Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (12 page)

CHAPTER 4

MEN, WOMEN, AND BEASTS: ELIZABETH I AND BEASTLY BRIDEGROOMS

“After the new bride was dressed in rich attire and adorned with jewels, she awaited the dear bridegroom, and the pig entered, filthier and muddier than ever. However, she graciously welcomed him by spreading out her precious gown and asking him to lie down by her side.”

—Giovanni Straparola, “The Pig Prince”

“The princess began to cry, and was afraid of the clammy frog. She didn’t dare touch him, and now he was going to sleep in her beautiful, clean bed. The king grew angry and said: ‘You shouldn’t scorn someone who helped you when you were in trouble.’”

—The Brothers Grimm, “The Frog King”

“The queen...says openly that she would give a million for her ‘frog,’ as she calls Alençon, to be swimming in the Thames...but her show of regret...is fictitious and feigned.”

—Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, commenting on Elizabeth’s reaction to one of her suitors

“He is like my little dog. As soon as he is seen anywhere, people know that I am coming.”

—Elizabeth on her relationship to Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester

In 2001, in the online magazine 
Nerve
, philosopher Peter Singer published a review of 
Dearest Pet,
 naturalist Midas Dekker’s book on the history of bestiality. In his review, “Heavy Petting,” Singer points out that the taboo against human-animal sex still prevails even though most other taboos against non-procreative sex have given way. According to Singer, the persistence of this taboo in spite of documented evidence of interspecies sexual contact is indicative of our ambivalent relationship with animals. Human-animal interactions, Singer explains, have served a variety of purposes: labor, procurement of food, emotional fulfillment—and even sexual satisfaction. On the other hand, we have “always seen ourselves as distinct from animals and imagined that a wide, unbridgeable gulf separates us from them,” particularly in the western tradition from Genesis to the Renaissance to Kant.
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The recent proliferation of academic interest in animal studies seeks to interrogate these entrenched cultural perceptions about the human-animal divide.
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That Singer’s review generated considerable controversy further underscores his argument about the vehemence of cultural anxieties regarding human-animal relationships, particularly where sexuality is involved.
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Indeed, in spite of this profound uneasiness—and perhaps because of it—there is a long literary tradition from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
 to the present in which women are betrothed to or mated with animals or to men who have been transformed into beasts.
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The fairy-tale canon, generously populated with animal figures in many guises, includes numerous tales of love or lust between human and animal or animal hybrid. Although there are some tales in which a male is attracted or affianced to a female animal, the majority of interspecies plots involve a woman bound to a beastly pursuer or bridegroom.
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The previous chapter focused on this tale type in the context of monstrous or unnatural births, but once the beastly child is allowed to survive, the primary narrative focus of these stories involves the protagonist’s development to adulthood and his insistence on marrying a woman. The outcome of this aberrant longing provides the narrative climax and closure for these tales.

This chapter focuses on what scholars refer to as the “beastly born hero” or “animal bridegroom” tale type and Elizabeth I’s canny manipulation of the bevy of male suitors, court favorites, and political advisors who flocked around her during her long reign.
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In stories that involve mating between woman and beast, the presence of bestiality must be acknowledged, but hints of perverse sexuality are generally minimized. What matters in these stories is the ideological import: the assertion of a particular masculine social order that is predicated upon the submission of women. The animal bridegroom tale is less about eroticism and more about social circumscription and reinforcement of the status quo. In the early modern period, hierarchical assumptions—whether fully endorsed or highly contested—about the appropriate position of man in relationship to woman and beast also operated in Elizabeth I’s male relationships, but the Virgin Queen cleverly subverted this vertical paradigm in the interests of affirming her own position of power.

Pigs, Frogs, Hedgehogs, and Other Fairy Tale Bridegrooms

One of the most familiar examples of the animal bridegroom tale type is Madame de Beaumont’s 1757 “Beauty and the Beast,” recast by Disney in a 1991 film whose success, according to Susan Bordo, demonstrates that “popular culture admires the man who won’t take no for an answer.”
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But other than the various incarnations of “Beauty and the Beast” and its corollaries, in which the male protagonist’s beastly nature is rendered less repulsive by his kindness and wealth, this thematic tradition has not become one of the more well-known subgenres of the fairy tale corpus. Particularly when fairy tales became more closely associated with younger audiences by the nineteenth century, tales of maidens mating with predatory beasts were given less attention. In the early modern period, however, tales of romantic relationships between animals and humans circulated widely.

We have explored how the beastly-born hero in the series of “pig prince” stories by Straparola, d’Aulnoy, and de Murat reflected early modern paranoia about monstrous births. In Straparola’s “The Pig Prince,” once the monstrous pig is allowed to survive, he is raised in royal fashion and begins to acquire some human characteristics, but his natural instincts are in constant tension with his civilized upbringing: “When he grew older, the piglet began to talk like a human being and to wander around the city. If he came near any mud or dirt, he would always wallow in it like pigs are accustomed to do and return home covered with filth,” then approach the king and queen, grunting and “defiling them with all kinds of dirt.”

When the Pig Prince reaches adulthood, he insists on marrying, in accordance with the fairy’s curse. At first the queen mother objects: “What maiden would ever take you for a husband? You’re dirty and you stink.” Narrative convenience intervenes just then, as an impoverished, fortune-seeking mother arrives at court with three beautiful daughters. The Queen asks the mother to offer the eldest as a bride to her son, acknowledging that “he is a pig,” but adding, “remember that she will inherit our entire kingdom.”

The young woman is ordered to marry but because of her obvious reluctance and pride, the Pig Prince kills her on their wedding night: “Stinking and dirty as he was, he lifted and defiled the clean smooth sheets with his filthy paws and snout and lay down next to his wife… Then he struck her with his sharp hooves and drove them into her breast.” A second sister is given as bride; she similarly balks and he murders her “the same way he did his first bride.” The Queen then offers the last daughter, and as fairy tale conventions would dictate, the third marriage succeeds. Unlike the first two sisters who, in spite of their poverty, did not sufficiently appreciate the benefits of a royal marriage, the third sister, Meldina, “was quite content to do as the queen requested and thanked her very much for deigning to accept her as a daughter-in-law. Indeed, she realized that she herself had nothing in the world, and it was her good fortune that she, a poor girl, would become the daughter-in-law of a powerful king.”

Straparola does not downplay the Pig Prince’s beastly ways and indeed emphasizes his most savage and uncivilized behaviors, which include coming to the marital bed “filthy,” “muddy,” and “stinking” and “leaving the mattress covered with excrement.” But because Meldina acknowledges her own lowly status, complies cheerfully, and willingly accepts her husband’s porcine ways, the Pig Prince is released from his beastly enchantment. In short order, the marriage is consummated, Meldina delivers a healthy boy, the Pig Prince is transformed into a handsome human being, and the King happily “discarded his diadem and his royal robes and had his son crowned king in his place with great pomp.”
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In contrast to her sisters’ resistance, the young woman’s humble acceptance of her role as agreeable consort and royal vessel guarantees the continuation of the patriarchal order, with the transfer of power triumphantly handed over from one king to the next. The pig prince’s murder of two innocent women is dismissed as a mere impediment on his path to marriage and the monarchy.

D’Aulnoy’s tale “The Wild Boar” follows a similar plot, though this version more thoroughly explores the hero’s identity crisis and invites speculation about the relationship between nature and nurture in light of current philosophical trends.
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Again, the first two sisters’ pride leads to their demise, but of the third sister, d’Aulnoy tells us that “after a long struggle, she consented to take him as her bridegroom and assured him she would love him as fondly as if he were the most charming prince in the world.” The bride’s gestures of domestic solicitousness and self-sacrifice are emphasized. As they prepare for sleep, “she was most careful to ask him if he liked his pillow high or low, if he had room enough, and on what side he slept best.” Because of her careful acts of humility and her resignation, the wild boar is transformed to a handsome prince and heir to the throne, and their joy is “increased by the birth of a son in whose face and character there was not a trace of the wild boar.”
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As in the “The Pig Prince,” d’Aulnoy’s “The Wild Boar” enacts the ultimate scene of female self-abasement and self-sacrifice in the marriage bed.

In both of these tales and their numerous counterparts, young women are repeatedly betrothed to beastly bridegrooms, including pigs, sheep, snakes, frogs, and hedgehogs. Bruno Bettleheim suggests that this tale type is about premarital fear of sexual engagement whereas other scholars, including Maria Tatar, Marina Warner, and Lewis Seifert, see in these stories the historical practice of arranged marriages in which one party—usually the female—is coerced into marrying an unknown and undesirable groom, typically for financial or social gain.
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Warner claims that these tales “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,” whereas Tatar notes, “The casual way with which fairy-tale parents sacrifice their daughters to beasts is nothing short of alarming.”
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In her discussion of Straparola’s version of this tale, Suzanne Magnanini agrees that “marriage remains a central theme” but she focuses on how through “the monstrous body of the pig king, Straparola explores the Venetian aristocracy’s deep concern with interclass marriages rather than the individual anxiety created by the sexual initiation of a wedding night.”
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Whether these tales betray an individual or a collective anxiety about enforced or subversive marriages, the stories consistently glorify female subservience and self-abasement; if a woman resists she can be attacked or killed. If she submits to the beast, she is eventually rewarded with wealth and a handsome mate, whereas the male acquires a passive wife, a human form, and a position of power. The endorsement of the prevailing male-dominated social order forms the narrative’s ideological drive.

Tatar and Warner make a persuasive case for the connection between these tales and the forced marriages of countless impoverished women. However, not all of the female characters who mated with beasts are socially or economically vulnerable; royal and aristocratic women are also sacrificed to animal bridegrooms. Indeed, the convention of “the proud princess who must be humbled” is a common subset in this tale type.
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The Brothers Grimm’s “Hans My Hedgehog,” another variant of the animal-bridegroom tale, involves the forced surrender of a princess to a sharply quilled lover.
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Freudian implications of this iteration aside—“when evening came and it was time to go to bed, she was quite afraid of the quills”—the contours of the tale type are consistent: the animal is betrothed to a king’s daughter, whose willing submission is the only means of achieving his human transformation and his succession to the throne.

A more familiar tale in which a prideful princess must learn humility through an intimate encounter with an animal suitor is “The Frog Prince,” a tale that, for all its familiarity in popular culture, has proved problematic for scholars. In keeping with our tendency to appropriate fairy-tale archetypes to suit our cultural moment, this tale has given rise to the ostensibly reassuring but misguided message to young women: “Before you find your prince, you have to kiss a lot of frogs.”

In brief: a princess is playing with her golden ball when it rolls into the pond; a frog pops up and promises to find it in exchange for marriage. The princess agrees, the frog retrieves the ball, and the princess runs off and forgets about the frog. But when the frog appears at the castle, the king demands that the princess keep her promise, even if it means taking the repulsive frog into her bed. She is ordered to obey, but once she and the frog are alone in the bedroom, she hurls him against the wall. Upon impact, he turns into a prince.

Though numerous oral variations of this tale have been traced to the sixteenth century, the most famous literary version of this tale comes from the Brothers Grimm, who gave it prominence as the opening tale in their 1812 
Nursery and Household Tales
 and in each of the seven subsequent collections published in their lifetime.
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But with each edition of the tales, Wilhelm Grimm revised the story in an increasing attempt to de-eroticize it, minimizing the frog’s requests for physical intimacy or his presence in the princess’s bed.
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What remained consistent in all of the versions, however, was the focus on the enforced humility and humiliation of the young princess. As Jack Zipes argues, this tale “communicated a moral message that advocated for the restoration of the patriarchal word and world order to which young women were to subscribe.”
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