From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  In France, the unruliness of women’s wagging tongues was illustrated in a print of around 1560 called ‘Le Caquet des femmes’, in which the women are shown brawling among themselves as well as provoking fights between men as a consequence of their chatter.36 An early seventeenth-century English broadsheet – ‘Tittle Tattle; or the several Branches of Gossiping’ – similarly depicts the feared sites where women’s tongues will wag, where they find themselves alone and able to communicate without supervision (here). The first place is ‘At the Childbed’. Women friends of the new mother – the gossips – are arriving to help with the birth. The ‘Market’ follows, then the bakehouse, the baths, church, and the river for laundry. The admonition concludes:

  Then Gossips all a Warning take,

  Pray cease your Tongue to rattle;

  Go Knit and Sew and Brew and Bake

  And leave off Tittle Tattle.37

  The word caquet, cackle, was used in the titles of a popular variety of book, collections of supposed female secrets: Caquets des poissonnières (1621–2) (Fishwives’ Chatter), Caquets des femmes du Faubourg Montmartre (1622), and, the most successful, Les Caquets de l’accouchée (Chatter at the Lying-in), which first appeared in 1623 with several reprints (one appeared later in the same publisher’s list of Facéties, or Jests, alongside Les Evangiles des quenouilles).38 As in Les Evangiles des quenouilles, this chatter at the childbed by the mother’s friends and cronies was reportedly transcribed at her behest by un secrétaire over a period of eight days. The women are imagined to exchange complaints about men: for instance husbands do not work hard enough to provide their wives with luxuries. The mother-to-be is twenty-four and a half and already has borne seven children, but still her mind fixes on frivolities (of course). The text, in spite of its levity, includes sober reflections on the cost of dowries, and the difficulties poor women have in finding a husband who will accept them dowerless. On the whole, it jokes against women, focussing on their erotic adventures. It reports that a sick man was advised by his physician to smuggle himself in to listen, as what he would overhear would stir him up so much he would regain his health.39

  The places where women gathered alone offered dangerous freedom, this broadsheet warned, in the lively exchange of news and gossip. At the lying-in TOP LEFT, in the hothouse, and then at the baker’s, the well (conduit), the alehouse, the river bank for the laundry, at the market, and in church they mark ordinary moments of a woman’s work (and play). However fighting CENTRE and other unruliness results. The author says: ‘At Child-bed when the Gossips meet,/ Fine stories we are told;/ and if they get a Cup too much,/ Their Tongue, they cannot hold.’ (‘Tittle-Tattle, or the several Branches of Gossipping’, English, c. 1603.)

  It would be absurd piety to suggest that the transformed meanings of the word ‘gossip’ and all its pejorative connotations do not spring from experience. But, as ever, it depends whose experience, where, and when. The gossip-mongering of the Roman borgo or inner-city neighbourhood can look rather different from a woman’s point of view. Elisabetta Rasy, the contemporary Italian novelist, offers some pungent observations on the prejudice against the chiacchiera, the traditional chatter of women in the street in Italy; gossip carried knowledge of secrets, of intimate matters – including illicit information about sex, contraception and abortion which threatened the official organs of the Church, the law, and science.40 Gossip includes mother-wit, and mother-wit knows a thing or two that They don’t know, or rather, that They don’t want to be known. Or, again, that They fear they don’t know. Rasy makes the connection between intimate talk and the control of women’s flesh – its pleasures and its sufferings – which those locker-room-minded mischief-makers, the anonymous authors of Les Evangiles des quenouilles and Les Caquets de l’accouchée, were insinuating, but she makes it as a partisan of gossip, not its enemy.

  In a tobacconist’s shop in Jalisco province in Mexico, two postcards were recently on sale, both lurid caricatures: in one a bent old harridan hauls her shopping while two lounging men look on approvingly: she has a huge padlock through her lips (Pl. 14).41 In the other, a sharp-featured woman’s eyes are popping in terror as a hairy fist pulls out her viper’s tongue and prepares to cut it off with scissors (here). These images correspond to cautionary children’s literature of the late nineteenth century, in which a similar asymmetry between the value of men’s and women’s expression governs the laws of good behaviour. The wife of Monsieur Croquemitaine the bogeyman comes for little girls who show too much curiosity and shuts them up in a trunk.42 The practice of storytelling was adapted to curb the tales children themselves might tell.

  III

  Rhetoric and iconography which exhibit fear of gossips’ influence have persisted in singling out the ageing woman as culprit. The high-spirited bawdy of Les Evangiles des quenouilles makes fun of old women’s lusts; later, the accusation turns nastier, and by the seventeenth century the outward form of the garrulous crone was established as an allegory of unwifely transgressions, of disobedience, opinion, anger, outspokenness, and general lack of compliance with male desires and behests. Female old age represented a violation of teleology, and this carried implications beyond the physical state, into wider prescriptions of femininity.

  The satire of Lustucru’s smithy gave a new twist to a medieval theme: the recycling of wives when their husbands are tired of them. Lustucru works as doctor and smith at one time, but the texts return to the verb repolir – to repolish. This ingenious topos relates to the medieval burlesque image of The Mill of Old Wives, which also circulated in print form.43 In a nineteenth-century woodcut version from Denmark (below), undesirable crones approaching the mill (one is being wheeled by her husband): they are shown being fed into the mill, ground and whittled, until they re-emerge whole and young and vigorous and amorous – again. ‘Their mouths’, says the inscription, ‘will be all the better for kissing now.’ The turning of the millstone does the work of Lustucru’s hammer; the women are worked and honed and polished. (Curiously, the men themselves have not suffered the effects of old age – an imperviousness which signals the unimportance of the issue in their case.)

  Early cosmetic surgery: halt and maimed, bald and toothless, crones are encouraged to try the magic of The Mill for Old Wives. Helped into the hopper and ground on the millstone, they emerge bright-eyed and bushy-tailed into the arms of gallant young husbands. (Danish, nineteenth century.)

  The virtue of Obedience was traditionally represented by the iconic representation of Silence; the third of the Franciscan vows, Obedience puts a finger to her lips in the thirteenth-century fresco by the Maestro delle Vele in Assisi. When the object of desire raised her voice, her desirability decreased; speaking implied unruliness, disobedience. And the penalty for this – the quick, ready-to-hand expression of this undesirable lack of compliance – was the appearance of physical decay. Decrepitude enciphered ugliness, ugliness unloveliness, unloveliness unwomanliness, unwomanliness infertility: a state of being against nature. The association between a woman’s body and her speech, between her face and figure and her tongue, lies at the heart of the public male quest for a desirable match. To look fair and speak fair are linked feminine virtues; to look foul and speak foul equally; the hag curses, the scold is ugly. The womb redeems the tongue; vulgarly speaking, a wombful excuses a mouthful. The First Epistle to Timothy makes the link explicit: motherhood redeems woman not merely from sexuality, but from her sinfulness as a speaking woman: ‘A woman ought not to speak … Nevertheless she will be saved by childbearing’ (1 Tim. 2:15).

  Consequently, the infertile woman, past the age of childbearing, transgresses the function and purpose of her sex, and like any transgressor against the God-given, natural order could serve to represent other pejorative and repugnant aberrations. As lewdness was a vice, and inappropriate lewdness, in a woman past her bloom, an even greater vice, the bedizened crone, or the hag who seeks to tempt love, emerges as an emblem of Sin itself, in allegories of vice in a wide varie
ty of media, in secular and religious manuscript illumination, in sculpture, embroideries, tapestries, ivory, enamel work, as well as the major fine arts. This iconographic language remains stable, like its verbal counterpart – the word ‘hag’ has not shifted in meaning since it first was established in English usage in the sixteenth century; Shakespeare, in whose work it acts as a synonym for witches, also frequently associates the word with an evil tongue.44

  Although allegory is a learned language, it travels, and it combines with cultural données to convey shared, material attitudes. Uncovering its structural axioms can help dismantle those conventionally attributed meanings themselves. For instance, in René d’Anjou’s early fifteenth-century romance, Le Livre du cueur d’amours espris (The Book of the Heart Smitten with Love), Jalousie, a female, lies in wait for the hero, the Knight of the Heart, and waylays him in the forest. The chivalric novel describes her in ferocious terms:

  A hunchbacked dwarf made all at cross purposes [contrefaicte] in face and body … hair … like the pelt of an old boar … eyes … like fiery coals … nose … large and twisted … mouth long and wide to her ears … yellow teeth, ears hanging down more than a palm’s length … dugs big and soft and hanging on her belly … her feet broad and webbed like a swan’s …45

  Jealousy is represented with unkempt hair and pelts of beasts (as well as withered dugs and splay feet) as she waylays the page Ardent Desire, in the foreground and the Knight of the Heart, visored behind him. (René d’Anjou, Livre du cueur d’amours espris, French, fifteenth century.)

  The keyword here is ‘contrefaicte’ – counterfeit, or ‘made against’, implying that her physical condition flouted nature’s laws and purposes. More particularly, Jalousie represents, in the romance, wicked counsel or speech, for she has captured and gagged the helpful and beautiful youth called Bel Acueil (Fair Welcome) who was to lead the lovers through the forest; and with her long, wide mouth she utters dreadful curses on them to impede their progress.

  A female personification – Justice or Charity, for instance – embodies meaning in its absolute and ideal ontological fullness, but does not pretend to represent the virtue’s active human agent (the good judge, the almsgiver).46 By contrast, allegories of the vices usually perform their wicked deeds themselves. They communicate meaning by anecdote and example: in the choir at Chartres, Gula (Greed) prepares to eat a large pork pie, while on the South Portal, Luxuria (Lust) is represented as a lewd embrace between the Devil and a lady. The vices cannot belong in the universal world of fixed forms, without falling into the Manichaean heresy of granting equal power and existence to the realm of the Devil. So they must be made flesh, take on humanity; when that humanity is female, the sin and the sinner become one and the same, allegory flows into anecdotal or literal depiction, the figured idea acquires social, historical and material context, participating in a narrative of either imaginary or lived experience. In the area of sexuality and its linked sins – like Vanity – the ageing woman emerges as the most fittingly abhorrent image. A seventeenth-century Allegory of Vanitas, for instance, was drawn by Jeremias Falck after a painting by Bernardo Strozzi. When the engraving was published, it was given a different title, namely, The Old Procuress at the Toilet Table (above). This hesitancy, which fails to distinguish clearly between the social document – an image from a brothel – and the figuration of an abstract idea – Vanity – in the engraving reveals a crucial historical aspect of the representation of vice as an old woman.

  When it comes to images of hags, the conventions of allegory merge with the assumptions of moralizing: a classic representation of Vanity, as a wrinkled old flirt, with mirror, fripperies, and roses doomed to fade, is renamed for publication in print as ‘The Old Procuress at the Toilet Table’ and passes for a portrait of a real life bawd. (Jeremias Falck, after Bernardo Strozzi, seventeenth century.)

  Allegories of vice are often hard to see; they can wear a look of naturalistic documentation; the allegorical tradition mingles with and influences the conventions of the naturalistic mode of representation, and whereas idealization is easy to detect, vituperation can present itself in the guise of verisimilitude.

  In seventeenth-century Dutch painting, the figure of the bawd, as painted by Strozzi, recurs as a conventional character. She is often toothless, chapfallen, and scraggy; in The Procuress by Dirck van Baburen, this kind of crone scratches the palm of her hand avariciously as a client embraces a smiling and voluptuous girl (Pl. 5). Yet the confessions of prostitutes and their madams in seventeenth-century Amsterdam reveal that many of the bawds began their careers in their twenties – as soon as they could leave the activity of prostitution and run a girl or two themselves, they did so. In consequence, the average age of the bawds was between thirty and thirty-five, around ten years older than the young women working under their control.47 Even allowing for different life expectancy and health, the bawds in Strozzi’s or Van Baburen’s paintings could not be in their thirties: the tradition of allegorical vice has modified the artists’ pictorial language and led them to the hag in order to convey the moral meanings they intended.

  When the Dutch genre painters turned to scenes of urban life, the language available to them for communicating the identity of a procuress was particular and limited. It was provided by a medieval vocabulary of sensual sin, which provided hags as the principal characters in a cautionary tale about the ugliness and the penalties of lust.

  Allegory has a long reach, deep into the most seemingly realistic ways of representation. The topos does not belong exclusively to the Judaeo-Christian tradition and its expression in Dutch Protestant culture. Since classical times, the hag has been reviled; and the hag who does not know herself to be a hag but primps and coquettes like a young woman came in for special abuse.48 Desire in a woman who cannot justify it by the grace of fecundity becomes excessive and unnatural; her lust ipso facto a mark of perverse insatiability. But the allegorical hag’s sins are not bodied forth only by the impairments and disfigurements of age, the sagging breasts and scrawny genitals against which medieval poems like the pseudo-Ovidian De Vetula, for instance, inveigh.49 A constant tendency inspires the image of transgressions as sins of her mouth: especially the noisy evils of her tongue. The classical personification of Ira (Anger) resembles Invidia (Envy) in her railing, and both derive from the Greek daimon Eris, or Strife, in Homer. Similarly, the conventional allegory of Invidia, Envy, is associated with wrongful speech; Cesare Ripa, author of the influential handbook on symbolic representation, the Iconologia, recommends that she be represented raging, gnawing her own heart and crowned with a mane of hissing snakes.50

  The principal sin, however, with which the tongue is particularly connected is lust, for, since the days of Eve and the serpent, as we have seen, seduction lies in talk, and the tongue is seduction’s tool. In medieval representations, the Devil at his work of temptation sometimes mirrors Eve’s own face, but he also often has wrinkled female dugs – his perversion blazoned on his chest as breasts that have lost their true purpose of nursing. Consequently, the body of an infertile woman, when invoked in anyway as a body, expresses perforce a perverted dimension of the natural, becomes transgressive in itself, open to derision as well as fear.

  The mill of youth and the anvil of Lustucru stand as emblems that the old woman’s voice was particularly disagreeable and disturbing, to male ears in particular: ‘Strike hard on the mouth: she has a wicked tongue.’

  IV

  Both the linguistic link between godmothers and old gossips, and the social link between ageing women and secret, wicked powers, are crucial in the world of fairy tale; wresting control of that evil tongue occupied the energies of many of the pioneers of nursery tales.

  Old women, either as godmothers or wicked fairies, dominate the channels of influence depicted within the tales, as Charles Perrault flippantly underlines in his moral to ‘Cendrillon’, his famous Cinderella story, when he adds how important it is for a young person to have a well-placed godmot
her. Perrault was alluding to the worldly society of aristocratic Paris, but in his story he translated the powers of networking into traditional wise-woman magic to assist his heroine’s social success – the rat coachman, the lizard footmen (advisedly picked because lizards bask in the sun all day and footmen were notoriously idle) and the pumpkin coach.51 Such metamorphoses, half a century before Perrault was writing, would have marked the fairy down for a most nefarious witch; indeed, Perrault appears almost to be punning on the fantasy of the witches’ stew. Common fears circulated – especially about women who could destroy married bliss by casting spells which made the husband impotent: they were called noueuses d’aiguillettes because they were thought to achieve their ends by tying knots using little needles on images of their victims.52 But by 1697, Perrault and his audience could make light of any dangers from sorcery, while enjoying the fancy of such wonderful powers.

  The practice of godparenting created bridges between different social islands: between the poor and the nobility, and vice versa. The disadvantaged might seek a sponsor among the powerful, but an aristocratic family, like the family of the Montaignes, would invite a beggar to hold the infant Michel, the future essayist, at the font at his baptism in 1533, to instil at an early age Christian principles of humility.53 This custom of infant sponsorship, or co-parenthood, came under pressure from reformers, but it survived, and was ritualized in continued exchanges of hospitality, gifts, and information, as new social alliances were forged at very different levels. The bond was considered so close and strong that it debarred cosponsors from marrying each other, as if they stood in blood relationship.54 Gossips created family ties: they marked out the faultlines of allegiance and dissociation.