From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  50 ‘… every word … is wise’: P, 173–81; ‘Ricky with the Tuft’, PAC, 99–110.

  51 ‘Fitcher’s Bird’: GZ, 167–71, 730–1.

  52 web-footed bird: GZ, 730–1.

  53 ‘Silver Nose’: ‘Il naso d’argento’, C-It, I, 31–5; C-Eng, 26–30.

  54 ‘… to be dashing’: C-Eng, xxvi.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE OGRE’S APPETITE

  1 ‘… woman far gone in pregnancy’: A, 110–1.

  2 ‘… Christ reserveth my soul’: GL, II, 615–19.

  3 ‘… the fiend sank in’: ibid.

  4 ‘… and eats them all up’: The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood (London, 1796): I owe this reference to the research of Ella Westland.

  5 relish babies: cf. ‘Le petit Poucet’, P, 187–98; ‘Hop O’ My Thumb’, PAC 113–29, in which Tom Thumb tricks the ogre into eating his own children.

  6 alive, but captive underground: LHCD, 96–176, ‘La Princesse Olymphe’ contains a tale within a tale, of the captivity of another, Irish, maiden, Hermaingarde, both are the ogre’s victims; Storer (1972), 49.

  7 maternal womb: I am grateful to Jacqueline Rose for sending me a postcard with Raphael’s painting from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

  8 over two hundred churches: Farmer, 260–1.

  9 castle of Tiffauges stood: See Pierre Saintyves, ‘L’origine de Barbe-Bleue’, Revue de l’Histoire des religions, lxxxiii (1921), 1–31; Ernest-Alfred Vizetelly, Bluebeard: An Account of Comorre the Accursed and Gilles de Rais (London, 1902); Harriet H. Mowshowitz, Gilles de Rais and the Bluebeard Legend in France, surveys the conflation of the historical and the fairy tale figure in the ballad tradition. Michigan Academician, vi, no.1 (1973), 83–92.

  10 ‘ar Miliguet’, or ‘the Accursed’: Sources for the story include Alain Bouchard, Grandes Chroniques (Nantes, 1531); Albert Le Grand de Kerigouval, La Vie, Gestes, Mort et miracles des saints de la Bretagne-Armorique [1636], (Rennes, 1901), 18–21; G. A. Lobineau, Histoire de Bretagne (1707); E. A. Vizetelly, op. cit.; F. Duine, Memento des sources hagiographiques de l’histoire de Bretagne (Rennes, 1917); Réau, III, 3, 1286.

  11 medieval frescoes … in Brittany: Cl3th or C14th; see Bulletin Archéologique de l’association Bretonne, 1850, II, 133; Velay-Vallantin, L’Histoire des contes, 85–7.

  12 grows up to threaten him: see Mulvey, ‘The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx’, in Mulvey, 177–201, for a brilliant analysis of the famous story from the point of view of the father’s fears, not the son’s.

  13 ‘Renaud le tueur des femmes’: Velay-Vallantin, ibid., 51–62.

  14 roaming in her husband’s absence: Bettelheim, 302.

  15 having their throats slit: Mentioned, sceptically, by Janet L. Nelson, ‘The problematic in the private’, Social History, 15:3, 355–64.

  16 their twelfth child: See Christopher Ricks ‘Donne After Love’, p.57, in Elaine Scarry (ed.), Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, Selected Papers from the English Institute 1986 NS 12 (Baltimore and London, 1988).

  17 a very real danger: In ducal families in the years 1650–99, the average number of children was six. This was to fall sharply, in this social group, over the next fifty years, to two per family, and then again, in the next fifty to less than two. Darrow, table 1, 59.

  18 anaesthetic and antibiotics: See Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of woman born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture (Cornell, 1990).

  19 Remarriage among widowers: Weber, 112.

  20 ‘… sorrows as the wife of Bluebeard’: PAC, 40.

  21 woodcuts that promoted her cult: See for instance Fifteenth Century Woodcuts and Metalcuts From the National Gallery of Art, ed. Richard S. Field (Washington, n.d.) no. 195, from a series printed in Augsburg, 1480–90.

  22 beast’s castle … be enclosed: See for instance ‘Castles’, in Terrible Tales and Racy Romances (Catalogue LXXXVIII, Jarndyce, London, 1992).

  23 love for his daughter: See chs 19 and 20.

  24 lying quite outside the marriage itself: cf. the treacherous attack on Shechem (Gen. 34: 6–31), when after he has married Dinah, Jacob’s sister, he and his tribe are wiped out by the Israelites; also the similar, bloody outcome of the brother’s arrival at Hildeburgh’s marriage in Beowulf, when the Danes murder Finn the Bridegroom and carry the bride back to ‘her people’ (lines 1076–78). Linda E. Boose, ‘The Father’s House and Daughter in it’, in Boose and Flowers, 27, 61–2.

  25 ‘… liberty, and married Fatima’: A New History of Bluebeard (New Haven, 1806).

  26 ‘… became her firm friend’: The History of Blue Beard; or, The Fatal Effects of Curiosity (London, n.d.), 34.

  27 thrifty ideas … he gave her: Juliana Horatia Ewing, ‘The Ogre Courting’, ZVFT, 127–133.

  28 after her husband’s death: Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ‘A Favourite of the Laws’, review of Susan Staves et al., Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833, LRB, 13 June 1991, 18–20.

  29 Maurice Maeterlinck … libretto: See Hugh MacDonald, ‘Dukas’s Ariane and Bluebeard’, in programme for Ariane and Bluebeard, Opera North, 1990, 11–16.

  30 rarely been put on since: It was produced at Covent Garden in 1937.

  31 ‘… only hopes for comfort’: MacDonald, op. cit., 14.

  32 Bluebeard to his deep, secret castle: See Béla Balázs, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, libretto, in The Stage Works of Béla Bartók, ed. Nicholas John (London, 1991), 45–60.

  33 graver risk … equal expression: ibid., 8–9.

  34 void … she is doing: See Paul Banks, ‘Images of the Self: Duke Bluebeard’s Castle’ ibid., 7–12.

  35 film titles which use the name Bluebeard: See note p.416.

  36 Carter … contemporary treatments: CBC; Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard’s Egg and Other Stories (London, 1988).

  37 avenging female … ‘enabling’: Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton and London, 1992); cf. Linda Williams, Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (London, 1990); Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography and Power, eds. Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson (London, 1944).

  38 triumphs over adversity: See Ward Parkes, Verbal Dueling in Heroic Narrative: The Homeric and Old English Traditions (Princeton, 1990), on the importance of ‘flyting’ 21–2; Jones, ‘Trickster’ (1994).

  39 Sherman … menace: Fitcher’s Bird, photography by Cindy Sherman (New York, 1992).

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: RELUCTANT BRIDES

  1 ‘… acknowledge him as her son’: A, 113.

  2 myth of sexual difference: Jack Zipes, ‘The Origins of the Fairy Tale, or How Script was Used to Tame the Beast in Us’, Zipes, 1994; Hägg, 182–6; Kott, 36–40.

  3 ‘… floating … own accord’: A, 102.

  4 Panchatantra: AT, 425A; see Bottigheimer, ‘Cupid and Psyché v. Beauty and the Beast: The Milesian and the Modern’ in MC, III, 1 (May 1989), 4–14.

  5 strong family resemblance: cf. the bawdy tale, ‘Asinarius’, of around 1200, in Berlioz et al., 211–26; S, V, 1, a beautiful fairy nearly dies laughing at the ugliness of a wild man, but he saves her life and she disenchants him; B, Il Serpente, i, 173–82.

  6 form of secular gospel: See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance (Harmondsworth, 1967), 58–9, 146–7, 175–6.

  7 discovers his true nature: In some less well-known tales, the Psyche-Beauty figure is a boy, who is captured by a mysterious enchantress, cf. The Story of Lionbruno (Venice, 1476), ed. and tr. Beatrice Corrigan (Toronto, 1976).

  8 deaths to both bride and groom: A, 134–47, 155–62.

  9 ‘The Tale of the Boy who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was’: GZ, 12–20.

  10 replaces orgasmic spasms: Bettelheim, 280–2; cf. joyous, updated retelling, by Peter Redgrove ‘The One Who Set Out to Study Fear’, in id. (London, 1989), 3–19.

  11 Mary Lamb published: ‘Beauty and the Beast: or, a Rough Outside with a Gentle Heart’ (London, 1811
), has been attributed to Mary and Charles Lamb, and appeared at William Godwin’s instigation; OCFT, 137–50.

  12 it was not … this century: Beauty and the Beast: A Manuscript by Richard Doyle (New York, 1973); his sister’s name could have been Adèle.

  13 widely read version in English: See Hearne, 49.

  14 publication of the Latin tale: Elizabeth Imlay, Charlotte Brontë and the Mysteries of Love: Myth and Allegory in Jane Eyre (London, 1989).

  15 Molière, Corneille and Quinault: Molière (and Corneille), Psyche, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1825), iii, 185–249.

  16 Les Amours de Psyché … 1669: La Fontaine, Oeuvres Complétes, ed. Charles Lahure (Paris, 1858), i, 568–682.

  17 custom of marrying off daughters: Darrow, 63. Table 1, 59, gives average age of women in ducal families in France at the time of their first marriage: 1650–99 as 20, 1700–49 as 19.4, and 1750–99 as 18.3, with their husbands around five to three years older.

  18 ‘…a mistress … to have pleasure’: Perrault, Oeuvres posthumes (Paris, n.d.), 358–93.

  19 ‘… function of the romance’: Beer, 13.

  20 necessity to holistic survival: Zipes in Avery and Briggs, 119–34.

  21 re-evaluation of animals: Thomas, 13–16, and passim.

  22 process by which the Grimms …: Bottigheimer (1987), 51–70.

  23 appropriate female conduct: e.g. Jay Williams’s, The Practical Princess and other liberating fairy tales (1978), Ethel Johnston Phelps’s The Maid of the North (1981); James Riordan’s The Woman in the Moon (1984); Redgrove, op. cit.

  24 aristocratic female patrons … their writing: Madeleine de Scudéry and the Duchesse d’Orléans took care of L’Héritier; Bernard lived under the patronage of the Chancelière de Pontchartrain, see Storer, 61–75, ZBB, 81.

  25 Henriette-Julie de Castelnau: See Storer, 140–59; DeJean (1991), 142–5; ZBB, 111–12; Cromer, 2–19; WT, 7–9, 236–7.

  26 truth of these accusations: DeJean (1991), 142–5 where she discusses Mémoires de Madame la Comtesse de M*** as an account of Murat’s struggles, tr. into English Countess of Dunois [sic] (London, 1694).

  27 Charlotte-Rose Caumont de La Force: Storer, 109–28; DeJean (1991), 210; ZBB, 101–2; see also ‘“L’enchanteur” Un Conte de Mlle de La Force’ ed. J. Barchilon, MC, II, 1 (May 1988), 47–60.

  28 volumes of tales: DeJean (1991), 214 for Murat’s bibliography.

  29 after she has grown old: ‘Jeune et Belle’, CF-I, I, 308.

  30 happiness … become a bore’: MCF, 64.

  31 while away long evenings: M, 151–423.

  32 Breton milch cow: ibid., 233.

  33 ‘… off to bed’: ibid., 248.

  34 marriage to a monster: This story, and the one which follows, ‘Etoilette’ or ‘Starlight’, do not appear in the novel’s first edition of 1710, but are introduced without further attribution in the reprint of 1756; however, internal evidence points strongly to the stories being by Mlle de Lubert [c. 1710 – c. 1779]. See intro., WT, 236–7. ‘Bearskin’, tr. Terence Cave, ibid., 99–121.

  35 Basile story, ‘The She-Bear’: ‘L’Orsa’, B, I, 183–92.

  36 shape-shifting … conditions: See intro., WT, 5.

  37 ‘… crazy about her’: M, 260–1; WT, 107.

  38 sequestered by his father: Barchilon, 75.

  39 Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy: Storer, 18–41; DeJean (1991), 183ff., and bibliography, 202ff.; ZBB, 257–9; Palmer (1974, 1975).

  40 ‘… unobjectionable to the English reader’: J. R. Planché (ed. and tr.), Fairy Tales by the Countess d’Aulnoy (London, n.d.), intro., xi–xii.

  41 her Memoirs … Murat: Palmer (1975), 239; Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford, 1992), 59–60, 124–6; WT, 9–11.

  42 confessed, and were executed: The deponents who were executed were Charles de Bonenfant, Sieur de Lamoizière, and J.-A. de Crux, Marquis de Courboyer; two others who took part in the conspiracy were set free. F. Ravaisson-Molion, Archives de la Bastille (Paris, 1866), VII, 335–7; see also ‘D’Aulnoy’, Dictionnaire de Biographie française, ed. J. Balteau, M. Barroux, M. Prévost (Paris, 1941), vol.4, 592–3; Foulché-Delbosc, iv–vi; Roche-Mazon (1930), gives a detailed study of the case.

  43 Recueil des plus belles pièces: See DeJean (1991), 183.

  44 ‘inside’ story … Versailles: Mémoires de la com d’Espagne (1679–81), Mémoires de la cour de France (1692) and Mémoires de la cour d’Angleterre (1695).

  45 real activities … remain a mystery: Obituary of Madame d’Aulnoy, Le Mercure galant, 1705, 244–9. See Foulché-Delbosc, intro., viiff. passim, for a spirited demolition of D’Aulnoy’s claims to historical veracity; also R. Foulché-Delbosc, ‘Madame d’Aulnoy et l’Espagne’, Revue hispanique, 67 (1926), 1–151.

  46 being her accomplice: Intro., DA, xii–xiii.

  47 ‘… ewe has gone astray’: CF-I, IV, 295–355; ‘The Ram’, ZBB, 399; cf. ‘Le Mouton’, Nouveaux Contes (1708); ‘The Royal Ram’, D’Aulnoy (1721–2); ‘Miranda and the Royal Ram’, Mother Bunch’s Fairy Tales (1790).

  48 ‘Prince Marcassin’: CF-I, III, 185ff; DA, 481–508.

  49 happy ending to the lovers: CF-II, 229–59; WT, 189–229.

  50 ill-favoured heroines … her tales: WT, 193.

  51 assaulting her again: ibid., 221.

  52 ‘… against the power of Love’: ibid., 227.

  53 ‘La Belle et la bête’: CF-I, XXVI, 29–214.

  54 ‘… Andersen or Oscar Wilde’: Angela Carter, ‘Beauty and the Beast by Betsy Hearne’, Folklore, I (1991), 123–4.

  55 translation into English: ‘The Story of Beauty and the Beast’, ZBB, 130–202; Louise Page adapted Villeneuve for a Christmas Beauty and the Beast, Liverpool Playhouse and Old Vic, 1985, but the complications rather swamped the drama. See Hearne for a clear plot outline, 22–3.

  56 ‘… Beast … not in his … actions’: ZBB, 159.

  57 ‘according to their inclinations’: ibid., 185.

  58 increases a fairy’s powers: ibid., 193.

  59 water on his face: ibid., 165.

  60 his proper figure’: BB, fig.7.

  61 Le Magasin des enfants: LPB; ZBB, 203–13; see Clancy, 195–204 for the background to Beaumont’s pioneering educational activities.

  62 Cocteau’s classic film: See Jean Cocteau, La Belle et la Bête: Journal d’unjilm (Paris, 1947).

  63 had several children: ZBB, 203.

  64 ‘… truth from falsehood’: The Young Ladies’ Magazine or Dialogues between a Discreet Governess and Several Young Ladies of the First Rank under Her Education (4 vols) in 2 (London, 1760), 1, xxi–xxii, quoted Hearne, 17.

  65 return for his honesty: Leprince de Beaumont, Le Trésor des families chrétiennes (Lille, 1827), 315–23, 347–52.

  66 ‘… passions may carry us!’: LPB, Magasin, 108–12.

  67 ‘… same mistake that I reprove’: Rita Goldberg, Sex and Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot (Cambridge, 1984), 3. I am very grateful to Tom Keymer for drawing my attention to this reference.

  68 the heroine’s duties: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, OCFT, frontispiece.

  69 rewriting of Clarissa: Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, The New Clarissa – A True History (London, 1768).

  70 nursery and the schoolroom: Darrow, 41–63.

  71 ‘… corrupt, and ungrateful heart’: BB, 28–31.

  72 ‘… Beauty killed the Beast’: Edgar Wallace, King Kong (New York, 1933); see also Warner, Monsters, 60–2.

  73 Baudelaire: ‘la femme est l’être qui projette la plus grande ombre ou la plus grande lumière dans nos reves. La femme est fatalement suggestive; elle vit d’une autre vie que la sienne propre; elle vit spirituellement dans les imaginations qu’elle hante et qu’elle féconde.’ [André Breton] Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (Paris, 1938), q.v. ‘Femme’, 11. Interestingly, the quotation cannot be found in Baudelaire: my thanks to Dawn Ades for advice.

  74 love from B
eauty herself: See Sylvia Bryant, ‘Re-Constructing Oedipus Through “Beauty and the Beast”’, in Zipes (1994).

  75 The Singing Ringing Tree: Rosemary Creeser, ‘Cocteau for Kids: Rediscovering The Singing Ringing Tree’, in Petrie, 111–24; Terry Staples, ‘Doing Them Good’, ibid., 125–39.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: GO! BE A BEAST

  1 ‘… would turn into a prince’: Lady Anna, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford, 1990), 506; Rudolf Dekker brought this passage to my attention – my gratitude to this Trollopian enthusiast.

  2 ‘… looks! … Help, help!’: Charles Perrault (attrib.), Les Plaisirs de l’Isle enchantée, ou les fêtes et divertissement du Roy à Versailles, le 7 mail 1664, pour plusieurs jours (Paris, 1664); another sumptuous feast book, also attributed to Perrault features bears from the royal menagerie, led by Moors to symbolize America, one of the Four Quarters of the globe. C. Perrault (attrib.), Festiva ad Capita (Paris, 1670), see p.302.

  3 prey on towns and villages: See D’Ours en ours, ed. Francis Petter (Catalogue), Museum national d’histoire naturelle, Jardin des Plantes (Paris, 1988), 5–21; Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven and London, 1984), 69–87.

  4 ‘…on the merchant’s neck’: ZBB, 136, 143.

  5 going to faint: ibid., 206.

  6 repeats them endlessly: ibid., 154.

  7 monstrousness … visible: See Warner, Monsters, 19.

  8 beastliness … diminishes: See Shell, Children of the Earth, 148–75, for a most interesting survey of the human-animal relationship.

  9 claws in another: Lamb (attrib.), op. cit.; OCFT, 144.

  10 ‘Go! be a beast.’ Homer: Lamb, ibid., Osborne Collection, Toronto.

  11 casts devoted looks: Beauty and the Beast, a Manuscript by Richard Doyle (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 1973).

  12 overlapping canines: Walter Crane, Beauty and the Beast (London, 1874).

  13 terrific natural weaponry: See Hearne, 33–56, and passim, for a richly illustrated survey of illustrators.

  14 iconography of the Devil: See Pallottino (1991).

  15 a female point of view: e.g. illustrations by Eleanor Vere Boyle (Beauty and the Beast, 1875), Hearne, pl. 3, Margaret Tarrant (Fairy Tales, 1920), ibid., pl. 6.