On Blondes
Page 12
A blonde heroine was essential to a successful fairytale. The stories of Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault, and the grande dames of the Paris salons, Mme de Villeneuve, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon, Baroness d’Aulnoy and Henriette Julie de Murat, teem with blonde heroines, luminous princesses and generous-spirited girls whose rewards come – by this extraordinary colour-coded bias – as a result of their wealth of hair. ‘Peau d’ne’, or ‘Donkeyskin’, published by Perrault in about 1697, is the tale of a father who wants to marry his daughter. After many failed attempts to escape her father’s attentions, the heroine finally disguises herself with a filthy old donkeyskin and flees her home. At the climactic moment her golden hair reveals her worth to an appropriately princely hero and she is rescued from her distress. An exceedingly blonde Catherine Deneuve starred in the role in Jacques Demy’s 1971 film Peau d’ne, her hair glowing on screen like some kind of phosphorescent spiritual halo. The classic fairytale Beauty and the Beast (an early version of which was published in the eighteenth century by Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont), reappeared in Jean Cocteau’s film La Belle et la Bête starring a classically virtuous blonde beauty. This theme of the beautiful, blonde and reluctant bride and the grotesque animal groom has shown great staying power over the centuries and has been the inspiration for numerous pantomimes and melodramas. Its kinkiest version yet is surely Hollywood’s 1933 film, King Kong.
By the nineteenth century, in the stories of the Brothers Grimm, blonde hair as a colour code was still pouring from the pages. Again the source of the Grimms’ tales was the culture of the common people. As children, the Grimm brothers had been lucky to make contact with the prolific storyteller Dorothea Viehmann. She used to stop by regularly at their home to tell a few stories on her way back from selling her farm goods at market. The two boys, Jacob and Wilhelm, used to sit at her feet in the living room of their Cassell home, enraptured as she wove all the classic fairytale ingredients – princesses, monsters, magic animals, magic sacks, wicked stepmothers – into fantasies which humbled the proud, elevated the good and glorified blonde hair. Close friends and relations later contributed similar tales. Wilhelm’s mother-in-law produced thirty-six tales for the collection and Dorothea, the boys’ sister, married into a family which provided another forty-one. The stories that the Grimms later wrote followed all the same patterns. The virtuous but wronged Rapunzel uses her long blonde hair to pull her lover up into her tower. In ‘All-Fur’, the mother declares, ‘If you desire to marry again after my death, I’d like you to take someone who is as beautiful as I am, and who has golden hair like mine.’74
Goldilocks, too, as her name implies, follows the convention of girlish blondeness; and in Cinderella we find the classic exploited skivvy eventually rewarded for her humility and virtue with a prince. At her wedding she appears with a properly coiffed head of blonde hair, signalling her newly revealed inner as well as outer beauty. Cinderella is consistently portrayed in children’s books, in films, and in art as a beautiful blonde, her hairstyle changing with the fashions of the day, but her hair colour remaining in consistent contrast with that of her wicked stepmother and stepsisters.
That fairytales were described, in a respected German volume of criticism of 1811, as ‘the wisdom of the peoples by which one lives’, gives us an idea of the position they occupied in the literary and intellectual pantheon of their times. The sanctification of the Grimm brothers’ stories had begun even before they were finally published in 1857. Fifty years earlier, the German poet Clemens Brentano had declared the growing collection a ‘treasure’; and in 1842 another poet, Eduard Mörike, called it a ‘golden treasure of genuine poetry’. By the late nineteenth century, the Grimms’ tales and those of their contemporary Hans Christian Andersen were widely known and admired across the Western world and the values of their stories were becoming lodged in the imaginations of its children. Blonde hair had won itself a wholly new and eager constituency.
d A fascinating pocket-sized volume entitled Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies: Or Man of Pleasure’s Kalender for the Year 1788, listing names, addresses, descriptions and speciality services of the most celebrated ladies available in London, reveals that roughly half of them were blonde, probably dyed. Many of them also, Harris tells us, had ‘a noted affection for the brandy or the gin bottle’.
e In his poem The Ancient Mariner of 1798, Coleridge painted his apparition of Death as a hideous blonde.
9
Wretched Pickled Victims
In Victorian England, blonde hair came tumbling back into prominence, less as a fashion among women than as a passion among men. If the blonde had been a preoccupation of Western art, literature and popular culture in classical, medieval, Renaissance and Elizabethan times, for the Victorians it became an outright obsession. In the paintings, poems, novels and other frantic outpourings of their period, the Victorians indulged in wild and fantastic images of hair, investing it with magical and symbolic powers. In the pecking order of obsessions, it was the blonde that triggered the most flamboyant responses. It kindled sentimental associations with cloying fairytale heroines; but it also re-emerged as a thrilling symbol of money and of sex, and became an expression of the notorious and unquenchable Victorian fascination with these consuming twin passions.
The Victorians were well versed in their divine and demonic blonde antecedents. They revelled in the saucy misdeeds of Messalina and of Poppaea. They pored over the perils of the Bible’s two snakiest sorceresses, Eve and Mary Magdalene. They adored Botticelli’s blondes and pondered the vanity, heartlessness and ravishing dominance of history’s other notorious blondes.
For Victorian men this powerful blonde imagery was sinister, frightening, grasping – and irresistible. The quivering, glinting blonde locks worked on them like alcohol or cocaine; stimulating, exciting and deadly. In their fevered imaginations, fired by the prudery of Victorian society, blonde hair became the source of overt temptation, the most menacing sexual mantrap yet.
But could the Victorians always be sure that they were ‘reading’ their silky texts correctly? Like gypsies reading grave portents into their sodden tealeaves, Victorians studied, interpreted, worried over and eventually pawed women’s hair to a degree not far off fetishism. Hair descriptions became so abundant and so important in literature that they acted as a method of shorthand character typing.
Elisabeth Gitter defined the types in her fascinating article ‘The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination’. Dark hair when straight, neatly combed and parted in the middle was typically the property of the virtuous governess or the industrious wife and mother. Tangled, disorderly hair represented the sexually and emotionally volatile woman. Artfully arranged curls denoted a girl-woman, immature and innocent, primped and preened for her man-father to embrace and protect. The more abundant the hair, the more combed, fiddled with, fluffed and displayed, the more obvious and potent the sexual exhibition.
Blonde hair had a particularly intriguing and exciting ambiguity of its own. It was a symbol in the Victorian imagination of the mythologised Victorian woman. When she was an angel, a fairytale child-woman, her blonde hair was a halo signifying her inherent goodness. When she was a demon, however her blonde hair was a sexual snare, invested with magical independent energy; enchanting, fascinating and ultimately devouring. Just as in the Middle Ages when the Virgin Mary’s golden hair symbolised her incorruptible purity while Eve’s represented lust, blonde hair in the Victorian era took on a similar duality. Was the Victorian blonde an angel or a demon? Context was essential for interpretation and Victorian literature frequently turned on the mistakes of men who, to their cost, misinterpreted her.
The innocent blonde is easy to spot in the novels of Charles Dickens. More than most other writers of the period, Dickens used the universal lessons of fairytales in his novels and created on his young girl characters a wealth of blonde hair signalling their spiritual integrity. His blonde women, cited by Elisabeth Gitter as
the nearest descendants of the golden-haired fairytale princess, are doll-like creatures identified by their transcendence and purity. In the turbulent setting of A Tale of Two Cities, for example, Lucie Manette’s long golden hair helps her amnesiac father to recognise her as he compares it to the golden strands of her dead mother’s hair that he has treasured during years of imprisonment. Lucie uses her hair to warm his head, restoring him to life. Then, once married, she becomes the radiant angel, ‘ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all together, weaving the service of her happy influence through the tissue of all their lives’. Many such winsome young girls fill the pages of Dickens’s novels, carefully drawn child-angels imbued with powerful contemporary ideals of innocence.
George Eliot’s blondes are more deceptive. In Middlemarch, Mr Lydgate is led blindly into an infatuation with Rosamund Vincy’s immaculate ‘infantile fairness’ which she blatantly uses, along with her swan neck, to seduce him. She ‘turned her long neck a little, and put up her hand to touch her wondrous hair-plaits – an habitual gesture with her as pretty as any movements of a kitten’s paw’.75 Married and trapped in the golden web of a woman who has turned out to be self-centred, indolent and narcissistic, Lydgate recalls his ‘old dreamland, in which Rosamond Vincy appeared to be that perfect piece of womanhood who would reverence her husband’s mind after the fashion of an accomplished mermaid, using her comb and looking-glass and singing her song for the relaxation of his adored wisdom alone’.76
Clearly, Lydgate’s knowledge of mermaids was a little patchy. As Thackeray pointed out in Vanity Fair, the stage for one of Victorian literature’s most wicked blonde sorceresses, mermaids may look pretty enough sitting on rocks with their mirrors and combs, ‘but when they sink into their native element, depend on it those mermaids are about no good, and we had best not examine the fiendish marine cannibals, revelling and feasting on their wretched pickled victims’. Thackeray’s sandy-haired witch, Becky Sharp, is finally exposed as a monster:77 ‘In describing this siren, singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all round, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness and showed the monster’s hideous tail above water? No! Those who like may peep down under the waves that are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling round corpses.’78
Fascination with female hair was not confined to literature. In everyday life the Victorians developed a bizarre popular passion for hair and hair tokens which at its peak turned into an extraordinary cultural obsession. Ladies wore pieces of jewellery – necklaces of hair beads, earrings, bracelets and brooches – made out of the intricately plaited hair of family members, lovers and friends, sometimes living but often dead. The middle-class Victorian woman, supplied with a hair-working kit and pattern book, would while away hours by the fireside, weaving and plaiting hair into lockets, into larger basket patterns or nosegays, and constructing elegant landscapes with weeping willows to hang on the wall. Elaborate works of hair made by Messrs Forrer of Hanover Square were displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and a full-length life-sized portrait of Queen Victoria, made entirely of human hair, caused a sensation at the Paris Exposition of 1855. The ubiquitous lock of hair, framed on the wall or enclosed in a locket, became an object of importance with an intrinsic value, a treasured repository of emotional attachment which contained something of the spirit within.
Hair was transformed into merchandise, a commodity which could be traded for wedded bliss, for sex or simply for cash. Robert Browning, writing to his future wife in 1845, nervously asks for ‘what I have always dared to think I would ask you for . . . one day! Give me . . . who never dream of being worth such a gift . . . give me so much of you – all precious that you are – as may be given in a lock of your hair.’ Elizabeth Barrett’s timorous reply suggests that his request is so intimate it is tantamount to demanding her instant sexual surrender. ‘I never gave away what you ask me to give you, to a human being, except to my nearest relatives and once or twice or thrice to female friends . . .’ Browning finally got his coveted curl, set in a ring, and he was ecstatic.79 ‘I was happy, so happy before! But I am happier and richer now . . . I will live and die with your beautiful ring, your beloved hair – comforting me, blessing me.’80
The married Elizabeth Barrett Browning never forgot the power or the commodity value of hair. One of her sonnets opens with the unflinching image of hair for sale: ‘The soul’s Rialto hath its merchandise; I barter curl for curl upon that mart’. Her husband, in his poem ‘Gold Hair: A Story of Pornic’, takes hair as currency to its literal conclusion with the story of a beautiful and ethereal girl whose deathbed request is that her abundant golden hair remain undisturbed. The legend of her saintly life grows until many years later the floor of the church is taken up for repair and village boys begin digging for buried treasure. They find the remains of the girl and, wedged around her skull where her hair had been, are heaps of gold coins. The girl’s golden hair, which everyone had assumed was a symbol of her inner sanctity, is revealed as her secret corruption, the sign of an appalling materialism and sinister filth.81
In the Victorian mind, gold was filthy lucre, deceptively gleaming but tainted beneath with base dirt and death, a vice which should be hidden, hoarded and buried. Ruskin expressed special loathing for the power of money, used like golden hair as a snare: ‘These pieces of gold . . .’ he wrote in ‘Unto This Last’, ‘are, in fact, nothing more than a kind of Byzantine harness or trappings, very glittering and beautiful in barbaric sight, wherewith we bridle the creatures.’82
Yet commerce in blonde hair – and by extension in sex was a theme that became as compelling as it was disgusting for the Victorian literati. Tennyson’s poem ‘The Ringlet’ is rank with the perceived fallacies, deceptions and depravities of a woman’s golden hair. Christina Rossetti’s bewitching poem ‘Goblin Market’ depicts the frank sale of blonde hair for sex. Blonde Laura, longing for the goblins’ fruit, laments her poverty. The goblins reply: ‘“You have much gold upon your head, /Buy from us with a golden curl.” /She clipped a precious golden lock, /She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,/ Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red.’83
Christina Rossetti’s brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, illustrated the poem with the image of a voluptuous blonde Laura cutting a lock of her long, thick hair before an audience of salivating rodents. It was an appropriate subject for him. Of all the Pre-Raphaelite painters in his circle, Rossetti stood out for many reasons; but the most unusual was his obsession with hair. Stories were told of him panting through the streets of London in pursuit of a head of irresistible hair, or breaking off in mid-conversation at parties, as if hypnotised, on seeing a mass of gorgeous hair enter the room. His wife, Lizzie Siddal, and his other models, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris, are splendidly pallid and worshippable women who appear with obsessive frequency in his paintings. They all had strikingly beautiful hair, thick, opulent locks which in many of his pictures seem to take on an erotic life of their own. Morris had dark brown hair, Cornforth had blonde hair and Siddal had coppery gold hair. After Siddal’s death in 1862, Rossetti wrapped her hair around first drafts of his early poetry which he buried with her. Seven years later, when he disinterred her body to retrieve his manuscripts, the hair, so the story goes, had grown and knotted itself around the paper, having to be cut away to release his work. Rossetti was shocked by the dead Siddal’s assertive powers, and in his poem ‘Life-in-Love’ he pondered the terrifying supernatural radiance of her hair. ‘Mid change the changeless night environeth, /Lies all that golden hair undimmed in death.’
By no means all of the beauties in Rossetti’s paintings have blonde hair, but a large number of his femmefatale characters do. His painting Lady Lilith of 1864 shows a sensuous heavy-lidded beauty of voluptuous, almost drugged intensity, langorously stroking her thick wavy blonde hair as if she were preening a pet tiger. Lilith, in Talmudic legend, was
the first wife of Adam and a beautiful but evil woman. She appears in this picture as a classic Rossetti blonde, a deadly siren, ready to use her gold to tempt, corrupt and strangle. In case we hadn’t got the message, on the back of a second portrait of Lilith, a watercolour of 1867, Rossetti copied out Shelley’s translation of Goethe’s description of Lilith:
Hold then thy heart against her shining hair,
If, by thy fate, she spread it once for thee,
For, when she nets a young man in that snare,
So twines she him he never may be free.
Rossetti’s expressions of beauty in paint were perhaps a response to the unbeautiful broodings of his own mind, which spilled out in his caustically misogynistic poetry. Repeatedly he milked the sexual conceit of blonde hair. In 1859 he wrote a poem about a prostitute, a golden-haired temptress called Jenny, whose hair symbolises her lasciviousness and greed. The poem drips with ghastly combinations of lust, fear and avarice: Rossetti’s narrator wrestles between desire and contempt as he lays gold coins in the sleeping Jenny’s hair. In the end, Rossetti’s own fantasy of dominance is revealed, and with it a fearful loathing of the womankind he desperately desires.
With all these Victorians spewing out page after impassioned page about prostitutes with blonde hair, can we assume that the hordes of women employed in this booming industry had continued the historic tradition, and did actually have blonde hair? One document published in 1883 for the edification of British visitors to Paris gives us a clue. Entitled The Pretty Women of Paris. Their Names and Addresses, Qualities and Faults, Being a Complete Directory or Guide to the Pleasure For Visitors to the Gay City, this enthralling little volume lists the prostitutes of Paris alphabetically. It gives comprehensive details of their careers, their men and their marriages, and merciless details of their attributes and their specialities, as well as Michelin-style ‘worth a detour’ recommendations. Among the nearly three hundred entries, there are roughly three times as many blondes as there are brunettes.