The old woman thought that was a good plan. She tied a rope around the girl’s leg and held on to one end of it. The girl took the other end of it and went outdoors. Then in the moonlight she noticed that what she thought was a rope was a long intestine. She quickly removed it from her leg and climbed up into a tree so that no one would find her. The woman waited for a long time. Her calls went unanswered.
She kept on calling, “Listen to me. Don’t stay out there in the cold. Otherwise you will return home sick, and your mother will scold me for failing to take care of you.” The old woman tugged on the cord again, and when she finally succeeded in pulling it back into the house, the girl was not at the end of it. The old woman wept and left the house to search for her. Before long she discovered the girl up in a tree. She called to her to come down but there was no answer. She decided to try to scare the girl by telling her that there were tigers in the trees. The girl answered, “I’m better off in the tree than on that mat. I know that you are really a tiger and that you ate my brother up without a second thought.” The women stomped off in anger.
Before long, the sun began to rise, and a man transporting some goods passed by. The girl called out to him, “Save me from the tigers that are out here.” The fellow put some clothes up in the tree and stole off with her. Later the woman returned with two tigers. She pointed up to the top of the tree and explained that a girl was up there. The tigers looked around in the tree and found the clothes. They were sure that the woman had tricked them and grew angry. Together they devoured the old woman and ran away.
* * *
† Huang Chih-chun, Huang Chengzeng, Annette Specht, Günter Lontzen, and Jacques Barchilon, “The Earliest Version of the Chinese ‘Little Red Riding Hood’: The Tale of the Tiger-Woman,” Merveilles & Contes 7 (1993): 513–27. Copyright © 1993 Wayne State University Press, reprinted with the permission of Wayne State University Press. This translation has been adapted by the editor with permission for this Norton Critical Edition.
Tsélané and the Marimo†
A man had a daughter named Tsélané. One day he set off with his family and his flocks to find fresh pastures. But his daughter refused to go with him. She said to her mother, “I’m not going. Our house is so pretty, with its white and red beads, that I can’t leave.”
Her mother said, “My child, since you are naughty, you will have to stay here all alone. But shut the door tight in case the Marimos1 come and want to eat you.” With that she went away. But in a few days she came back, bringing food for her daughter.
“Tsélané, my child, Tsélané, my child, take this bread, and eat it.”
“I hear my mother, I can hear her. My mother speaks like an ataga bird, like the tsuere coming out of the woods.”
For a long time the mother brought food to Tsélané. One day Tsélané heard a gruff voice saying, “Tsélané, my child, Tsélané, my child, take this bread and eat it.” But she laughed and said, “That gruff voice is not my mother’s voice. Go away, naughty Marimo.” The Marimo went away. He lit a big fire, took an iron hoe, made it red hot, and swallowed it to clear his voice. Then he came back and tried to fool Tsélané again. But he could not, for his voice was still not soft enough. So he heated another hoe, and swallowed it red-hot like the first. Then he came back and said in a still soft voice, “Tsélané, my child, Tsélané, my chee-ild, take this bread and eat it.”
Tsélané thought it was her mother’s voice and opened the door. The Marimo put her in his sack and walked off. Soon he felt thirsty, and, leaving his sack in the care of some little girls, he went to get some spirits in a village. The girls peeped into the sack, saw Tsélané in it, and ran to tell her mother, who happened to be nearby. The mother let her daughter out of the sack, and stuffed it with a dog, scorpions, vipers, bits of broken pots, and stones.
When the Marimo returned home with his sack, he opened it and was planning to cook and eat Tsélané. The dog and the vipers bit him, the scorpions stung him, the pot shards wounded him, and the stones bruised him. He rushed out, threw himself into a mud heap, and was changed into a tree. Bees made honey in its bark, and in the springtime young girls came and gathered the honey for honey-cakes.
* * *
† T. Arbousset and F. Daumas, Narrative of an Exploratory Tour to the North-East of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town: Struik, 1846), pp. 59–61. This translation has been adapted by the editor for this Norton Critical Edition.
1. A tribe of cannibals.
INTRODUCTION: Beauty and the Beast
“Beauty and the Beast” may be a love story about the transformative power of compassion, but it also has an emotional ferocity that encodes messages about how we manage anxieties about monstrosity and alterity. The story ranks among the most popular of all fairy tales. It has been retold, adapted, remixed, and mashed up by countless storytellers, writers, filmmakers, philosophers, and poets. Unlike most other fairy tales, it accommodates a double trajectory, with a Beast in search of redemption, and a Beauty who learns the value of empathy. The two antithetical allegorical figures have traditionally resolved their differences in what can be seen as a heteronormative myth of romantic love, yet the story’s representational energy is also channeled into the tense moral, economic, and emotional negotiations that complicate all courtship rituals.
“Animals are good to think with,” as Claude Lévi-Strauss and countless other anthropologists remind us. “Beauty and the Beast” illustrates that truism supremely well, combining animal magnetism with human charms to create a symbolic story about what it means to form a partnership both passionate and principled. The odd couple featured in “Beauty and the Beast” is not so odd after all. The story is always better with the animal in it, as Yann Martel tells us in Life of Pi, and a curved mirror, one that distorts and takes us into the funhouse, is always more compelling—and often more true—than a purely reflective one. Nearly every culture tells “Beauty and the Beast” in one fashion or another, making the story new so that we think more and think harder about the stakes in partnerships and marriages today. There is good reason to keep renewing the terms of the tale, for it is the iconoclasts who keep the story alive, infusing it with values we hold today. The versions of “Beauty and the Beast” that follow offer an opportunity to pause and reflect on how the story has changed as it migrates across time and place.
A quick look at the tale-type index reveals that there are two versions of stories about courtships between humans and beasts: ATU 400 The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife and ATU 425 The Search for the Lost Husband. What differentiates the one from the other? In the first, an adventurous young man must break the magic spell cast on the woman who will become his bride, while in the second, a young woman is on a mission to liberate the animal who will become her husband. In sum, we have stories about animal brides and animal grooms, yet what we call “Beauty and the Beast” insistently pairs a seductively attractive woman with a grotesquely misshapen monster. What Disney called a “tale as old as time” dominates our fairy-tale landscapes in ways that make us overlook the prominence of animal brides in our folkloric heritage.
There are two types of animal brides, with the first as the victim of abduction or seduction. These are the selkies, mermaids, seals, and swan maidens who marry mortals and become human, bearing children and keeping house until one day they are seized by a powerful sense of nostalgia. Putting their sealskins back on or donning their feathers, they abandon their families and follow the call of nature. Rooted in the idea that women have mysteriously close ties to nature, these stories reveal the dangers of what anthropologists call exogamy—marrying outside the tribe—as well as of consorting with outsiders in general. They form a sharp contrast with another set of animal brides, the many toads, birds, fish, monkeys, mice, tortoises, and dogs that seek men who can break the magic spell binding them to an animal state. Frequently they perform domestic chores, spontaneously and effortlessly carrying out prodigious tasks that demonstrate their c
lear superiority to the human competition.
“The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife” is something of a misnomer, for the men who marry creatures of the earth, air, and sea often stumble upon their brides or are part of an elaborate plan orchestrated by those metamorphic women. In the Filipino “Chonguita” (see here), the protagonist does nothing but agree to marry a monkey, and he liberates her through an act of brutal force, hurling her against a wall. The Indian “Dog Bride” (see here) features a youth who witnesses a beautiful maiden shed her dog skin before bathing and resolves to marry her. In “The Enchanted Frog” (see here) from Spanish New Mexico, the youngest of three brothers leaves all the hard work to the frog and does nothing more than throw his amphibious bride multiple times into the sea.
One cultural variant of animal-bride stories is particularly powerful in its representation of the painful burdens of social disguise and domestic responsibilities. “The Swan Maiden” (see here), a tale widespread in Nordic regions, discloses the secretly oppressive nature of marriage with its attendant housekeeping and child-rearing duties. Swan maidens, domesticated by acts of violence, eventually seize the opportunity to return to a primordial natural condition. The tormented Nora of Henrik Ibsen’s Doll’s House, a figure identified again and again as a bird or creature of nature, was clearly inspired by the mythical swan maiden and her domestic tribulations. Instead of donning feathers (as swan maidens do), Nora rediscovers a diaphanous dancing dress and, after executing a frantic tarantella, takes leave of her dour husband, Torvald. The symbolic nexus connecting animal skins, costumes, and dancing is so prominent in this tale type that it points to a possible underlying link with Cinderella, Donkeyskin, and Catskin stories, showing us the dark side of what happens in a post-happily-ever-after phase.
Tales about swan maidens, selkies, seals, and mermaids may have been far more widespread than they are today. One critic has argued that the tales could once be found “in virtually every corner of the world,” because in most cultures “woman was a symbolic outsider, was the other, and marriage demanded an intimate involvement in a world never quite her own.”1 Yet some animal brides lure their mortal husbands into their own worlds, hermetic spaces of timeless beauty where husbands cavort in domains of untold pleasures even as they are aware of an uncanny edge to their carefree bliss. Like Tannhäuser of medieval lore, who becomes Venus’s captive in the caverns of her mountain abode, the Japanese fisherman Urashima and his many folkloric cousins dwell in a realm where they are the outsiders.
Like tales about animal brides, stories about animal grooms display an interesting bifurcation, with one set of stories going viral and mainstream, the other going dormant and, if not underground, then under the radar. The “classic” version of “Beauty and the Beast” gives us a compassionate heroine who redeems Beast with her tears. The less prominent counterpart to this tale (the best-known example of which is “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon”) features an adventurous heroine who undertakes a quest to recover a husband who has taken flight. Both sets bleach out details about the animal groom and give us a heroine enviable in the determined gusto with which she undertakes tasks. As if to compensate, illustrators and animators have turned Beast into an alluring chimera with a commanding sense of mystery and authority. In recent remediated versions, he has regained much of his nobility, status, and dignity.
The earliest known version of an animal-groom fairy tale appeared in the second century C.E. in Apuleius’s Transformations of Lucian: Otherwise Known as the Golden Ass. The story of Cupid and Psyche is told by a “drunken and half-demented” woman to a young bride abducted by bandits on her wedding day. Perversely, the fairy tale is meant to “console” the distraught captive. While “Cupid and Psyche” shares many features with “Beauty and the Beast,” as well as with “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon,” it deviates from what has become our canonical version in a number of ways. Eros, the first “Beast,” is only rumored to be a monster, and it is he who abandons Psyche, after her sisters urge her to take a look at the “enormous snake” that is her husband. More important, Psyche’s story is what one critic has declared to be a “paradigm of female heroism.”2 The intrepid heroine, jilted by Cupid, never indulges in self-pity but sets off on an epic quest fraught with risks and requiring her to accomplish one task after another. Unlike her loquacious avatars in European versions of “Beauty and the Beast,” Psyche is all action and no words. She undertakes a mission that not only requires the performance of feats (sorting grains, fetching a hank of golden wool, bringing Venus a jar of ice-cold water from the river Styx) but also demands that she renounce that quintessential feminine virtue known as compassion—the very trait that comes to the fore in European tales about beauties and beasts.
The animal-groom story most familiar to Anglo-American audiences was penned in 1756 by Madame de Beaumont (Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont) for her instructive Magasin des Enfants, designed to promote good manners in the young. Based on a baroque literary version of more than one hundred pages written in 1749 by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, Madame de Beaumont’s child-friendly “Beauty and the Beast” (see here) reflects a desire to transform fairy tales from adult entertainments into parables of good behavior, vehicles for indoctrinating and enlightening children about the virtues of fine manners and good breeding, often by strategically inserting standard-issue platitudes into the narrative.
The lessons and moral imperatives encoded in Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” pertain almost exclusively to the tale’s young women, who, in a coda, are showered with either praise or blame. As Angela Carter points out, the moral of Madame de Beaumont’s tale has more to do with “being good” than with “doing well”: “Beauty’s happiness is founded on her abstract quality of virtue.”3 With nervous pedagogical zeal, Madame de Beaumont concludes her tale in a frenzy of plaudits and aspersions. Beauty has “preferred virtue to looks” and has “many virtues” along with a marriage “founded on virtue” (see here). Her two sisters, by contrast, have hearts “filled with malice and envy” (see here).
What exactly makes Beauty virtuous? To begin with, she seems possessed of a yen for acts of self-sacrifice. After discovering that Beast is willing to let her father go so long as one of his daughters shows up at the castle, she declares: “I feel fortunate to be able to sacrifice myself for him, since I will have the pleasure of saving my father and proving my feelings of tenderness for him” (see here). To be sure, not all Beauties are such willing victims, valuing subordination over survival. In the Norwegian “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon,” the heroine has to be coaxed into submission with promises of wealth. She agrees to marry Beast (a white bear) because her father badgers her: “[He] kept on telling her of all the riches they would get and how well off she would be herself; and so at last she thought better of it.”4
Marrying her daughter off to a swine does not appear to be a terrible prospect to a woman in Straparola’s “Pig King” (see here), especially after she learns that the daughter stands to inherit a kingdom. And in words that read to us like a parody of paternal expectations, the king of Basile’s “Serpent” pleads with his daughter to take a snake as her husband: “Finding myself, I know not how, bound by my promise, I beg you, if you are a dutiful daughter, to enable me to keep my word and to content yourself with the husband Heaven sends and I am forced to give you.”5
That the desire for wealth and upward mobility motivates parents to turn their daughters over to beasts points to the possibility that these tales mirror social practices of an earlier age. Many an arranged marriage must have felt like being tethered to a monster, and the telling of stories like “Beauty and the Beast” may have furnished women with a socially acceptable channel for providing advice, comfort, and the consolations of imagination. Written at the dawn of the Enlightenment, Madame de Beaumont’s tale attempted to steady the fears of young women, to reconcile them to the custom of arranged marriages, and to brace them for an alliance that require
d them to efface their own desires and to submit to the will of a “monster.”
What many of these tales endorse in one cultural inflection after another is a strengthening of patriarchal norms, the subordination of female desire to male authority, and a glorification of filial duty and self-sacrifice. Angela Carter’s “Courtship of Mr. Lyon” is unique in its effort to demystify and undo these “natural” virtues by subjecting them to grotesque exaggeration. Her heroine, who is “possessed by a sense of obligation to an unusual degree,” perceives herself to be “Miss Lamb, spotless, sacrificial.”6 Untainted by any form of self-interest, she is ready, like the parade of folkloric brides preceding her, for any exercise that demands self-immolation.
Madame de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” not only endorses obedience and self-denial but also doubles the significance of the interactions between the two characters by preaching the transformative power of empathy and the need to value essences over appearances. No matter how ugly and repulsive the beast may be, his character, mind, and soul will triumph and win the heart of a woman called, well, Beauty. That the latter message is sent in a tale with a heroine who embodies physical perfection and a seamless fit between external appearances and inner essences is an irony that seems to have been lost on the French governess. In men, external appearances and even charm count for nothing. “It is neither good looks nor great wit that makes a woman happy with her husband, but character, virtue, and kindness, and Beast has all those good qualities. I may not be in love with him, but I feel respect, friendship, and gratitude toward him” (see here). In an anonymous version of 1818, Beauty delivers a similar speech attesting to the way in which Beast’s kindness makes his “deformity” virtually disappear.
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