Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (16 page)

Given the high premium placed on beauty and the linguistic straining to describe it, comparisons were inevitable, which in turn created a climate of competition. This chapter explores the tension between idealized and realistic portrayals of beauty in fairy tales and in descriptions of early modern queens or queen-candidates, and the rivalry that was often engendered by such emphasis on perfect beauty. The familiar tale type most associated with the beauty quest is “Snow White,” a tale driven by the competition between a reigning queen and a would-be queen; in the historical realm, the most famous rivalry was played out between Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots. All queens, however, were paraded beneath the royal banner of beauty, which was one more point of intersection between fairy tale royals and the early modern monarchy.

Early Modern Fairy Tales: Mirror Mirror on the Wall

In fairy tales and romance, beauty is the defining feature for many characters, especially queens and princesses, as Sidney acerbically noted. Indeed, it is difficult to find a fairy tale that does not include the word “beautiful” at least once, and most tales include multiple references. Men, natural phenomena, and valued objects are also described as beautiful but the adjective applies predominantly to women, and queens and princesses in particular. Although most fairy tale authors do not employ Basile’s colorful, protracted imagery in their descriptions of beauty, they do rely on superlatives and abstraction:

“Now this monarch desired very much to have some heirs, and thus he married...a beautiful and graceful lady who was, in truth, perfection itself.” (Straparola, “Constanza/Constanzo”)

“There was once a king’s daughter who was so beautiful that nothing in the world could be compared with her.” (D’Aulnoy, “Fair Goldilocks”)

“Once upon a time there was a king who ruled a realm whose name I don’t know. He married the daughter of a king and she was as beautiful as can be.” (Murat, “The Pig King”)

“He was the father of this charming little princess whom they called Blanche Belle because she was both beautiful and very white. After some time passed, she became so beautiful that she was the marvel of marvels…There was no woman as perfect as she and there was not a single monarch who did not seek her hand in marriage.” (Jean de Mailly, “Blanche Belle”)

In his essay on fairy tale aesthetics, “Beauty and Its Shock Effect,” Max Lüthi repeatedly emphasizes the genre’s abstract articulation of beauty: “The most noticeable feature of the representation of beauty in the European fairytale (and to a large extent in the oral tale from the orient) is 
generality.
 Beauty is almost never made specific. We learn nothing about eye color or complexion, about stature or type of build; we hear nothing about the characteristic beauty of the nose, the lips, or the breast.”
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An overview of early modern fairy tales supports Lüthi’s claim, though occasionally more specific details slip through the gilded surface. References to “lily white skin” or hair “as pure as gold” or as “black as a raven’s feather ” can fill in the broader, generic outlines of pure idealization. More often, any realistic allusions include appreciation and wonder at a woman’s freshly bathed skin, clean hair, or sweet-smelling breath, moments that are more inadvertent indictments of early modern hygienic practices than actual physical descriptions.

What can we learn about early modern concepts of beauty from fairy tales that evoke the attribute so frequently but so vaguely? As it is now widely understood that the qualities beauty comprises are in large part historical and cultural constructions, how does “fairy tale beauty” correspond to broader early modern ideals? Beyond fairy tales, there was a wealth of commentary on the subject: poetry, drama, courtesy manuals, emblem books, and rhetorical treatises all weighed in on the constitution of beauty.
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Because many of these notions emerge from the Neoplatonic tradition that equates outer beauty with inner virtue, definitions are necessarily highly idealized and abstract. The Petrarchan tradition that so profoundly influenced continental and English poetry informs the more specific literary descriptions of beauty, though even these detailed portrayals quickly lapse into clichés, a tendency Shakespeare so famously lampooned in his sonnet, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”

Nonetheless, it appears that certain physical qualities were esteemed more than others—the coral lips or rosy cheeks, for example, to which Shakespeare’s satire alludes. Sara Matthews Grieco argues that feminine beauty in the early modern period was formulaic and that throughout England and Europe, “the basic aesthetic was the same: white skin, blond hair, red lips and cheeks, black eyebrows. The neck and hands had to be long and slender, the feet small, the waist supple. Breasts were to be firm, round, and white, with rosy nipples.” Whereas concessions were occasionally made for hair and eye color, “the canon of feminine appearance remained essentially the same for some three hundred years.”
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Literal descriptions of beauty in early modern fairy tales, though spare, generally corroborate this ideal.

Furthermore, the Renaissance notion that inner and outer beauty correspond is often promulgated in fairy tales: although a beautiful exterior may cover a more sinister interior, usually the most beautiful character is also the most virtuous. The tale types that have had the most enduring cultural currency, such as “Cinderella” and “Beauty and the Beast,” illustrate this pattern. Basile’s “The Two Cakes” is representative of the loaded binary: “Once upon a time there were two sisters, Luceta and Troccola, who each had a daughter, one called Marziella and the other Puccia. Marziella was as beautiful in appearance as she was good at heart. In contrast…Puccia was as ugly as sin and just as evil at heart.”
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One of the grand injustices of the fairy tale world is the unequal distribution of assets: readers might well wonder why it is that one person seems to “get it all.” However, this common dichotomy supports popular early modern belief in the link between exterior and interior attributes.
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Madame d’Aulnoy’s “The Enchantments of Eloquence” is another of the many tales that begins with extremes: one girl who “was just as terribly ugly as she was boorish” is set against a beautiful, intelligent, and kind girl whose “skin was so lily white and so dazzling.”
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Not surprisingly, given what Nancy Canepa refers to as Basile’s “prodigious use of metaphor,”
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his contrasting portraits in “The Three Fairies” are even more dramatic: one young woman is “the most marvelous and beautiful creature that you could possibly find in the world. She had smiling and captivating eyes, tempting lips that sent everyone into ecstasy, and a throat of milky white that caused convulsions…It’s enough to say she seemed drawn by a painter’s brush. She was perfect.” Her foil is “the quintessence of ugliness, the better part of a sea monster, the very flower of rotten casks. She had a headful of lice, ruffled hair, plucked temples, a smashed forehead, swollen eyes, a warty nose, decayed teeth, a mouth like a fish, a bear of a goat, the throat of a magpie, breasts like bags, a crooked back, arms like fishing reels, bowed legs, and ankles like cauliflowers.”
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Lüthi claims that in fairy tales “ugliness is as little particularized as beauty,” but in many tales, especially Basile’s, an abundance of realistic detail is wedged in with the outlandish metaphors of grotesquerie: swollen eyes, decayed teeth, ruffled hair, and bowed legs are specific and more credible than the hyperbolic language applied to beauty. In other words, fairy tale representations of beauty, as we will see with historical accounts, repeatedly uphold an ideal standard of beauty against which women are measured but invariably fail to reach. Lüthi insists that because beauty in its highly generalized, superlative form so permeates the fairy tale, descriptions of ugliness are necessary as an aesthetic “form of opposition”: “The beautiful would decrease in significance if it were not in contrast to” ugliness.
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However, more than dichotomous imagery is at issue here. Fairy tale references to beauty are frequent and abstract, rendered in superlatives, and advanced through contrast with an equally extreme—but often more informative—ugliness. In spite of the cultural premium on beauty and its desirability as an asset for advancement in the world, most women could not fully satisfy the impossible ideal and their failures were often rendered as grotesque. Furthermore, comparisons and rivalry were inevitable results of such a construct, for not everyone could be “the most beautiful.”

Competition over beauty is generally imposed by a culture that values women for their physical ability to answer to male desire, and this ethos is often internalized by women as well. The premise of d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat” is a king’s fear that his three sons are overly eager to acquire his throne, so he distracts them with a series of difficult trials. After they successfully complete the first two tasks, the king sends them off again: “Go once more on a yearlong journey, and whoever returns with the most beautiful maiden shall wed her and be crowned king on his marriage; it is of course imperative that my successor have a wife.”
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When the youngest son transforms an enchanted white cat into the most beautiful princess, he wins the contest, but in the facile manner of fairy tale denouements, the princess conveniently possesses enough extra kingdoms for the other brothers and their new wives. The white cat/princess deftly turns the male-driven competition around so that everyone is a winner.

The competitions of most tales are not so easily resolved. In Basile’s “The Bear,” a queen dies, leaving the king with a daughter but no male heir. He must remarry to find “some appropriate way of having a son” but assumes he will not find any woman as beautiful as his first queen. The king forges ahead with his “beauty contest” and his goal to “marry the most beautiful.” Women are summoned from all parts of the world and the king places them in a line while he promenades in front of them with his critical male gaze in full force: “He brooded and looked them up and down. The first woman seemed to him to have a crooked forehead; the next had too long a nose; another, too large a mouth; another had big lips; and another was too tall. One was small and malformed; then another was too plump; and yet another much too lean. He did not like the Spanish girl because of her sallow complexion. His disliked the Neapolitan because of the way she walked on her heels…The Venetian was nothing but a shuttle of flax, and her hair was losing its color.”
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His collective audition fails, as each woman has a flaw that excludes her from his standard of perfection. The women voice no objections to the king’s deconstructive scrutiny perhaps because being chosen as his next queen consort is seen as justification for such a humiliating trial.

D’Aulnoy’s “The Hind in the Woods” also reveals the competition engendered when royal matchmaking and the opportunity to win a throne are at stake. In this tale a prince is betrothed to one princess, but when he sees the portrait of another more beautiful one, he sends an envoy to break off the first commitment. The first affianced is the Black Princess of Ethiopia, and upon hearing that she is being replaced, she asks the ambassador, “Does not your master consider me rich and beautiful enough?...Come into my treasury and you will see more gold than is contained in the mines of Peru. Look at my jet black complexion, my flat nose, and thick lips: is anything wanting that makes a woman handsome?”
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In addition to the problematic racializing in this passage and the reminder that financial gain often played a role in marriage negotiations as much as physical appearance, the Black Princess’s comments call attention to a comparison between two royal women. The rejected princess notes three specific physical attributes—her skin, her nose, her lips—that she assumes disqualify her from being “beautiful enough.” The episode also points to the delicacy required from ambassadors in marriage negotiations: this emissary wisely answers, “Madame, as much as a subject dares, I blame my master’s conduct, and if heaven had placed me on the throne, I know with whom I should hope to share it.” The Black Princess assures him that his diplomatic response saved his life and he is allowed to escape unharmed.

Rivalry still propels the subsequent narrative action: both the spurned Black Princess and the ladies-in-waiting of the “more beautiful” princess are so consumed by jealousy that they manage to substitute an “artificially beautiful” woman in her place. The schemers are eventually exposed and all is righted for the new royal couple, but not for the rejected Black Princess and the inferior surrogate princess, who are either unaccounted for or punished.

In fairy tales, female rivalry that is based on beauty is a common phenomenon and the tale types driven by competition between women have become the most familiar and beloved in the popular canon. In all the tales predicated on the beauty contest, much is to be gained by being determined the most beautiful: selection as the prince’s bride and, eventually, queenship. The classic illustration of this pattern is “Snow White,” wherein a beautiful queen is driven to murderous jealousy when her position as the fairest in the land is threatened by her more beautiful stepdaughter and heir to the throne.

The Snow White tale has become one of the most popular of all tale types, largely due to the influential commercializing force of Disney, which based its 1937 film on the Brothers Grimm version.
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In the Grimm’s tale, Snow White lives under the shadow of her stepmother, a queen who frequently consults her mirror for affirmation of her beauty. As Snow White grows up, she becomes “more and more beautiful. When she was seven years old, she was as beautiful as the bright day and more beautiful than the queen herself.”
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When the comparison-drawing mirror tells the queen that she no longer occupies first place, the narrative action proceeds.
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The jealous queen schemes to kill her young rival the three requisite times and becomes increasingly enraged when the voice in the mirror continues to declare Snow White more beautiful. The queen’s final assassination attempt would have been successful had an accident not dislodged the poison apple from the comatose princess’s throat. At the wedding and celebration of Snow White as the new “young queen,” the guilty elder queen is forced “to put on the red hot iron shoes and dance in them until she dropped to the ground dead.” Again, the fairy tale’s system of punishment is horrific but apt: a woman so actively consumed with seeking affirmation from others and with violently undoing her rival is forced to enact her own physical destruction as a public spectacle.