From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  19 ‘… book of Suffolk names’: MGM, 4.

  20 Newbery’s Mother Goose’s Melody: It was reprinted in the US in 1794; see MGM.

  21 Sarah Martin in 1805: ‘The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog’, in ONC, 5–8, 28–31.

  22 ‘And yet the old woman could never be quiet’: Denslow’s Mother Goose, being the old familiar rhymes and jingles of Mother Goose (London and Edinburgh, 1902), 155.

  23 ‘… bumble’: Iona Opie (ed.) Ditties for the Nursery (Oxford, 1959), 68–70. The Willy Pogány’s Mother Goose (New York, 1928), n. p.

  24 pranks … intended to be funny: Eleanor Mure, The Story of the Three Bears [1831] (Toronto, 1967).

  25 ‘…St Paul’s churchyard steeple’: ibid.

  26 ‘… set about helping herself’: Robert Southey, ‘The Story of the Three Bears’, in The Doctor, etc. iv, (London, 1837), 320–1.

  27 ‘… the Three Bears never saw anything more of her’: ibid., 326.

  28 often been taken for witches: See Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (London, 1981); Alan McFarlane, ‘Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex’, in Mary Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations (London, 1970), 81–99.

  29 crease of her Bible: e.g., Saint Anne in A Geertgen tot Sint Jans [The Holy Kinship] (1485), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. See J.-C. Margolin, ‘Des Lunettes et des Hommes ou la satire des mal-voyants au XVIe siècle’ Annales: Economies-Sociétés-Civilisations 30 (1975), 375–93).

  30 ancient and mannish hag: Ryoji Tsurumi, ‘The Development of Mother Goose in Britain in the Nineteenth Century’, Folklore, 101:1 (1990), 28–35; David Mayer III, Harlequin in his Element: The English Pantomime (London, 1949), 25.

  31 ‘… present as well as future happiness’: Advice to her Young Readers’, i.e. Tales of Past Times by Old Mother Goose with Morals (London and York, 1798), 93–4.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: IN THE KINGDOM OF FICTION

  1 ‘… better to tell a plain truth?’: The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband (Oxford, 1965), I, 293.

  2 ‘The Isle of Happiness’, of 1690: Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, ‘L’lle de la Félicité’, in Histoire d’Hypolite, Comte de Duglas (Paris, 1690; repr. Robert: 1984); ‘The Island of Happiness’, in ZBB (New York, 1989), 299–308.

  3 ‘… people of good breeding’: Les Contes de fées par Mme. d**, III (Paris, 1710), 108–9.

  4 ‘denying him … use of speech’: La Fontaine, ‘La vie d’Esope le Phrygien’, Oeuvres complétes, 12.

  5 a very fine wit: ibid.

  6 ‘… liberty to say what they think’: Les Fables de Pilpay Philosophe Indien ou La Conduite des Rois (Paris, 1697), n.p.

  7 Tales of the Fairies appeared: Palmer (1974), 237–53.

  8 ‘like a monkey a chestnut’: D’Aulnoy, ‘La Belle aux cheveux d’or’, in CF–II, 1, 268.

  9 baby eagles and other nestlings: D’Aulnoy, ‘La Chatte Blanche’, CF-II, 26; idem, tr., John Ashbery, ‘The White Cat’, WT, 27.

  10 ‘… the Countess Danois’: D’Aulnoy, Collection (1721–2).

  11 accordingly modified: e.g. Mother Bunch’s Fairy Tales. Published for the Amusement of all those Little Masters and Misses, who By Duty to their Parents, and Obedience to their Superiors, Aim at Becoming Great Lords and Ladies (E. Newbery: London, 1790).

  12 ‘That on thee I may cast an eye’: D’Aulnoy (1708), 38.

  13 notre siècle est fertile …’: D’Aulnoy, ‘‘L’oiseau bleu’, ibid., 154; CF-II, 138; Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s translation (1892) dropped the morals altogether.

  14 ‘And Wedlock throw her Chains aside …’: D’Aulnoy, Collection (1721–2).

  15 position of protest: See DeJean (1981), DeJean (1991), 142ff.; Marina Warner, intro., WT, 3–17.

  16 Catherine of Siena and Héloïse: Aegidio Menagio, Historia Mulierum Philosopharum (Amsterdam, 1692).

  17 because she was a woman: Storer, 63.

  18 ‘… horror of vice inspires in them’: Fénelon, De l’Education des filles, ed. Charles Defodon (Paris, 1902), 71–2; quoted Gibson, 19.

  19 touching hymn of praise: Charles Perrault, Oeuvres posthumes (Paris, 1706), 358ff.

  20 of comparatively recent date: See Lettre de M. Mignot de Bussy de L’Académie de Villefranche à M. de Vertron de l’Académie Royale d’Arles au sujet de la préférence que doit avoir la langue française sur la Latine, que M. de C. soutient être la plus belle (Villefranche, 1687), for a good example of the kind of passionate and pedantic intervention the debate inspired.

  21 bastard child of the vulgar crowd: See Villiers, passim; Paul Bonnefon, ‘Les dernières années de Charles Perrault’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France (1906), 606–57.

  22 Frenchmen like Racine and Poussin: See Perrault, Hommes Illustres, I (Paris, 1696); II (Paris, 1700).

  23 milk here can be taken to mean language: See Louis Marin, ‘La voix d’un conte: entre La Fontaine et Perrault, sa récriture’, in Littératures populaires: Du dit à l’écrit, Critique Paris (1980), vol.36, no.394, 333–42; Hélène Cixous on ‘white ink’, Sorties, in Cixous and Clément, 94, inspired the idea of this connection.

  24 ‘… ordinarily best to consult women’: DeJean (1981), 301.

  25 either sisters or cousins: see Hallays, 293–4. However the writer is almost always referred to as Perrault’s niece. See also Storer, 42–60; DeJean (1991), 212.

  26 eulogy after her friend’s death: Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, L’Apothéose de Mlle de Scudéry (Paris, 1702).

  27 attend the chariot of Clio: ibid., 25.

  28 Muses as the tenth: LHBI, 326–7.

  29 Perrault’s Mother Goose … but also hers: See Storer, 44ff.; Delarue.

  30 ‘… held my spirit enthralled’: Charles Perrault, Griselidis Nouvelle avec le conte de Peau d’Asne et celuy des Souhaits ridicules (Paris, 1694) n.p.

  31 ‘… hollow of her hand’: Jeanne Roche-Mazon, ‘Les Fées de Perrault et la Véridique Mère l’Oye’, Revue Hebdomadaire (17 Dec. 1932), 158.

  32 troubadours and storytellers of Provence: LHTT, 236ff.

  33 ‘The Subtle Princess’: LHBI, 169ff; tr. Gilbert Adair, WT, 65–97.

  34 … and as one speaks: LHBI, 169.

  35 ‘… troubadours invented’: ibid., 171.

  36 aficionados the manuscript itself: M, 153–263; ‘Starlight’, tr. Terence Cave, WT, 149–87; Dronke (1994), 76–81, 136–7, 143.

  37 ‘… keep them under wraps’: LHBI, repr. in Perrault, Contes, ed. Giraud (Paris, 1865), 296.

  38 ‘… ancient, foolish stories’: Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, ‘Ricdin-Ricdon’, LHTT; CF-I, XII, 126.

  39 ‘… King Richard who is speaking, but me’: CF-I, XII, 24.

  40 salon name … was Télésille: Claude-Charles Guyonnet de Vertron, La Nouvelle Pandore, ou Les femmes illustres du siècle de Louis le Grand, 2 vols (Paris, 1698) (II) ‘Illustres sgavantes modernes’.

  41 led them into battle: Pausanias, 1, 178–9.

  42 at traditional men’s ordeals: For D’Aulnoy and Murat’s treatments of cross-dressed heroines, see ‘Le Sauvage’, M-I, 1–65; DA, ‘Belle-belle’, 377–409; Sylvie Cromer, ‘“Le Sauvage” – Histoire Sublime et allégorique de Madame de Murat’, MC, I, 1 (May 1987), 2–19; Caroline T. Trost, ‘A Liberated Woman in a Tale by Mme d’Aulnoy’, MC, V, 1 (May 1991), 57–67; Velay-Vallantin, La Fille en gargon, 61–132.

  43 family’s collection of tales: LHBI, 3.

  44 travesty uncovered – to rejoicing all round: The story of the Amazon princess was adapted from a slightly older writer, the Comte de Prechac, whose book, L’Héroine mousquetaire, related the true exploits of Christine de Meirak, who fought disguised in the French army in 1675–6. See Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol, ‘Republican Heroines: Cross-dressing women in the French Revolutionary Armies’, History of European Ideas, X, no.3 353–63, n.23 for full details of the translations of Prechac’s tale.

  45 Quietlife Island: M, 352–7; ‘Starlight
’, tr. Terence Cave, WT, 173–17.

  46 sleep in the armchair: LHBI, 362; CF-I, XII, 206.

  CHAPTER TWELVE: GRANNY BONNETS, WOLVES’ COVER

  1 meets a wolf: ‘Le Petit chaperon rouge’, P, 113–15; PAC, 23–8; see Zipes (1983, 1994); Dundes (1989).

  2 slip the knot and get away: Paul Delarue, ‘The Story of Grandmother’ (c. 1885), in Dundes, op. cit., 1320; and Dundes, ‘Interpreting “Little Red Riding Hood” Psychoanalytically’, ibid., 192–236; Zipes, op. cit., 20–3.

  3 child’s aggressive … mother’s breast: Géza Róheim, ‘Fairy Tale and Dream: “Little Red Riding Hood”’, in Dundes, op. cit., 159–67.

  4 compound of old woman and child: I read Lewis C. Seifert’s excellent article ‘Tales of Difference: Infantilization and the Recuperation of Class and Gender in seventeenth century “Contes de fées”’, in Hilgar, 179–92, after writing this chapter: he makes many similar observations, but is more jaundiced in his view of the class tensions; see also Louis Marin, ‘Les enjeux d’un frontispice’, L’Esprit créateur, vol.XXVII, no.3 (Fall 1987) 49–57.

  5 regenerated by the granddaughter: Werner von Bülow, quoted Dundes, op. cit., 239.

  6 ‘… dangerous beasts of all’: PAC, 28.

  7 ‘… tough, though lovely and white’: P, 105; PAC 69.

  8 ‘The Enchantments … gentleness’: Perrault turned this particular tale more concisely and more memorably in his collection as ‘Les Fées’, sometimes known as ‘The Fairy’, and by folklorists as ‘Diamonds and Toads’. But specialists – Paul Delarue notably – have examined the manuscript evidence and convincingly shown that Perrault must have had the story from Mlle L’Héritier, and adapted it. The Grimm Brothers collected a variation of it in their ‘Three Little Men in a Wood’ (no. 13). The plot does not turn as narrowly on the question of proper language as in the earlier French versions, but more on proper conduct. See G, 78–83.

  9 ‘Diamonds and Toads’: LHBJ, 119ff; cf ‘Les Fées’, P, 147–50; PAC, 75–80; AT, 480: ‘The Kind and Unkind Girls’.

  10 beast in a single tirade: LHBI, 147.

  11 ingredients of the witches’ broth: Perrault tidied up the plausibility and the dynamics of the story, introducing a single fairy in a single test of the protagonists: both girls meet her disguised as a beggarwoman at the well, and react in their own way. But both narrators despatch Alix to the same coldblooded end.

  12 ‘… lightning flashes … Pericles’: LHBJ, 164–5.

  13 genre was so closely identified: Fumaroli, 153–86.

  14 tale-telling associated with Mother Goose: Sanjay Sircar, ‘The Victorian Auntly Narrative Voice and Mrs Molesworth’s Cuckoo Clock’, Children’s Literature, XVII, 1–24.

  15 ‘… all the rest … just beggarwomen’: MHS, preface.

  16 ‘… child must be an ironic child’: Novalis, Notes on the Fairytale, 3, 280–1, kindly translated by David Constantine for MW.

  17 ‘acoustic mirror’: Silverman, 72–100.

  18 the von Haxthausen family: Jack Zipes, ‘Once there were two brothers named Grimm’, in GZ, XVII–XXXI, 728–43.

  19 against the male authorities in the household: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Ledwina, in Bitter Healing: German Writers 1700–1830, ed. Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantop (Lincoln and London, 1990), 480–526, esp. 482–3.

  20 ‘Among people who follow the old ways …’: Joseph Campbell, ‘The Work of the Brothers Grimm’, G, 833.

  21 ‘… return of a better day’: ibid., 836.

  22 ‘… wholly unconscious of its simplicity’: Laurence Housman (ed.), Gammer Grethel’s Fairy Tales (London, n.d.).

  23 dawn breaks … victim go: e.g. ‘Funderogel’, (‘Foundling’), GZ, no.51, 189–92; ‘Keep your secrets’, Tales Told in Togoland, ed. A. W. Cardinall (Oxford, 1931); VFT-I, 64–5.

  24 The Passion of New Eve: See Suleiman (1990), 136–40.

  25 ‘… centred on the arsehole’: ‘In Pantoland’, CAG, 98–109; see also programme notes by Billy Leeston, ‘A Dame’, London Palladium, April 1991.

  26 what the Panto Dame – intended: See Adam Phillips, ‘Cross-Dressing’ in Flirting (London, 1994), 122–30.

  27 instrinsically ironic: Suleiman (1990), 163–4; see also Marina Warner, ‘Bottle Blonde; Double Drag’, in Lorna Sage (ed.), The Flesh and the Mirror (London, forthcoming) for a fuller discussion of Carter’s comedy.

  PART TWO

  1 Like glitter ascended into fire: Wallace Stevens, ‘The Sail of Ulysses’, Opus Posthumous (London, 1990), 126–31.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: ABSENT MOTHERS

  1 ‘What happened to the mother …’: Ruth Padel, ‘Reading Snow White to my Daughter in Greek, thinking of the Stepdaughter I never see’, in Summer Snow (London, 1990), 56–7.

  2 The earliest extant version of ‘Cinderella’: Waley, 226–38, quoting Tuan Ch’eng-shih, Miscellany of Forgotten Lore. The teller was born in the South of China, and was called Li shih-yuan; see also R. D. Jameson, ‘Cinderella in China’; Dundes (1988), 71–97; Philip, 17–20.

  3 Perrault’s ‘Cendrillon’: ‘Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoujle de verre’, P, 157–65; PAC 83–96.

  4 ‘Turn and peep … waits for you’: ‘Cinderella’ (no.21), G, 127; GZ, 86–92.

  5 Egypt to make her his wife: Aelian, Varia Historia (Leiden, 1701).

  6 explored by Bruno Bettelheim: Bettelheim, 266–72.

  7 ‘… petals of a daisy’: Anon., Cinderella (London, 1963), Renier Collection.

  8 fairy godmother familiar today: Cox, 16, 37, 127–8, 189, 354–5; Propp (1968), 79–83; Dundes (1988), passim; Joseph Jacobs, ‘Cinderella in Britain’, Folklore, IV, 3 (Sept. 1893), 269–841: Philip, passim.

  9 meet her young prince there: Jacobs (1894), 5; Lang, (1910); reprinted Kevin Crossley-Holland, (ed.), Folk-Tales of the British Isles (London, 1985), 355–61; Philip, 60–2, cf. ‘Burenushka, the Little Red Cow’, ‘The Poor Girl and her Cow’, ‘Rushycoat and the King’s Son’, and others in Philip, op. cit.; see also Jane Yolen, The Moon Ribbon and Other Tales (New York, 1976) for a beautiful modern retelling.

  10 daughter’s ultimate escape from pain: Brewer, 25–30.

  11 ‘Now everything is all right’: Angela Carter, ‘Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost’, CAG, 110–20.

  12 ‘… from the sceptre to the spit’: B, I, 62.

  13 ‘… love her as her own child’: Aunt Mavor’s Picture Books for Little Readers (London, c. 1889).

  14 ‘… she had no one who loved her’: Anon., Cinderella (Palette Publications: c. 1965), Renier Collection.

  15 wearing sackcloth and ashes: Dan. ix: 3.

  16 a daughter who continues to grieve: Bettelheim, 255.

  17 stories were drastically purged: Kay Stone, ‘Things Walt Disney Never Told Us’ in Women and Folklore, ed. Claire R. Farrer (Austin and London, 1975), 42–50.

  18 vicious power of the evil stepmother: See Tatar (1992).

  19 Holbek … Bottigheimer: Holbek, 618; Bottigheimer (1994); Herranen, 105–15 compares two oral accounts in Swedish of the same tale, told by two blind storytellers, one a man, one a woman; both follow the Grimm text closely, with interesting differences: among other things, the woman imagines the scene in practical detail (the daughter is sweeping dust so she can cook). See Tharu and Lalita, 1–37, for a brilliant survey on approaches to reading women’s writings.

  20 control of their dowries and labour: Reimar Schefold, ‘The meaningful transformation: The anthropological field of study, the analysis of myths and the gender perspective’ in Variant Views: Five lectures from the perspective of the ‘Leiden Tradition’ in Cultural Anthropology, ed. Henri J. M. Claessen (Leiden, 1989), 94–131.

  21 storytelling in Estremadura: Taggart, passim.

  22 ‘… falsely against my kind’: Olga Broumas, ‘Cinderella’, in Beginning with O (New Haven and London, 1977); Mieder, 85–6.

  23 ‘… favourite daughter died’: ‘Tattercoats’, Jacobs (1894), 61–5.

  24 pivot of the viol
ent plot: Bottigheimer (1987), 180–2; this is a fundamental study of the Grimms, to which I am deeply indebted.

  25 more beautiful than her: ‘Nourie Hadig’, 100 Armenian Tales, ed. Susie Hoogasian-Villa (Detroit, 1966), 84; VFT-I, 192–9.

  26 Christian and social values: Bottigheimer (1987); also id., ‘Marienkind (KHM 3): A Computer-Based Study of Editorial Change and Stylistic Development within Grimms’ Tales from 1808 to 1864’, in ARV-Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore, 46 (1990), 7–31.

  27 mother into a wicked stepmother: Bottigheimer, op.cit, 81, 181–2; in one nasty case, however, ‘The Stepmother’, they omitted the tale altogether from the second edition. GZ, 739.

  28 ‘… good relation to Mother’: Bettelheim, 68–9.

  29 embedded in stories as eternal truths: e.g., Cnut’s widow, Emma, schemed after his death in 1035 to advance her son with Cnut against his elder half-brother, Harold Harefoot, and even against her own two older sons by her first marriage to the earlier English king, Aethelred the Unready. Stafford, 4–5.

  30 wife and started another family: Klapisch-Zuber (1985), 120–1.

  31 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Weber, 93–113.

  32 decorated with pictures … ‘Cinderella’: E. H. Gombrich, ‘Apollonio di Giovanni: A Florentine Cassone Workshop Seen Through the Eyes of a Humanist Poet’, JWCI, XVIII, nos. 1–2 (1955), 16–34; B. Fredericksen, The Cassone Paintings of Francesco di Giorgio (Malibu, 1969); E. Callman, Apollonio di Giovanni (Oxford, 1974); Marina Warner, ‘Pronubi legni: I cassoni nuziali di Francesco di Giorgio’, FMR 10/1990, 41–72.

  33 ‘…I am an orphan’: ‘The Market of the Dead’, Dahomean Narrative, ed. Melville and Frances S. Herskovits (Evanston, 1958), 290; VFT-I, 168–9.