The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  Still, the stories appropriated by the Walt Disney Company have hardly suffered setbacks, and a look at some of the tales in the Grimms’ collection reveals that what is preserved there resonates with narratives from all over the world, reminding us that the stories will never stop replicating themselves in what Darwin called “endless forms most beautiful and wonderful.” Nowhere is this more true than in tales about women silenced and women endowed with the power to speak and tell their stories.

  Examples of girls silenced abound in the Grimms’ Children’s Stories and Household Tales. In “The Frog King,” the famed first story in the collection (recall that Campbell used it as the curtain raiser for The Hero with a Thousand Faces), the title figure, with an instinct for authority, tells a princess in tears over a lost golden ball: “Be quiet and just stop bawling.” “Don’t cry, Gretel” and “Be quiet”—that’s also what Hansel tells his sister when they are lost in the woods, unable to find their way back home. And the girl in the Grimms’ story “Our Lady’s Child” loses the power of speech when she refuses to admit that she opened a door forbidden to her. Constantly deprived of speech, these fairy-tale figures are rendered defenseless and vulnerable. Complaint remains taboo for them.

  “The Goose Girl,” a story included in the Grimms’ collection of 1812, reveals the complex ways in which silence and speech operate in tandem to produce self-reflexive narratives that allude to the power of stories to make things right—in other words, to find justice. In this case, however, a female rival, rather than a predatory male, inflicts suffering on the heroine, reminding us that villainy can come from any quarter. The rescuer comes in the form of a patient listener, who doubles as suitor and savior.

  A princess traveling to foreign lands for her wedding is betrayed by an ambitious chambermaid who usurps her position. Forced to tend geese in the kingdom she was to rule, she cannot reveal her true identity, on pain of death. All the while she retains magical powers, summoning the winds to divert the attentions of unwelcome suitors or communicating with the head of her beloved horse, a creature decapitated by the chambermaid. If speech in its most urgent form is denied her, still she finds, as is the case with Cinderella, Snow White, Thousandfurs, and a host of other fairy-tale heroines in the Grimms’ collection, some consolation in her power to commune with and be at home in the natural world.

  It is the father of the prince who, after getting wind of intrigue and betrayal from the horse’s head endowed with speech, proposes that the goose girl tell her troubles to an old iron stove. Once he walks away, the princess crawls into the iron stove and starts “weeping and wailing.” “She poured her feelings out and said: ‘Here I sit, abandoned by the whole world, even though I’m the daughter of a king. A false maid forced me to remove my royal clothing and now she has taken my place with my bridegroom. And here I am, forced to do menial work as a goose girl. If my mother knew about this, her heart would break in two.’”48 The sly king had not moved far from where the princess was and inched his way over to the stovepipe, catching every word of the goose girl’s complaint. The truth becomes public thanks to the royal eavesdropper, a sympathetic listener who is also a male intermediary with the authority to validate and air the facts, even when, or perhaps especially when, they are hotly denied. Telling your story, finding the power of speech—even if it seems to take the form of mere breath in the wind—liberates and rights wrongs.

  Giambattista Basile’s seventeenth-century collection of Italian stories known as The Pentamerone contains a tale that resembles the Grimms’ version of “Snow White.” But there is a crucial difference: in it an aunt plays the role of cruel persecutor. The ill-treated girl one day asks her uncle to bring back for her from his travels a doll, a knife, and a pumice stone. What does Lisa, as the girl is called, do when the doll arrives? She puts it in front of her and begins weeping, recounting “all the story of her troubles to that bundle of cloth, just as if it had been a real person.” And what is the point of the knife and pumice stone? When the doll does not respond, Lisa threatens to sharpen the knife on the stone and stab her with it. “All right,” the doll quickly declares, “I have understood you. I’m not deaf!”49

  The doll may be animated, but it is no substitute for a real-life interlocutor, and, one day, Lisa’s father eavesdrops at the door. He hears the weeping girl speaking with dark intensity:

  [The Baron] saw Lisa telling the doll all about her mother’s jump over the rose-leaf, how she swallowed it, her own birth, the spell, the curse of the last fairy, the comb left in her hair, her death, how she was shut up in seven caskets and placed in that room, her mother’s death, the key entrusted to the brother, his departure for the hunt, the jealousy of his wife, how she opened the room against her husband’s commands, how she cut off her hair and treated her like a slave, and the many, many torments she had inflicted on her. And all the while she wept and said, “Answer me, dolly, or I will kill myself with this knife.” And sharpening it on the pumice stone, she would have plunged it into herself had not the Baron kicked down the door and snatched the knife out of her hand.

  Something of a second self, the doll becomes a conversation partner, not human to be sure, but also “not deaf.” It is willing to listen to the tale of Lisa’s woes without triggering fear of retaliation for “telling” on the aunt. The Baron asks his niece for a full account and then stages a banquet at which he urges her to “tell the story of the hardships she had undergone and of the cruelty of his wife.” This is a tale that makes “all the guests weep.” Reciting woes to an inanimate object, in this case a kind of personal talismanic figure, creates the opportunity for a sympathetic listener to eavesdrop, which in turn prepares the way for a public performance, a scene of storytelling that elicits sympathy for the victim and leads to a punishment for the persecutor: “Then he drove his wife away, sending her back to her parents.” Justice is served, perhaps not entirely cold, at the Baron’s banquet.

  There are many fairy tales that take as their subject self-imposed muteness or enforced silence followed by disclosures of abuse. The Portuguese story “The Maiden with the Rose on Her Forehead” gives us a heroine who asks her uncle for a talisman. What does she do but take the artifact made of stone to her room and place it on her bed:

  As the prince was curious to know what she would do with it, he hid himself under the bed. The girl began to tell her history to the stone, saying, “Oh! talisman, I am the daughter of a princess, sister to the prince my uncle, who lives in this palace and is married. But he does not know that I am his niece, for I was kept spell-bound in an iron chest; and his wife and her mother burnt my skin all over with a hot iron.”50

  In this case, kinship has been suppressed and is revealed at last through the girl’s testimony, overheard by the prince, to an inanimate object. He restores the girl to her royal rank and does away with his wife and mother-in-law by scorching their skin and immuring them behind a wall.

  Occasionally, stories about betrayal and abuse feature men as victims, as in “The Lord of Lorn and the False Steward,” a ballad recorded in nineteenth-century Britain by Francis James Child.51 The steward in that story, much like the heroine of the Grimms’ “Goose Girl,” is forced to trade places with a servant. His true identity is revealed when he tells his story, not to the lady of the house directly, but to a horse that kicked him. As in “The Golden Bracelet,” recorded in Kentucky and appearing in a collection called Tales from the Cloud Walking Country (1958), an animal rather than an inanimate object becomes the audience for a tale of woe, told this time by a “true bride.”52 “[She] had let her little dog follow her to Spain,” we read in that Southern tale, “and it was a heap of comfort to her to talk to it every night and tell how she lost the golden bracelet that was her protection from harm. She held to her promise not to tell it to no human person. But the old king’s serving woman heard, and she told the old king.” Although there are occasional wronged young men in these stories, women still far outnumber them, and they can be said to
suffer as much at the hands of mothers, sisters, aunts, and servants as at the hands of fathers, husbands, brothers, and uncles.

  In the early 1940s, Susie Hoogasian Villa decided to collect folktales from informants living in an Armenian community located in Delray, a part of southwest Detroit. Using Gregg shorthand, she wrote down several hundred tales, among them “Nourie Hadig,” a story told to her by Mrs. Akabi Mooradian. In an appendix to 100 Armenian Tales, the highlights from her extensive archive, she added notes about a dozen similar tales told in regions neighboring Armenia, pointing to the widespread dissemination of the story.

  “Nourie Hadig,” like the Grimms’ goose girl and Basile’s Lisa, is the victim of a rival who does everything in her power to trade places. In this case, Nourie Hadig has been tending a slumbering prince, and, when he finally awakens after seven years, he believes that a duplicitous female servant has been in charge of his recovery. “Neither girl told the prince the truth about the arrangement”—Nourie Hadig’s pride and the servant girl’s infatuation get in the way of disabusing the prince of his error. Before the wedding, the prince plans a shopping trip, and he asks Nourie Hadig what she would like. “A Stone of Patience” is the reply. Off the prince goes to a stonecutter, who gives him the required object, along with a speech about its powers:

  If one has great troubles and tells them to the Stone of Patience, certain changes will occur. If one’s troubles are great, so great that the Stone of Patience cannot bear the sorrow, it will swell and burst. If, on the other hand, one makes much of only slight grievances, the Stone of Patience will not swell, but the speaker will. And if there is no one there to save this person, he will burst. So listen outside your servant’s door. Not everyone knows of the Stone of Patience, and your servant, who is a very unusual person, must have a valuable story to tell.53

  What is less alive and sentient than a stone? The notion of a stone of patience, a stone that can listen to human sorrows so intense that it feels empathy, swells, and can burst is a stroke of genius. As expected, Nourie Hadig recounts her sufferings to the stone, and we find in the folk narrative a miniaturized version of the events already told, now from the point of view of the heroine:

  “Stone of Patience,” she said, “I was the only child of a well-to-do family. My mother was very beautiful, but it was my misfortune to be even more beautiful than she. At every new moon my mother asked who was the most beautiful in the world. And the new moon always answered that my mother was the most beautiful. One day my mother asked again, and the moon told her that Nourie Hadig was the most beautiful one in the whole world. My mother became very jealous and told my father to take me somewhere, to kill me and bring her my bloody shirt. My father could not do this, so he permitted me to go free,” Nourie Hadig said. “Tell me, Stone of Patience, am I more patient, or are you?”

  The Stone of Patience began to swell.

  The girl continued, “When my father left me, I walked until I saw this house in the distance. I walked toward it, and when I touched the door, it opened magically by itself. Once I was inside, the door closed behind me and never opened again until seven years later. Inside I found a handsome youth. A voice told me to prepare his food and take care of him. I did this for four years, day after day, night after night, living alone in a strange place, with no one to hear my voice. Stone of Patience tell me, am I more patient, or are you?”

  The Stone of Patience swelled a little more.

  “One day a group of gypsies camped right beneath my window. As I had been lonely all these years, I bought a gypsy girl and pulled her up on a rope to the place where I was confined. Now, she and I took turns in serving the young boy who was under a magic spell. One day she cooked for him and the next day I cooked for him. One day, three years later, while the gypsy was fanning him, the youth awoke and saw her. He thought that she had served him through all those years and took her as his betrothed. And the gypsy, whom I had bought and considered my friend, did not say one word to him about me. Stone of Patience, tell me, am I more patient, or are you?”

  The story within the story mirrors the larger narrative, but also offers a new perspective and a new audience, with the Stone of Patience modeling empathetic behavior, reminding listeners that stories can be rousingly tender and emotionally charged. More than intellectual exercises in mapping “What if?” scenarios, the story also contains a dose of magic, with its stone that swells with pity. By telling a tale, you can communicate pain, suffering, and injustice. And the prince, who eavesdrops on the scene of storytelling, willingly concedes the hazards of partial knowledge: “I didn’t know the whole story.” And with that, the gypsy is sent back into servitude (creating the opportunity for a new tale of injustice), and Nourie Hadig marries the prince.

  Stones of Patience are a rarity in European and Anglo-American folklore, though a German saying about something being capable of moving a stone to tears or making a stone empathetic (etwas könnte einen Stein erbarmen) suggests some kind of deep chasm separating the cold, mute silence of a rock-hard surface and the kind, effusive warmth of human compassion. Persian folklore has a tale called “Sang-e Sabur,” and the patient stone in the title represents the most empathetic listener imaginable. Collecting all the compassion that has been squandered in the world, it absorbs suffering as it listens to the tribulations of those who must bear an intolerable burden of misery. The patient stone sacrifices itself, willingly bursting into pieces by taking on what would otherwise crush its human interlocutor.

  The Stone of Patience made its way into Armenia, and in mysterious ways other tropes and motifs of the Persian tale about a long-suffering young woman also migrated into European lore. In 1966 Hafizullah Baghban collected a story called “The Seventy-Year-Old Corpse” from a thirty-year-old housewife named Haya¯, living in Herat City in Afghanistan.54 In the next decade Baghban recorded two additional versions of the tale, a fact that suggests a widespread dissemination of stories about Stones of Patience. Elements of the tale are kaleidoscopically reconfigured in the European repertoire, repurposed in ways that make better cultural sense for the audience. Occasionally, however, they hold the key to fairy-tale puzzles. Why, for example, does the heroine of “The Goose Girl” tell her woes to an iron stove, of all possible things? The answer becomes evident when we look at its distant analogue, the Afghan story about an aging corpse.

  A man sells thorn bushes for a living and has a daughter who spins cotton while he is away. One day, a nightingale perches on a wall and tells the girl that she will marry a seventy-year-old corpse. The next day the man and his daughter set out to visit a relative. On the way they run out of water, and the daughter walks to a fort where she fills her jug but is then unable to find an exit. She begins to weep, and a window opens, giving her access to seven rooms. In the seventh lies the corpse of the title, punctured with needles. The girl purchases the services of a concubine, who is given instructions to remove all the needles sticking in the corpse, save one. Instead, she defiantly removes all the needles. The corpse is resurrected, marries the concubine, and makes the spinner his second wife. Here we find the same role reversal of princess and servant, beautiful girl and gypsy, that appears in European analogues.

  As in “Beauty and the Beast” and “Cinderella” stories, the heroine makes a modest request, asking the “corpse” to bring her a patience stone and a black-handled knife when he returns from a shopping expedition for wife number one. After securing the items, the “corpse” learns that he must attend to how they are used: “She’ll put herself in an oven and cover the top. Then she’ll tell her story from the beginning to the end [to the stone]. At the end she’ll kill herself [with the knife].” The seventy-year-old heeds these words and sits near the oven, listening to the story of the old man’s daughter. How does he react? Stunned by the revelation of wife number one’s treachery, he ties her hair to a horse’s tail and has the horse run until the woman is “torn to pieces.” Then he covers her skull with silver and turns it into a drinking glass.
The young woman who succeeded in revealing the truth has the “good fortune” of marrying the seventy-year-old corpse, and one can only hope that the exercise in revelation has transformed him physically as well as emotionally: “God fulfilled their wish.”

  What happens when the seventy-year-old corpse is the patience stone? This is the premise of a 2008 novel by Atiq Rahimi, a French-Afghan writer and filmmaker. The Patience Stone is set “somewhere in Afghanistan or elsewhere.”55 In this setting that is both a very real war-torn village and an imagined anywhere in the world, a woman tends her comatose husband, a jihadist shot in the neck during a dispute with a relative. Gradually the woman begins to confide in her husband, revealing her fears and desires, the agony of her marriage, in short, her most closely guarded secrets.

  It is the woman who makes the connection between her mute husband and the patience stone. “Before she has picked up her veil, these words burst from her mouth: ‘Sang-e saboor!’ She jumps. ‘That’s the name of the stone, sang-e saboor, the patience stone! The magic stone!’ She turns to her comatose husband and whispers, ‘Yes, you, you are my sang-e saboor! . . . I’m going to tell you everything, my sang-e saboor. Everything. Until I set myself free from my pain, and my suffering, and until you, you . . .’” For the first time in her marriage, she is able to talk back, to break the code of silence that prevailed for a decade, with a husband so preoccupied by armed conflict that he failed to exchange words with his wife. For her, the process of speaking to the immobilized husband is therapeutic, even if and because she knows that the words she utters can be said only when her husband is unable to respond with words or blows. “What pours out of her is not only a brave and shocking confession, but a savage indictment of war, the brutality of men, and the religious, marital, and cultural norms that continually assault Afghan women, leaving them with no recourse but to absorb without complaint, like a patience stone,” Khaled Hosseini writes in his introduction to Rahimi’s novel.56