From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  34 the narrator identifies with her too: cf. Suleiman, 13–63 where the author points out that for Melanie Klein as well as Freud ‘psychoanalytic theory invariably places the artist, man or woman, in the position of the child. Just as motherhood is ultimately the child’s drama, so is artistic creation.’; ibid., 17, She turns this perspective around and discusses the creative mother instead who looks at her child.

  35 reversals in the protagonist’s life: Nikos Papastergiadis, ‘John Berger: The act of approaching’, Third Text, 19 (Summer 1992), 94.

  36 the evil-tongued sister: LHBI, 147.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: WICKED STEPMOTHERS

  1 ‘This is the world …’: Louise Glück, ‘Gretel in Darkness’, House of Marshland (New York, 1975); Mieder, 68.

  2 mother’s best friend: Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, ‘La Belle et la Bête’, CF-1, 26; ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ZBB, 173–5.

  3 eventual sexual fulfilment: Bettelheim, 234–6.

  4 whose daughter she has become: See Darrow, 46–7.

  5 fourteenth century, Perceforest: Jacques Barchilon and Ester Zago (eds and trs into modern French), ‘“La Belle au bois dormant” à travers l’aventure de Troylus et Zellandine dans le roman de Perceforest’, MC, II, 1 (May 1988), 37–46; MC, II, 2 (Dec. 1988), 111–19; MC, III, 2 (Dec. 1989), 240–6; Susan McNeill Cox (tr.), ‘The complete tale of Troylus and Zellandine from the Perceforest novel: an English translation’, MC, IV, 1 (May 1990), 119–39. See also P. L. Travers, About The Sleeping Beauty (New York, 1975), for interesting translations and comment.

  6 known to Basile: My thanks to Roger Cardinal, who helped me with his notes comparing the different versions. Letter to MW, 6 Feb. 1990.

  7 In Basile, the saviour hero: ‘Sole, Luna e Talia’, B, II, 498–503.

  8 awake and flourishing: See Ester Zago, ‘Unwanted pregnancies: Kleist’s “Die Marquise von O …” and the Sleeping Beauty tradition’, MC, IV, 2 (Dec. 1990), 186–95. Eric Rohmer’s 1976 film of Kleist’s short story develops the connections with the fairy tale through its dreamlike imagery.

  9 In Perrault’s version of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’: ‘La Belle au Bois Dormant’; P, 97–107; PAC, 57–71; ZBB, 40–6 (slightly adapted). See Marin (1980), 141–55 for an inspired reading of Perrault’s cannibal theme.

  10 ‘Little Briar Rose’: GZ, 186–9

  11 The macabre excesses of Basile and Perrault: Robert Samber’s chapbook translation of 1796 keeps the full tale, as do other Cl8th editions (I am grateful to Dr Ella Westland for sharing her research with me); the ogress mother-in-law disappears for instance from The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood (Tabart & Co.: London, at the Juvenile School Library, 1804); Richard Doyle and J. R. Planché, An Old Fairy Tale Told Anew in Pictures and Verse (London, 1865); Walter Crane, The Sleeping Beauty (Walter Crane’s Toy Books) (London, 1873–6).

  12 Persinette: Charlotte-Rose Caumont de La Force, Les Contes des Contes (Paris, 1697) 42–57; ‘Parslinette’, ZSE, 115–21; see Carolyn Vellenga, ‘Rapunzel’s desire: A Reading of Mlle de la Force’, MC, VI, 1 (May 1992), 59–73.

  13 Rusticula’s legal incapacity: Janet L. Nelson, ‘Commentary on the Papers of J. Verdon, S. F. Wemple and M. Parisse’, Frauen in Spätantike und Frühmittelalter (Freien Univ. Berlin, February 18–21 1987), ed. Werner Affeldt and Ursula Vorwerk (Sigmaringen, 1990), 325–32.

  14 ‘…on that side shall I lose’: Shakespeare, King John, III.i.326–35.

  15 women’s domestic turbulence: cf. Folk songs from India, sung in the lamenting voice of incomers against mothers- as well as sisters-in-law, Tharu and Lalita, 126–42.

  16 ‘… nearly shook her head off: A, 125.

  17 lively step-dance in time to it: A, 133.

  18 Francesco di Giorgio … goddess’s presence: c. 1475–80, Villa I Tatti. See n.214 (1) for references.

  19 Like ‘pardon tales’: Davis, passim.

  20 her monstrous litter: S, I, 176–88.

  21 wickedness to the Devil himself: Herranen, 110–13.

  22 testicles which have made her so unfeminine: La dame escouillée’, quoted by Tom Shippey, ‘Women beware midwives’, LRB, 10 May 1990, 19.

  23 fifteenth-century Florence: Klapisch-Zuber (1985), 117–31.

  24 lesion in the social body: In Australia, among the Dyirbalyan of North Queensland (formerly called Tully River Blacks) this relation is so taboo that daughters-in-law used to speak a different language of respect, with an entirely different vocabulary, to their mothers-in-law, and vice versa. It has fallen into disuse since 1930. See Robert M. W. Dixon, The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland (Cambridge, 1972), 32–4.

  25 board, was granted and observed: Stone, 60.

  26 dowry which was … survival outside: Klapisch-Zuber (1985), 122.

  27 flouted their legal obligations: Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England 1660–1833 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 27–55, 196–230. She comments: ‘One cannot help suspecting that the rights of women have been especially vulnerable to the sort of “legal accidents” that lie behind the maxim communis error facit ius (common error makes law)’, ibid., 40; Norman F. Cantor, ‘The law of dower’, letter, TLS, 25 Jan. 1991.

  28 Dower Act of 1833: Andrew Lewis, TLS, Feb. 15 1991: ‘Widows became dependent for their provision on the arrangements made as part of the family settlements agreed by their male relatives rather than enjoying what had been theirs as of right at common law.’

  29 widowed women much greater independence: Wayne Ph. te Brake, Rudolf M. Dekker, Lotte C. van de Pol, ‘Women and Political Culture in the Dutch Revolutions’, in Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution, ed. Harriet B. Applewhite and Darien G. Levy (Michigan, 1990), 109–46, 124–5.

  30 condition of old people: In 1776, for instance, in France only 7.20% of the populaton were 60 and over; in 1973, this figure had grown to 18.1%. In 1776 42.8% were 19 and under; in 1973, this proportion had fallen to 32.5%.

  31 parents living with them was 9.8 years: Troyansky, 137–54.

  32 keys to the household … business: Michelle Perrot, ‘Roles and Characters’, in Perrot, 178.

  33 fireside, both in France and England: ibid., 179.

  34 unattached and ageing was vulnerable: Troyansky, 155–62.

  35 ‘… home nor protection dies’: Quoted in Perrot, op. cit., 253.

  36 ratio remained … years later: ibid. 255.

  37 feast days to these needy women: Another tablet in the same church records a similar legacy of £36 in 1780, for 3d. loaves – the price of bread was to rise.

  38 ‘… I don’t like having useless people about’: The Three Sisters, Act III, in Anton Chekhov, Plays, tr. Elisaveta Fen (Harmondsworth, 1959), 296.

  39 ‘… thirty or more children’: ‘La Mère Cigogne’, in Contes de fées, (Imagerie Pellerin, Epinal [n.d.], repr. 1984), 28.

  40 ‘… changed instantly into windmills’: ibid., 28.

  41 ‘to watch thy bed’: ‘My Mother’, Walter Crane’s New Toy Book (London, 1873).

  42 She refuses to help Hawthorn ….: ‘Peau d’ours’ M, 252; ‘Bearskin’, WT, 101.

  43 ‘… extend to the qualities of the heart’: Murat, ‘Le Prince des Feuilles’ CF-II, II, 58.

  44 Magotine’s perverted desires: D’Aulnoy, ‘Serpentin vert’, CF-II, I, 229–59; ‘The Great Green Worm’, WT, 189–229.

  45 Formidable, Danamo, Mordicante: Henriette-Julie de Murat, ‘L’Heureuse peine’, MCF, 160–232; ‘Le parfait amour’, CF-I, I, 201–48; ‘Jeune et Belle’, CF-I, I, 306–43.

  46 ‘The Fairies’ Tyranny Destroyed’: Louise d’Auneuil, ‘La Tyrannie des fées detruite’, CF-I, V, 183–262; ibid., ed. Alice Colanis (Paris, 1990), 24–183.

  47 young person’s advancement … is required: ‘But however great may be your God-given store, it will never help you to get on in the world unless you have either a godfather or a godmother … for a patron.’ PAC, 96.

  48 no blood relation: Lynch, 278–9; Shell, Elizabeth’s Glass
, 8–15.

  49 face in their looking glass: M, 153ff.

  50 ‘… the most … delightful aspects of ours’: D’Aulnoy, Nouveaux contes des fées par Madame d*** (Amsterdam, 1708), dedication page.

  51 turn them into intertwined palm trees: ‘Le Nain jaune’, CF-II, I, 295; ZBB, 423.

  52 ‘… to neglect them, as they have neglected me’: D’Aulnoy, ibid.

  53 compelled her to give up her child: Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, ‘La Belle et la bête’, CF-I, 26; ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ZBB 184–99.

  54 the relations of wetnurses … godparents: LHTT; ‘Ricdin-Ricdon’, CF-I, 12, 25–79, 83–126; ZSE 48–90; ‘La Robe de sincérité’, CF-I, 12, 132–278.

  55 Mère Arnault: Jacqueline-Marie-Angélique de Sainte-Madeleine [d. 1661]. Her conversations and lectures, very influential in Jansenist circles, were widely published after her death; she and her sister Jeanne-Catherine-Agnès de Saint-Paul [d. 1671] are portrayed in a magnificent painting by Pierre de Champagne in the Louvre.

  56 another servant, the sorrel nag: Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, part 2, ch.2, part 4, ch.3; Duffy, 214.

  57 nurse as the fairy godmother: She was either Monica Zajic, who would have been around forty years old, or Resi Wittek. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904, ed. J. M. Masson (Cambridge, 1984), 268, quoted Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud’s Women (London, 1992), 16–17.

  58 ‘… and unable to do anything’: Freud to Fliess, 269.

  59 maquerelle in colloquial speech: cf. the mères of the compagnons who still take part in the Tour de France and meet their chosen champions at different stations on the route.

  60 ‘… elderly woman of the lower class’: At English boarding schools for boys, for instance, the woman looking after the house in which they lived was traditionally known as Mother (surname), or in some schools, as the ‘Dame’.

  61 Old Dame Trot: ‘The Comic Adventures of Old Dame Trot and Her Cat’, ONC, 40–3, 123–4.

  62 afterlife as a pantomime dame: Harlequin and Mother Shipton, or, Riquet with the Tuft, Covent Garden, Dec. 1826, 1827.

  63 biological mother in the nuclear family: I am grateful to Ludmilla Jordanova for drawing my attention to this historical development in the meanings of the word ‘mother’.

  64 Nannies use bogeymen: Lucy Lane Clifford [b. 1853] produced a memorable example of a mother resorting to a similar stratagem in her story of 1882 ‘The New Mother’: when two children are suborned by a bad fairy, they begin to misbehave so destructively that their mother despairs and threatens them with a replacement. And so it turns out. The children heard ‘through the thin wooden door the new mother move a little, and then say to herself – ‘“I must break open the door with my tail.”’ She has a wooden tail which drags, and glass eyes which shoot blinding light, and the children run away, exiled from home for ever. As Clifford wrote to support herself and her two daughters after being widowed young, it’s not difficult to read the story as a tired woman’s threat to unruly children: Lurie, 120–39.

  65 ‘… And would not stop crying’: ‘The Woman who Married Her Son’s Wife’, in A Kayak Full of Ghosts, ed. Lawrence Millman (California, 1987), 127; told by Gustav Broberg Kulusak, East Greenland; VFT-I, 170.

  66 ‘… cannot be exactly delineated from each other’: Propp, (1968), 79.

  67 Thesmophoria rituals: See Froma I. Zeitlin, ‘Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousae’, in Helene Foley, Reflections on Women in Antiquity (London, 1981), 169–217.

  68 sister Lotte or himself: Taylor and Rebel, 347–78, 354; GZ, 729.

  69 ‘Aschenputtel’: GZ, 86–92.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: DEMON LOVERS

  1 ‘The eight one you shall be’: ‘Ballad of May Colven’, CPB, I, 56.

  2 the heroine’s sister Anne: It is possible that Bluebeard’s wife’s cry to her sister echoes the medieval tradition of Dido’s deathbed lament, in which she repeatedly addresses ‘Anna, soror’, See ‘Dido’s Lament’, Dronke (1992), 431ff.

  3 climaxes with a multiple wedding: Warner, ‘The Uses of Enchantment’, 16.

  4 ‘… vigorous, active, quick men’: Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, CXXXII, 7, quoted Giles Constable, intro. to Burchard of Bellevaux, ‘Apologia de Barbis’, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, in Apologiae Duae (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis LXII, Turnholt, 1985), 60.

  5 ‘… lusts like stinking goats’: Orderic Vitalis, Hist. ecc. VIII, 10, quoted ibid., 96.

  6 pages of Regency romances: See Marina Warner, ‘Shearings’, in Ann Hamilton, ed. Lynne Cooke (New York, 1994).

  7 calling Bluebeard a ‘Barbe-hairy-un’: F. W. N. Bayley, Bluebeard With Illustrations Humorous and Numerous (London, c. 1844).

  8 foreign name, like Abomélique: A New History of Bluebeard written by Gaffer Black Beard. For the Amusement of Little Lack Beard, and his Pretty Sisters (New Haven, 1806).

  9 takes place near Baghdad: The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book (London, 1933), 143.

  10 blue blood: see Claude Brémond, ‘La barbe et le sang bleus’, in Une Nouvelle civilisation? Hommage à Georges Friedmann (Paris, 1973), 255–366.

  11 ‘… within and without the organism’: William Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (Manchester, 1979), 33.

  12 Red Riding Hood should have: Zipes (1933), 1–88.

  13 lucky not to be skinned: Walter Crane, The Three Bears (Routledge’s New 6d. Toy Books, no. 105: London, n.d.); id., Routledge’s Shilling Toy Books, no. 22.

  14 ‘… such a very blue beard’: P, 123.

  15 ‘Whatever the colour … master’: P, 129.

  16 endangers her life: Walter Crane’s Picture Book Bluebeard (London, c. 1875).

  17 Eve who ate of the forbidden fruit: Bluebeard: or, Fatal Curiosity (London, n.d.); The History of Bluebeard; or, the Effects of Female Curiosity (Alnwick, n.d); The History of Bluebeard; or, the Fatal Effects of Curiosity (London, n.d., early C19th).

  18 uses the forbidden key: ‘Our Lady’s Child’, no.3, G, 23–9; ‘The Virgin Mary’s Child’ GZ, 8–12.

  19 Beardsley’s obscene marginalia: Crowquill was the nom de plume of Alfred Henry Forrester. F. W. N. Bayley, op. cit.

  20 ‘… cut their throats with knives’: ibid.

  21 ‘… hanging up to dry’: Bayley, 23.

  22 ‘… improper and forbidden curiosity’: The History of Bluebeard; or, the Fatal Effects of Curiosity.

  23 ‘… the true ape of God’: Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons (Paris, 1982), 179.

  24 ‘… imitation is imperfect’: ibid., 179.

  25 helps to assuage it: Bettelheim, 299–303; see Tatar (1987), 156–78, for a trenchant critique of his and other ‘taming’ views.

  26 Bluestocking Ella: Sabilla Novello, ‘The History of Bluebeard’s Six Wives’. Mendacious Chronicles (London, 1875).

  27 run with lemonade: Cruikshank (1853).

  28 The Marian miracle play: A Marvellous History of Mary of Nimmegen, tr. Harry Morgan Ayres, intro. Adriaan J. Barnouw (The Hague and London, 1923). It has been attributed to Flemish poet Anna Bijns [1493–1575].

  29 power, in the Faustian tradition: He promises her: ‘If to mermaids your love were dress’d/I would teach you in all their parts/ Music, rhetoric, all the seven arts …/ No woman on earth in learning shall speed/As ye shall do.’ ibid., 14–15; see also De Bruyn, 3–11.

  30 ‘…a merry art’: Mary of Nimmegen, 17; the magic gifts she has won by forfeiting her soul are verbal, for the Devil’s cunning is closely allied to fluency of speech and the arts of persuasion. In her later hymn to rhetoric itself, Mary claims that it is a gift of the Holy Ghost’s bestowing – a heavy irony since she has achieved her own powers through the devil, ibid., 36–8.

  31 ‘… heavenly glory above’: ibid., 78.

  32 as he had planned to kill her: ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight’, CPB, I, 22–62; see also ‘The Ballad of Anna Molnar’, take
n down in Transylvania in 1872, tr. Peter Sherwood and Keith Bosley, in The Stage Works of Béla Bartók, ed. Nicholas John (London, 1991), 23: ‘Then Annie Miller she looked up/ she peeped into the tree:/ Six pretty maids were hanging there./ A seventh he’ll make me!’

  33 drowned, like all her predecessors: ‘Heer Halewijn’, Balladenboek, ed. Tjaard de Haan (Amsterdam, 1979), 15–18, 21–4, 263–4 – Jet Bakels brought these parallel ballads to my attention. See also Marie Ramondt, ‘Heer Halewijn en Blauwbaard’, in Miscellanea J. Gessler, II (Deurne, 1948), 1030–43. I am grateful to Jan Herwaarden for this article.

  34 Perrault … wrote saints’ lives: Charles Perrault, Le Triomphe de Sainte Geneviève (Paris, 1694); cf. Saint Paulin, evesque de Nole (Paris, 1686).

  35 printing blocks were drawn: See Perrault’s Tales, ed. Barchilon, for reproductions of fairytale vignettes as well as title-page sketch, attrib. Perrault to ‘Hymnes de Santeuil’ (1690) with images of saints.

  36 L’Héritier’s ‘The Subtle Princess’: LHBI, 170ff; CF-I, I, 78–117; this is the same volume as Perrault, to whom the story is attributed.

  37 Gilbert Adair’s recent translation: WT, 65–97.

  38 ‘… shoes unutterably fatiguing’: ibid., 66.

  39 ‘… give her time to meditate’: ibid., 83.

  40 ‘… barrel down the mountain’: ibid., 87.

  41 ‘… eaten that evening’: ibid., 95.

  42 gentlemen of their choosing: P, 128; PAC, 128.

  43 ‘… wholly indecipherable hand’: WT, 89–90.

  44 ‘Sapia Liccarda’: B, I, 275–81.

  45 ‘The Bold Decision’: Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, ‘Le Jugement téméraire’, Les Caprices du Destin (Paris, 1718).

  46 and marry her: ibid.,

  47 ‘The Yellow Dwarf’: CF-II, 275–95; DA, 232–48; OCFT, 68–80.

  48 ‘Ricky with the Tuft’: Catherine Bernard, Inès de Cordoue, nouvelle espagnole. For Bernard’s bibliography, see DeJean (1991), 203; Storer, 61–75.

  49 ‘… lovers become husbands anyway’: Catherine Bernard, ‘Riquet à la Houppe’, ZBB, 81–6.