by Maria Tatar
The latest edition of the tale-type index, published in 2011 under the title The Types of International Folktales, gives us an inventory of the variants of the two different types of stories, both of which are the subject of this volume. Below is an abbreviated version of the subheadings in the two categories:
ATU
400
The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife
401A
The Soldiers in the Enchanted Castle
402
The Animal Bride
403
The Black and the White Bride
404
The Blinded Bride
405
Jorinde and Joringel
406
The Cannibal
407
The Girl as Flower
408
The Three Oranges
409
The Girl as Wolf
410
Sleeping Beauty
411
The King and the Lamia
412
The Maiden (Youth) with a Separable Soul in a Necklace
413
The Stolen Clothing (Marriage by Stealing Clothing)
ATU
425
The Search for the Lost Husband
425A
The Animal as Bridegroom
425B
Son of the Witch
425C
Beauty and the Beast
425D
The Vanished Husband
425E
The Enchanted Husband Sings a Lullaby
425M
The Snake as Bridegroom
426
The Two Girls, the Bear, and the Dwarf
433B
King Lindorm
440
The Frog King, or Iron Henry
441
Hans My Hedgehog
444
Enchanted Prince Disenchanted
What is the use of the folkloristic typology? For one thing, it enables us to see immediately that an animal partner in a romantic relationship with a human constitutes the backbone of the two tale types. And that concept—an animal bride or an animal groom—is packed with sensational scandal. All other variations on the tale types are just that: variations that swirl around the notion of a beastly spouse, at times literally so, at times figuratively so. The trope of a beastly mate captures the heart and soul of both tale types, and it challenges us to make sense of something that we do not encounter in real life. In our anthropocentric, rational, “enlightened” universe, animals stand in an asymmetrical relationship to humans. They may, in their domesticated form, be our companions, but only in the pornographic imagination are they anything more than that. As our dark doubles, they stand for everything we disavow in ourselves—ferocity, bestiality, and untamed urges. Because our relationship to them is saturated with mysterious desires and projected fantasies, our stories about them enable us to probe what remains uncivilized, unruly, and undomesticated in us.
In an analysis of sexual decadence in Western literature and art, Camille Paglia tells us that the point of contact between “man and nature” is sex, and that “morality and good intentions” fall there to “primitive urges.” She describes this intersection as an “uncanny crossroads,” both “cursed and enchanted.”3 Paglia’s observations go far toward explaining the staying power of Beauty and the Beast stories, tales that invoke the mind/body problem and lead us into the fraught territory of beauty and charisma as a challenge to ethical aspirations. Where do we draw the line when it comes to desire, and how and why do we set limits on it?
Tales of animal brides and animal grooms have suffered neglect today in part because we have new ways of figuring the monstrous other. In the twentieth century, we feared beasts like King Kong and Godzilla, along with aliens from other planets, more than anything else. Today our anxieties about creatures that will take over the planet are embodied more often in cyborgs, robots, and androids than in animals. Wolves, bears, and lions figure less as predators than as endangered species in our cultural imaginations. In some ways, life in a posthuman era has intensified our anxieties about machines while reducing our fears about beasts.
In the tale type known as “The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife,” an adventurous young man must break the magic spell cast on the woman who will become his bride. Devoted and doting, he keeps the faith despite the manifest “otherness” of the beloved, who is divided in her allegiance to nature and to civilization. Two types of animal brides haunt the folkloric imagination, with the first as the victim of abduction or seduction. These are the selkies, mermaids, seals, and swan maidens who marry mortals and become human, bearing children and keeping house until one day they are seized by a powerful sense of nostalgia. Putting their sealskins back on or donning their feathers, they abandon their families and follow the call of nature. Rooted in the idea that women have mysteriously close ties to nature, these stories reveal the dangers of what anthropologists call exogamy—marrying outside the tribe—as well as of consorting with outsiders in general. They form a sharp contrast with another set of animal brides, the many toads, birds, fish, monkeys, mice, tortoises, and dogs that seek men who can break the magic spell binding them to an animal state. Frequently these creatures excel at domesticity, spontaneously and effortlessly carrying out prodigious tasks that demonstrate their clear superiority to the human competition.
“The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife” is something of a misnomer, for rather than find their brides, the men who marry creatures of the earth, air, and sea often stumble upon them or are part of an elaborate plan orchestrated by those metamorphic women. In the Filipino “Chonguita,” the protagonist does nothing but agree to marry a monkey, and he liberates her through an act of brutal force, hurling her against a wall. The Indian “The Dog Bride” features a youth who resolves to marry a beautiful maiden after witnessing her shed her dogskin before bathing. The Russian “Princess Frog” gives us an amphibious bride who is so resourceful, enterprising, and accomplished that she succeeds in earning the devotion of a husband who does little more than burn her animal skin, and too soon at that: The burning of the skin leads to a second phase of action that demonstrates the husband’s willingness to go to the ends of the earth for his wife’s sake and stages the joyous reunion of the pair.
One cultural variant of animal-bride stories is particularly powerful in its representation of the painful burdens of social masquerades and domestic responsibilities. “The Swan Maiden,” a tale widespread in Nordic regions, discloses the secretly oppressive nature of marriage, with its attendant housekeeping and child-rearing duties. Swan maidens, domesticated by acts of violence, eventually seize the opportunity to return to a primordial, natural condition. In Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, the tormented Nora,
a figure identified again and again as a bird or creature of nature, was clearly inspired by the mythical swan maiden and her domestic tribulations. Instead of donning feathers (as swan maidens do), Nora rediscovers a diaphanous dancing dress and, after executing a frantic tarantella, takes leave of her dour husband, Torvald. The symbolic nexus connecting animal skins, costumes, and dancing is so prominent in this tale type that it points to a possible underlying link with Cinderella, Donkeyskin, and Catskin stories, showing us the dark side of what happens in a post–happily-ever-after phase.
Tales about swan maidens, selkies, seals, and mermaids may once have been far more widespread than they are today. One critic has argued that the tales can be found “in virtually every corner of the world,” because in most cultures “woman was a symbolic outsider, was the other, and marriage demanded an intimate involvement in a world never quite her own.”4 Yet some animal brides lure their mortal husbands into their own worlds, hermetic spaces of timeless beauty where husbands partake of untold pleasures even as they are aware of an uncanny edge to their carefree bliss. Like Tannhäuser, who in medieval lore becomes Venus’s captive in the caverns of her mountain abode, the Japanese fisherman Urashima and his many folkloric cousins dwell in a realm where they are emphatically the outsiders.
Like tales about animal brides, stories about animal grooms display an interesting bifurcation, with one set of stories going viral and mainstream, the other going dormant and, if not underground, then under the radar. The “classic” version of “Beauty and the Beast” gives us a compassionate heroine who redeems Beast with her tears. Its less prominent counterpart (the best-known example of which is “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”) features an adventurous heroine on a mission to lift the curse that has turned a man into a beast. These are the stories that show us the heroine as determined agent—wearing out iron shoes or racing to the back of the north wind to liberate men kept prisoner by ill-tempered trolls or diabolical vixens. Both sets of tales bleach out details about the animal groom and give us a heroine enviable in the determined gusto with which she undertakes tasks. As if to compensate for the lack of verbal descriptors for Beast, illustrators and animators have turned him into an alluring chimera with a commanding sense of mystery and authority. In recent remediated versions, he has gained much in terms of nobility, status, and dignity, in part because we have renewed respect today for the beauty and spiritual power of animals.
Terri Windling, whose literary fairy tales for adults are powered by a deep understanding of myth and history, writes with vivid sympathy about how a switch has been flipped in our contemporary rescriptings of “Beauty and the Beast”:
One distinct change marks modern re-tellings however—reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the bear who comes knocking at our window is not such a frightening creature; instead, he’s exotic, almost appealing. Where once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it’s been tamed and cultivated (or set aside and preserved); the dangers of the animal world now have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives “the wild” a different kind of power; it’s something we long for rather than fear.5
ANIMALS AS SELF AND OTHER: THERIANTHROPY AND TERATOLOGY
There is poetry in the notion of Beauties encountering Beasts, yet there is also a reductive binarism at work in the pairing, something that Jacques Derrida, in a moment of deep philosophical insight, referred to as intellectual bêtise.6 With that brilliant phrase he both undid the divide between humans and animals and at the same time reinforced it. What we are discovering today is that the bifurcation of living beings into human and animal is not a universal feature of thought. Rather, that particular binary derives from Enlightenment thinking, from a post-Cartesian moment in which humans are decreed to exist in a different mode of consciousness and being from all other living creatures: Cogito ergo sum.
A look at the Oxford English Dictionary reveals that the term “animal” hardly appears at all in English before the end of the sixteenth century. Instead, there are “beasts” and “creatures,” beings differentiated topographically (inhabiting the earth, the waters, or the air) and also sentient and capable of communication, as in this Bible passage: “Aske now the beasts, and they shall teach thee, and the foules of the heaven, and they shall tell thee: Or speake to the earth, and it shall shewe thee: or the fishes of the sea, and they shall declare unto thee. Who is ignorant of all these, but that the hande of the Lord hath made these? In whose hande is the soule of every living thing, and the breath of all mankinde” (Job 12:7–10).
Shakespeare tells us in As You Like It that there are “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stone, and good in everything.”7 Less pantheistic than offering a cosmic vision of connectedness, the passage reminds us, with its biblical partner, of fairy-tale paracosms, worlds in which nature in all its manifestations is voiced, vocal, and animated. The fish of the sea respond to catch and release by granting wishes; a stream warns that drinking its waters will transform you; and a trickster cat wins a kingdom for his master by telling tall tales. Partnerships and collaborations exist alongside predator/prey relationships marked by domination and submission.
The word “animal” contains within it an odd cultural contradiction. Although we define animals by their lack of a soul, we use a word derived from the Latin noun anima, meaning “soul, spirit, or breath,” to refer to them. Artistotle’s De Anima endowed all living creatures with a soul even as it created hierarchies by ranking them. Fairy-tale worlds tap into this kind of thinking and feed on it, creating universes in which living beings exist in a state of connected enmity or empathy. If Little Red Riding Hood frames the relationship between humans and beasts in terms of predators and prey, then Beauty and the Beast stories contrastingly tell us that, in a heartbeat, humans can become beasts and vice versa.
Therianthropy is the term used by folklorists to describe what happens in tales like “Beauty and the Beast.” Derived from the Greek therion, meaning “beast,” and anthropos, meaning “human being,” the word captures both hybridity (humans who believe that they possess the soul of an animal) and shape-shifting (humans changed into animals). Lycanthropy, or the transformation of humans into wolves, is perhaps the most prominent form of therianthropy, but both feral and domestic forms of dogs and cats also figure frequently in the therianthropic imagination of cultures from the East and West. There are many variations on therianthropic beings: skin-walkers, for example—men and women who turn themselves into animals by putting on their pelts.
Pantheistic forces surge and ebb in the fairy-tale universe, animating rivers, rocks, and trees, but also endowing everything from bones and mirrors to birds and frogs with the power to sing and speak. Fairy-tale plots are fueled by magic and transformation, and they recruit those forces to animate a universe in which sudden shifts in the narrative circuits move us headlong from the sublime to the monstrous and back again. Much as wisdom and power are distributed democratically across the animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds, hierarchies remain and install the sovereign human subject as the heroic, redemptive force in the fairy-tale world.
Monsters, as Rosi Braidotti has pointed out, are inherently “epistemophilic.”8 In other words, they arouse our curiosity about origins and causes. “How could this happen?” we ask, when a talking muskrat comes courting or when a crane starts talking and decides to abandon her aquatic home to marry a mortal. Ruptures in the natural order of things are always charged with significance. But they do more than fascinate, for, despite the fact that they are physically other, they challenge us to explore the moral transgression from which the monstrous—a breaching of the laws of nature—seems to emerge. Teratology—the study of monsters—helps us understand who we are and how we define ourselves, by distancing ourselves from the pathologies we project onto difference. Monsters unsettle
boundaries, reminding us that the distinctions we make between nature and culture, the human and the nonhuman, or reason and instinct are both fragile and fraught.
Monstrosity arouses curiosity, invites speculation, and has helped us shape moral landscapes, even as it remains a general placeholder for alterity, any and all deviations from dominant social norms. Representing more than otherness, monsters come to embody threats and dangers, tapping into our fears about invasion, contamination, and wholesale consumption. As one theologian points out, the Greek word for monster, teras, captures a paradox, designating something both repulsive and attractive. Monsters may be awful, but they also inspire awe, making us stare with enraptured attentiveness.
“Monsters are our children,” Jeffrey Cohen tells us in a study about how the monsters we create invite us to meditate on the fragile and indeterminate boundaries we set up when it comes to race, gender, and sexuality.9 We make the mistake of locating the origins of monsters in exotic regions and terrain, but they cohabit the world with us, as alter egos that capture all the anxieties we disown, disavow, and project onto creatures who are different from us. They challenge us to ask how we created them, as Cohen observes, and by following their cues, we can begin to discover in our projections exactly who we are and what makes us as ferocious, predatory, and cruel as the monsters out there.
