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 GooseTales', an oldservant spins by thehearth, telling her fairy tales tothe children of the family Tho frn-;-;vin r„ r.,.i,,.- n.,....'. _ ^:__ „._ __ .

312 FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE

Ted Hughes's intuition that Beauty is stirred by love for the Beast, even when he terrorizes her in the night, reappeared in a more definite form in the popular 1987 eus series for television, which was also shown in Britain, in which the Beast never casts off his hybrid form. A roaring, rampaging half-lion, half-human crea-ture, he reigns over the subway system of New York as a defender of women and beggars, an urban Robin Hood, who was born from an immaculate virgin and the seed of two fathers, the double lord of the underworld, one a good magus, the 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 passionate, chivalrous and ... illicit. I-le is `the monster of her dreams' and she likes him just as he is.

The disenchantments of the Beast take many forms, not all of them benign; women have remained consistently intrigued. As Karel Capek has commented: `The same fiction of evil which quickens events in fairy stories also permeates our real lives.' It would be easy to dismiss these visions of the Beast's desirability as male self flattery, and female collusion with subjection, or, even more serious, as risky invitations to roughness and even rape. But to do so misses the genuine attempt of the contemporary versions of the fairy talc, in certain metamorphoses of its own, to face up to the complicated character of the female erotic impulse. From the post-Utopian vantage point of the 1990s, we cannot rejoice unequivo-cally in the sexual liberation Surrealism and its aftermath offered women: the 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-tion of the Beast with some exclusively male positive area of energy and expression.

The journey the story has itself taken ultimately means that the Beast no longer needs to be disenchanted. Rather, Beauty has to learn to love the beast in him, in order to know the beast in herself: Beauty and the Beast stories are even gaining in popularity over `Cinderella' as a site for psychological explorations along these lines, and for pedagogical recuperation. Current interpretations focus on the Beast as a sign of authentic, fully realized sexuality, which women must learn to accept if they are to become normal adult heterosexuals. Bettelheim argues:

Eventually there comes a time when we must learn what we have not known before - or, to put it psychoanalytically, to undo the repression of sex. What we had experienced as dangerous, loathsome, something to be shunned, must change its appearance so that it is experienced as truly beautiful.

GO! BE A BEAST 313

Belle had to learn to be a loving wife in the eighteenth century; in the late twentieth, she has to learn to be game in bed. But the Bettelheimian argument takes the exuberance and the energy from female erotic voices, and effects one last transformation of the Beast, by turning him into a mistaken illusion in unawak-ened female eyes. In this, the psychoanalyst works his way back, in more solemn vein, to the I-lellenistic romance, in which Psyche was at fault for fearing her lover was an ogre and not trusting him in bed.

III

The cuddliness of the teddy hear, the appeal of domesticated sexuality, also informs the present trend towards celebrating the male. In Tim Burton's film Edward Scissorhands (1990), the outcast hero does harm, entirely inadvertently: like Frankenstein's monster, he has been made by a ^nad scientist but left

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

con-nection to the world of others, the scissorhands capture eloquently the idea of the redeemed male beast in current circulation. By the 1990s, the perception of the social outcast, the exile from humankind in the form of a beast, had undergone

such a sea-change that any return to full human shape might have degraded rather than redeemed the hero, limited his nobility rather than restored it.

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

candy-coloured human who emerged from the enchanted monster; the Beast had won them. Linda Woolverton and the team who collaborated on the film had clearly steeped themselves in the tale's history, on and off screen; prolonged and intense production meetings, turning over every last detail of representation and narrative, can almost be heard over the insouciant soundtrack. This fairytale film is more vividly aware of contemporary sexual politics than any made before; it consciously picked out a strand in the tale's history and deliberately developed it for an audience of mothers who grew up with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, 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 her own terms. Beneath this prima facie storyline, the interpretation contained many subtexts, both knotty and challenging, about changing concepts of paternal authority and rights, about permitted expressions of male desire, and prevailing notions in the quarrel about nature/nurture. Above all, the film placed before the 1990s audience Hollywood's cunning domestication of feminism itself

LikeanAmerican buffalo, or a cartoonPicasso Minotaur, theDisneyBeast, created by the

animatorGlenKeane, learns with Bellehow to bea new man . ( Beauty and the Beast, directed

by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991, © Disney.)

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 feisty, strong-willed heroine, and carries the audience along on the wave of her dash, her impatient ambitions, her bravery, her self-awareness, and her integrity, 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 within the unregenerate male. The graphic intensity given to the two protagonists betrays the weight of interest: Beauty is saucer-eyed, dainty, slender, and wears a variation on the pseudo-medieval dresses of both Cinderella and Snow White, which, as in Cinderella, turn into ancien regime crinolines-cum-New Look debu-tante gowns for the scene of awakening love when she dances with the Beast. Her passage from repugnance to attraction also follows a movement from village hall to castle gate, in the conventional upwardly mobile style of the twentieth-century fairy tale. The animators have introduced certain emancipated touches: she is 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 tales more than any other kind of book, and consequently recognizes, when she finds herself in the Beast's castle, the type of story she is caught in.

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

some-times 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

shoul-ders, 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

other-wise (it is of course scattered by synecdoche all over his body in the Disney car-toon). 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-tion of virility.

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

the Minotaur, the hybrid offspring of Pasiphae and the bull, and an ancient

night-mare of perverted lust, and it is significant that Picasso adopted the Minotaur as his alter ego, as the embodiment of his priapism, in the vigour of youth as well as

the impotence of old age. But the real animal which the Disney Beast most resembles is the American buffalo, and this tightens the Beast's connections to

current perceptions of natural good - for the American buffalo, like the grizzly, represents the lost innocence of the plains before man came to plunder. So

the celluloid Beast's beastliness thrusts in two contradictory directions: though he is condemned for his `animal' rages, he also epitomizes the primordial virtues of the wild (left).

The Beast's longstanding identity with masculine appetite nevertheless works 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 own desires by making up stories about beasts who either denied them or fulfilled

316 FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE

The storywithout frills: 'Beauty and theBeast' from a nursery retelling, c. 1880.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.

This shows the wonderful

trans-formation . There lies the poor Beast, nothing but an ugly old

Bear.

Then of a sudden in his place there kneels a handsome young Prince atBeauty 'sfeet, and, as the storysays,they lived happily

ever afterwards.

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 sexual politics, by introducing a second beast, another suitor for Belle's love, the human hunk Gaston . Gaston is a killer - of animals - and remains one; he is a

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

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

- 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

Beast's castle . In the film , he takes the part of the real beast , the Calvinist unre-deemed damned beast : socially deviant in his supremacist assumptions , unsound on ecology in both directions , abusing the natural ( the forest ) and culture (the library ). What is above all significant about this caricature is that lie is a man in a

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 assump-tion 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.

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

culmina-tion 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

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

evo-lution of the Beast in fairy tale and his portraits in film illustrate this profound

shift in cultural values as well as sexual expectations.

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

granting Beauty freedom of movement and responsibility for the rescue of the

Beast and for his restoration to fundamental inner goodness. The traditional fairy

tale often includes the tragic motif that, in return for his life, the father promises the Beast the first thing to greet hint when he returns home; as in the story of 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-eenth-century French fairy story, which focussed on the evils of matrimonial

cus-toms, the father hands over Belle to the Beast in exactly the same kind of legal and

financial transaction as an arranged marriage, and she learns to accept it. Bruno Bettelheim takes a governessy line on the matter: Beauty, learning to relinquish her Oedipal attachment to her father, should be grateful to her father for giving her away and making the discovery of sexuality possible.

44 NI.IL CAIMAN

"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.

FOR RAY BRADBURY

C^

t\c C NA

THE HIDDEN CHAMBER 1`lctrf^:^!

ao©^ .

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.

.1 6 NEIL t_,AIMAN

Please, wander round. Explore it all you wish. I've broken with tradition on sonic points. If there is one locked room here, you'll never know. You'll not find in the cellar's fireplace old bones or

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,

FRAGILE THINGS tasting the blood and oceans of your

tears. I'll wait instead,

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

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

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.

178 NLIL GAIMAN

`1412. Y es. A great big house. A nd she went in ... "

I remember, as I tell it , that the locks of Southey' s heroine had silvered with age. The Old Woman and the "three Bears ... Perhaps they had been golden once,

when she was a child.

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

too-"-hot..",

'Mrtdit was too-"--cold!"

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

The porridge is eaten, the baby's chair is shattered, Goldilocks goes upstairs, examines beds, and sleeps, unwisely.

But then the bears return.

Remembering Southey still, I do the voices: Father Bear's gruff boom scares von,

and you delight in it.

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

my porridge eaten, and my chair destroyed, my bed inhabited by some strange girl.

You giggle when I do the baby 's wail, "Someone's been eating my porridge,

and they've eaten it"

FRAGILE THINGS

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

The bears go upstairs hesitantly,

their house now feels desecrated. They realize what locks are for. They reach the bedroom. "Someone's been sleeping in my bed.

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

One day your mouth will curl at that line. A loss of interest, later, innocence.

Innocence, as if it were a commodity. "And if I could," my father wrote to me, huge as a bear himself, when I was younger,

"I would dower you with experience, without experience," and 1, in my turn, would pass that on to you.

But we make our own mistakes. We sleep unwisely.

The repetition echoes down the years. When your children grow, when your

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?

`A rid then Goldilocks jumped out of the window and she ran-"

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

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

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

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.

Again.

Again.

Again.

THE PROBLEM OF SUSAN

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 hun-dred 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