The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  Jane Eyre talks back and stands up to authority; Janie opens up and confides in a friend to tell her story. Both are authorities who become authors of their life stories. Resistance and revelation are paired in these two accounts that reveal how to put muteness, shame, resignation, and submission on the run. Both fictional autobiographies challenge the prevailing social order, using narrative as a confessional, a pulpit, and a lectern.9

  Telling Your Story: Talking Skulls and a Princess Wearing a Suit of Leather

  The folkloric imagination is a storytelling machine gone wild, and it is not surprising to find that it has built-in advertisements for itself, with many stories about the power of stories. Poetry makes things happen, no matter what W. H. Auden may have declared, and symbolic stories have their own high-voltage power.10 Many tales from oral traditions broadcast the upside to narrative, even as they candidly disclose the downside to confabulation. These made-up stories may not report factual events, but they can capture razor-sharp truths that belong to the wisdom of the ages. Self-referential with a vengeance, they reveal what can happen when you tell a story even as a story is being told. One of these stories is widely disseminated, as folklorists have shown, with analogues in Nigeria, Ghana, and Tanzania, as well as in the United States and the West Indies.11 A version of it was recorded in 1921 by Leo Frobenius, a German ethnologist who collected stories from the African continent. The teller is clearly exploiting anxieties about skulls, bones, and mortality to produce maximum dramatic effect and to remind listeners that a good story can be a matter of life and death.

  A hunter goes into the bush. He finds an old human skull. The hunter says, “What brought you here?” The skull answers, “Talking brought me here.” The hunter runs off and finds the king. He tells the king, “I found a human skull in the bush, and, when I spoke to it, it talked back.”

  The king said, “Never since my mother bore me have I heard that a skull could speak.” The king summoned the Alkali, the Saba, and the Degi and asked them if they had ever heard anything like this. None of the wise men had heard anything like it, and they decided to send a guard out with the hunter to find out if his story was true. The guard accompanied the hunter into the bush with the order to kill him on the spot if he was lying. The guard and the hunter find the skull. The hunter says to the skull, “Skull, speak.” The skull remains silent. The hunter asks as before, “What brought you here?” The skull remains silent. All day long the hunter pleads with the skull to speak, but it remains silent. In the evening the guard tells the hunter to make the skull speak, and when it does not, they kill him as the king commanded.

  After the guard leaves, the skull opens its jaws, and asks the dead hunter’s head, “What brought you here?” The dead hunter replies, “Talking brought me here.”12

  A cautionary tale about reporting what you have seen and heard, “The Talking Skull” also self-reflexively creates a meaningful narrative that undermines its own message. On the one hand we learn about the risks of bringing back news about outlandish things, but on the other hand we have a story that revels in reporting a shocking, startling, scandalous event. The tellers of this tale knew about the compulsion to reveal, confess, air, and just simply talk. But they also understood, at a profound level, that the temptation to tell all can take a wrong turn and lead to a sentence of death.

  “I’m afraid they’ll kill me. They said they’d kill me if I told on them.” That’s what Recy Taylor told a reporter after she had been abducted and raped by six white men after leaving church on a Sunday evening in Alabama in 1944. That telling tales can have fatal consequences is driven home with a vengeance in this shameful chapter of American history. Taylor received death threats from white vigilantes, who also firebombed her home and set her front porch on fire. If Black victims of sexual assault in the United States rarely found justice in the courtroom, their stories helped mobilize leaders in the civil rights movement to build legal and political coalitions.13 It was Rosa Parks who helped organize Recy Taylor’s defense and who went to Abbeville in 1944 to gather the facts in the case and to make sure her story was told.

  Given the enormous stakes in telling your story or speaking truth to the custodians of power, there is always risk. Even when you are reporting the facts, your audience might remain skeptical or hostile, indicting you for false claims, duplicity, or gross exaggeration. The talking skull is, of course, a wonder, an embodied oxymoron that defies belief. The story of its duplicity endlessly replicates itself in a metaphorical hall of mirrors as it is passed down, repeated, and varied, from one generation to the next. There is “The Skull That Talked Back,” collected by Zora Neale Hurston in the 1930s in the Deep South, the Ghanaian story “The Hunter and the Tortoise,” and the Ozark tale about a talking turtle.14 In Hurston’s story, Old Skull Head tells a man named High Walker: “My mouth brought me here, and if you don’t mind, yours will bring you here too.”15 The folktale reminds listeners to keep their mouths shut even as the actual teller of the tale is running off at the mouth, turning a story about storytelling into an allegory of diction as contradiction.

  The risk involved in voicing public denunciations becomes evident when we see how girls and women in folkloric inventions resort to subterfuge, wearing costumes and using all manner of stealth measures before telling their tales. In the tales themselves, they are forever engaging in deception, sometimes putting on animal skins (as in “Donkeyskin,” “Thousandfurs,” or “Catskin”), occasionally hiding in boxes, barrels, and baskets (“Fitcher’s Bird”), or covering themselves with cinders, pitch, green moss, or feathers (“Mossycoat”). The heroines profit from mimicry and masquerade, engaging in mysterious parlor games of hide-and-seek, concealing their identity and then revealing it.

  In the Egyptian story “The Princess in the Suit of Leather,” Juleidah—the girl who wears that odd costume named in the title—flees from home when a “wrinkled matron” advises her widower father to marry his own daughter. She leaps over a palace wall, commissions a suit of leather from a tanner, becomes a servant in a sultan’s palace, and wins the heart of the ruler’s son, whom she weds. One day, she receives visitors that include her father and the troublemaking matron who had proposed the ill-advised marriage. Putting on the robes and headcloth of her husband, she tells stories to “entertain” her guests. The matron keeps interrupting her accounts, nervously asking, “Can you find no better story than this?” It is then that Juleidah tells the “history of her own adventures,” and, when she finishes, she announces: “I am your daughter the princess, upon whom all these troubles fell through the words of this old sinner and daughter of shame.” The matron is flung over a cliff; the king gives Juleidah half his kingdom; and all the survivors live in “happiness and contentment.”16

  Many so-called old wives’ tales give us, near the end of the story, a compact digest of the narrative, which itself may have been fragmented by interruptions, from stirring the soup to quieting a squalling infant. This dense nugget of elder wisdom was an insurance policy against cultural amnesia and guaranteed that stories mapping escape routes from bad betrothals, abject circumstances, and toxic marriages had a good chance of surviving and enduring. On the one hand, the tales proclaim the importance of disclosing the facts in the here and now (“Speak out! Tell your story”), but they also endorse committing told tales to memory, ensuring their replication and survival, in the form of fiction rather than fact, as a meme that can, in the positive sense of the term, go viral.

  “The Princess in the Suit of Leather” was put into print in the twentieth century. But the story circulated in oral traditions long before that in the form of fairy tales, as one of those stories we classify as an “old wives’ tale.” These confabulations have a long and venerable history as late-night entertainments told by gossips, grannies, nannies, and female domestic servants among themselves and to younger generations. Plato tells of the mythos graos, the “old wives’ tales” told to amuse or punish children (note the use of the term mythos, from
which our term “myth” derives).17 There is also the anilis fabula (“old wives’ tale”), a term used in the second century CE by Apuleius, who staged a scene of storytelling in The Golden Ass, when a “drunken old crone” tries to comfort the victim of an abduction by telling her a tale called “Cupid and Psyche.”18 Even before the rise of print culture and the production of anthologies of fairy tales explicitly for children, traditional tales told by old women were demoted to the status of fare for the younger crowd.

  Stories like “The Princess in the Suit of Leather” can give us pause and make us wonder if the women telling these stories were in fact only “old wives”—the elderly women and female domestics to whom they are usually attributed. For centuries the collectors of fairy tales described their sources as aged, invariably misshapen, old crones (that’s the term used by the seventeenth-century Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile), or as servants and nursemaids (Madame de Sévigné labeled them as such in the nineteenth century), or as old women, grandmothers, and nurses (Charles Perrault attributed his seventeenth-century collection of French stories to them). Tadeo, host of the storytelling sessions in The Pentamerone, chooses ten women, the ones who are “most expert” and “quick-tongued” in the art of speaking. Here is the parade of crones: “lame Zeza, twisted Cecca, goitered Meneca, big-nosed Tolla, hunch-back Popa, drooling Antonella, snout-faced Ciulla, cross-eyed Paolla, mangy Ciommetella, and shitty Iacova.”19

  Frontispieces to fairy-tale collections picture the tellers as crooked women, bent with age, leaning on canes, often surrounded by grandchildren. By attributing authorship of fairy tales to older generations belonging to the laboring classes, the collectors, educated men from a higher social class, distanced themselves from female voices even as they took command of them. They deprived fairy tales of their authority by disavowing the broad cultural ownership of the tales, which belong to young and old, educated and literate, aristocrats and commoners.

  Discrediting the Wisdom of Old Wives’ Tales

  Old wives’ tales can be encoded with valuable knowledge. The fact that wisdom is preserved through conversation in female domestic circles and in routine tête-à-tête moments between women becomes evident from a tale collected in 1931 by a British colonial administrator in what is today Ghana. It was given the title “Keep Your Secrets.” Like the story of the talking skull, this tale too is aggressively didactic, admonishing its listeners to exercise discretion. It warns about the hazards of divulging lifesaving strategies passed on from one generation of women to the next.

  In “Keep Your Secrets,” a young woman decides to choose her own husband and weds a man who is not a man at all but a hyena. At night, the husband asks his wife what she would do were they to quarrel, and the wife replies that she would turn herself into a tree. “I should catch you all the same,” the hyena-husband replies. The wife’s mother, eavesdropping on the conversation about her daughter’s various tactics for a quick getaway, shouts from her room, “Keep quiet, my daughter, is it thus that a woman tells all her secrets to her man?” The tale concludes by describing the wife’s decision to leave her hyena-husband and the tricks she uses to escape. He is on to all her subterfuges, save one, the “thing” she managed to keep to herself.

  Next morning, when the day was breaking, the husband told his wife to rise up as he was returning to his home. He bade her make ready to accompany him a short way down the road to see him off. She did as he told her, and as soon as the couple were out of sight of the village the husband turned himself into a hyena and tried to catch the girl, who changed herself into a tree, then into a pool of water, then into a stone but the hyena almost tore the tree down, nearly drank all the water and half swallowed the stone.

  Then the girl changed herself into the thing which the night before her mother had managed to stop her from betraying. The hyena looked and looked everywhere and at last, fearing the villagers would come and kill him, made off.

  At once the girl changed into her own proper form and ran back to the village.20

  “Keep Your Secrets” wisely and mischievously avoids disclosing the lifesaving secret, leaving us as readers wondering not just about the wife’s strategy but also about what came up in conversations that followed the telling of the story. Was it resourceful speculation about the identity of the “thing” shared between guarded mother and loose-lipped daughter? Or about how to find protection against violent men, even husbands? Could it have been about the beastly nature of husbands? The wonders in this story surely gave rise to wondering why and how, as well as considering the many ways to navigate the risks and perils of domestic arrangements.

  That kind of talk among women was dangerous, and there were ways to discredit the stories that gave rise to it. The German writer Christoph Martin Wieland protested what he believed to be a lowering of literary standards when he declared in 1786, just a few years before the Grimms started putting fairy tales between the covers of a book: “It is all right for popular fairy tales, told by the people, to be transmitted orally, but they ought not to be printed.”21 His resentment-inflected caveat is a sharp reminder of a deep need to secure the boundary separating the printed eloquence of educated men from the mere chatter of women. The literary canon as created by an elite had to be cordoned off from the improvisational storytelling of ordinary folk, especially gossipy and silly old women.

  The Dismal Tale, painted by Thomas Stothard (1755–1834) and engraved by H. C. Shenton Wellcome Collection

  Fairy tales from women’s storytelling circles were further segregated and kept in their place by transplanting them into the culture of childhood. Passed down from one generation to the next, the stories—minus the ones that took a turn into the edgy and subversive—could be deployed to offer lessons in values, beliefs, and moral principles. They became part of a free-floating pedagogical agenda that preceded the rise of literacy and offered wisdom packaged in wit. The French author Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon defended the resourceful intelligence of nurses and governesses by pointing to the “moral features” of the stories they told. At the same time, unlike her male contemporaries, she understood that the tales could still operate effectively in adult salons for a social elite, enabling listeners to indulge in aristocratic romanticism, serving as conversation starters, and constructing platforms for the sociability so highly prized in those settings.22

  As Marina Warner has insightfully pointed out in a cultural history of fairy tales, arguments like Madame L’Héritier’s for coaxing the stories out of the nursery and repurposing them for elite audiences were doomed, for old wives’ tales came to be trivialized, dismissed as nonsense and idle chatter. “On a par with trifles, ‘mere old wives’ tales’ carry connotations of error, of false counsel, ignorance, prejudice and fallacious nostrums.”23 And as Angela Carter put it, once the stories were associated with old women, they could readily be dismissed. “Old wives’ tales—that is, worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the genuine art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it.”24

  A look at the frontispieces to fairy-tale collections reminds us of why so many were determined to exclude the tales from literary culture. In most of those images, an elderly female domestic figure (think again stern grannies, nannies bent over by age, or servants in patched clothing) recites stories to boys and girls. Fairy tales now belong to the very young or the very old, but not to anyone in between. Parents are absent, and how could adults in their right minds possibly number among the enraptured listeners of such trifles? Controlling the traffic between the oral and the literary and holding the line against enabling the oral a right-of-way into print culture reflects the strong determination to keep what had become old wives’ tales in the home and far away from the printing press, which created pathways into the public sphere. Otherwise, they might be widely disseminated rather than obstinately existing in pockets of local oral storytelling cultures.

  As fairy tales moved from sp
inning rooms, sewing circles, and the hearth into the nursery, they lost much of their subversive energy. The editors of the famed collections that we continue to publish today (the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, Joseph Jacobs, Alexander Afanasev, and so on) were for the most part men, prominent literary figures and political actors who had no reservations about taking control of and repurposing those vexing voices that had transmitted tales from one generation to the next.

  George Cruikshank, frontispiece for German Popular Stories, 1823 Richard Vogler Cruikshank Collection, Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, UCLA

  Like the common scold—the designation for a cantankerous woman who became a public nuisance by engaging in forms of negative speech such as complaining, bickering, and quarreling—the tellers of tales talked in ways that could be irritating, provocative, and inflammatory. Giambattista Basile let one of those foul-mouthed women slip into the frame narrative for his Tale of Tales. When a court page shatters the jar used by an old woman to collect cooking oil, she lets loose a torrent of curses: “Ah you worthless thing, you dope, shithead, bed pisser, leaping goat, diaper ass, hangman’s noose, bastard mule! . . . Scoundrel, beggar, son of a whore, rogue!”25 Is it any wonder that a fifteenth-century British playwright compared women’s speech with the waste products of animals: “Go forth, and let the whores cackle! / Where women are, are many words: / Let them go hopping with their hackle! / Where geese sit, are many turds.”26 The words of poets can be revelatory, but scolds generally give more offense than pleasure. What better way to marginalize the tellers of fairy tales than to affiliate them with crones and hags, who, through their close proximity with scolds and witches, hardly seemed trustworthy sources of wisdom and guidance? That the word “scold” is derived from the Old Norse skald (“poet”) is suggestive, pointing to the possibility that those crabby old women might have been on to something, sharing arsenals of satirical weapons with poets.