From the Beast to the Blonde
on Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
Marina Warner
Noonday Press
New York: 1994.
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RELUCTANT BRIDES
Fairy tale as a form deals with limits, and limits often act by fear: one of its fundamental
themes treats of a protagonist who sets out to discover the unknown and overcomes its terrors.
"The Tale of the Boy who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was" (Marchen van einem, der
auszog, das Furchten zu lernen), about a hero who knows no fear, one of the Grimms' most
famous fairy stories, sets out the theme in its stark simplicity: after various ordeals in which the
boy plays cards with corpses, bowls skulls at skittles with skeletons for playmates, meets and
subdues various hell-cats and ghouls, he at last encounters the princess, and in bed with her learns
how to shudder when she tips a pail of live fish over him—perhaps a metaphor for the
overwhelming power of physical passion. (In the compelling Freudian interpretation, shuddering
euphemistically replaces orgasmic spasms.)
When women tell fairy stories, they also undertake this central narrative concern of the
genre—they contest fear, they turn their eye on the phantasm of the male Other and recognize it,
either rendering it transparent and safe, the self reflected as good, or ridding themselves of it
(him) by destruction or transformation. At a fundamental level, "Beauty and the Beast" in
numerous variations forms a group of tales which work out this basic plot, moving from the
terrifying encounter with Otherness, to its acceptance, or, in some versions of the story, its
annihilation. In either case, the menace of the Other has been met, dealt with and exorcized by the
end of the fairy tale; the negatively charged protagonist has proved golden, as in so many fairy
tales where a loathsome toad
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proves a Prince Charming. The terror has been faced and chased; the light shines in the dark
places.
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Beneath the literary wrangle in the capital lay a vital moral issue, about the character and
purpose of marriage and the different needs of women from men, and the different experiences of
women within the institution. Conjugal friendship was not an aspect of many women's lives, the
testimony of fairy tale would seem to be telling us. Romance-love-in-marriage was an elusive
ideal, which the writers of the contes sometimes set up in defiance of destiny. As Gillian Beer has
so succinctly put it: "Revolution is one function of the romance." When the revolutionary
situation is past, readers then come to interpret the subversion it expressed in its texts in a spirit of
docile nostalgia. The fairy tale of Beauty and the assumed a female audience on the whole who
fully expected to be given away by their fathers to men who might well strike them as monsters.
The social revolution which has established both romantic and companionate marriage as the
norm has irreversibly altered the reception of such romances, and ironically transformed certain
women's examination of their matrimonial lot into materialistic propaganda for making a good
marriage. The partial eclipse of those fairy tales which criticize marriage in favour of ones which
celebrate it has arisen partly from the new, comparative freedom to choose a partner–or partners.
The pact with the Beast at the beginning of the fairy tale, when Beauty's father hands over his
daughter, actually narrates a common circumstance, and Beauty's whole-hearted obligingness in
the matter was increasingly emphasized. But the fading of fairy tales in which Beauty or her
counterpart resists the arrangement her father has made on her behalf also follows from the
growing control of printers, imprison male and female in stock definitions. By contrast, attitudes
to the Beast are always in flux, and even provide a gauge of changing evaluations of human
beings themselves, of the meaning of what it is to be human, and specifically, since the Beast has
been primarily identified with the male since the story's earliest forms, what it is to be a man.