Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (3 page)

“Once upon a time there was a king and a queen who lacked nothing but children to make them happy.”

—D’Aulnoy, “The Orange Tree and the Bee”

“The most serene dauphine is of a fine disposition except for her ability to become a mother
... 
I do not think there is anyone here [who] would not give their blood for her to have a son.”

—Venetian ambassador Matteo Dandolo on Catherine de Médicis’s infertility

Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third wife, was the only one of his six queens to provide him with a male heir. Twelve days after she gave birth to the future Edward VI in October 1537, she died from complications related to the delivery. Rumors soon began to circulate that Henry had been forced to choose between the life of his queen and the life of his son. One report alleged that Henry was told by a gentlewoman assisting at the birth “that one of the two must die,” so the king ordered the child to be “cut out of his mother’s womb.”
¹
Decades later, Nicholas Sander wrote that Henry ordered that his son be saved “because he could easily provide himself with other wives.”
²
This story also became the subject of numerous ballads and was recounted in Samuel Rowley’s play, 
When
You See Me You Know Me,
 in which Henry asks, “Should I lose my Sonne (if Sonne it be)...I lose the hope of this great Monarchy. What shall I doe?”
³
In fact, Henry was not faced with such a decision because Jane most likely did not undergo a Caesarean section and she succumbed to her postpartum illness gradually over several days.
⁴
However, that the rumors erupted so quickly and maintained such currency not only demonstrates a depth of anti-Henrician sentiment but suggests that the begetting of an heir was deemed so critical that the sacrifice of a queen’s life to that end was even considered plausible.

Women of all classes were expected to bear children, but the stakes were perilously high for a queen who could not produce a healthy, preferably male heir to the throne. Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn both fell from grace because of their failure to provide Henry with a son; Jane Seymour died fulfilling that mandate; Elizabeth I was urgently pressed throughout much of her reign to marry and produce an heir. In spite of the fact that she had several children, Marie de Médicis’ intermittent periods between pregnancies alarmed the French court. Anne of Austria, who became queen consort to Marie’s son Louis XIII, suffered 22 years of infertility and public shame. In the early modern period, queens could exercise substantial political power, but at the same time they endured significant pressure to provide for a secure succession. The health of the body politic depended upon the fertility of the queen’s personal body.

Early modern fairy tales also demonstrate a preoccupation with royal pregnancy: numerous tales begin with a king and queen hoping for a child but unable to conceive. The narrative trajectory of some of these tales is determined by the outcome of this pregnancy wish, whereas others pursue an entirely different plot line. The formulaic opening of the fairy tale, “Once upon a time,” is a well-recognized feature of the genre but less noticed is how frequently the phrase is followed by “there were a king and queen who longed for a child.” Historians have amassed information on mortality rates for women and children in the early modern period, but data about conception and fertility are less conclusive.
⁵
However, both the historical record and literary accounts point to intense private and public anxiety about producing an heir. As Jacques Gelis points out, “In their longing for children, a royal couple was not greatly different from married subjects: but they made more frequent and sustained efforts to remedy the situation, which involved the kingdom as a whole.”
⁶

Gelis highlights the public nature of the queen’s reproductive task; her pregnancies could never be a private affair since the stability of the entire kingdom depended upon the provision of an heir. This chapter examines the convergence of the frequent pregnancy-wish motif in early modern fairy tales and the challenges attendant upon actual early modern queens trying desperately to fulfill their role as royal vessel.

Early Modern Fairy Tales: Once Upon a Pregnancy Wish

That pregnancy and childbirth have always been significant in fairy tales is not surprising given the genre’s emphasis on the cycle of marriage and reproduction: fairy tales often begin with the formation of one family and end with a promise of renewal in the next generation. The story of “Cupid and Psyche” in Apuleius’s second century novel
The Golden Ass,
 considered one of the earliest literary fairy tales, follows the quest of a young heroine who is impregnated by her immortal lover and hopes to deliver “a divine babe.”
⁷
Giovanni Fiorentino’s fourteenth-century tale, “Dionigia and the King of England,” recounts the travails of a queen who is reported to have given birth to two monkeys.
⁸
References to reproduction are even more ubiquitous in early modern fairy tales that are replete with pregnancy wishes, pregnancy cravings, pregnancy metaphors, and odd or anomalous pregnancies. Maria Tatar explains how the Brothers Grimm, in revising literary fairy tales of previous centuries, suppressed references to pregnancy—but not to extreme violence—in their zeal to make the genre suitable for a younger readership.
⁹
But in the early modern period the literary fairy tale is fertile with pregnancy allusions, particularly in the context of queens.

Straparola’s 
Le piacevoli notti
 includes, among others, a story of a poor fisherman who curses a haughty princess into pregnancy because she mocks him; a tale of a noble woman who is impregnated by a grass snake while she naps in the garden; another in which a queen’s unexpected middle-aged pregnancy disrupts inheritance plans. Basile’s 
Pentamerone
 is even more imbued with references to reproduction: the collection’s framing tale revolves around pregnancy cravings; another story offers such an extraordinary fertility potion that even the furniture becomes pregnant; and the rich, figurative language of this collection frequently employs images of pregnancy and childbirth. Not surprisingly, the fairy tales by women writers of the seventeenth-century French salons are even more concerned with reproductive issues: pregnancy references can be found in over half of Madame D’Aulnoy’s 23 tales.
¹⁰

In recent years, as scholarship on early modern fairy tales has increased, the genre’s preoccupation with reproduction has begun to receive the attention it deserves. Three scholars warrant particular mention here. In her article “Fertility Control and the Birth of the Modern European Heroine,” Ruth Bottigheimer argues that the early modern woman’s weakened control over her fertility contributed to the emergence of a more passive fairy-tale heroine in the tales of Straparola and Basile: in contrast to the feisty heroines of medieval fabliaux who are more focused on their pleasurable sexual rendezvous than on potential pregnancies, her early modern counterparts fear sexual encounters and their consequences. Holly Tucker’s
Pregnant Fictions: Childbirth and the Fairy Tale in Early Modern France
examines French tales by early modern women alongside contemporary medical discourse and argues, on the other hand, that these stories feature empowered women who challenge the encroachment of masculine obstetrical practices on the female reproductive body. Suzanne Magnanini’s 
Fairy Tale Science: Monstrous Generation
in the Tales of Straparola and Basile
 similarly explores the intersection between early modern medical theories of reproduction and the literary tale in the Italian tradition. These works address multiple aspects of the pregnancy theme in fairy-tale fiction from a historical perspective.
¹¹

Among the many ways in which pregnancy is present in fairy tales, the initial pregnancy wish is one of the most prevalent, but the motif itself has received little analysis. Although some fairy tales include unexpected and unwanted pregnancies, more stories involve a couple’s longing for a baby. As Tucker points out, “Nearly a quarter of all tales by Mme. d’Aulnoy and one-third of those by Mme. de Murat depict a royal couple trying desperately to have a child.”
¹²
The childless state is typically announced at the beginning of the tale, as in Straparola’s “The Pig Prince”: “Though [the king and queen] had been married several years, she had not been able to become pregnant, and they were both unhappy about this,”
¹³
or d’Aulnoy’s “The Orange Tree and the Bee”: “Once upon a time there was a king and a queen who lacked nothing but children to make them happy.”
¹⁴

Why such a pronounced emphasis on infertility at the beginning of the tales? Given that the most paradigmatic fairy tale is based on the constitution and reconstitution of family, the narrative might be expected to begin with an intact, stable unit of king, queen, and child, and then proceed with the formulation of the new generational order. According to Tzvetan Todorov’s concise description of narrative design, for which the fairy tale serves as his exemplum, narrative comprises a movement from equilibrium to disequilibrium to a new “similar but not identical” equilibrium. As Todorov explains, “At the start of the narrative, there is always a stable situation...subsequently something occurs which introduces a disequilibrium.” The example Todorov offers is the young fairy tale protagonist who leaves his or her family, overcomes obstacles in the larger world, and eventually forms his own family structure: “The equilibrium is then re-established, but is no longer that of the beginning: the child is no longer a child, but has become an adult among the others.”
¹⁵

Todorov’s framework, however, does not account for the pregnancy wish. Even given that the genre’s narrative economies dictate a rapid sequence of events, the couple’s longing for a child, announced in the first paragraph or even the first sentence, does not constitute a “stable situation” nor does it serve as the primary disequilibrium of the tale. In other words, the royal infertility does not provide a state of equilibrium because the couple is simultaneously happy as a couple but unhappy about their childless state; on the other hand, the infertility is not what provides the plot’s requisite point of disequilibrium or conflict, though its resolution can lead to complications at the outcome of the reproductive process. In terms of the fairy tale’s conventional narrative structure, then, the reference to infertility is arguably superfluous. Indeed, in some fairy tales, the state of infertility is introduced and then resolved in the mode of inexplicability in which the genre operates. As Lüthi argues, within the abstract style of the fairy tale, events occur so matter-of-factly and randomly that characters evince neither astonishment nor fear: the fairy tale protagonist “lacks all sense of the extraordinary” and does not seek explanations. So, for example, d’Aulnoy’s “The Orange Tree and the Bee” simply continues, “Since the queen was already old, she had given up all hope of having any [children]. However, it was just then that she became pregnant, and in due time she gave birth to the most beautiful girl the world had ever seen.”
¹⁶
The problem of conception is abruptly announced, just as promptly erased, and the narrative proceeds in a new direction.

Peter Brooks’s theory of narrative desire may be more useful here than Todorov’s schema. Brooks argues that readerly expectations are propelled by a longing for closure; thus, narrative structure strives to satisfy a sequence of desires that are directed toward fulfillment. However, digression is also necessary: on the one hand, we are eager to reach the dénouement, but its achievement cannot occur too quickly or the narrative will seem incomplete. A satisfying narrative must paradoxically comprise both digression and progression vis-à-vis the ending.
¹⁷

Perhaps the pregnancy-wish motif provides one of these small narrative digressions; however, it is so frequently invoked and yet so often summarily dismissed that it suggests more than a minor plot device. D’Aulnoy’s “Princess Mayblossom” offers another example of the pregnancy wish and its sudden resolution, but with more suggestive detail: “Once upon a time there lived a king and a queen who had had several children born to them. But they all died, and the king and the queen were so very sorry that they could not be comforted. They were very rich and the one thing they wanted was to have children. It was five years since the queen’s last son had been born, and everybody thought she would not have more or she distressed herself so much in thinking of all the little princes who had been so pretty, and who were dead. At last, however, the queen knew that another child was to be born to her.”
¹⁸

As with many other tales, the childless state is rectified without explanation and the plot develops along an entirely different line; however, the opening of “Princess Mayblossom” is also historically allusive. The reference to the death of the previous heirs is a reminder that the high rates of infant mortality made a queen’s maternal function even more fraught: we could cite any number of royal heirs whose premature death threatened the succession. This passage also highlights a recognizable emotional state: grief. In light of the high rates of infant mortality in the early modern period, historians have debated the extent to which parents mourned the loss of their children, but there is ample evidence for such grief, especially for women.
¹⁹
Furthermore, the queen’s very failure to conceive another child is seen as a direct result of her “distress” and “so much thinking” about her dead princes.
²⁰
In both history and fiction, the desire for an heir was typically shared by the royal couple, but the burden of reproduction was largely ascribed to the queen. Certainly, the process of conception necessarily involved the king, even though he might have minimal participation during the queen’s gestation period and delivery. Yet, in the majority of tales involving pregnancy wishes, the king’s role, even at the stage of conception, is negligible or nonexistent.