Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (17 page)

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s seminal reading of Snow White in 
Madwoman in the Attic
 argues that the tale “should really be called ‘Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother,’ for the central action of the tale—indeed, its only real action—arises from the relationship between these two women: the one fair, young, pale, the other just as fair, but older, fiercer.”
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The male characters in the tale—the king, the prince, the huntsman, the dwarves—are secondary to the action whereas the principal narrative is based on the increasing face-off between the two women. The king—the queen’s husband and Snow White’s father—“never actually appears in this story at all, a fact that emphasizes the almost stifling intensity with which the tale concentrates on the conflict in the mirror between woman and woman...though there is clearly at least one way in which the King 
is
 present.

His, surely, is the voice of the looking glass, the patriarchal voice of judgment that rules the queen’s—and every woman’s—self-evaluation.”
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The rivalry, even if conducted between two women and in the absence of an overt male presence, still emerges from a desire to satisfy the male-sanctioned ideal of beauty. Other interpretations that focus on the tale as a coming-of-age story, an oedipal drama, or a romance argue that the voice behind the mirror is Snow White herself, or her biological mother, or “society,” but as Cristina Bacchilega notes, “Whether speaking with the women’s collusive voice or the men’s, it [the mirror] is a patriarchal frame that takes the two women’s beauty as the measure of their (self )worth and thus defines their relationship as rivalry.”
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Wolfgang Mieder also highlights the themes of “narcissism, beauty, jealousy, competition” in the tale and argues that it can serve as a “parody of a society in which outside appearance is valued more highly than ethical convictions.”
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James McGlathery similarly argues that “this is a story not of possessive love or mere envy but of jealous vanity.”
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Indeed, the “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of us all?” refrain is embedded in our popular culture as a sign of female superficiality and rivalry.

Many attempts have been made to trace the early modern precursors of the Brothers Grimm “Snow White,” which first appeared in their 1812 edition and underwent minor revisions in subsequent editions.
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One of the challenges of gathering previous iterations is that this particular tale type includes so many discrete details or motifs—such as the persecuted heroine, her abandonment in the woods, the incriminating mirror, the glorification of domestic duties, the dwarves, the sleeping princess, the glass coffin—only some of which appear in other tales.
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Nonetheless, the jealous vanity between women is, as we have seen, common in the fairy tale canon. One early modern tale that deserves more attention in the tradition of rivalry between a queen and a would-be queen is d’Aulnoy’s “Gracieuse and Percinet,” a tale that unremittingly exposes jealous vanity and the quest for male approval.
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The tale begins with an incomparably beautiful princess, Gracieuse, whose equally beautiful queen mother dies, leaving an opening for a stepmother rival, Duchess Grognon. Unlike the elder queen in “Snow White” whose loss of beauty occurs incrementally, Grognon is from the outset said to be “as ugly as she could be. Her hair was as red as fire and her huge face was all covered with pimples. She had but one blear eye left, and her mouth was so big...all her teeth were gone…She had a hump before and behind, and she was lame of both legs.” This is an extreme portrait of physical shortcomings but it comprises realistic details, in part the inevitable effects of aging. Grognon’s self-loathing is quickly established as the cause for her rage: “Monsters like her are very jealous of those who are beautiful. She therefore hated Gracieuse with a deadly hatred, and left the court so as not to hear her praises sung, retiring to a castle of her own a little way off.” Whenever Grognon heard anyone praise Gracieuse, the duchess would cry out, “It is a lie! it is a lie! She is not beautiful! There is more charm in my little finger than in her whole body.” Thus, the machinery of female beauty competition is set in motion.

In this tale, the king’s voice does not hide behind a mirror; he is a gullible and easily manipulated presence, but the princess and the new queen still vie for his favor. The rich Grognon cunningly wins the king who is happy to overlook her physical flaws because “he cared for money more than anything.” Grognon marries the king on the condition that she be given authority over Gracieuse and he agrees to her demand, creating a contentious climate in which Grognon repeatedly attempts to outdo her stepdaughter.

Appearance and acknowledgement of status are the primary sites of rivalry in these tales. Grognon tries cosmetics and artificial aids to improve her looks: “She stuck in the best made glass eye that could be found, painted her face to make it white, and dyed her red hair black,” but she still cannot outshine Gracieuse. When Grognon sees the princess’s beautiful horse, she insists on having it: “Why should that creature have a finer horse than I?” The king orders Gracieuse to dismount but when the horse takes Grognon for a wild ride, the queen is even more furious and insists that she be allowed to “name a punishment fitting” for the princess. Grognon summons Gracieuse to her chamber where suddenly “four women threw themselves on her by their mistress’s orders, pulled off her pretty clothes, and tore her shift from her back. When her shoulders were bare these merciless furies could not endure to look on their dazzling whiteness, and shut their eyes as if they had been looking on snow for a long time.” Gracieuse’s beauty is so overwhelming that it disables the torturers while Grognon urges them on: “Flay her till not a little morsel remains of that white skin she thinks is so beautiful.” The emphasis on the princess’s snowy “white skin” returns us to the Snow White tale type and to one of the most prominent elements of the idealized beauty aesthetic.

Competitive fury drives the tale, but Gracieuse survives the assaults of the jealous queen stepmother. For the wedding celebration, “as the king knew that Grognon liked to be called beautiful better than anything else, he had her portrait painted, and ordered a tournament to be arranged, where six of the best knights of the court should [claim]...that Queen Grognon was the fairest princess in the whole world.” But when the knights arrive they celebrate Gracieuse’s beauty instead, and an infuritated Grognon accuses the princess of stealing the prize: “‘How dare you,’ she said, ‘dispute with me the prize of beauty? I will have my revenge or I will die for it!’ Gracieuse replied, ‘I protest I have no part in what has just happened. If you like, I will attest with my blood that you are the most beautiful in the world, and that I am a monster of ugliness.’” The narrative proceeds with a series of conflicts in which an obsessively jealous Grognon presents Gracieuse with impossible tasks. Both women receive some supernatural assistance—Grognon from a malevolent fairy and Gracieuse from an adoring fairy prince—but the contest is primarily between the two women as a match of furious wit and resourceful creativity. As in “Snow White,” only the “most beautiful” woman can emerge victorious: by the end of the tale, Gracieuse has escaped death several times with her “marvelous beauty” intact whereas the queen’s former fairy ally “flew to the king’s palace where she sought out Grognon, and wrung her neck before the guards or her attendants could hinder her.” Another ignoble punishment is appropriately rendered as the physical destruction of one so obsessed with the body.

Fairy tales do not claim to be realistic. Just as we suspend our disbelief in the face of dancing shoes, gold-producing donkeys, and women giving birth to pigs and hedgehogs, we simply accept the extraordinary and often indescribable beauty of so many princesses and queens. But against the marvelous and wonderful, realistic details stubbornly surface. In the ideal realm of fairy tale beauty, two historically relevant points emerge. The abstract, superlative framework used to describe so many beautiful queens and princesses betrays the challenges of meeting such an ideal standard—hence, imperfections are much more vulnerable to concretization. Nonetheless, the ideal is still held on to tenaciously, so that comparisons and competition are inevitable, especially when the stakes are the highest possible in a social and political hierarchy: a place on the throne.

Early Modern Queens: “She Was a Queen, and Therefore Beautiful”

If the queen’s body as reproductive entity was subsumed into the body politic, her body as aesthetic object was also subject to official scrutiny, public commentary, and royal standards. The queens who came to the throne through political marriage rather than inheritance were vetted with especial care; beauty was a primary criterion for royal suitability, though it could be trumped by a prospect’s political or financial assets. A king’s physical appearance was also subject to adulation and critique but queens in particular were targets of the public gaze.

Fairy tales harbor a generalized vision of perfect beauty, but realistic details occasionally crop up to clarify or undermine that ideal. When we turn to extrapolate concepts of beauty from specific historical accounts, the vagaries of individual preferences and an acknowledgement of human imperfections similarly challenge idealized notions of superlative beauty. Examining letters, dispatches, and reported conversations to determine what early modern queens looked like and how they measured up reveals some subjectivity. A pale complexion, for example, could signal either “sickly” or “fair” while a tall woman could be deemed “appealing” or “intimidating.”

Furthermore, if any evaluation of a queen’s appearance inevitably returns to the “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” cliché, another cautionary platitude is also apt: “consider the source.” An ambassador’s report or a courtier’s casual aside about a queen’s looks could well have been influenced by political or circumstantial bias: the public and official nature of a queen’s position negated or at least complicated candid assessments. Even accounting for prejudices, however, a consensus often emerges about the relative beauty of one queen or another; individual preferences were still largely articulated against an ideal standard.

As with fairy tales, historical descriptions of queens were often overblown and abstract, even if the subject was deserving. Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary, for example, consistently elicited rapturous praise from admirers. When Mary was betrothed to Charles of Castile, the humanist Erasmus exclaimed: “O thrice and four times happy our illustrious prince who is to have such a bride! Nature never formed anything more beautiful and she exceeds no less goodness and wisdom.”
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When that engagement was broken in favor of a marriage to Louis XII, the French king commissioned a portrait of his bride-to-be by Jean Perréal. Louis was so pleased with the result that he declared he was “more pleased to have such a beautiful wife than half his state”
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and he was even more impressed with Mary in person. Margaret of Austria’s ambassador, Gérard du Pleine, wrote that Mary “was one of the most beautiful girls that one would wish to see; it does not seem to me that I have ever seen one so beautiful.”
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These panegyrics could have been borrowed from any number of fairy tales.

Although there seemed to be universal agreement about Mary’s beauty, these accounts reveal nothing about her actual appearance. Other descriptions of queens, however, could be more precise, especially when marriage negotiations were in play. When Henry VII’s queen, Elizabeth of York, died toward the end of his reign, he considered remarriage. One interesting prospect was the widowed Joanna of Castile, more familiar to history as Juana the Mad because of her tragic mental instability.
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This marriage would have resulted in an unusual family configuration since Joanna was the sister of Catherine of Aragon, who was Henry’s daughter-in-law. Henry had seen Joanna briefly when she and her husband, Philip of Burgundy, visited England in 1506 and the king was taken with her beauty, but his interest was not reciprocated so Joanna did not become her sister’s stepmother-in-law.
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Even more disconcerting was Henry’s highly detailed inquiry about another possible Spanish wife, Ferdinand’s niece Joanna, the young widowed Queen of Naples. Henry sent three envoys to Valencia to investigate Joanna’s appearance, personality, and finances.
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The king gave his agents a 24-item questionnaire in which they dutifully recorded answers about Joanna’s height, her use of cosmetics, her complexion, the color of her hair, the length of her arms, the sweetness of her breath, and a number of other features. The composite report of her appearance was favorable: “the said queen is not painted, and the favour of her visage is after her stature, of a very good compass, and amiable, and somewhat round and fat”; “the said queen is very fair and clear of skin”; “it should seem her hair to be of a brown hair of colour”; “the eyes of the said queen be of colour brown, somewhat grayish.” In response to Henry’s order to inquire after the size of her breasts, the envoys noted, “As to this article, the said queen’s breasts be somewhat great and full; and...were trussed high, after the manner of the country.”
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Although it was common practice for monarchs to send delegates to assess a marriage prospect’s suitability,
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Henry’s excessively detailed survey deconstructs the young queen as much as any poetic blazon that praises a woman feature by feature. The literary “blazon anatomique” was, however, a rhetorical and aesthetic form that trafficked in metaphor. Henry, on the other hand, required his ambassadors to catalog Queen Joanna’s body in clear, itemized detail. The sum of the parts was still not sufficient to result in a marriage, though it appeared to be Joanna’s financial and political assets that were found more wanting than her appearance.

Other kings, like the greedy monarch in “Gracieuse and Percinet,” were also willing to sacrifice beauty for political and financial gain. When Henri of Navarre became Henri IV of France in 1594, he annulled his first childless marriage with Marguerite de Valois to obtain a new queen who could provide him with an heir. His advisors drew up a list of candidates, including princesses from eastern provinces, but Henri objected, saying that “if he married a German princess he would feel as if he were sleeping with a wine barrel.”
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Beauty was important to the licentious Henri, but so was wealth, so he was persuaded to marry the presumably fertile and definitely wealthy Marie de Médicis, whose illustrious family absorbed his vast debts.
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Henri was unenthusiastic about Marie’s physical appearance—there was a rumor that he called her his “fat banker” behind her back—but he was pleased that she had a sizable dowry and that she eventually provided him with several children.
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