From the Beast to the Blonde: On fairytales and their Tellers

FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE On fairy tales and their tellers

Marina Warner

M it , V I N TAG E

Under the sign 'Mother Goose Tales', an old servant spins by the hearth, telling her fairy tales to the children of the family Tho frn-;-;vin r„ r.,.i,,.- n.,....'. _ ^:__ „._ __ .

312 FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE

GO! BE A BEAST 313

Ted Hughes's intuition that Beauty is stirred by love for the Beast, even when

Belle had to learn to be a loving wife in the eighteenth century; in the late

he terrorizes her in the night, reappeared in a more definite form in the popular

twentieth, she has to learn to be game in bed. But the Bettelheimian argument

1987 eus series for television, which was also shown in Britain, in which the Beast

takes the exuberance and the energy from female erotic voices, and effects one last

never casts off his hybrid form. A roaring, rampaging half-lion, half-human crea-

transformation of the Beast, by turning him into a mistaken illusion in unawak-

ture, he reigns over the subway system of New York as a defender of women and

ened female eyes. In this, the psychoanalyst works his way back, in more solemn

beggars, an urban Robin Hood, who was born from an immaculate virgin and the

vein, to the I-lellenistic romance, in which Psyche was at fault for fearing her lover

seed of two fathers, the double lord of the underworld, one a good magus, the

was an ogre and not trusting him in bed.

other a wicked wizard. Beauty in this case works as an investigator in the District Attorney's office, but communicates secretly with her saviour Beast; their love is

III

passionate, chivalrous and ... illicit. I-le is `the monster of her dreams' and she

The cuddliness of the teddy hear, the appeal of domesticated sexuality, also

likes him just as he is.

informs the present trend towards celebrating the male. In Tim Burton's film

The disenchantments of the Beast take many forms, not all of them benign;

Edward Scissorhands (1990), the outcast hero does harm, entirely inadvertently:

women have remained consistently intrigued. As Karel Capek has commented:

like Frankenstein's monster, he has been made by a ^nad scientist but left halffin-

`The same fiction of evil which quickens events in fairy stories also permeates our

ished , with cutlery for hands. As a metonymy of maleness and its fumbling con-

real lives.' It would be easy to dismiss these visions of the Beast's desirability as

nection to the world of others, the scissorhands capture eloquently the idea of the

male self flattery, and female collusion with subjection, or, even more serious, as

redeemed male beast in current circulation. By the 1990s, the perception of the

risky invitations to roughness and even rape. But to do so misses the genuine

social outcast, the exile from humankind in the form of a beast, had undergone

attempt of the contemporary versions of the fairy talc, in certain metamorphoses

such a sea-change that any return to full human shape might have degraded rather

of its own, to face up to the complicated character of the female erotic impulse.

than redeemed the hero, limited his nobility rather than restored it.

From the post-Utopian vantage point of the 1990s, we cannot rejoice unequivo-

In the same year, the Disney film animation, Beauty and the Beast, one of the

cally in the sexual liberation Surrealism and its aftermath offered women: the

biggest box-office draws of all time, ran the risk of dramatic collapse when the Beast changed into the prince. No child in my experience preferred the sparkling

experiences of the last decades have given former flower children pause. But what threatens women consumers - and makers - of fairy tale above all is the identifica-

candy-coloured human who emerged from the enchanted monster; the Beast had

tion of the Beast with some exclusively male positive area of energy and expression.

won them. Linda Woolverton and the team who collaborated on the film had

The journey the story has itself taken ultimately means that the Beast no longer

clearly steeped themselves in the tale's history, on and off screen; prolonged and

needs to be disenchanted. Rather, Beauty has to learn to love the beast in him, in

intense production meetings, turning over every last detail of representation and

order to know the beast in herself: Beauty and the Beast stories are even gaining in

narrative, can almost be heard over the insouciant soundtrack. This fairytale film

popularity over `Cinderella' as a site for psychological explorations along these

is more vividly aware of contemporary sexual politics than any made before; it

lines, and for pedagogical recuperation. Current interpretations focus on the

consciously picked out a strand in the tale's history and deliberately developed it

Beast as a sign of authentic, fully realized sexuality, which women must learn to

for an audience of mothers who grew up with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem,

accept if they are to become normal adult heterosexuals. Bettelheim argues:

who had daughters who listened to Madonna and Sinead O'Connor. Linda Woolverton's screenplay put forward a heroine of spirit who finds romance on

Eventually there comes a time when we must learn what we have not known

her own terms. Beneath this prima facie storyline, the interpretation contained

before - or, to put it psychoanalytically, to undo the repression of sex. What we

many subtexts, both knotty and challenging, about changing concepts of paternal

had experienced as dangerous, loathsome, something to be shunned, must

authority and rights, about permitted expressions of male desire, and prevailing

change its appearance so that it is experienced as truly beautiful.

notions in the quarrel about nature/nurture. Above all, the film placed before the 1990s audience Hollywood's cunning domestication of feminism itself

314 FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE

GO! BE A BEAST 315

But next to the Beast, this Belle is a lacklustre creature. lie held the animators' full attention: the pneumatic signature style of Disney animation suited the Beast 's character as male desire incarnate. Ile embodies the Eros figure as phallic toy. The Beast swells, he towers, he inflates, he tumesces. Everything about him is big, and apt to grow bigger: his castle looms, its furnishings dwarfed by its Valhalla-like dimensions . His voice thunders, his anger roars to fill the cavernous spaces of his kingdom. We are shown him enraged, crowding the screen, edge to edge, like a face in a comic strip; when he holds Belle he looks as if he could snap her between his teeth like a chicken wing. His body too appears to be constantly burgeoning; poised on narrow hooves and skimpy legs, the Disney Beast sometimes lollops like a big cat, but more often stands erect, rising to an engorged torso , with an enormous, craggy, bull-like head compacted into massive shoulders, maned and shaggy all over, bristling with fangs and horns and claws that almost seem belittled by the creature's overall bulk.

The Beast's sexual equipment was always part of his charm - hidden or otherLike an American buffalo, or a cartoon Picasso Minotaur, the Disney Beast, created by the animator Glen Keane, learns with Belle how to be a new man . ( Beauty and the Beast, directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991, © Disney.)

wise (it is of course scattered by synecdoche all over his body in the Disney cartoon). When Titania fell in love with Bottom the weaver, the associations of the ass were not lost on the audience. But the comic - and its concomitant, the pathetic - have almost entirely slipped away from this contemporary representa-

Knowing as the film is. it could not avoid the trap that modern retellings set: the Beast steals the show While the Disney version ostensibly tells the story of the

tion of virility.

feisty, strong-willed heroine, and carries the audience along on the wave of her

Whereas Bottom, even in his name, was a figure of fun, and the Golden Ass, his classical progenitor, a ruefully absurd icon of (male) humanity, the contemporary

dash, her impatient ambitions, her bravery, her self-awareness, and her integrity,

vision of the Beast tends to the tragic. The new Disney Beast's nearest ancestor is

the principal burden of the film's message concerns maleness, its various faces and masks, and, in the spirit of romance, it offers hope of regeneration from

the Minotaur, the hybrid offspring of Pasiphae and the bull, and an ancient nightmare of perverted lust, and it is significant that Picasso adopted the Minotaur as

within the unregenerate male. The graphic intensity given to the two protagonists

his alter ego, as the embodiment of his priapism, in the vigour of youth as well as

betrays the weight of interest: Beauty is saucer-eyed, dainty, slender, and wears a

the impotence of old age. But the real animal which the Disney Beast most

variation on the pseudo-medieval dresses of both Cinderella and Snow White,

resembles is the American buffalo, and this tightens the Beast's connections to

which, as in Cinderella, turn into ancien regime crinolines-cum-New Look debu-

current perceptions of natural good - for the American buffalo, like the grizzly,

tante gowns for the scene of awakening love when she dances with the Beast. Her

represents the lost innocence of the plains before man came to plunder. So

passage from repugnance to attraction also follows a movement from village hall

the celluloid Beast's beastliness thrusts in two contradictory directions: though

to castle gate, in the conventional upwardly mobile style of the twentieth-century

he is condemned for his `animal' rages, he also epitomizes the primordial virtues

fairy tale. The animators have introduced certain emancipated touches: she is

of the wild (left).

dark-haired. a book worm and walks with a swing. The script eves contains a fashionable bow in the direction of self-reflexiveness, for Belle likes reading fairy

The Beast's longstanding identity with masculine appetite nevertheless works

tales more than any other kind of book, and consequently recognizes, when she

for him rather than against him, and interacts with prevailing ideas of healthy male sexuality. The enterprise of the earlier fairytale writers, to try to define their

finds herself in the Beast's castle, the type of story she is caught in.

own desires by making up stories about beasts who either denied them or fulfilled

316 FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE

The story without frills: 'Beauty and the Beast' from a nursery retelling, c. 1880.

GO! BE A BEAST 317

man's shape, Clark Kent as played by Christopher Reeve. The Disncy version is pitiless towards Gaston; self-styled heart throbs who fancy themselves Supermen are now the renegades, and wild men in touch with nature and the beast within the exemplars. He is moreover one of the rustics whom the sophisticated Belle despises in her opening song ('I want much more than they've got planned'), an anthem for the Me-generation; this Disney, like its predecessors, does not question the assumption that the Beast's princeliness must be material and financial. His credit card, with his social status, is no doubt bigger than Gaston's, too. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. This shows the wonderful transformation . There lies the poor Beast, nothing but an ugly old Bear.

In Edward Snssorhands, the heroine also acts quickly, with gallantry and courage, to save this outcast from a mob; but he is fatally hampered by his hybrid form, halfway between the automaton and the creaturely; his weapon hands encumber him with man-made technology and cut him off from the desirable aspects of the human, which derive from what is perceived as natural, as animal. The further the cinematic outcast lies from the machine, the more likely his redemption: the Beast as cyborg, as in the Terminator movies, represents the apocalyptic culmination of human ingenuity and its diabolical perversion. Whereas, to a medieval spectator, the Devil was represented as close to the animal order in his hooved hairiness , and a bloodless and fleshless angel in gleaming armour approximated

Then of a sudden in his place there kneels a handsome young Prince at Beauty 's feet, and, as the story says, they lived happily ever afterwards.

the divine artefact, the register of value has been turned topsy-turvy since the eighteenth century and the wild man has come into his own as an ideal. The evolution of the Beast in fairy tale and his portraits in film illustrate this profound shift in cultural values as well as sexual expectations.

them, has been rather lost to sight. The vindication of the Beast has become the chief objective ; the true lovableness of the good Beast the main theme. The Disney cartoon has double -knotted the lesson in contemporary ecological and

The most significant plot change to the traditional story in the Disney film concerns the role of Beauty's father, and it continues the film's trend towards

sexual politics, by introducing a second beast, another suitor for Belle's love, the

granting Beauty freedom of movement and responsibility for the rescue of the Beast and for his restoration to fundamental inner goodness. The traditional fairy

human hunk Gaston . Gaston is a killer - of animals - and remains one; he is a

tale often includes the tragic motif that, in return for his life, the father promises

lyncher, who preys on social outcasts (suspected lunatics and marginals ), he wants

the Beast the first thing to greet hint when he returns home; as in the story of

to breed ( he promises Belle six or seven children ), and he is capable of deep treachery in pursuit of his own interests . The film wastes no sympathy on Gaston

Jephthah in the Bible (Jg. 11: 12), his daughter, his youngest and most dear, rushes to the gate to meet him, and the father has to sacrifice her. In the eight-

- though his conceit inspires some of its cleverest and funniest lyrics. The penalty for Gaston ' s brutishness is death : he falls offa high crag from the

eenth-century French fairy story, which focussed on the evils of matrimonial cus-

Beast's castle . In the film , he takes the part of the real beast , the Calvinist unredeemed damned beast : socially deviant in his supremacist assumptions , unsound

financial transaction as an arranged marriage, and she learns to accept it. Bruno

toms, the father hands over Belle to the Beast in exactly the same kind of legal and Bettelheim takes a governessy line on the matter: Beauty, learning to relinquish

on ecology in both directions , abusing the natural ( the forest ) and culture (the

her Oedipal attachment to her father, should be grateful to her father for giving

library ). What is above all significant about this caricature is that lie is a man in a

her away and making the discovery of sexuality possible.

44

C^

l

NI.IL CAIMAN

t\c C NA

"Put it like that," said November, "and I feel better. I suppose we can't help who we are." "That's the spirit," said his brother. Arid they touched hands as they walked away from the fire's orange embers, taking their stories with them hack into the dark.

THE HIDDEN CHAMBER 1`lctrf^:^! ao©^ .

FOR RAY BRADBURY

I)o not fear the ghosts in this house: they are the least of your worries. Personally I find the noises they make reassuring, The creaks and footsteps in the night,

their little tricks of hiding things, or moving them, I find endearing, not upsettling. It makes the place feel so much more like home. Inhabited.

Apart from ghosts nothing lives here for long. No cats, no mice, no flies, no dreams, no bats. Two days ago I saw a butterfly,

a monarch I believe, which danced from room to room and perched on walls and waited near to me. There are no flowers in this empty place, and, scared the butterfly would starve, I forced a window wide, cupped my two hands around her fluttering self, feeling her wings kiss my palms so gentle,

and put her out, and watched her fly away.

I've little patience with the seasons here, but your arrival eased this winter's chill.

NEIL t_,AIMAN

.1 6

Please, wander round. Explore it all you wish. I've broken with tradition on sonic points. If there is

FRAGILE THINGS tasting the blood and oceans of your tears. I'll wait instead,

one locked room here, you'll never know. You'll not find

here in my private place, and soon I'll put

in the cellar's fireplace old bones or

a candle

hair. You'll find no blood. Regard: just tools, a washing machine, a dryer, a water heater, and a chain of keys. Nothing that can alarm you. Nothing dark.

I may he grins, perhaps, but only just as grim as any roan who suffered such affairs. Misfortune, carelessness or pain, what. matters is the loss. You'll see the heartbreak linger in my eyes, and dream

of making ine forget what came before you walked into the hallway of this house. Bringing a little summer in your glance, and with your smile.

While you are here, of course, you will hear the ghosts, always a room away, and you may wake beside rile in the night, knowing that there's it space without a door knowing that there's a place that's locked but isn't there. Hearing

them scuffle, echo, thump and pound.

If you are wise you'll run into the night, fluttering away into the cold

wearing perhaps the laciest of shifts. The lane's hard flints will cut your feet all bloody as you run, so, if 1 wished, I could just follow you,

in the window, love, to light your way hack home. The world flutters like insects . I think this is how I shall remember you, my head between the white swell of your breasts, listening to the chambers of your heart.

47 6

A

LOCKS

We owe it to each other to tell stories, as people simply, not as father and daughter. I tell it. to you for the hundredth time:

"There was a little girl, called Uoldilocks, for her hair was long and golden,

and she was walking in the W ood and she saw " "-cows." You say it with certainty, remembering the strayed heifers we saw in the woods behind the house, last month.

"W ell, yes, perhaps she saw cows. but also she saw a house."

"-a great big house," you tell inc. "No, a little house, all painted, neat and tidy. "

`4 great big house. "

You have the conviction of all two-year-olds. I wish I had such certitude.

FRAGILE THINGS

NLIL GAIMAN

178

`1412. Y es. A great big house.

`1411 up," you say. A response it is,

A nd she went in ... "

Or an amen.

I remember, as I tell it , that the locks

The bears go upstairs hesitantly,

of Southey' s heroine had silvered with age.

their house now feels desecrated. They realize

The Old Woman and the "three Bears ...

what locks are for. They reach the bedroom.

Perhaps they had been golden once,

"Someone's been sleeping in my bed.

when she was a child.

And here I hesitate, echoes of old jokes, soft-core cartoons, crude headlines, in my head.

And now, we are already up to the porridge, '_`4nd it was too-

One day your mouth will curl at that line.

"-hot..",

A loss of interest, later, innocence.

'Mrtdit was too-

Innocence, as if it were a commodity.

"--cold!"

"And if I could," my father wrote to me,

And then it was, we chorus, "just right."

huge as a bear himself, when I was younger, "I would dower you with experience, without experience,"

The porridge is eaten, the baby's chair is shattered,

and 1, in my turn, would pass that on to you.

Goldilocks goes upstairs, examines beds, and sleeps,

But we make our own mistakes. We sleep

unwisely.

unwisely.

But then the bears return.

The repetition echoes down the years.

Remembering Southey still, I do the voices:

When your children grow, when your

Father Bear's gruff boom scares von,

and you delight in it.

dark locks begin to silver,

when you are an old woman, alone with your three bears, what will you see? What stories will you tell?

When I was a small child and heard the tale, if I was anyone I was Baby Bear,

`A rid then Goldilocks jumped out of the window

my porridge eaten, and my chair destroyed,

and she ran-"

my bed inhabited by some strange girl.

Together, now: `A ll the way home."

You giggle when I do the baby 's wail,

And then you say, 'A gain . A gain. A gain."

"Someone's been eating my porridge, and they've eaten it"

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

179

ISO

NEIL CAIMAN These days my sympathy's with Father Bear. Before I leave my house I lock the door, and check each bed and chair on my return.

THE PROBLEM OF SUSAN

Again.

Again.

Again.

She has the dream again that night. In the dream, she is standing, with her brothers and her sister, on the edge of the battlefield It is summer, and the grass is a peculiarly vivid shade of green: a wholesome green, like a cricket pitch or the welcoming slope of the South Downs as you snake your way north from the coast. There are bodies on the grass. None of the bodies are human; she can see a centaur, its throat slit, on the grass near her. The horse ha f of it is a vivid chestnut. Its human skin is nut-brown from the sun. Shefinds herself staring at the horse's penis, wondering about centaurs mating, imagines being kissed by that bearded face. Her eyes flick to the cut throat, and the sticky red-black pool that surrounds it, and she shivers. Flies buzz about the corpses.

The wildflowers tangle in the grass. They bloomed yesterday-firr the first time in ... how long? ,4 hundred years:' A thousand' A l hundred thousand' She does not know. A ll this was snow, she thinks, as she looks at the battlefield Y esterday, all this was snow A lways winter, and never Christmas. Her sister tugs her hand, and points. On the brow of the green hill they stand, deep in conversation. The lion is golden, his arms folded behind his back. The witch is dressed all in white. Right now, she is shouting at the lion. ti-ho is .simply listening. The children cannot make