The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  Tales about abusive fathers and harassing brothers disappeared from the fairy-tale canon. Giambattista Basile’s “Penta with the Chopped-Off Hands” shows us a woman talking back to a brother, a man determined to make his sister his wife: “I’m amazed that you let those words come out of your mouth! If they’re in jest, they’re worthy of an ass, and if they’re in earnest they stink like a billy goat. I’m sorry that you have the tongue to say those ugly and shameful things, and that I have the ears to hear them. Me, your wife? Who did this to you? What kind of trap is this? Since when have people made these blends? Since when these stews? These mixtures?” The brother answers by singing the praises of his sister’s hands. How does she respond? By chopping them off and sending them to him on a platter, whereupon the brother locks her in a chest that he then tosses into the sea. A sorcerer restores the hands in the end, in a final tableau of reconciliation.42

  Why have all the heroines who show fierce determination in the face of domestic violence disappeared? The loss of these stories is of real consequence, for Bluebeard’s wife, Catskin, the Maiden without Hands, Thousandfurs, and a host of other heroines with names that we would not recognize today model heroic behavior, demonstrating how victims of dreadful family circumstances can find ways not just to survive but to prevail, even after enduring the unimaginable. Endurance: that is the trait that Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, saw as the guiding lesson of stories like “The Handless Maiden” (as she calls it). The word “endurance,” she points out, means not just to continue without cessation but also “to harden, to make sturdy, to make robust, to strengthen.” “We don’t just go on to go on,” she adds. “Endurance means that we are making something.”43

  Along with the oral storytelling cultures that bound together domestic servants, women in sewing circles, wet nurses, and cooks at the hearth, tales about domestic violence have gradually faded and been forgotten, transformed into “innocent” child’s play rather than remaining the grown-up business of talk and conversational give-and-take. While it is true that the undisguised and unembellished versions of these tales have gone missing, the tropes of some of these stories have real staying power. There are plenty of forbidden chambers, bloody keys, and husbands with skeletons in their closets in our entertainments today. And, as we shall see, these are precisely the stories that women writers took up in the late twentieth century, resurrecting traditions that would otherwise have been lost.

  “A woman without a tongue is as a soldier without his weapon,” the British poet George Peele wrote in his 1595 play The Old Wives’ Tale.44 Silencing women’s voices, keeping their stories out of the official canon, became something of a mission, consciously or not, and the strategy of belittling fairy tales was a powerful way of preventing them from becoming a form of cultural capital available to women belonging to the educated classes, as the stories had once been for the unlettered. It also impeded the wider dissemination of an entire genre of stories that tell of the complications of courtship, love, and marriage, of the underdog who succeeds in turning the tables on the wealthy and powerful, of utopian fantasies that end with a “happily ever after.”

  Before turning to the afterlife of some of these stories in the works of women writers, let us look at one of the old wives’ tales that performed a vanishing act. “Fitcher’s Bird,” included in the Grimms’ Children’s Stories and Household Tales, gives us a heroine who is not only courageous and clever but also a healer and rescuer. Here is her story, a variant of the tale of “Bluebeard,” a fairy tale that conventionally ends with the liberation of the heroine by her brothers:

  Once upon a time there was a wizard who used to disguise himself as a poor man and go begging from door to door in order to capture pretty girls. No one had any idea what he did with them, for they all disappeared without a trace.

  One day the wizard appeared at the door of a man with three beautiful daughters. He looked like a poor, weak beggar and had a basket strapped to his back, as if he were collecting alms. When he asked for something to eat, the eldest girl came to the door to give him a crust of bread. All he did was touch her, and she had to jump right into his basket. Then he made long legs and hurried off to bring her back to his house, which was in the middle of a dark forest.

  Everything in the house was grand. The wizard gave the girl whatever she wanted and told her: “Dearest, I’m sure you’ll be happy here with me, for you’ll have whatever your heart desires.” After a few days had gone by, he said: “I have to go on a trip and will leave you by yourself for a while. Here are the keys for the house. You can go anywhere you want and look around at anything you want, but don’t go into the room that this little key opens. I forbid it under the punishment of death.”

  He also gave her an egg and said: “Carry it with you wherever you go, because if it gets lost, something terrible will happen.” She took the keys and the egg and promised to do exactly as he had told her. After he left, she went over the house from top to bottom, taking a good look at everything in it. The rooms were glittering with silver and gold, and she thought that she had never seen anything so magnificent. When she finally got to the forbidden door, she was about to walk right past it when curiosity got the better of her. She inspected the key and found that it looked just like the others. Putting it into the lock, she turned it just a bit, and the door sprang open.

  Imagine what she saw when she entered! In the middle of the room there was a big basin full of blood, and in it were the hacked off limbs of dead bodies. Next to the basin was a block of wood with a gleaming ax lodged in it. She was so horrified that she dropped the egg she was holding into the basin. Even though she took it right out and wiped off the blood, it didn’t help. The stain came right back again. She wiped and scraped, but it just wouldn’t come off.

  Not much later the man returned from his journey, and the first things he asked for were the key and the egg. She gave them to him, but she was trembling, and when he saw the red stain, he knew that she had set foot in the bloody chamber. “You went into the chamber against my wishes,” he said. “Now you will go back in against yours. Your life has reached its end.”

  The man threw her down, dragged her into the chamber by her hair, chopped her head off on the block, and hacked her into pieces so that her blood ran down all over the floor. Then he tossed her into the basin with the others.

  “Now I’ll go and get the second one,” said the wizard, and he went back to the house dressed as a poor man begging for charity. When the second daughter brought him a crust of bread, he caught her as he had the first just by touching her. He carried her off, and she fared no better than the first sister. Her curiosity got the better of her: she opened the door to the bloody chamber, looked inside, and when the wizard came back she had to pay with her life.

  The man went to find the third daughter, but she was clever and sly. After handing the keys and the egg over to her, he went away, and she put the egg in a safe place. She explored the house and entered the forbidden chamber. And what did she see! There in the basin were both her sisters, foully murdered and chopped into pieces. But she set to work gathering all the body parts and put them back where they belonged: heads, torsos, arms, and legs. When everything was in place, the pieces began to move and to knit back together. Both girls opened their eyes and came back to life. Overjoyed, they kissed and hugged each other.

  On his return home, the man asked right away about the keys and egg. When he was unable to find a trace of blood on the egg, he declared: “You have passed the test, and you shall be my bride.” He no longer had any power over her and had to do her bidding. “Very well,” she replied. “But first you must take a basketful of gold to my father and mother, and you must carry it on your back. In the meantime, I’ll make plans for the wedding.”

  She ran to her sisters, whom she had hidden in a little room, and said: “Now I can save you. That brute will be the one who carries you home. But as soon as you get back there, send help for me.
”

  She put both girls into a basket and covered them with gold until they were completely hidden. Then she summoned the wizard and said: “Pick up the basket and start walking, but don’t you dare stop to rest along the way. I’ll be looking out my little window, keeping an eye on you.”

  The wizard hoisted the basket up on his shoulders and started off with it. But it was so heavy that sweat began to pour down his forehead. He sat down to rest for a while, but within moments one of the girls cried out from the basket: “I’m looking out my little window, and I see that you’re resting. Get a move on.” Whenever he stopped, the voice sounded, and he had to keep going until finally, panting for breath and groaning, he managed to get the basket with the gold and with the two girls in it back to the parents’ house.

  Meanwhile the bride was preparing the wedding celebration, to which she had invited all the wizard’s friends. She took a skull with grinning teeth, crowned it with jewels and a garland of flowers, carried it upstairs, and set it down at an attic window, facing to the outside. When everything was ready, she crawled into a barrel of honey, cut open a featherbed and rolled around in the feathers until she looked like a strange bird that no one could possibly recognize. She left the house and, on her way, she met some wedding guests, who asked:

  “Oh, Fitcher’s feathered bird, where have you been?”

  “From feathered Fitze Fitcher’s house I’ve come.”

  “And the young bride there, how does she fare?”

  “She’s swept the house all the way through,

  And from the attic window, she’s staring down at you.”

  She then met the bridegroom, who was walking back home very slowly. He too asked:

  “Oh, Fitcher’s feathered bird, where have you been?”

  “From feathered Fitze Fitcher’s house I’ve come.”

  “And the young bride there, how does she fare?”

  “She’s swept the house all the way through,

  And from the attic window, she’s staring down at you.”

  The bridegroom looked up and saw the decorated skull. He thought it was his bride, nodded, and waved to her. But when he reached the house filled with his guests, the brothers and relatives who had been sent to rescue the bride were there ahead of him. They locked the doors to the house so that no one could get out. Then they set fire to it, and the wizard and his crew were burned alive.45

  The German heroine engineers her own rescue from the wizard Fitcher, an expert in the art of division and a master of dismemberment. He uses his chopping block to separate into pieces what was meant to be whole. The third sister must reverse this process, rejoining the dismembered parts of her sisters, healing them, and restoring them to life.

  Arthur Rackham, illustration for the Grimms’ Little Brother & Little Sister and Other Tales, 1917

  The German word heilen (to heal) in this tale, despite its many damaging associations with the political rhetoric of the Third Reich, is in fact the holy grail of many wonder tales, for making whole, restoring equilibrium, and evening out are so often their aim. Fairy tales give us melodramas packed in a tight frame, propulsive yet also spare and contained, with the result that appearances count more than in most narrative forms. Hence the frequency with which healing and wholeness are embodied in beauty, an attribute of the heroine. As Elaine Scarry notes in a philosophical treatise on beauty: beautiful objects make visible “the manifest good of equality and balance.”46 Especially in earlier ages, “when a human community is too young to have yet had time to create justice,” she adds, the symmetry of beauty can model justice. It is in the fairy tale that beauty and justice are supremely well suited to mirror and amplify each other, for what is the moral code in that genre but a kind of naïve morality—“our absolute instinctive judgment of what is good and just.”47 The signature attribute of fairy-tale heroines, beauty, comes to function as an index of fairness in both senses of the term. Beauty, magic, healing, and social justice thus operate in tandem in many wonder tales to produce restorative outcomes, final tableaus in which, as the old chestnut declares, virtue is rewarded and vice is punished.

  The “cleverest” of the trio of sisters, the third sister also becomes the preserver of life. Not only does she defy the powers of the wizard by making her sisters whole again, she also preserves the egg, protecting it from bloodied defilement by placing it in a bed of goose down. She then transforms herself into a hybrid creature—half human, half animal—dipping her body in honey and rolling in feathers. And to entice her bridegroom to his death, she fashions what is to function as her own double: a skull decorated with flowers and jewels, which Fitcher will believe, at least from a distance, to be his bride. The display created through the adorned skull produces a symbolic nexus linking the bride with beauty and death. The sly sister creates a second self that corresponds precisely to the desires of her groom, while she herself escapes his fatal touch by transforming herself into a thing with feathers, a living creature affiliated with lightness, safety, life, and hope. The heroine claims the powers of the magician, but she uses them to restore life rather than to engineer scenes of slaughter.

  Speaking Up and Writing

  We have seen how rumor and gossip turned into old wives’ tales, which in turn morphed into fairy tales that landed directly in the culture of childhood with the almost instant loss of stories about women surviving, triumphing, and prevailing, always against the odds. Tales that raised the specter of not-so-happily-ever-after and addressed anxieties about courtship, nuptials, and married life also disappeared from the repertoire as spheres of social activity for women reconfigured themselves. Gone were storytelling sessions that once provided channels for socialization and acculturation as well as for problem-solving and philosophical soundings. At the same time, the myths of antiquity, along with epics such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, hardened into belief systems that were viewed as the cultural heritage of the West and became a standard fixture in the curriculum of the U.S. education system. Schoolchildren discovered how to be a hero by reading about Achilles, Odysseus, Prometheus, and Hercules.

  That women’s voices have been silenced, beyond the realm of fairy tale and myth, was acknowledged by the poet Adrienne Rich when she read her acceptance speech for the 1974 National Book Award in poetry, for which she was chosen co-recipient with Allen Ginsberg. Rich and the two other nominated women had formed a pact to share the award with each other should one of the three be named, and this is what Rich read: “We, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker, together accept this award in the name of all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world, and in the name of those who, like us, have been tolerated as token women in this culture, often at great cost and in great pain.” The award was dedicated to “the silent women whose voices have been denied us, the articulate women who have given us strength to do our work.”48 Those voices may not have made it into print, but they were anything but silent, as a look at oral storytelling traditions from earlier times reveals. It is time to bring back some of those ancestral voices, and a number of women writers have done just that in the past decades.

  As writers, women have faced daunting challenges, never occupying as prominent a place in the literary canon as their male counterparts. As of 2019, of the 116 Nobel laureates awarded the prize for literature, only 15 have been women. “A woman writing thinks back to her mothers,” Virginia Woolf wrote, and those mothers, as we have seen, presided over a social sphere that was domestic, prosaic, and deeply invested in the ordinary and everyday as well as in the sentimental and sensational.49 It was not just the lack of a room of one’s own that prevented women from becoming writers. It was the utter absence of a social environment that supported women at a desk, pondering plots, writing them down, and sending words out into the world.

  It has not helped that, for centuries now, women novelists have disparaged their own work in ways that echo the voices of those who wished to discredit old wives’ tales. The British no
velist Frances Burney felt pressured to give up writing as an “unladylike” practice. For a time she wrote in secret, and she ended up burning her first manuscript, The History of Caroline Evelyn. When she published Evelina a year later, in 1778, she described it as “the trifling production of a few hours.” Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792, referred to “stupid novelists” and expressed contempt for their works. And George Eliot (who disavowed her female identity by using a male pseudonym) wrote an entire essay called “Silly Novels” in which she denounced the work of lady novelists as “busy idleness.” Around the same time, Jo March, the bold, defiant, and spirited second-born of the four March sisters, burned a set of stories that she had decided were “silly” (after a conversation with Professor Bhaer), something her real-life author had also done. As late as 1959, Sylvia Townsend Warner, a British writer who was at the vanguard of female emancipation and empowerment, worried that “a woman writer is always an amateur.”50

  Listening to Rich, Woolf, Burney, and others, it becomes evident that the challenge for women writers is to listen to the voices of their ancestors (that’s how Toni Morrison put it)—to excavate, unearth, and rediscover stories that were anything but frivolous and trivial. It may be true that mythological worlds are forever being shattered, as the renowned anthropologist Franz Boas once wrote, but they are always also in the process of being rebuilt.51 Oddly, it is often writers in the avant-garde who undertake projects of reclamation and inadvertent preservation. We have seen how Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, Madeline Miller, and Ursula Le Guin refashioned myths, giving us a different perspective on heroic behavior by foregrounding marginalized figures from the mythical past and discovering how to restore the power of speech to those who had been silenced by their culture. The writers in the section that follows used many of the same strategies, going back in time to reimagine stories from times past, giving us tricksters in many cases rather than pure victims (what folklorists refer to as the archetype of the “innocent, persecuted girl”). By acquiring authority through analytic skill and verbal wizardry, these women authorized themselves and elevated the genre of the old wives’ tale to what is now dignified by the name of literature. It was, after all, by listening to the ancestors that the Nobel Prize–winning Toni Morrison breathed new life into tales about flying Africans, taking the tropes of those stories, remixing them, mashing them up, and producing what else but The Song of Solomon.