She disobeys his injunction, and opens the door: flames and smoke explode from inside and she sees damned souls burning in Hell. When Silver Nose returns, the rose he pinned in her hair bears telltale scorchmarks and he knows she has disobeyed him; so he tosses her into the flames to join her predecessors.
The same thing then takes place with the second daughter. Silver Nose pins a carnation in her hair, and again it is singed and gives her away. For a third time, Silver Nose returns to the washerwoman, who fetches for him the youngest girl, Lucia. But ‘she was the most cunning of them all’. She too opens the door, but she has left behind the ‘jasmine blossom’ that would have given her away in a jar of water in her room. One by one, Lucia retrieves her sisters from hellfire, bundles each one into a laundry bag and asks Silver Nose to take the washing back to her mother. In this way, unwittingly, he delivers the revived sisters home. Finally, Lucia makes a rag doll, puts it in the marital bed in her stead and hides herself in another bag of laundry, which again the Devil hauls off to be washed. So Lucia contrives to be rescued by her Devil bridegroom, and as she has also taken care to carry off a great deal of his money in the laundry bag with her, she and her family ‘were now able to live in comfort and happiness’.
This Italian Devil is very interesting: he is presented ‘in his customary aristocratic attire’, a boss who demands sexual services along with good housekeeping, and his metal appendage could mask a nose wasted from syphilis.
Though ‘Silver Nose’ follows a similar narrative to nursery ‘Bluebeards’, it does not resemble in tone and message the horrid sermons which Perrault’s version spawned, tut-tutting about female curiosity and unwifely behaviour. It represents, within the Bluebeard cycle, an alternative, triumphant, gleeful approach, mostly vanished from the nursery shelves. ‘Silver Nose’ descends from a version in which quickwitted female doubledealing overcomes the tyrant; by contrast, Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ and the familiar stories based on it bring the heroine’s brothers to the rescue in the nick of time, and resolve the matter with the death of Bluebeard at their hands.
But the horror that terrifies the wives in marriage is not always the ogre’s direct responsibility – their fear may arise from another cause, which happily, for historical reasons, has been eclipsed by much more prominent phantom of the serial killer.
Bluebeard, on his return home, finds the enchanted key suspiciously bloodstained. (Alfred Crowquill in F. W. N. Bayley, Blue Beard, London, 1844.)
Satyr, Puck, Robin Goodfellow, the devil of folklore comes in many heathen shapes. ‘Are not you he / That frights the maidens of the villagery?’ asks a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘I am that merry wanderer of the night’, he replies. (Anon, ballad woodcut, Robin Goodfellow, seventeenth century.)
Saint Margaret was swallowed by a dragon, but he spewed her up safe and sound; her delivery from the gaping maw made her the special patron of childbirth. (Raphael, Saint Margaret, c. 1520.)
CHAPTER 16
The Ogre’s Appetite: Bluebeard II
The husband who comes secretly gliding into your bed at night is an enormous snake, with widely gaping jaws, a body that could coil around you a dozen times and a neck swollen with deadly poison. Remember what Apollo’s oracle said: that you were destined to marry a savage wild beast …he won’t pamper you much longer … when your nine months are nearly up he will eat you alive; apparently his favourite food is a woman far gone in pregnancy.1
Apuleius
SAINT MARGARET OF Antioch, one of the most popular saints of the middle ages, resisted the unwanted attentions of the Roman prefect Olybrius, seeing him off with the words, ‘Thou shameless hound and insatiable lion! Thou hast power over my flesh, but Christ reserveth my soul.’2 Thrown into prison for this contumely, she is assaulted there by the Devil. He first appears as a dragon, and swallows her alive. But the power of her holiness proves too strong for his digestion: he regurgitates her safe and sound (left). He then makes another attempt on her virtue, this time, ‘in the form of a man’. She confounds him again: ‘She caught him by the head and threw him to the ground, and set her right foot on his neck saying, Be still thou fiend under the feet of a woman … She took her foot off his head and said, Hence thou wretched fiend, and the earth opened and the fiend sank in.’3
In myth and fairy tale, the metaphor of devouring often stands in for sex: ogres like Bluebeard eat their wives, we are told, even though the story itself reveals their bodies hanging whole in the secret chamber, or chopped into pieces, apparently uneaten; Beauty, like Psyche, is terrified that the Beast will eat her, as he eats other creatures. The Cocteau film La Belle et la bête shows the Beast’s pelt and paws smoking after a fresh kill, and Belle revolted as well as terrified. In a chap-book of 1796, the author adds a helpful footnote to explain the word ‘ogre’: ‘An Ogree [sic] is a Giant with long teeth and claws, with a raw head and bloody bones, [who]runs away with naughty Boys and Girls and eats them all up.’4
But consumption does not end with disciplinary measures in the nursery, or with sexual contact: the woman’s fears do not focus on the act itself, but on its consequences, which are also often spoken of in images of eating: the woman’s body, especially pregnant, is particularly delicious to beasts, it seems. For the greedy villains of fairy tale relish babies: their appetite first aims at women, but with an ulterior motive of devouring their offspring.5
This cannibal motif conveys a threefold incorporation: sexual union, by which a form of reciprocal devouring takes place; pregnancy, by which the womb encloses the growing child; and paternity, which takes over the infant after birth in one way or another. Fairytale princesses enclosed in towers are themselves metonymically swallowed up. One of Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier’s tales, ‘La Princesse Olymphe, ou l’Ariane de Hollande’, describes how Olymphe is abandoned on an island where a monster roams who devours young women; later, it turns out he is an ordinary man in disguise who keeps his victims alive, but captive underground.6 Again, the threat of being eaten stands for the dread of being immured, confined. (It is interesting that the word ‘confinement’ is used of the late stages of pregnancy.) The motif of deliverance – Margaret’s case, when she was spewed forth safely from the dragon’s belly – conveys a twofold physical salvation: first, from the act of sexual congress itself (in her legend and in those of all virgin martyrs like her, she remains a virgin), and secondly, from the threatened physical trauma of childbearing. Saint Margaret, one of the most powerful intercessors before the Reformation, had a specific jurisdiction: childbirth. The dragon, by swallowing her whole and then vomiting her up safe and sound, seemed to offer a picture of the perfect delivery. In some representations of her assailant, his yawning gullet does more than hint at the association with the maternal womb (here).7 As the patron saint of childbirth at a time when the act carried grave dangers, she gave rise to a flourishing cult: there are over two hundred churches dedicated to her in England alone.8
The sphere of Margaret’s influence points to an interesting undercurrent in the Bluebeard group of fairy tales, in which flows the theme of children’s and mothers’ deaths. Perrault’s immediate source for ‘La Barbe bleue’ is not known, but Gilles de Rais, the Breton nobleman, Marshal of France and companion at arms of Joan of Arc, who was hanged in 1440 for satanism and the murder of hundreds of children, has been long associated with the fairytale ogre, especially in Brittany and the Vendée, where Gilles de Rais’s castle of Tiffauges stood.9 In Saint Joan, Shaw even calls the historical character ‘Bluebeard’ and gives him a goatee of that tint. But although the crimes of Gilles de Rais swelled the figure of the fairytale villain, another, earlier, Breton story offers a more thought-provoking possible original connection.
A young woman called Triphine, the daughter of Guerech, Count of Vannes, was married to Cunmar or Conomor of Brittany, surnamed ‘ar Miliguet’, or ‘the Accursed’.10 In a jealous rage, he killed her, cutting off her head. But a local saint, Gildas, abbot of Rhuys in the sixth century, wa
s miraculously able to join her head again to her body; together they then forded the stream of the Blavet to pursue Cunmar to his castle and confront him there. As they approached his castle, its walls came tumbling down. The episode was recorded in the Vita of Saint Gildas five hundred years after his death, by another monk of the foundation at Rhuys, and it drew on Breton legend. When Cunmar the Accursed married Triphine, he had already murdered several of her predecessors, and Triphine, his latest bride, fled from him after she was warned of her likely fate by the wives’ ghosts. When she went to pray by the family tombs in the ancestral chapel, they spoke to her; there, in this foreshadowing of Bluebeard’s secret chamber, they told her that Cunmar killed his wives as soon as they became pregnant. As Triphine knew that she too was expecting a child, she tried to escape, but Cunmar pursued her into a wood and killed her – and with her their unborn child.
Cunmar is a historical figure: a ruler of Brittany in the mid-sixth century who deposed the legitimate prince, became the scourge of the local clergy, and was consequently anathematized by the bishops of Brittany. In local legend, he has survived as a night wanderer, a bisclavret, or werewolf, while various churches are dedicated to Sainte Triphine, and to her son, Saint Trémeur, who after his mother’s resurrection was safely born and given to Gildas as his godson to be brought up with him in the monastery. Some say Cunmar beheaded him too, and the seventeenth-century votive statue of mother and child in Guern, for instance, shows both saints miraculously carrying their own heads, like Roman martyrs. More vividly, the earlier, medieval frescoes in the church of St Nicholas des Eaux, also in Brittany, which were uncovered in the last century, break down the story into episodes which include Triphine’s marriage to Cunmar, his handing over a small key to his castle, her opening a chamber in which seven former wives are hanging, his attempt to murder her – images which anticipate very satisfyingly the fairytale ogre, as chronicled by Perrault.11 On the main altar in another Breton shrine, a nineteenth-century Triphine is being seized by her hair in readiness for decapitation, an image which reproduces common children’s illustrations to ‘Bluebeard’ (cf. Pl. 22), or the early film treatment by Georges Méliès, who showed the ogre dragging her by her hair up the spiral stairs to the top of a tower. As Méliès filmed using a dummy (thankfully), she bounces most grimly on the steps as her captor charges up them.
In this mourning portrait, Elizabeth Basse, Lady Saltonstall, lies pale in her deathbed, with her two children at the side of her husband; her successor, Mary Parker, their new stepmother, sits at her side, with her newborn in her arms. (David Des Granges, The Saltonstall Family, English, c. 1636–7).
The Bluebeard figure’s animus against his pregnant wives has been ascribed to the Oedipal rivalry so often dramatized in mythology: he wishes, like Oedipus’ father Laius, to do away with a son before he grows up to threaten him.12 Or it has been attributed to jealousy: in a European ballad known over a large part of Europe (in French, ‘Renaud le tueur des femmes’), the verses follow the usual plot about the murderous husband, but explain that when he returns, after a long absence, to find his wife has had a child, he suspects her of infidelity: his rage is the unreasoning, maddened response of the man who fears cuckoldry, and believes that a child who is not his is being foisted on him.13 This trope gives the ballad’s tale an affinity with the Accused Queen legends: the ogre’s wife, innocent and faithful, is put to the test by a hard and suspicious husband. But this has also been seen from the opposite point of view: Bruno Bettelheim reversed the story’s poignant message, that husbands wrongfully accuse wives of betraying them, and analysed the damn spot on the key, the spot on the egg, as the proof of the wife’s roaming in her husband’s absence.14
But the Bluebeard figure’s reaction – and his last wife’s – could also reveal an experiential truth about marriages in the past, and the fairy tale, with its connections to the legend of the pregnant Triphine, may enfold a stark reality of women’s lives, one which listeners and readers today might well miss, as they delve deep into the universal psychological secrets of the story In this case, again, the seventeenth-century fairy tale can yield most interesting evidence when taken at face value: as stepmothers favoured their own children over the offspring of a previous marriage, or widowed mothers persecuted their sons’ wives, as peasants starved but could advance through cunning, so, in the case of Bluebeard, widowers married many times in quick succession because wives died young, and died in childbirth, their infants with them. The fairy tale may attest to serial murderers in the past (Hincmar of Rheims in the ninth century, for instance, wrote that noblemen dealt with troublesome wives by having their throats slit), but it may also enclose a more routine cause of mortality.15 One of the principal causes of death before the nineteenth century was childbirth, and both child and female mortality was high. In the forbidden chamber, Bluebeard’s wife perhaps found herself face to face with the circumstances of her own future death.
The cult of Saint Triphine and her son Trémeur was not specially connected with women’s fertility or childbirth, but it is associated with a devotional practice even more revealing. These are saints whose protection extends above all to children and their survival: infants were brought to their shrines when they began taking their first steps. The first steps, taken around ten months to a year old, marked, in times of high infant mortality, an improved degree of safety, a march stolen on death.
For many children did not live to walk, nor did their mothers survive their births. The wife of the English poet John Donne, for instance, died at the age of thirty-three, in 1617, soon after the stillbirth – of their twelfth child.16 She had borne a baby every year of their marriage. In Westminster Abbey, London, there are two monuments side by side to the wives of a certain Samuel Morland, put up by him and the dead women’s parents: the stark epitaphs, which communicate a genuine, griefstricken note by their very presence, record that Carola, née Harsnett, ‘bare a second son October 4/died October 10th/Anno Domini 1674/Aetatis XXIII’; and that her successor Ann [née Filding] died February 20th/Anno Domini 1679/80/Aetatis XIX’. Nothing is said of the children’s survival. During the time in which fairy tales like Perrault’s ‘La Barbe bleue’ were being written, childbirth did indeed present a very real danger.17
Christian moral philosophy laid down that the child came first – so that it could be saved by baptism. Caesareans were performed, and no mother survived this surgery before the discovery of anaesthetic and antibiotics.18 The situation improved, but only very slowly. Eugen Weber gives some statistics for rural France: in 1800 women of Lower Burgundy for instance could expect to live only an average of around twenty-five years; by mid-century, this had risen to almost forty years; by the end of the century, the average female lifespan stood at fifty-two years. Remarriage among widowers was very common indeed in France – 80 per cent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a figure which had fallen to 15 per cent in the nineteenth.19
At the cheerful end of Perrault’s story, Bluebeard’s wife is able to dispose of his unencumbered fortune:
Bluebeard left no heirs, so his wife took possession of all his estate. She used part of it to marry her sister Anne to a young man with whom she had been in love for a long time; she used more of it to buy commissions for her two brothers, and she used the rest to marry herself to an honest man who made her forget her sorrows as the wife of Bluebeard.20
In spite of all those wives, Bluebeard had had no children. A rich man of his sort, and a widower many times over, would not have been such an oddity in Perrault’s world or to generations who heard his story later, until the next century and improving rates of infant and female mortality. Perrault, a realist who clothed his witness in fancy dress, spun a tale of reassurance, in which his heroine is spared one of the most present fears of young women in the past: that marriage will be the death of her.
When Cunmar and Bluebeard figure as serial murderers, they may not have been individually responsible in the way their stories suggest to a
contemporary audience. When Saint Margaret escapes first Olybrius, then the dragon, and then the fiend ‘in the form of a man’, and is delivered up safe and sound from the dragon, she may well inspire reassurance in her votaries’ breasts as a woman who has escaped the dangers of sex, rather than escaping sex itself. Her many laudatory lives dwell on her splendid resistance to her various assailants, and sometimes qualify as ‘apocryphal’ the story of the dragon’s belly bursting asunder to set her free. Jacobus de Voragine says so, in The Golden Legend, and quickly moves on to another topic, almost as if he realizes that this tale of being devoured carries suggestive implications that were better left alone. It is even possible, as one thinks oneself into the mind of a congregation listening to the story in fourteen hundred and something, to imagine that Saint Margaret represented to them a woman forced against her will by not just one man but more, who either miraculously escapes conceiving or, if she does bear a child, is spared the physical dangers and maybe even the social obloquy following rape. Certainly the look on the dragon’s face, as he licks his lips looking up at Saint Margaret in the cheap woodcuts that promoted her cult in fifteenth-century Europe, leaves the onlooker in no doubt that his intentions were not merely gastronomic.21
II
Fear of death in childbirth may represent one of the story’s latent meanings, but it does not figure among its patent messages. Bluebeard is presented as a man of enormous wealth: his castle is filled with treasures, paintings; luxury feasting and entertainments take place be he absent or present, in a veritable potlatch of expenditure. The plot follows the heroine’s transition, her passage from her native home to her new marital household, as takes place in exogamous arrangements. The castle possesses the allure and the dread of the strange, other place to which she is going. As in penny dreadfuls and Gothic romances, fairy tales dramatize the beast’s castle, the place of foreboding where the heroine will be enclosed.22
From the Beast to the Blonde Page 32
