Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (2 page)

Given its unfettered intertextual borrowings among authors and iterations, the fairy tale is an amorphous and slippery genre. The fairy tale is also a capacious umbrella term, and scholars, especially structuralists, have devoted considerable time making distinctions and drawing taxonomies to accommodate its various plot trajectories, common motifs, and narrative functions. Whereas the various authors of fairy tales exhibit considerable local color and stylistic variation, the fairy tale as a form consistently includes various motifs and discrete narrative units that are recycled and reassembled: a sleeping princess, a prized donkey, a magic potion, or a persecuted heroine, for example, might be the centerpiece of the plot in one tale and make only a brief appearance in another. This repetition of motifs and images—not just from one iteration of a particular tale to the next but also between different tale types—is what gives many fairy-tale readers the sense of “déjà lu” (already read).
¹⁵

For our purposes, two caveats about the fairy tales are necessary: one, the tales under consideration are not the epic fairyland romances also popular in the early modern period, such as Spenser’s
Fairie Queene
 or Michael Drayton’s 
Nymphidia.
 These works are characterized by a parallel universe with a focus on supernatural beings operating under a different set of laws; the stories we refer to as fairy tales often involve magical or extra-natural intervention but are largely human-centered with recognizable character types. Two, most of the tales considered here are limited to the large subgroup that focus primarily on the lives of the monarchy rather than on the “folk tales” that deal with concerns of the peasantry, although these areas invariably intersect.

Within the tales that focus so prominently on courtly affairs, the queen is often a central figure in the narrative, so much so that she is as much a hallmark of the genre as its other familiar characteristics: the number three, magical objects, quests, happy endings. That queens occupy such space in these early modern tales is not surprising given the historical significance of queens in this period.
¹⁶
While sixteenth-century England began with a powerful monarch in King Henry VIII, his tumultuous marital history brought six interesting queens to the stage: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr. His two sisters, Margaret and Mary, became queen consorts and his two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, succeeded him as queens in their own right. Henry’s niece, Mary, Queen of Scots, was briefly queen of France as well as Scotland and she aspired to the throne of England. In France, Catherine de Médicis was a powerful queen consort to Henri II, while Marguerite de Navarre, Marguerite de Valois, and Marie de Médicis all featured significantly in the political realm.

Italy, Spain, and regions of the Holy Roman Empire and the northern continent also produced queens who contributed substantially to the rich, complicated, and intertwined early modern monarchies. Within the tightly circumscribed and elite nature of the monarchical system, many of these queens knew one another by kinship or marriage; episodes in their lives are interconnected just as certain motifs in fairy tales replicate and speak to one another.

The careers of these women represent myriad ways in which queenship could be expressed. Some were active, powerful queens: Elizabeth I ruled for 45 years as sole monarch, whereas Catherine de Médicis served as queen regnant for almost 30 years during the monarchies of her three sons. Others had more short-lived reigns, such as Mary Tudor and Mary, Queen of Scots, but their impact on the political and religious climate was nonetheless profound. Still others, including Catherine of Aragon, Catherine Parr, and Marie de Médicis, powerfully wielded their roles, albeit circumscribed, as queen consorts, whereas other queen consorts—Elizabeth of Valois or Jane Seymour, for example—accepted more submissive roles. Yet others are remembered, often unjustly, for their sexual transgressions and treasonous behaviors, most notably, Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard, and Marguerite de Valois. Numerous other queen consorts figured prominently as well, including Juana the Mad of Spain, Anna of Denmark, Henrietta Maria, and Catherine Braganza. Some queen consorts recognized that the security of their positions depended on the abdication of any significant political influence, whereas others exploited their positions precisely for political purposes. The more we delve into the history of early modern queenship, the more we discover the layers of complexity and variety in the lives of these many intriguing women.

Similarly, the depiction of female monarchs in the fairy tale canon is multifaceted. Fairy tales often revolve around simple binaries: rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, smart and stupid, kind and cruel, good queen and bad queen. But closer scrutiny reveals a rich canvas of queens who rule capably in their own right, who reign deceitfully in their sons’ absence, who are falsely accused of murder, who actually attempt murder, who suffer infertility, who grieve the loss of their children, who survive their falls from grace, who vie with other queens for power, who protect their families and realms, and who subvert social and political expectations.

To what extent these literary depictions of queens are grounded in historical accuracy and to what extent they represent and reproduce cultural biases and stereotypes are questions this book seeks to address. Just as the fantastic world of fairy tales often reveals points of historical truth, so also the historical, allegedly factual representations of queens are sometimes propelled by falsehoods and biases. Reputations and assessments are often based on unstable foundations and then maintained as sacrosanct: historians continue to revise many unfair notions about particular queens, not to idealize them but to reexamine the record of evidence and received opinion. In examining many actual queens against their fictional counterparts, this study revisits some of the particular episodes in their lives that have been minimized, falsely reported, or misinterpreted.

A second point about methodology: in most cases, I am not claiming to trace direct, linear influences or to argue that a particular tale was written with a particular queen in mind. Rather, I am interested in the broader confluences between fiction and fact, in the more organic and ongoing relationship between the fairy-tale tradition and its historical context. Indeed, many of the tales explored predate some of the queens’ lives and others follow, but their interconnections point to shared conditions and prevailing notions about queens and their roles in this particular time period. For example, an Italian tale might resonate with the life of a certain French queen whereas a French tale might call attention to the particular circumstances surrounding an English queen. As we have seen, these tales themselves—in their original languages and in translations—traversed geographical boundaries as freely as their magical characters and the actual queens who were traded between countries in the royal marriage market.

Within a more reciprocal and organic notion of the relationship between fairy tales and history, a fairy-tale motif or theme may portray a queen conducting herself in a manner based on social and cultural understandings of “how queens act.” By inscribing that behavior in a widely circulated tale, subsequent readerly and cultural expectations and notions about queens are influenced and shaped. At the same time, actual queens may have had a sense that their behaviors were reflected or reaffirmed by their literary counterparts. When Elizabeth I tells the French ambassador La Mothe-Fénelon that she had “taken great pains to be more than a good mother to the Queen of Scots,” but that “she who uses and plots against her mother, deserves to have nothing other than a wicked stepmother,” she is drawing on a rich and familiar tradition of fairy tales.
¹⁷

Faced with the vast trove of literary and historical material, thematic patterns suggested the most effective organizing principal for this book. One of the most ubiquitous but often overlooked features of the fairy tale is the motif of the pregnancy wish. Many tales begin with a royal couple lamenting their state of infertility and desperately longing for an heir to the throne, but the burden of conception is ascribed to the queen. Similarly, many early modern monarchs experienced reproductive anxiety but the pressure was felt primarily by the queens, who strove desperately to fulfill their roles as royal vessels. Chapter 2 examines the pregnancy wish in several fairy tales and the ways it parallels and reflects the perilous fertility crises various queens suffered, especially Catherine de Médicis and Mary Tudor. Successful conception, however, was not the only reproductive hurdle that both fictional and actual queens faced. Chapter 3 looks at the frequently disastrous outcome of impregnation in the form of anomalous or monstrous births. In the more exaggerated realm of the fairy-tale genre, these aberrant births include snakes, pigs, dogs, cats, and moles. There were also numerous reports of monstrous births in popular culture. Although monstrous offspring were not exclusively a Renaissance phenomenon, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an extraordinary obsession with abnormal progeny, comprising a range of the factual and the fictitious, as evidenced in countless publications from medical treatises to broadsides and ballads. Fascination with monstrous births emerged in multiple arenas, and we will explore the unsuccessful pregnancy experiences of Mary Tudor and Anne Boleyn in this context.

In the tales involving monstrous births, the primary narrative focus is on the protagonist’s development to adulthood and his demand to marry a woman, even as he remains in his animalized state. Known as the “animal bridegroom” or “beastly born hero” tale type, these stories privilege the satisfaction of the male protagonist at the expense of the female, who must submit to an undesirable arranged marriage that often proves violent. Chapter 4 focuses on the articulation of the hierarchical relationship between man, woman, and beast in these tales and Elizabeth I’s manipulation of this paradigm in her authority over the men closest to her—her favorites, suitors, and advisors. Public image and self-representation were critical for all monarchs, but queens were held under a particularly keen public gaze. The superlatives used so liberally in fairy tales typically describe queens as beautiful; certainly, physical beauty was an important consideration in any king’s choice of a bride. However, such a burden on external appearance often engendered a competitive atmosphere, and, indeed, one of the most common tale types of the canon, “Snow White,” features a queen and a would-be queen who are rivals in beauty and rivals for male approval. Chapter 5 explores the preoccupation with appearance in fairy tales and in the early modern monarchy and the alleged beauty competition between two queens,

Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots.

For fairy-tale and historical queens, presentation of physical beauty was almost inseparable from a literal self-fashioning. Fairy tales are filled with beautiful and dazzling dresses, as are royal wardrobe accounts, letters, and ambassadors’ reports. Chapter 6 considers what it meant to be “dressed like a queen” when clothing not only signaled status but represented an investment in resources and a means of establishing control over the royal image. Although it is tempting to see lavish wardrobes as a sign of indulgence and superficiality, they were also a crucial part of a queen’s self-representation and self-empowerment.

Finally, Chapter 7 explores what may be the most familiar manifestation of the queen figure in fairy tales: the wicked queen. There are numerous examples of the evil monarch both in fairy tales and in historical accounts. Whether or not these accusations were valid, several actual queens were depicted as monstrous and Machiavellian, particularly Catherine de Médicis, Mary Tudor, and Caterina Sforza. Often, a queen’s alleged wickedness was manifest in her sexual reputation and behavior: occasional fairy tales depict queens who were accused or guilty of adultery or promiscuity. Similarly, several of their historical counterparts—Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard, Mary, Queen of Scots, Margaret of Valois, and even Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen—suffered charges of sexual transgression. A queen’s sexual misconduct was, of course, more than a private breach of trust; it was a violation of the entire body politic that so depended on the legitimacy of any of the queen’s heirs. Not surprisingly, often the more power these queens wielded, the more apt they were to be denigrated. Scottish reformer John Knox, no friend to female rulers, was one of the most vocal denouncers of queens in power: “How abominable before God is the empire or rule of wicked woman.”
¹⁸
In the end, John Knox and any like-minded allies may have had little influence on curbing the rule of actual queens, but their misogynistic fears contributed to one view of queens that persists today.

When one is immersed in the riches of early modern history, intertextual connections to fairy tales emerge unbidden. When we hear of the dangerous, storm-tossed voyages of Catherine of Aragon or Anna of Denmark or Anne of Cleves as they traveled to meet husbands in foreign countries, we are reminded of the many fairy-tale queens who found themselves cast at sea, fleeing and confronting peril. Ferdinand of Aragon’s avowal that he preferred his youngest daughter, Catherine, over her elder sisters reminds us of the father-daughter dynamic in “Beauty and the Beast,” “Cinderella,” or “The Ram.” Henry VIII’s tumultuous record of serial wives has more than once evoked comparisons with “Bluebeard.” The many stories of princesses imprisoned in towers recall the chilling experiences of Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn, and Katherine Howard in the Tower of London. Fairy-tale allusions surface though the fissures of history, and historical allusions emerge in the pages of fairy tales. Although none of this suggests a simple, linear correspondence between the literary and the historical, this study argues that the exchange between early modern fairy-tale queens and their historical counterparts was vibrant, reciprocal, and ongoing.

CHAPTER 2

THE QUEEN’S (IN)FERTILE BODY AND THE BODY POLITIC