9 Europe and further afield: GZ, no.9, 35–9; no.49, 182–5; a third story, ‘The Seven Ravens’ (no.25), GZ, 99–101 is also related to this group, but does not include the motif of the heroine’s silence; HCA, 117–31; ‘The Twelve Wild Ducks’, VFT-II, 3–9; see Taylor and Rebel for a most interesting analysis of the relations between these tales and the conscription of young men during C19th.
10 female nemesis … great emphasis: The C12th Dolopathos op. cit. ends with ‘Virgil’ issuing a tirade which climaxes: ‘Woman is a great evil.’ 71–7.
11 chivalrous enterprises open to them: I wrote a version of the story in The Lost Father (London, 1988) and gave it to the fantasy of my protagonist, Rosa, who is growing up in provincial Southern Italy in the early part of the century. Though Rosa casts herself as the chivalrous questor, who defies all for love – in this case, not of a brother, but a lover – she represents the channelling of women’s vitality that these ancient and exemplary stories tend to hold out for approval; she expresses, on my behalf, the distressing limits on women’s capacity for energy and passion encoded within the most beckoning and inspiring material.
12 ‘… husband will not beat you’: LPB, 122–4.
13 ‘And you will see, his anger will pass’: ibid.
14 other women in articulacy: Bottigheimer (1986), 177–87; see also, ‘Silenced Women in the Grimms’ Tales: The “Fit” between fairy tales and society in their historical context’, in Bottigheimer (1986), 115–32.
15 ‘… say nothing’: Julia O’Faolain, ‘Interview with Myself’, LRB, 23 June 1994, 26–7.
16 the secrecy of some of the contents: See Mary H. Nooter, Preface and ‘The Impact of the Unseen’, in Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and Reveals (New York and Munich, 1993), 18–21, 235–40 on the power of discretion.
17 ‘… ivy around a wall’: Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Benjamin, 108, 395.
18 finger to his lips: cf. Quentin Massys, Allegory of Folly, Metropolitan Museum, New York, c. 1510–20; E. Tietze-Conrrat, Dwarfs and Jesters in Art, (London, 1957).
19 criteria held up for the sex: chs 2 and 3.
20 actually disappearing out of the text: Bottigheimer (1987), 53.
21 silence for five years: Plutarch, De Curiositate (Moralia III), La Curiosità, ed. Emidio Pettine (Salerno, 1977), 43.
22 moral and philosophical arguments: I am very grateful to Laura Mulvey, for lending me her paper on ‘Godard’s Hail Mary’ (not then published), in which she develops a powerful insight into the importance of female curiosity as a leverage against the reification of women and their bodies. See ‘Marie/Eve: Continuity and Discontinuity in J. L. Godard’s Iconography of Women’, in M. Locke and C. Warren (eds) “Hail Mary”: Women and the Sacred in Film, (Carbondale, 1993).
23 Passau during the Nazi period: Directed by Michel Verhoeven, 1989.
24 strictures on female behaviour: See Warner, ‘Through a Child’s Eyes’ and ‘Women against Women in the Old Wives’ Tale’, in Petrie, 57–8, 67–8; also, Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt (London, 1994), 267–74, about the twists and turns Rosmus’ tale has taken since.
25 siren’s voice for human form: ‘The Little Mermaid’ first appeared in Tales Told for Children, iii, 1837, and in English in Bentley’s Miscellany (London, 1846); HCA, 57–76.
26 bride on certain conditions: cf. Jean d’Arras, Mélusine, ed. Edmund Lecesne (Arras, 1888); V. Bruhier, Caprices d’imagination (1740) Lettre III, Sur les Sirènes, Tritons, Néréides, et autres Poissons rares, qui se trouvent dans la mer; Friedrich de La Motte-Fouqué, Undine and Other Stories, tr. Edmund Gosse (Oxford, 1932); Jean Markale, Mélusine (Paris, 1993); also A. S. Byatt’s magical treatment of the themes in Possession (London, 1990).
27 bride who comes from the sea: The Arabian Nights, tr. Richard Burton, adapt. and tr. Jack Zipes (New York, 1991), 223–63.
28 speak (and sing): First produced in March, 1901 in Prague. Libretto by Jaroslav Kvapil. See Karel Brusak, ‘A lyrical fairy-tale’ (prog.), Rusalka, English National Opera, London, 1983.
29 worship of Woman: See Catherine Clément, Opera or the Undoing of Women, tr. Betsy Wing (London, 1989;, 111–15.
30 Danish national monument: The sculptor was Edvard Eriksen [1876–1959].
31 ‘… have my powerful potion’: HCA, 48.
32 Titus Andronicus: See Pasternak Slater, op. cit., 123–4.
33 ‘… cause your blood to flow’: HCA, 48–9.
34 red in the costumes and décor: Des. Stefanos Lazaridis.
35 go on rowing: Homer, The Odyssey, XII, tr. E. V. Rieu (Harmondsworth [1942], 1982), 193–4.
36 present, and of the future: See Padel, 65.
37 ‘… sirens’ rocky shores’: Cicero, De Finibus, V, xviii–xix, LCB, 448–51. I am very grateful to Nick Havely for bringing this passage to my notice.
38 Thelxiope (Enchanting Face): Graves, II, 361.
39 nature’s only voiced chorus: The presence of feathers on musical angels’ bodies as well as their wings points to their affinity with birds; Sri Lankan ivory plaques from the C17th and C18th, for instance, represent heavenly musicians as bird-bodied. British Museum 1943.7–12.2,4.
40 folklore about Harpies: Graves, I, 128; II, 230
41 play at a nobleman’s banquet: An imposing, life size terracotta group of two sirens on either side of a seated man, from Apulia, Magna Graecia, fifth century BC, is in the John Paul Getty Museum, Malibu.
42 golden plumage … their faces: OM, V, 551–63.
43 Harpy, means snatcher: The pomegranate – emblem of Persephone, goddess of the underworld – appears in the relief carvings on the so-called Harpy Tomb from Xanthos in Turkey (erected 480–470 BC) offered by seated figures who may be making their goodbyes in this manner to the dead. They are much more likely to be sirens, instead, the accompanying angels of the dead in classical mythology, and the tomb’s traditional name mistaken. F. N. Pryce, British Museum Catalogue of Sculpture, i, part 1, 1928 B286–318, 122ff.
44 flight, but a watery passage: Pierre Courcelle, ‘Quelques symboles funéraires du Néo-Platonisme Latin. Le Vol de Dédale – Ulysse et les sirènes’, Revue des Etudes anciennes, XLVI (1944), 65–93.
45 possess ‘utmost music’: Padel, 65.
46 ‘… into the tomb a bride’: Peter Dronke, ‘The Lament of Jephtha’s daughter’, in Dronke (1992), 345ff.
47 … ‘What comes in’ moves them: Padel, 65.
48 hell without end: I am most grateful to Nicholas John for noticing this siren.
49 Psychomachia: See The Hortus Deliciarum of Herrad of Hohenburg (Landsberg) ed. Rosalie Green, Michael Evans, Christine Bischoff, Michael Curschmann, 2 vols (London, 1979); also Courcelle, op. cit., 82.
50 the presence of danger: George Steiner, in a lecture on Sirens, 9 Nov. 1991, in Cambridge, first drew my attention to the word’s growth in meaning.
51 ‘uterus on the loose’: Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London, 1993), 11.
52 ‘… exposes herself, terribly open’: Paul Valéry, Degas. Danse. Dessin. (Paris, 1938), 30–1. My deepest thanks to Terence Cave for tremendous help (and inspiration) with this difficult translation.
53 The knight says: ‘Sovereignty’: ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell’ (East Midlands, C15th) in D. B. Sands (ed.), Middle English Verse Romances (London, 1966). The Wife of Bath tells a variation on this tale. See Chaucer, 303–10; Warner, Monsters, 14–6.
54 laughter of hope and pleasure: Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop (London, 1967).
55 ‘… because of my piano’: Jane Campion, The Piano (London 1993), 9.
56 ‘… so why not he!’: ibid., 9.
57 ‘I am learning to speak’: Campion, ibid., 122.
58 rampantly romantic resolution: Sarah Kerr, ‘Jane Campion’s The Piano’, NYRB, 3 Feb. 1994; Letter from Martha Nussbaum, NYRB, 7 April 1994
59 a structure of relationships: Douglas (1973), 189–201.
CONCLUSION
<
br /> 1 which nobody can test’: Homer, Odyssey, XI, 181.
2 ‘on this veiled evening’: Eavan Boland, ‘What we lost’, in Outside History (Manchester, 1990).
3 heckle or boo: Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) brilliantly satirized Hollywood’s accommodations to audience desires.
4 competing regional music: See Dubravka Ugrešic, Have a Nice Day (London, 1994).
5 resistance to state propaganda: Serbian songs, traditionally sung by women, are well capable of flyting the bloody pretensions of the heroes building their nation states. See e.g. ‘The Best Place for the Village’, in Vuk Stefanovic Karadžic [1787–1864], Red Knight: Serbian Women’s Songs, ed. and tr. Daniel Weissnort and Tomislav Longinovic (London, 1992), 26–7.
6 revolutionary age: See Ted Hughes, ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’, in Winter Pollen (London, 1994), 330–4.
7 ‘… tension with the public one’: Eavan Boland, ‘In a Time of Violence’, Poetry Book Society Bulletin (Spring 1994), no. 160, 2.
8 Oz books: See Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London, 1993), for an astute analysis of the film’s ideological changes to Baum’s original series of novels, beginning with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).
9 bureaucrats and bullies: See Capek (1990).
10 irreproachable figures: Personal communication to MW, Annual Conference of the Welsh Academy, Cardiff, 1991.
11 ‘… chain of speech communion’: Mihail Bakhtin,’ The Problem of Speech Genres’, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, tr. Vern W. McGhee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1986), 60–102, quoted in ZVFT, 100.
12 as Rushdie has done: See Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (London 1990), which reveals the crisis of the storyteller today: Rushdie’s protagonist Rashid has lost his powers through grief at the elopement of his wife, and his son Haroun, like a questing hero, defies the forces of silence, led by the sinister Khattam Shud (whose name means All Is Silence), to recover his father’s tongue. With magnanimity of spirit and an effervescent energy, the novella transparently allegorizes the situation of Rushdie himself, whom the Ayatollah and his supporters have attempted to silence when they objected to the story he told in The Satanic Verses and the way that he told it.
13 ‘… make us regret reality’: Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Démocratic en Amérique, ed. A. Gain (2 vols, Paris, 1951), vol.2, 110.
14 flight to another world: See Calvino (1988), esp. ‘La Tradizione popolare nelle fiabe’ (1973), 109–28; I am very grateful to Lorna Sage for her insights into Calvino’s writing.
15 change the face of reality: Calvino (1992), 27.
16 descended from Guy of Warwick: Pageant of the Birth, Life and Death of Richard Beauchamp Earl of Warwick K. G. 1381–1439, 36–40. Guy of Warwick was still included, alongside King Arthur, 100 Merry Tales and Robin Hood, among the ten favourite chapbook titles of the seventeenth century in England. Watt, 270–1. I am most grateful to Martin Lowry for communicating this information. The scarf of St Cunera, on exhibition in Museum Het Catherijneconvent, Utrecht, gives another example of cross-fertilization between East and West, romance and real life, hagiography and fairy tale: silk embroidered with silver, it is Byzantine work from Syria, made in the sixth century, and the label says it was used to strangle St Cunera by a wicked queen who was jealous of her beauty and goodness. St Cunera, according to her legend, was the only one of St Ursula’s 11,000 virgins to survive the massacre at Cologne by the Huns (in the seventh century). See Marina Warner, ‘Les trois coffrets européens’, Lettre Internationale, no.31, Winter 1991–2, 3–4; id., ‘The Three Caskets of Europe’, PN Review 82, 18:2, 15–7.
17 Adults Only: e.g. Bluebeard, directed by Edward Dmytryk, with Richard Burton in the title role, and publicity declaring: ‘Bluebeard had a way with the world’s most beautiful, most seductive, most glamorous women … he did a way with them … Raquel Welch … suffocated … Virna Lisi … guillotined … Karin Schubert … shot …’ Press release, Cinerama UK, 1972.
18 ‘… the spoken word’: Čapek (1951), 63.
19 ‘how I make potato soup’: Angela Carter, intro, VFT-I, x.
20 a hole in his pocket: ‘The Tramp’s Tale’ in Čapek (1980), 145–63.
21 ‘… liberatory paths/voices’: Guattari, 35.
22 ‘… universe of creative enchantments’: ibid., 31.
Acknowledgements
I COULD NOT have begun to tell the story I have put down here without the help of numerous friends and colleagues. I began the research as a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in 1987–8, where I was given precious time to write as well as access to superb bibliographical support: to all the staff there, my profound thanks, especially to John Walsh, Kurt Forster, Herb Hymans, Thomas Kren, Marcia Reed and the researchers, Amy Morris and Lori Repetti. My colleagues there and in the wider circle of Los Angeles that year were an inspiration: Caroline Walker Bynum, Ruth Mellinkoff, David Kunzle, Svetlana Alpers, Daniel Selden, Ellen Kemp, Wolfgang Kemp, Martin Lowry, Carl Schorske, Charles Dill, Conrad Rudolph created a community of argument and knowledge which sharpened my wits and gave me many new ways of looking at material. The first ideas for the book were written as a series of eight public lectures on fairy tales as Tinbergen Professor at Erasmus University, Rotterdam (1989–90); in the Netherlands, Rudolf Dekker, Lotte van de Pol, and Jan van Herwaarden were true friends, and also helped with excellent advice and numerous references. Gerard Rooijakhers shared with me his wide knowledge of catchpenny prints and popular illustration. In 1993, I was made a Visiting Fellow of The British Film Institute, where I continued very enjoyable research into the theme, as explored in film. To Colin MacCabe and Duncan Petrie, special thanks.
At different stages in my quest, the path was marked by Peter Dronke, Mariët Westermann, Terence Cave, Malcom Jones, Ruth Padel, David Constantine, Jack Zipes, Ruth Bottigheimer, and my debt to them is very deep. Peter Dronke also read part of the finished typescript and saved me from many horrors; Terence Cave read the final draft and gave me the benefit of his perception and learning. I am profoundly grateful to them both. Susannah Clapp put inspiring and fascinating books my way for review: for this, much thanks. So too have Alan Hollinghurst, Jan Dalley, Lyndsay Duguid, Blake Morrison. Many libraries and librarians helped me: Tessa Chester of the Renier Collection, Clive Hurst of the Bodleian’s Special Collections, the staff of the Osborne Collection, Toronto, of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, of the Clark Collection in Los Angeles, of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the London Library, the Warburg Institute and, of course, the British Library. Various lectures I gave often prompted some extremely acute and rich responses, so my thanks are due to all who invited me and came to hear and comment.
Iona Opie, Dubravka Ugrešić, A. D. Deyermond, Lisa Appignanesi, John Dickson, John Forrester, Elaine Showalter, Roy Porter, Patricia Morison, Joanna Innes, Jacqueline Simpson, Arnold Smeets, Roy Judge, Diane Purkiss, Valerie Yule, Mathilde van Dijk, Robert Smith, Scott Mandelbrote, Dimphena Groffen, David Scrase, Hermione Lee, Roy Foster, Laura Mulvey, Paul Taylor, Birté Carié, Ben Haggarty, Jennifer Chandler, Naomi Lewis, Ella Westland, Joseph Farrell, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Roger Cardinal, Julia O’Faolain and Lauro Martines, Janet Nelson, Roger Malbert, Jet Bakels, Anneke Mulder-Bakker, Norman F. Cantor, Henri Colomer, Richard Wentworth, Kathleen Davis, W. A. Jackson, Joan Aiken, Isabel Cardigos, Margaret Meek, Nicholas Tucker, Alberto Manguel all gave me vital information and insights. I have also benefitted greatly from the pioneering work of Jacques Barchilon. Misri De, Ben Ramos, Linda Weston, Daniel Welldon, James Forrester, Anne Francis gave me support in different ways, and I thank them all and hope that they do not object too strongly to the results.
Special acknowledgements are due, for the quotations I have used from their poetry, to Eavan Boland, ‘What we Lost…’ from Outside History, Carcanet Press; Olga Broumas, ‘Cinderella’ from Beginning with O, Yale University Press; Liz Lochhead, ‘Men Talk’ from True Confessio
ns and New Clichés, and ‘The Storyteller’ from Dreaming Frankenstein, Polygon; and Ruth Padel, ‘Reading Snow White’ from Summer Snow, Hutchinson.
At my publishers, I was given every encouragement and great friendship throughout; the appearance of this book results from the work and care of Peggy Sadler, Anna Pinter and Pippa Lewis. The support I was shown by Carmen Callil gave me the energy and conviction I needed; the editing and criticism of Alison Samuel have been tonic and invaluable. To Jonathan Burnham and Frances Coady, too, much thanks, for encouragement throughout. Gill Coleridge has battled spiritedly on my behalf, and I am very grateful indeed to her. As the book has taken me several years, there were more helpers on the way (those kindly spirits who appear in misfortune to grant a boon) and they scattered so much more flour, a bounty of crumbs for me to follow down new tracks. John Dewe Mathews never abandoned me: a rare patience and understanding, and the book would not have been made without him. To them all, salaams, and more than three wishes, if it could be.
Marina Warner
Kentish Town, 1994
The author, Giovanni Boccaccio, is depicted seated outside the circle of storytellers, eavesdropping as they take turns to while away their time of voluntary exile from plague-stricken Florence. This fifteenth-century frontispiece to The Decameron sustains the narrative convention that male authors often acted as mouthpieces for women’s firsthand experience.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Details of works frequently quoted can be found above in the list of abbreviations; the following titles fill out the references in the notes and offer a guide to background reading.
TELLERS AND TALES
Antoninus Liberalis, The Metamorphoses, ed. and tr. Francis Celorio (London, 1992).
Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne de, Les Contes de fées, ou Les Fées à la mode [1696], ed. M. F.-A. de Lescure (Paris, 1881).
From the Beast to the Blonde Page 62