From the Beast to the Blonde Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  List of Illustrations

  Picture Credits

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Part One THE TELLERS

  1 In the Cave of the Enchantress

  2 The Old Wives’ Tale

  3 Word of Mouth

  4 Game Old Birds

  5 No Hideous Hum

  6 Saint Anne, Dear Nan

  7 The Magic of the Cross

  8 The Glass Paving and the Secret Foot

  9 On Riddles, Asses and the Wisdom of Fools

  10 Sweet Talk, Pleasant Laughter

  11 In the Kingdom of Fiction

  12 Granny Bonnets, Wolves’ Cover

  Part Two THE TALES

  13 Absent Mothers

  14 Wicked Stepmothers

  15 Demon Lovers

  16 The Ogre’s Appetite

  17 Reluctant Brides

  18 Go! Be a Beast

  19 The Runaway Girls

  20 The Silence of the Fathers

  21 The Language of Hair

  22 From the Beast to the Blonde

  23 The Silence of the Daughters

  Conclusion

  Picture Section

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Entrancing, multi-layered and as wittily subversive as fairy tales themselves, this beautifully illustrated work explores and illuminates the unfolding history of the famous tales, the contexts in which they flourished, and the tellers themselves – from ancient sibyls and old crones to Angela Carter and Disney.

  About the Author

  Marina Warner is a novelist, historian and critic; her fiction includes Indigo, The Lost Father (awarded a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize), a collection of stories, The Mermaids in the Basement, and, more recently The Leto Bundle. Among her acclaimed works on myth, symbolism and fairy tales are Alone of All Her Sex, Joan of Arc, Monuments and Maidens (winner of the Fawcett Prize) and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (Winner of the Katherine Briggs Folklore Award). She has edited Wonder Tales, six French fairy stories, and in 1994 she gave the Reith Lectures on BBC radio, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time.

  Marina Warner is currently a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge.

  Under the sign Mother Goose Tales’, an old servant spins by the hearth, telling her fairy tales to the children of the family. The frontispiece to Charles Perrault’s collection Histoires ou contes du temps passé of 1697, might have been inspired by his own family.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Plates appear between pages 170–171, and between pages 266–267.

  1 Cinderella by Arthur Rackham, from The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book, 1933. 2 The Birth of the Virgin by Domenico Ghirlandaio, Church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence (Bridgeman Art Library, London; K & B News Foto, Florence). 3 Celebrating the Birth by Jan Steen, 1664 (Bridgeman Art Library, London; Wallace Collection, London). 4 The Cumaean Sibyl by Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Rome (Scala Istituto Fotografìa, Florence). 5 The Procuress by Dirck van Baburen (Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). 6 The Queen of Sheba watched by King Solomon, from The Assembly of Lovers by Sultan Husayn Mirza, 1552 (Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Ouseley Add. 24 f. 127). 7 The Queen of Sheba from Conrad Kyeser’s Bellifortis, c.1405 (Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen). 8 The Queen of Sheba in Piero della Francesca’s fresco cycle of The Legend of the True Cross, Church of San Francesco, Arezzo (Scala Istituto Fotografia, Florence). 9 The Queen of Sheba by Pantaleone, in a mosaic pavement, Otranto Cathedral, Southern Italy. 10 Mermaid by Pantaleone: mosaic pavement, Otranto Cathedral. 11 Vertumnus and Pomona by Jan van Kessel (Bridgeman Art Library, London; Johnny van Haeften Gallery, London). 12 A Winter Night’s Tale by Daniel Maclise, c.1867 (Manchester City Art Galleries). 13 There was an old woman‘…’, from Mother Goose by W. W. Denslow, 1902 (Victoria & Albert Museum, London). 14 Old woman with padlocked lips: postcard, c.1985, Chapala, Mexico. 15 The Zodiac Sign of Virgo: detail from Triumph of Ceres and Astrological Symbols by Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de’ Roberti, Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara (Scala Istituto Fotografìa, Florence). 16 Female saints in heaven by Gerard Horenbout, from The Spinola Book of Hours, c.1515, Flemish (Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California). 17 The Mystic Nativity by Sandro Botticelli, detail (Bridgeman Art Library, London; National Gallery, London). 18 The Whore of Babylon from The Angers Apocalypse tapestry (Musée d’Angers de la Tapisserie, Angers; Photographie Giraudon, Paris). 19 Threshing the harvest under the sign of Virgo, from a Book of Hours, Rouen, c. 1520–25 (Photograph courtesy James Marrow, Princeton, New Jersey). 20 A wild maiden with a unicorn: tapestry, Upper Rhine, 1475–1500 (Historisches Museum, Basel). 21 A blue-bearded devil: detail from The Last Judgement, stained glass window, c.1495, Fairford, England (Photograph © Sonia Halliday and Laura Lushington). 22 Saint Dympna in Jan van Wavre’s sculptured altarpiece, c.1515, Church of Saint Dympna, Geel, Belgium. 23 A nineteenth-century Cinderella, with doves, from a Grimm Brothers’ book cover (Renier Collection, Victoria & Albert Museum, London). 24 Cinderella and her sisters, from the Ladybird Books version of Disney’s 1950 film (© Walt Disney Productions. The Walt Disney Company Ltd; Ladybird Books, Loughborough). 25 Ma Gouvernante, My Nurse, Mein Kindermädchen by Meret Oppenheim, 1936 (© Meret Oppenheim; Statens Konstmuseer, Stockholm). 26 Loop My Loop (originally titled Quite Contrary) by Helen Chadwick, 1991 (© Helen Chadwick).

  PICTURE CREDITS

  Black and white illustrations are published by kind permission of the following: Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam 22; Basilica di S. Francesco, Arezzo 101; Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich 359, 360; Bodleian Library, Oxford x, 60, 120; Bridgeman Art Library, London (Agnew & Sons) 109; British Film Institute, London 241, 272, 308, 319; British Museum, London 40/41, 51 (left), 400; Brüder Grimm Museum, Kassel 189 (top), 191; Bulloz, Paris 89, 164 (Musée de Troyes); © Leonora Carrington 383; Ceskoslovenska Akademie Ved. Prague 118 (left); Davis Museum & Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Mass. (Museum purchase 1953.8) 140; The Walt Disney Company Ltd 225, 314; Dulwich Picture Gallery, London 343; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 46; ©Jill Furmanowsky 416; J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu CA 139, 408; © Tara Heinemann 195; © Sophie Herxheimer 449; © David Hockney 227; Institüt fur Realienkunde, Krems (Austria) 122; Kunsthaus, Zurich 375 (right); Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna 258; Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection, London 147; Mansell Collection, London xiii, 80; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection, New York 131; National Gallery, London, 84; National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen 61 (right); National Library, Vienna 45; Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public Library xi; Pierpont Morgan Library, New York 64, 376, 110; © Paula Rego (photo Marlborough Graphics Ltd) 311; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 66, 87 (top and bottom), 93, 329; Royal Photographic Society, Bath 20; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen 159; Scala Istituto, Florence 2, 85 (Uffizi), 104/5; Tate Gallery, London 200, 262; Madame Tussaud’s, London 211; Warburg Institute, London 218; Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art 172. Other illustrations: author’s collection.

  For Ruth Padel, in friendship

  With Gwen in mind

  Introduction

  Madame D ***, otherwise Marie-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne d’Aulnoy, was one of the leading enthusiasts in the new literary fashion for telling fairy stories, orally in salons as well as on the page, in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century. (Frontispiece to one
of several collections she wrote, Contes des fées, Amsterdam, 7 702.)

  IN HER FIRST anthology of fairy tales, Angela Carter included a story from Kenya: while a poor man’s wife in the village thrives, the Sultana in the palace grows thinner and scrappier by the minute. The Sultan summons the poor man and demands to know the secret of his wife’s happiness. ‘Very simple,’ he replies. ‘I feed her meat of the tongue.’ The Sultan sends out for all the tongues money can buy – ox tongues and lambs’ tongues and larks’ tongues; still his sad Sultana withers away. He orders his litter, makes her change places with the poor man’s wife; she immediately starts to thrive, becoming the picture of health, plumper, rosier, gayer. Meanwhile, in the palace, her replacement languishes, and soon has become as scrawny and miserable as the former queen.

  For the tongue meats that the poor man feeds the women are not material, of course. They are fairy tales, stories, jokes, songs; he nourishes them on talk, he wraps them in language; he banishes melancholy by refusing silence. Storytelling makes women thrive – and not exclusively women, the Kenyan fable implies, but other sorts of people, too, even sultans.1

  When I was young and highly robust, I still felt great hunger for fairy tales; they seemed to offer the possibility of change, far beyond the boundaries of their improbable plots or fantastically illustrated pages. The metamorphoses promised more of the same, not only in fairy land, but in this world, and this instability of appearances, these sudden swerves of destiny, created the first sustaining excitement of such stories. Like romance, to which fairy tales bear a strong affinity, they could ‘remake the world in the image of desire’.2 That this is a blissful dream which need not be dismissed as totally foolish is central to the argument of this book.

  I decided, for this study, to start with the collection which inaugurated the fairy tale as a literary form for children: Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé, or Contes de ma Mère l’Oye, of 1697. The book, published in Paris, contains ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Red Riding Hood’, ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper’, and ‘Tom Thumb’ – some of the best known and best loved fairy tales in the world. This small volume is the stone I cast, and I then followed the wave patterns it made as the Perrault tales set ripples in motion which crossed stories by his contemporaries and friends, as well as later tales, from the Grimm Brothers’ Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales, 1812–57) and Hans Christian Andersen’s collection of 1837–74. Charting from the Perrault epicentre, as it were, meant I was focussing on fairy tales with family dramas at their heart, rather than the jests and riddles, animal fables and proverbial cautionary tales also often described under the catchall name of fairy tale.

  I began investigating the meanings of the tales themselves, but I soon found that it was essential to look at the context in which they were told, at who was telling them, to whom, and why. In the eyes of posterity, Charles Perrault (1628–1703) has become the most famous pioneer teller of fairy tales. But he was greatly outnumbered, and in some instances also preceded, by women aficionadas of contes de fées whose work has now faded from view. Le Cabinet des fées (The Fairy Library), a series of forty-one volumes which published hundreds of the tales of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the heyday of the genre as a literary form, includes more than twenty authors; of these over half are women. Marie-Catherine, Baronne d’Aulnoy, has a volume of stories to herself, and several more tales in subsequent volumes, while some of the men contribute only a single tale, as in the case of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his story, ‘La Reine fantasque’.3, 4 The pattern of female authorship is repeated in a companion sequence of volumes, entitled Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions et romans cabalistiques.5 Fantastic journeys are mixed up with magic-realist novels and fairÿ tales by D’Aulnoy and other women contemporaries, like Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Comtesse de Murat.

  These editions solicited an adult audience; the older generation were being eased into taking pleasure in make-believe, in pretending they had become childlike again and had returned to the pleasures of their youth through tales of magic and enchantment and the homespun wisdom of the hearth. In 1714, the court tutor the Abbé Fénelon, writing to a friend, said that the most serious men today enjoy ‘fables – even those which are like fairy tales … We willingly become children again.’6

  When I was a child, the escapism implied by such wishful thinking made liking fairy tales slightly shameful; with their pinnacled castles and rose-wreathed princesses, their enchanted sleeps and dashing princes showing a leg, they were also definitely girly, and though the accusation was never spoken aloud in my hearing, the taste for them revealed lack of intellectual – and possibly moral – fibre. Boys might surrender to the pleasures fairy tales offered before they were stories that have always been called by that term, even when they do not feature any fairy characters: in Perrault’s ‘Red Riding Hood’ the wolf talks, and in ‘Bluebeard’ the bloodstained key is ‘fée’ (magic), but there are no winged messengers from the other world, above or below; Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier’s ‘The Subtle Princess’ (‘L’Adroite Princesse, ou Les aventures de Finette’) shows the heroine’s cunning escape from a cruel predator, by using her wits, although the narrative moves through a landscape stocked with such wonders as doorless towers where maidens are kept prisoner, glass distaffs which shatter by magic, and barrels lined with knives.

  Charles Perrault was a distinguished scholar, courtier, poet and polemicist. The glass slipper and the pumpkin coach appear in print for the first time in his ‘Cinderella’; he also published several of the best known fairy tales, such as ‘The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood’, ‘Red Riding Hood’, ‘Tom Thumb’ and ‘Puss in Boots’. (Eighteenth century, after François Tortebat’s portrait.)

  Under the sign ‘Mother Goose Tales’, an old servant spins by the hearth, telling her fairy tales to the children of the family. The frontispiece to Charles Perrault’s collection Histoires ou contes du temps passé of 1697, might have been inspired by his own family.

  Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon hotly defended ‘the old wives’ tale’ against its detractors, wrote spirited stories herself, and influenced her older cousin Charles Perrault in the recovery of fairy tales as a legitimate branch of French literature. (Early eighteenth century.)

  Shape-shifting is one of fairy tale’s dominant and characteristic wonders: hands are cut off, found and reattached, babies’ throats are slit, but they are later restored to life, a rusty lamp turns into an all-powerful talisman, a humble pestle and mortar becomes the winged vehicle of the fairy enchantress Baba Yaga, the beggar changes into the powerful enchantress and the slattern in the filthy donkeyskin into a golden-haired princess. More so than the presence of fairies, the moral function, the imagined antiquity and oral anonymity of the ultimate source, and the happy ending (though all these factors help towards a definition of the genre), metamorphosis defines the fairy tale.

  The marvels and prodigies, the seven-league boots and enchanted mirrors, the talking animals, the heroes and heroines changed into frogs or bears or cats, the golden eggs and everflowing supplies of porridge, the stars on the brow of the good sister and the donkeytail sprouting on the brow of the bad – all the wonders that create the atmosphere of fairy tale disrupt the apprehensible world in order to open spaces for dreaming alternatives.13 The verb ‘to wonder’ communicates the receptive state of marvelling as well as the active desire to know, to inquire, and as such it defines very well at least two characteristics of the traditional fairy tale: pleasure in the fantastic, curiosity about the real. The dimension of wonder creates a huge theatre of possibility in the stories: anything can happen.14 This very boundlessness serves the moral purpose of the tales, which is precisely to teach where boundaries lie. The dreaming gives pleasure in its own right, but it also represents a practical dimension to the imagination, an aspect of the faculty of thought, and can unlock social and public possi
bilities.

  Paradoxically, the remoteness of their traditional setting – the palace, the forest, the distant and nameless kingdom, the anonymity and lack of particularity of their cast of characters, the kings and queens and princesses with names like Beauty or the Fair with the Golden Hair – which could not belong to anybody in the social and historical milieu of the tellers or the receivers of the tale – all this underpins the stories’ ability to grapple with reality. As Wallace Stevens believed, it helps us to see the actual world to visualize a fantastic one.15 Fairy tales typically use the story of something in the remote past to look towards the future, their conclusions, their ‘happy endings’ do not always bring about total closure, but make promises, prophecies. Despite all their supernatural elements, these are not tales of the uncanny either; they do not leave open prickly possibilities, or enter unnegotiated areas of the unknown, as in fantasy or surrealist literature or ghost stories, like The Turn of the Screw and some of M. R. James’s inventions, and even at times the short stories of Raymond Carver.16 For ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Donkeyskin’ come to an orderly resolution, and the characters, one is left imagining, return to ordinary life. On the whole fairy tales are not passive or active; their mood is optative – announcing what might be. Imagining the fate that lies ahead and ways of dealing with it (if adverse – as in ‘Hansel and GreteP and ‘Donkeyskin’), or achieving it (if favourable – as in ‘Puss in Boots’), is the stuff of Mother Goose tales. The genre is characterized by ‘heroic optimism’, as if to say, ‘one day, we might be happy, even if it won’t last’.17

  The prodigies are introduced to serve this concealed but ever-present visionariness of the tale, and serve it well by disguising the stories’ harshly realistic core: the magic entertainment helps the story look like a mere bubble of nonsense from the superstitious mind of ordinary, negligible folk. The enchantments also universalize the narrative setting, encipher concerns, beliefs and desires in brilliant, seductive images that are themselves a form of camouflage, making it possible to utter harsh truths, to say what you dare. The disregard for logic, all those fairytale non-sequiturs and improbable reversals, rarely encompasses the emotional conflicts themselves: hatred, jealousy, kindness, cherishing retain an intense integrity throughout. The double vision of the tales, on the one hand charting perennial drives and terrors, both conscious and unconscious, and on the other mapping actual, volatile experience, gives the genre its fascination and power to satisfy. At the same time, uncovering the context of the tales, their relation to society and history, can yield more of a happy resolution than the story itself delivers with its challenge to fate: ‘They lived happily ever after’ consoles us, but gives scant help compared to ‘Listen, this is how it was before, but things could change – and they might.’