At first Rapunzel was frightened, but soon she came to like the young king so much that she agreed to let him visit every day and to pull him up. The two lived joyfully for a time and loved each other dearly, like man and wife. The enchantress did not catch on at all until Rapunzel told her one day: “Tell me, Godmother, why is it that you are much harder to pull up than the young prince?” “Wicked child,” cried the enchantress.
It is easy to leap to the conclusion that Teutonic prudishness or the Grimms’ delicate sense of propriety motivated the kinds of changes made in “Rapunzel.” That may well be the case. But it is far more logical to assume that Wilhelm Grimm took to heart the criticisms leveled against his volume and, eager to find a wider audience, set to work making the appropriate changes. His nervous sensitivity about moral objections to the tales in the collection reflects a growing desire to write for children rather than to collect for scholars.
In the years that intervened between the first two editions of the Nursery and Household Tales, Wilhelm Grimm charted a new course for the collection. His son was later to claim that children had taken possession of a book that was not theirs to begin with, but Wilhelm clearly helped that process along. He had evidently already done some editing behind Jacob’s back but apparently not enough to satisfy his critics. The preface to the second edition emphasized the value of the tales for children, noting—almost as an afterthought—that adults could also enjoy them and even learn something from them. The brothers no longer insisted on literal fidelity to oral traditions but openly admitted that they had taken pains to delete “every phrase unsuitable for children.” Furthermore, they expressed the hope that their collection could serve as a “manual of manners” (Erziehungsbuch).
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† From Maria Tatar, “Sex and Violence: The Hard Core of Fairy Tales,” in The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987), pp. 3–19. Copyright © 1987 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Footnotes have been edited for this Norton Critical Edition.
1. Jost Hermand mistakenly claims that the Grimms deleted violent episodes from the tales (“Biedermeier Kids: Eine Mini-Polemik,” Monatshefte 67 [1975]: 59–66). John Ellis, by contrast, finds that the Grimms actually “increased the level of violence and brutality when, for example, those in the tales who suffered it deserved it according to their moral outlook.” See his One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 79.
2. Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm: Vollständige Ausgabe in der Urfassung, ed. Friedrich Panzer (Wiesbaden: Emil Vollmer, 1953), p. 155.
3. Dorothea Viehmann’s tale is printed in volume 3 of Heinz Rölleke’s edition of the 1856 version of the Grimms’ collection: Brüder Grimm: Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980), pp. 192–93.
4. For the original manuscript version of “The Frog King or Iron Heinrich,” see Die älteste Märchensammlung der Brüder Grimm: Synopse der handschriftlichen Urfassung von 1810 und der Erstdrucke von 1812, ed. Heinz Rölleke (Cologny-Genève: Fondation Martin Bodmer, 1975), pp. 144–46.
5. Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, ed. Friedrich Panzer, p. 85.
LEWIS HYDE
From Slipping the Trap of Appetite†
The Bait Thief
The trickster myth derives creative intelligence from appetite. It begins with a being whose main concern is getting fed and it ends with the same being grown mentally swift, adept at creating and unmasking deceit, proficient at hiding his tracks and at seeing through the devices used by others to hide theirs. Trickster starts out hungry, but before long he is master of the kind of creative deception that, according to a long tradition, is a prerequisite of art. Aristotle wrote that Homer first “taught the rest of us the art of framing lies the right way.”1 Homer makes lies seem so real that they enter the world and walk among us. Odysseus walks among us to this day, and he would seem to be Homer’s own self-portrait, for Odysseus, too, is a master of the art of lying, an art he got from his grandfather, Autolycus,2 who got it in turn from his father, Hermes. And Hermes, in an old story we shall soon consider, invented lying when he was a hungry child with a hankering for meat.
But I’m making a straight line out of a narrative that twists and turns, and I’m getting ahead of myself. We must begin at the beginning, with trickster learning how to keep his stomach full.
Trickster stories, even when they clearly have much more complicated cultural meanings, preserve a set of images from the days when what mattered above all else was hunting. At one point in the old Norse tales, the mischief-maker Loki has made the other gods so angry that he has to flee and go into hiding. In the mountains, he builds himself a house with doors on all sides so he can watch the four horizons. To amuse himself by day, he changes into a salmon, swimming the mountain streams, leaping the waterfalls. Sitting by the fire one morning, trying to imagine how the others might possibly capture him, he takes linen string and twists it into a mesh in the way that fishnets have been made ever since. Just at that moment, the others approach. Loki throws the net into the fire, changes into a salmon, and swims away. But the gods find the ashes of his net and from their pattern deduce the shape of the device they need to make. In this way, Loki is finally captured.3
It makes a nice emblem of trickster’s ambiguous talents, Loki imagining that first fishnet and then getting caught in it. Moreover, the device in question is a central trickster invention. In Native American creation stories, when Coyote teaches humans how to catch salmon, he makes the first fish weir4 out of logs and branches. On the North Pacific coast, the trickster Raven made the first fishhook;5 he taught the spider6 how to make her web and human beings how to make nets. The history of trickery in Greece goes back to similar origins. “ ‘Trick” is dólos7 in Homeric Greek, and the oldest known use of the term refers to a quite specific trick: baiting a hook to catch a fish.
East and west, north and south, this is the oldest trick in the book. No trickster has ever been credited with inventing a potato peeler, a gas meter, a catechism, or a tuning fork, but trickster invents the fish trap.
Coyote was going along by a big river when he got very hungry. He built a trap of poplar poles and willow branches and set it in the water. “Salmon!” he called out. “Come into this trap.” Soon a big salmon came along and swam into the chute of the trap and then flopped himself out on the bank where Coyote clubbed him to death. “I will find a nice place in the shade and broil this up,” thought Coyote.8
Trickster commonly relies on his prey to help him spring the traps he makes. In this fragment of a Nez Percé story from northeastern Idaho, Coyote’s salmon weir takes advantage of forces the salmon themselves provide. Salmon in a river are swimming upstream to spawn; sexual appetite or instinct gives them a particular trajectory and Coyote works with it. Even with a baited hook, the victim’s hunger is the moving part. The worm just sits there; the fish catches himself. Likewise, in a Crow story from the Western Plains, Coyote traps two buffalo by stampeding them into the sun so they cannot see where they are going, then leading them over a cliff.9 The fleetness of large herbivores is part of their natural defense against predators; Coyote (or the Native Americans who slaughtered buffalo in this way) takes advantage of that instinctual defense by directing the beasts into the sun and toward a cliff, so that fleetness itself backfires. In the invention of traps, trickster is a technician of appetite and a technician of instinct.
And yet, as the Loki story indicates, trickster can also get snared in his own devices. Trickster is at once culture hero and fool, clever predator and stupid prey. Hungry, trickster sometimes devises stratagems to catch his meal; hungry, he sometimes loses his wits altogether. An Apache story from Texas, in which Rabbit has played a series of tricks on Coyote, ends as follows:
Rabbit came to a field of watermelons. In the middl
e of the field there was a stick figure made of gum. Rabbit hit it with his foot and got stuck. He got his other foot stuck, then one hand and then his other hand and finally his head. This is how Coyote found him.
“What are you doing like this?” asked Coyote.
“The farmer who owns this melon patch was mad because I would not eat melons with him. He stuck me on here and said that in a while he would make me eat chicken with him. I told him I wouldn’t do it.”
“You are foolish. I will take your place.”
Coyote pulled Rabbit free and stuck himself up in the gum trap. When the farmer who owned the melons came out and saw Coyote he shot him full of holes.10
Coyote doesn’t just get stuck in gum traps, either; in other stories, a range of animals—usually sly cousins such as Fox or Rabbit or Spider—make a fool of him and steal his meat.
So trickster is cunning about traps but not so cunning as to avoid them himself. To my mind, then, the myth contains a story about the incremental creation of an intelligence about hunting. Coyote can imagine the fish trap precisely because he’s been a fish himself, as it were. Nothing counters cunning but more cunning. Coyote’s wits are sharp precisely because he has met other wits, just as the country bumpkin may eventually become a cosmopolitan if enough confidence men appear to school him.
Some recent ideas in evolutionary theory echo these assertions. In Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence, Harry Jerison presents a striking chart showing the relative intelligence of meat-eaters and the herbivores they prey on.11 Taking the ratio of brain to body size as a crude index, Jerison finds that if we compare herbivores and carnivores at any particular moment in history the predators are always slightly brainier than the prey. But the relationship is never stable; there is a slow step-by-step increase in intelligence on both sides. If we chart the brain-body ratio on a scale of 1 to 10, in the archaic age herbivores get a 2 and carnivores a 4; thirty million years later the herbivores are up to 4 but the carnivores have gone up to 6; another thirty million years and the herbivores are up to 6 but the carnivores are up to 8; finally, when the herbivores get up to 9, the carnivores are up to 10. The hunter is always slightly smarter, but the prey is always wising up. In evolutionary theory, the tension between predator and prey is one of the great engines that has driven the creation of intelligence itself, each side successively and ceaselessly responding to the other.
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† From Lewis Hyde, “Slipping the Trap of Appetite,” in Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), pp. 17–20, 357–58. Copyright © 1998 by Lewis Hyde. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.
1. Aristotle, Poetics 1460.
2. Odyssey XIX:432.
3. Jean I. Young, The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (Berkeley: U California P, 1966), pp. 84–85.
4. Barry Lopez, Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter: Coyote Builds North America (NY: Avon Books, 1990), p. 73.
5. Mac Linscott Ricketts, “The Structure and Religious Significance of the Trickster-Transformer-Culture Hero in the Mythology of North American Indians,” diss., U Chicago, 1964, p. 139.
6. Ricketts, “The Structure and Religious Significance …,” p. 142.
7. Norman O. Brown, Hermes the Thief (Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1947), pp. 21–23, and Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1991), pp. 27–28. “The oldest known use” appears in one of Homer’s offhand similes: “as a fisherman on a jutting rock … casts in his bait [dólos] as a snare to the little fishes, just so.…” (Odyssey XII:252).
8. Lopez, p. 73.
9. Lopez, pp. 127–28.
10. Lopez, p. 113.
11. Harry J. Jerison, Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence (New York: Academic Press, 1973), p. 313.
MARIA TATAR
From Female Tricksters as Double Agents†
With the rise of warrior women in popular entertainments comes a degree of cultural anxiety about producing a new stereotype that, while disavowing the notion of princesses passively awaiting liberation, risks installing an even more disturbing archetype of female heroism. Hollywood may have moved from one extreme to another, first enshrining comatose heroines like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, and now turning Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Gretel into beauties with impressive arsenals at their disposal. But the folkloric legacy reminds us that there are other options and models, in particular the mythical trickster, who navigates his way (and I use the masculine pronoun with all due deliberation) to “happily ever after” by using wits and courage rather than guns and steel.
“All the regularly discussed figures are male,” Lewis Hyde tells us in his magisterial study of the culture-building feats of tricksters ranging from Hermes and Loki to Coyote and Hare. Tricky women exist, he concedes, but their acts of deception and disruptive deeds fall short of the “elaborated career of deceit” that marks the lives of those cultural heroes we know by the name of Trickster.1
There may be a good reason for the absence of female tricksters in the mythological imagination. The male trickster-figure is never found at home, sitting by the hearth. Driven by hunger and appetite, he is always on the road, mobile and mercurial in ways unimaginable for women in most cultures. As a boundary-crosser and traveler, trickster is adept at finding ways to gratify his multiple appetites—chiefly for food and for sex, but for spiritual satisfactions as well. He is even capable of procreation, as the Winnebago trickster named Wakdjunkaga reveals, when he changes into a woman to marry the son of a chief and bear three sons. But that trickster, like Hermes (who is sometimes depicted as a hermaphrodite), remains resolutely masculine with nothing more than the capacity to become a woman.
It may well be that trickster is, by his very nature, male, a mythological construct designed to define male appetites and desires. As the product of patriarchal mythologies, trickster’s powers may simply have been reserved for male agents. But it is also possible that the female trickster has carried out her own stealth operation, functioning in furtive ways and covering her tracks to ensure that her powers remain undetected. Perhaps she has survived and endured simply by becoming invisible and flying beneath the radar that we use to understand our cultural stories. And now, in cultures that grant women the kind of mobility and subversive agency unknown in earlier ages, she can join up with the more visible postmodern female counterparts that appear in cultural production today. This essay will trace the covert operations of a set of female trickster figures who may not have “fully elaborated” careers but who nonetheless remind us that there is a female counterpart to the mythical male trickster, one with its own set of defining features.
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Trickster and Trickstar
Marilyn Jurich was the first to detect gender disturbances in the airwaves of folkloric meditations on tricksters. She identified and defined a female figure who operates in much the same way as the male trickster, and used the term “trickstar” to differentiate one from the other. If satisfying appetites, crossing boundaries, and shape-shifting characterize the male figure, playing tricks becomes for Jurich the hallmark of the female trickster: “Women can rescue themselves and others through tricks, pursue what they need or desire through tricks, transform what they find unworkable or unworthy through tricks.”2 Jurich’s emphasis on how women “trick their way into more desirable positions” and “use tricks to gain advantages for their communities” can have an unsettling effect on some, for it repeatedly emphasizes deceit and duplicity almost to the exclusion of the nimble and creative intelligence associated with the male trickster.
Determined to show the distaff side of a concept that has been declared male territory, Jurich’s intense focus on trickery seems at times to impoverish the notion of female tricksters rather than enrich it, as she searches re
lentlessly for examples of women’s power to dupe, hoodwink, and outmaneuver their antagonists. Using the frame tale of the Thousand and One Nights as her point of departure, she suggests that Scheherazade has only one resource at her disposal to deter the king from carrying out his murderous daily assaults on the “treacherous” women of Baghdad. Scheherazade knows better than to reason, beg, plead, bargain, preach, or scold. Instead, she relies on the only strategy available to the powerless: deceit.
What I would like to set up in contrast to Jurich’s notion of a female trickster who slavishly holds to her moniker is the notion of female tricksters as double agents, women who operate using strategies both subversive and transformative in order to construct their own identities but also to effect social change. Like sleuths at a detective agency, they possess the ability to shape themselves even as they serve others. At times, that form of double agency is inflected in interesting ways. For example, Scheherazade, the first in a series of female trickster figures, operates at levels both culturally productive and biologically reproductive. Both creative and procreative, she sets the stage in powerful ways for the literary progeny that spring from her story.
“I will begin with a story,” Scheherazade tells her sister Dinarzad, “and it will cause the king to stop his practice, save myself, and deliver the people.”3 Scheherazade’s triple project is ambitious: she is seeking the king’s salvation, her own release, and the protection of other women from harm. Recall that King Shahrayar has caught a wife in flagrante with a “black slave,” and that his brother Shahzaman has suffered a similar humiliation. Both brothers are so mortified by the betrayal of their wives that they depart together in search of someone who has been even more disgraced—only then can they continue to rule. Once they encounter a jinni whose wife has cuckolded him five hundred and seventy times, their dignity is restored, and they return home to behead Shahrayar’s wife and the slaves.
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