear in Christian lists before the Reformation, e.g. St Peter’s, in the Old English relic list of Exeter, c. 1010. See Marina Warner, ‘Shearings’, in Ann Hamilton (Newark, 1994) for discussion of hair as a different kind of human leaving from relics. I am very grateful to Patricia Morison for help in this area.

  13 men as well as to women: Dada Haarwasser, Bergmann & Co. Zurich, reproduced Dames in dada, eds. Carolien van der Schoot, Marleen Swenne (Amsterdam, 1989), 24.

  14 also appears blonde: For the iconography of Virgo, I consulted: A Barzon, I cieli e la loro influenza (Padua, 1924); H. Bober, ‘The Zodiacal Miniature of Les Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry – Its sources and meanings’, JWCI, XI, 1948, 1–34; Albumasar, De magnis coniunctionibus (Augsburg, 1489); id., De revolutionibus nativitatum, ed. D. Pingree (Leipzig, 1968); F. Saxl, ‘Macrocosm and Microcosm in Medieval Pictures’, Lectures (London, 1957), I, 58–72; Eric Burrows, Virgo in Christian Documents (London, 1941); Lucio Grosseto, ‘La decorazione pittorica del Salone’, in Il Palazzo della Ragione, ed. Carlo Guido Mor et al. (Venice, 1963); Luigi Aurigemma, Il segno zodiacale dello Scorpione nelle tradizioni occidentali dall’antichità greco-latina al rinascimento (Turin, 1976); Samek Ludovici, Il ‘De sphaera’ estense e l’iconografia astrologica (Milan, n.d.); Gioia Mori, ‘Arte e astrologia’, Arte, Dossier no.10, Feb. 1987. I am most grateful to Amy Morris for her research assistance with this topic.

  15 Spica (Wheatear): Aratus, Phaenomena (c. 276–274 BC): ‘Beneath both feet of Bootes, mark the Maiden, who in her hands bears the gleaming Ear of Corn.’ LCL, 214–15.

  16 wheatsheaf in her hand: Paolo d’Ancona, I mesi di Schifanoia in Ferrara (Milan, 1954), 69–72.

  17 heads uncovered and their hair loose: Les présentes heures à l’usaige de Rouan [de Simon Vostre] (Paris, 1508), 126–37.

  18 refusal to do as the heads asked: Villeneuve, Les Contes marins ou La Jeune Américaine (Paris, 1740).

  19 it grows longer: Variations on ‘Diamonds and Toads’ (see ch. 11); ‘L’acqua nel cestello’, C-It, I, 409–11; C-Eng, 353–5.

  20 performed on one another at Montaillou: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, tr. Barbara Bray (Harmondsworth, 1980), 141–2.

  21 delousing their children’s hair: Pieter De Hooch, ‘A Mother’s Duties’, Wallace Collection.

  22 golden hair promised riches: On meanings of gold, see Grahame Clark, Symbols of Excellence: Precious metals as expressions of status (Cambridge, 1986), 50–8.

  23 ‘… a sunburst of rays …’: P, 73.

  24 ‘… when he awoke’: ibid., 58–9.

  25 mediums of erotic power: See Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London, 1985), 66ff; Marina Warner, intro., Carrington (1987); id., ‘The Art of Playing Make-Believe’, Leonora Carrington (Catalogue), Serpentine Gallery, London, 1991; Suleiman (1990), 26–32, 144–6, 169–79; id., ‘Artists in Love (And Out): Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst’, Suleiman (1994), 89–121.

  26 ‘Baldness lies … my child’: Max Ernst, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, tr. Dorothea Tanning [1930] (New York, 1982).

  27 ‘…all his beauty at one go’: ‘As they rode along the edge’, Carrington, Seventh Horse, 3–15.

  28 and take her clothes: ‘The Débutante’, in Carrington, The House of Fear, 44–8.

  29 white horse … room behind her: Leonora Carrington (Catalogue), cover; Chadwick, op. cit., 77.

  30 painted herself as a horse: Warner, intro.; Chadwick, op. cit., 78–81; Carrington, The House of Fear, 6–12; Suleiman (1994), 89–121.

  31 strangles him: Carrington, House of Fear, 37–43.

  32 Meret Oppenheim was born …: Bice Curiger, Meret Oppenheim: Defiance in the Face of Freedom (Catalogue) Zurich, New York, London, 1989; ‘Collaboration Meret Oppenheim’, Parkett no.4, 1985, 20–49, including Jacqueline Burckhardt, ‘The Semantics of Antics’, ibid., 23–9. I am
very grateful to Bice Curiger and Jacqueline Burckhardt for their help throughout my research.

  33 children’s classic in Switzerland: Lisa Wenger, Joggeli söll ga Birli schüttle! [1908] (Muri bei Bern, 1988).

  34 clothe herself and her child: Meret Oppenheim, ‘Endlich! Die Freiheit!’, in Husch, husch, der schönste Vokal entleert sich. Gedichte, Zeichnungen (Frankfurt, 1984), 15.

  35 ‘… full bitterly him wrung’: ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’, Chaucer, 289; Malcolm Jones also draws attention to Saint Jerome, who cites Plutarch’s story about a Roman sage, who, ‘divorcing his wife, said that only the wearer of an ill–fitting shoe knos where it pinched.’ Letter to MW, 24 June 1994.

  36 free to marry elsewhere: Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law (New York, 1984), 113–15.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: THE SILENCE OF THE DAUGHTERS

  1 ‘… upon land a living soul’: Answer: ‘Siren’, see Michael Alexander, Old English Riddles From the Exeter Book (London, 1980).

  2 he begins to cry: AT 923 (Love like salt). See Alan Dundes, ‘“To love my father all”: A psychoanalytic study of the Folktale Source of King Lear’, in Dundes (1982), 229–44; also Ann Pasternak Slater, Shakespeare the Director (Brighton and New Jersey, 1982), 121–36.

  3 loss hangs over both plays: Shakespeare recast his own will, to favour Susannah, his elder daughter, over her sister Judith. See S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford, 1991), 20–2.

  4 honesty as well as modesty: See Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (London, 1983), 108–10.

  5 ‘… concealment and dumbness’: ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’, FSE, XII, 291–301, 294.

  6 ‘… into her arms’: ibid., 301.

  7 tissue of metaphors: Derek Walcott, Omeros (London, 1991), 296.

  8 English sense of mute: cf. Secundus the Silent, Irwin, 75–6; see Johannes de Alta Silva, Dolopathos, or The King and the Seven Wise Men, tr. Brady B. Gilleland (Binghamton, 1981) for a C12th romance in which a youth, accused by a wicked stepmother of attempted rape, does not speak in his own defence.