From the Beast to the Blonde Page 2

  But trying to do this, to place fairy tales in relation to society and history, is hampered from the start by the difficulty of composing any kind of firm chronology or origin. The collector of stories may find a silent princess or an enchanted ass in a new, earlier manuscript, but these examples do not mean the older version is the ancestor of the other. One theory, diffusionism, holds that stories are passed on across borders, from distant origins – often Eastern: India is, for instance, invoked as the source of a seminal collection of seventy tales, the Panchatantra (The Five Books), which was put together around the sixth century AD, and attributed to Bidpai (or Pilpay), a legendary Brahmin sage.18 Jean de La Fontaine, wandering along the quais in Paris in the 1660s, came across a volume by Bidpai; he bought it, and the tales he read there became one of the founding inspirations of his own Fables, commonly assumed to represent the apogee of Gallic urbanity.19 Elements of Greek romance, Roman moralities, Arabian nights, animal fables, medieval jests, pious saints’ lives jostle and unite with unbuttoned lack of inhibition in the fairy tale. The nature of the genre is promiscuous and omnivorous and anarchically heterogeneous, absorbing high and low elements, tragic and comic tones into its often simple, rondo-like structure of narrative. Motifs and plotlines are nomadic, travelling the world and the millennia, turning up on parchment in medieval Persia, in an oral form in the Pyrenees, in a ballad sung in the Highlands, in a fairy story in the Caribbean.20

  An opposing theory – of archetypes – proposes that the structures of the imagination and the common experiences of human society inspire narrative solutions that resemble one another even when there can have been no contact or exchange: there are tales of animal metamorphosis in the legends of the Algonquin and other Native American peoples, which seem to echo – or vice versa – Asian and European fairytale transformations. But there are problems of vagueness with these comparisons; when it comes to details of narratives and particular plot features (splinters of flax which cause a beauty to fall into an enchanted sleep; invisible attendants and dishes which appear of their own accord in a magic castle), a literary source usually lies at the story’s origin. Exchanges between voice and text then continually take place, adding, enriching, adapting, changing, in ceaseless permutation of motifs and pattern. The Hellenistic tale of ‘Cupid and Psyche’ provides powerful evidence of the dependency of the genre on texts: until a manuscript of the second-century metaphysical romance The Golden Ass, in which it appears, was rediscovered, perhaps by Boccaccio, this pair of star-crossed lovers do not leave a trace in medieval narrative.21 Similarly, the story of another famous couple of lovers, Aucassin et Nicolette, becomes the stuff of fairy tale again only after the one surviving manuscript is recovered in 1715.22 Aversion, the story ‘Etoilette’ (Starlight), attributed to the Comtesse de Murat, then appears almost simultaneously (see Chapter Eleven).

  Remarkable, exhaustive efforts have been made, notably by the folklorists of the Scandinavian school, Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, to tabulate and classify systematically story types and motifs within the stories. But this taxonomy provides a list of ingredients and recipes with no evocation of their taste or the pleasure of the final dish, nor sense of how or why it was eaten. However universally distributed, stories spring up in different places dressed in different moods, with different twists, and regional details and contexts which give the satisfaction of particular recognition to their audiences.23

  Because complex characters are rare, and the distribution of villainy and virtue is not muddied by ambiguity, Red Riding Hood or Snow White have become rich symbols for psychoanalysts to gloss. But the thrust towards universal significance has obscured the genre’s equal powers to illuminate experiences embedded in social and material conditions. These are subject to change over time and ultimately more capable of redress than the universal lessons of greed, lust and cruelty which fairy tales give us; in one sense, the historical interpretation of fairy tale holds out more hope to the listener or the reader than the psychoanalytic or mystical approaches, because it reveals how human behaviour is embedded in material circumstance, in the laws of dowry, land tenure, feudal obedience, domestic hierarchies and marital dispositions, and that when these pass and change, behaviour may change with them.

  Theorists today prefer to visualize models of fairy tales’ dissemination by borrowing metaphors from science: wave theory offers an image of a stone thrown in a pond, radiating in rings outwards where they might meet other ripples and join in chevron patterns with other stones cast in other seas of story. Robert Irwin, in his 1994 companion to The Arabian Nights, offers an image from genetics, of a ‘selfish word-string’ which, like a selfish gene, continues to reproduce itself in different host bodies: the ragamuffin who becomes a beautiful princess, the simpleton who kills a giant, the monster who turns into a radiant bridegroom might present such selfishly unappeasable and indestructible word-strings.24 Yet another way to think of fairy tales is to imagine them as a language of the imagination, with a vocabulary of images and a syntax of plots.

  But even when the teller is known and the circumstances of the telling are clear, fairy tales are still rebarbative as historical documents: the transmission problems make them resemble an archaeological site that has been plundered by tomb robbers, who have turned the strata upside down and inside out and thrown it all back again in any old order. Evidence of conditions from past social and economic arrangements co-exist in the tale with the narrator’s innovations: Angela Carter’s Beauty is lost to the Beast at cards, a modern variation on the ancient memory, locked into the plot of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, that daughters were given in marriage by their fathers without being consulted on the matter. The matter of fairy tale reflects such lived experience, with a slant towards the tribulations of women, and especially young women of marriageable age; the telling of the stories, assuming the presence of a Mother Goose, either as a historical source, or a fantasy of origin, gains credibility as a witness’s record of lives lived, of characters known, and shapes expectations in a certain direction. Fairy tale offers a case where the very contempt for women opened an opportunity for them to exercise their wit and communicate their ideas: women’s care for children, the prevailing disregard for both groups, and their presumed identity with the simple folk, the common people, handed them fairy tales as a different kind of nursery, where they might set their own seedlings and plant out their own flowers. Charting the circumstances of their making and remaking, analysing the politics and history embedded in the tales, does not mean trampling, I hope, on the sheer exuberance of their entertainment, or crushing the transcendent pleasures they so often give. For these are stories with staying power, as their antiquity shows, because the meanings they generate are themselves magical shape-shifters, dancing to the needs of their audience.

  The first half of the book looks at storytelling, at its practitioners and images, in art, legend and history, from the prophesying enchantress who lures knights errant into her false paradise to the jolly old beldame, Mother Goose, and her masqueraders in the real world. The rich and fluctuating perceptions of women’s relation to fancy and fairy tale became, as my work progressed, the absolutely necessary ground on which the familiar figures like Cinderella and her wicked step-mother stepped into place. Prejudices against women, especially old women and their chatter, belong in the history of fairy tale’s changing status, for the pejorative image of the gossip was sweetened by influences from the tradition of the Sibyls and the cult of Saint Anne, until the archetypal crone by the hearth could emerge as a mouthpiece of homespun wisdom. I found that I was discovering a kind of fairytale origin for the figure of Mother Goose herself, as I followed the tracks left by the Queen of Sheba, taking me into Islamic as well as Christian territory. It turned out she had left a strangely shaped print – of either a hoof or a webbed foot – which led me on, deeper into the layered character of the traditional narrator. The interconnections of storytelling with heterodox forms of knowledge, with illicit science and ridd
les – the juggling tricks of the Devil – emerge, only to be themselves domesticated, contained by the context of the children’s nursery. Once this imagined voice was established as legitimate for certain purposes – the instruction of the young – writers co-opted it as their own, using it as a mask for their own thoughts, their own mocking games and even sedition – from the élite salonnière in the old régime to Angela Carter in our time.

  The second half of the book, The Tales, takes up a handful of the most familiar fairy tales themselves and, in the light of the tellers’ position and interests, examines the painful rivalry and hatred between women in tales like ‘Cinderella’ and ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ and the possible reasons for this virulence in such loved stories. Somewhat like the pardon letters which criminals wrote from prison in the sixteenth century, in which they tried to move the king to a reprieve by describing their plight when they had murdered their wife, husband, or child, so the violence in fairy tales about family strife can often be read as offering a plea of extenuating circumstances.25 The fairy tale’s relationship to romance gives the question of love pride of place among its concerns, and four chapters follow which take up the portrait of marriage – or, more particularly, of men and marriage: I look at the fears of young women through the tales of forced union with an ogre like Bluebeard. ‘Beauty and the Beast’ tells, in its many diverse variations, a different story, of a bridegroom redeemed from monstrousness; the changes to this fairy tale probably reveal, more clearly than in any other, the interweaving of social custom and law with fantasy narratives. It also encloses a microcosmic history of re-evaluated relations between humanity and animals, and different answers to the questions, who is the beast, who is the brute?

  There follows an analysis of ‘Donkeyskin’, the fairy tale about a father who wants to marry his daughter, which tackles the meanings of incest as reflected in fairy tales. Once widely told, now almost suppressed, this peculiar story sympathetically dramatizes an early phase in the establishment of adolescent autonomy. The heroine disguises herself in a filthy donkeyskin to hide away after her father’s proposal, but at the climactic moment her golden hair reveals her worth.

  The blondeness of the fairytale beauty is one of the most potent and recurrent symbols within the genre, and I try to restore even this predominant, quasimystical image of light and vitality to its historical and social context. Some of the counterparts of ‘Donkeyskin’ take refuge from violation or unfair accusations in silence: so in the last chapter the issue of voice returns, for fairy tales give women a place from which to speak, but they sometimes speak of speechlessness as a weapon of last resort. The book, beginning with gossip as a woman’s derided instrument of self-assertion, closes with muteness, as another stratagem of influence.

  The happy endings of fairy tales are only the beginning of the larger story, and any study which attempts to encompass it wholly must stumble and fall before any kind of ending can be made: the story of storytelling is a tale that will never be done. As one traditional closing formula implies, the story is made by both together: ‘This is my story, I’ve told it, and in your hands I leave it.’

  PART ONE

  The Tellers

  The old woman sighed sympathetically. ‘My pretty dear,’ she said, ‘you must be cheerful and stop worrying about dreams. The dreams that come in daylight are not to be trusted, everyone knows that, and even night-dreams go by contraries … Now let me tell you a fairy tale or two to make you feel a little better.’1

  Apuleius

  There are indeed many wonders, and

  with regard to the stories people tell one

  another, it may be

  that such tales go beyond the true account

  and, embellished with iridescent lies,

  beguile them.2

  Pindar

  The Sibyl of Cumae was something of a trickster as well as a seer: when Tarquin of Rome would not pay her price for the Sibylline books, she burned three, and then three more. He paid, rather than see the remaining books in her hand join the pyre at her feet. (Giovanni di Stefano, 1482, pavement, Duomo of Siena.)

  CHAPTER 1

  In the Cave of the Enchantress

  For me your love is only pain

  I’ve opened up my eyes

  And seen in you, my lady fair,

  The devil in disguise.1

  The Tannhäuser Ballad

  WHEN IT LOOKED as if Christianity was taking hold in her native Campania in southern Italy, the Sibyl left her labyrinth of caves in Cumae below the temple of Apollo. She had pronounced her oracles there for hundreds of years, but she was now taking to the hills, to make one of the last stands of paganism on the highest ridge of the Apennines, still called the Monti Sibillini in her honour.

  She had shown Aeneas the way down to the pagan underworld in Virgil’s epic; she had sold the volumes of Sibylline leaves, her oracles written on palms, to the last king of Rome, Tarquin the Proud, and had proved that she was worldly-wise as well as deep: when he would not pay the price she asked for the nine books, she burned three, and when he still would not pay, she burned another three, and so he found himself outmanoeuvred and had to pay the full price for the last remaining three volumes rather than risk their total destruction.2 But, with the new faith gaining ground, the oracles’ author was obliged to run, to conceal herself in a cave, and practise her forbidden arts there, under the rose. One of these was making up stories, passing on information; giving a picture of what the future might hold for her hearers. In some accounts, she had even invented the first alphabet in the West – but there are one or two other contenders for this title.3

  The ‘Grotta della Sibilla’ in the Umbrian mountains is first mentioned in medieval not classical legend: it appears in the chivalric romance Guerino il Meschino, written by Andrea da Barberino (also called Andrea dei Magnabotti) in 1391 and subsequently read by the literati, as well as told and retold by professional storytellers, the cantastorie.4 Its eponymous hero, Guerino the Wretch, soon became a byword for Italian cunning and fearlessness: he is an orphan hunting for his parents in the company of an innkeeper’s son; in the course of their wanderings, the two youths reach a mountain pass near Norcia in Umbria, where they meet the Devil. The Devil wants Guerino’s soul – what else? – and tempts him with news of a greatfata, a fairy, an enchantress, called Sibilla, who lives near by, in a subterranean kingdom where every delight will be his. Guerino takes up the new quest eagerly, though he is warned what might lie in store for him when he comes across Macco, a victim of the fairy, at the mouth of the cave; changed by the enchantress into a terrible snake, he has been left there, ordered to keep guard.

  The Christian origin of this legend demanded that the two great enemies of the faith in Barberino’s day – Jews and heathens – be represented in some sort of conspiracy together. By giving the fairy’s victim the name Macco, the author was demonstrating his orthodoxy. For ‘Malco’ was the Wandering Jew of legend, and the serpentine shape would then reflect the anti-semitism of such Christian legends, just as the fantasies of female magic emanate from the religion’s prejudices against all daughters of Eve, ‘the Devil’s gateway’. In the story, Guerino immediately tramples the snaky Macco underfoot, and passes blithely on. Inside the cave, he finds the fata: ‘so great was her charm that she would have deceived any human being, and with her sweet words and her lovely greetings, there was courtesy in her beyond measure …’In her subterranean kingdom, trees flower and fruit at the same time, and there is no pain or age or sorrow.5 She offers to discover the identity of Guerino’s lost father if only the hero will yield to her charms, and these are considerable: ‘when he was in bed, she laid herself down by his side and showed him her beautiful, white flesh, and her breasts indeed seemed to be made of ivory …’ He learns from the fairies in her entourage that she is the learned Cumaean Sibyl, and that she will live until the crack of doom.6 According to a divergent variation on the legend, she had fled to her present refuge because, after prophesying t
he birth of the Saviour from a virgin, she had expected to be chosen herself for the task. ‘She [had been] so virginal … she thought God would descend into her when he went and took flesh.’7 To her disgust, the lot had fallen upon Mary instead.

  Guerino, a type of folkloric trickster, and a wily survivor, manages to keep his virtue and resist the fata, in spite of all the enchanted blandishments and treats with which he is regaled in the cave. Her ‘paradise’ offers a life of endless feasting, music, fashionable dress, no pain, no hunger, no poverty, no ageing. But he rejects her, and he becomes glad of his strength of mind, for he soon discovers that on Saturdays Sibilla turns into a monster, and her beautiful attendant ladies into other horrible creatures. He learns it when he peeps and sees their deformed nether limbs under their skirts. So he turns on his lover, and rejects her and her fairy kingdom in fury. She protests at this cruelty, invoking the name of Aeneas, recalling how much more courteously she was treated by that great founding father of civilization, a man who surpassed even Guerino in accomplishments, as he had instituted the Roman empire. But Guerino will not be swayed; he is a pattern of Christian virtue, and he manages to make his escape – he goes to Rome and is absolved of his misspent year in the Sibyl’s company.