Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (8 page)

Years later, Babiole returns to her parents’ court. The queen’s sentimental joy at recovering her daughter is quickly overcome by renewed apprehension. Again, her ladies-in-waiting counsel murder: “Some said the monkey must be strangled, others that she should be shut up in a den; others, even, that she should be thrown into the sea.” One lady, again anxious about the queen’s public image, cautions, “Your reputation must be saved. What would the world think if you declared that a little monkey was your daughter? It’s not in nature to have such children when one is as beautiful as you are.” In the ensuing plot, filled with the multiple digressions typical of d’Aulnoy’s tales, Babiole survives numerous threats to her life, reattains her human state, and finds maternal and romantic love—for indeed, both the queen and a beloved prince find Babiole appealing once she is transformed into “a perfect likeness of her mother.” In spite of the conventionally happy ending, the tale’s emphasis is on Babiole’s monstrosity and the prolonged torment she endures. Less noticed but still significant is the queen’s distress: although her self-absorbed reaction and her willingness to twice contemplate infanticide challenge the reader’s sympathy for her character, she genuinely fears for her “reputation,” her standing as queen consort, and perhaps her own life.

Kathryn Hoffmann views this tale within the context of the early modern obsession with the collection and display of marvels and curiosities. In the various characters’ responses to Babiole, we see the “alternating courtly aversion to and fascination with her monstrous body.”
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Hoffmann connects “Babiole” with two remarkable stories of actual “monkey girls” in the early modern period: the Gonzales daughters, who made their way to the upper echelons of sixteenth century Italian and French society, and Barbara Urslerin, who was known throughout seventeenth-century Europe for her freakish appearance and her musical talents.

Petrus Gonzales, born in the Canary Islands, was brought to the court of Henry II and Catherine de Médicis in 1547 where he was kept and displayed as a curiosity. Gonzales suffered a condition known as congenital hypertrichosis, or extreme hairiness. Because of the hair that covered his entire body he was nicknamed “Barbet” after a species of Belgian shaggy dogs. He was educated and married to a French woman with whom he had several children, five of whom inherited their father’s condition. The three daughters, Antonietta, Maddalena, and Francesca, were taken up and adorned for the amusement of various noble and royal audiences.
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Hoffmann suggests that surviving portraits of the Gonzales girls illustrate how the fictional Babiole might have been seen—as a monstrous monkey-faced curiosity in an elaborate, costly dress: “Hairy people, both fictional and real, were caught in the practices of display that turned them into liminal beings, caught at the borders of nature and culture, monstrosity and civilization.”
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Another hirsute female, Barbara Urslerin, earned a living in the seventeenth century by also displaying herself. Urslerin traveled from one venue to another performing on the harpsichord for popular audiences. Jan Bondeson describes how vulnerable Urslerin was to the sexually deviant and voyeuristic behaviors that accompanied fairground display: “Any person paying to see a human or animal curiosity had the right to thoroughly examine the creature on show, to make sure there was no imposition.” Motivated by “lechery, curiosity, or scientific inquiry,” visitors were allowed to examine her genitals to reassure themselves that she was a woman, as long as they paid an extra fee.
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Though human to animal transformations—and vice versa—have been a mainstay of mythology, romance, and fairy tales, d’Aulnoy’s monstrous heroine Babiole and her historical counterparts offer another site of literary and historical convergence. In addition to contextualizing “Babiole” within the craze for oddities and exotica, Hoffmann also suggests that the protagonist’s monstrous transformation is what propels the rest of the plot: “Babiole’s adventures begin, as in many fairy tales, in the aftermath of the conjunction of maternal desire and fairy magic.”
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Once her transformation into monstrosity occurs, the narrative is underway.

A subgroup of tales classified by folklorists as the “animal bridegroom tale type”
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begins with the same formulaic premise: in response to a pregnancy wish, an infertile queen is cursed by a malevolent fairy and in due time delivers a monstrous child, usually an animal or an animal-human hybrid. In Straparola’s “The Pig Prince,” the royal couple is “tormented” after the queen gives birth to a pig, and “since the king did not wish to disgrace his saintly wife, he felt compelled to have his son killed and cast into the sea.”
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Upon further reflection, more generous feelings overtake him and the pig-child is allowed to live. D’Aulnoy’s “The Wild Boar,” a lengthier retelling of Straparola’s tale, recounts how shocked everyone was when “instead of a handsome prince, a little wild boar was born.”
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Again, the king “was very distressed. He ordered them to put the wild boar in a sack and thrown him to the bottom of the sea,” and again, compassion supersedes shame and the monstrous child is allowed to live. In both tales, royal embarrassment nearly leads to infanticide.

Henriette de Murat’s “The Pig King” follows these two precursors closely, but in this version the king is called to war at the time of delivery, a convenient and frequently employed plot device in many fairy tales: “At another time the queen would have regretted her husband’s departure, but the circumstances of her pregnancy made her see his leaving from another viewpoint. Indeed, she could be the mistress of her own actions during his absence.”
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The good fairies assure the queen that although they cannot prevent the monstrous birth, they will assist with an alibi and childcare. The queen’s delivery is secured within a protected female space where she can be “the mistress of her own actions.” When the pig-child is born, the fairies “carried it away without anyone seeing it…The next morning it was announced that the queen’s pregnancy had come to an end, and there had been a miscarriage.” The king believes their account of the failed birth while the pig prince is secretly raised by a kind fairy. In all three iterations of this tale, the queen’s monstrous delivery provides a brief but catalytic moment, whereas the principal narrative focuses on the prince’s travails until such time as he can reveal his true human and royal self, inherit the throne, and acquire his own queen consort, whose reproductive future will presumably be less complicated.

As with “Babiole,” the emphasis of the animal-bridegroom tales is on the suffering of the monstrous protagonists and their quest for marriage and the throne. Many scholars, as we will discuss in the next chapter, argue that the presence of so many monstrous protagonists and their reluctant brides reflects historical practices of unwanted arranged marriages. But our focus here is on the initial moment of the monstrous birth and the immediate aftermath, for in the distressed response of the queen and her court to the failed delivery we hear echoes of early modern queens. Although the monstrous children of fairy tales and their queen mothers are allowed to survive for the sake of an adventurous plot, there was no similar impunity for their historical counterparts.

The second strand of monster-birth stories, which we will refer to as “slander tales,” include a jealous queen mother or sister who falsely reports that the young queen has delivered a monstrosity, usually in the form of a pig, a dog, a cat, or a mole. Four successive iterations of this tale demonstrate the queen’s shame and the king’s punitive action in response to her failure. In Straparola’s “Ancilloto,” a queen gives birth to three healthy children but her spiteful mother-in-law sends word to the king that his wife has produced three mongrel pups. With the help of the young queen’s jealous sisters and the midwife, the queen mother “had only one thing left to do—bring about the cruel death of the three innocent children.”
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The women throw the babies in the river, but they are saved by a miller passing by: “Seeing how beautiful they were, he thought they were the children of some noble lady who had committed this crime to hide her shame.” Meanwhile, the king is “greatly disturbed” at the news of his wife’s disastrous delivery. However, he decides only to dethrone and humiliate rather than to execute her: the king “did not sentence her to death. Instead, he ordered her to be brought to a place where she was to wash the pots and pans, and where she was to be fed the rotten garbage that fell to the dirty, stinking ground.” Foucault’s claim that “the ideal punishment would be transparent to the crime that it punishes”
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could apply to the manner in which fairy tales excel in meting out appropriate justice; thus, because the queen failed in her elevated role as royal vessel and provider of an heir for the kingdom, she is demoted, animalized, and relegated to serving the royal household by cleaning their contaminated vessels. As the story progresses, the children’s true identities are revealed and everyone is restored to his or her proper position, but in the interim the suffering of the slandered queen for her reproductive crime is extreme.

D’Aulnoy’s “Princess Belle-Etoile and Princess Cheri” replicates Straparola’s plot, but this version heightens the queen’s shame: when the queen mother tells her daughter-in-law that she gave birth to three blind puppies instead of the healthy babies she actually delivered, the young queen cries, “I’d have considered myself happy if the gods had permitted me to die before experiencing the disgrace of being a mother to these little monsters.”
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The queen mother exacerbates her daughter-in-law’s suffering: “Take them and nurse them yourself, for you won’t find any women willing to suckle puppies,” so the young queen nurses “the filthy whelps under the impression that she was their mother.” Common practice dictated that royal and aristocratic women did not nurse their own children; in this case the impropriety of a queen nursing her own offspring is enhanced by their animalistic state.
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D’Aulnoy’s young queen, like Straparola’s, is punished through association with the bestial. The queen mother, orchestrator of the malicious plan, orders the midwife to strangle the children; instead, the midwife puts them out to sea, which we now recognize as the apparently preferred fairy-tale method of eliminating unwanted offspring. Some cases of infanticide in the early modern period involved actual drowning,
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but in fairy tales, consigning unwanted children to the waters provides a convenient opportunity for rescue and a continuation of the narrative.

As in Straparola’s iteration of this tale, the children survive but the king is ignorant of their existence. In great distress over the succession and “thunderstruck” at the news, he yields to his mother’s suggestions and “finally decided to banish the queen.” She is “immediately placed in a litter with her three dogs and carried without the least mark of respect to her mother’s house, where she arrived all but dead.” The young queen has failed to fulfill her royal assignment so she is shamed “without the least mark of respect” and returned to her former life as a mere subject. Years later, the children resurface, the family is reconstituted, and the evil queen mother is punished, but only after the unfairly maligned queen has suffered most of her life for an imaginary reproductive crime.

Multiple iterations of any fairy tale often differ at the microlevel of detail and degree rather than at the macrolevel of plot: in other words, differences from one telling to the next are often not found in the broad contours of the narrative but in minute descriptive strokes. In progressive versions of this tale, the general plot remains the same but the nature of the slander and quality of the queen’s punishment are intensified. In Eustache Le Noble’s “The Bird of Truth,” the queen mother writes her son that his queen “had brought two male cats and a female cat into the world. When the king heard this news, he was so horrified that, without thinking that the report might have been false, he replied to his mother that she should lock his wife in the tower and drown the three alleged monsters that she had produced.”
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Previous queens were assigned menial kitchen labor or banished from the court but this king orders imprisonment in the tower for the queen and drowning for the “monsters,” a more definitive step than casting them out to sea. The ensuing plot follows the previous versions—the children are saved, the queen is restored—but again, only after years of extreme suffering and loss that resulted from an alleged monstrous birth.

Antoine Galland’s “The Jealous Sisters and Their Cadette” replicates the previous plots but spins out the malicious slander in three stages. The eponymous jealous sisters inform the sultan, in successive reports, that his young queen has given birth to a dead puppy, a kitten, and a mole. Each time the actual babies are thrown into the canal but are later rescued. After the birth of the first two alleged monsters, an advisor is able to assuage the sultan’s murderous fury, but the third time he cannot be stopped: “That woman is unworthy of my bed. She has filled the palace with monsters. Should I even let her live? No, that will not happen. She herself is a monster. I shall purge her from this world!”
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Language of monstrosity is employed throughout the story as the monarch conflates the horrific unnaturalness of mother and children, finding them so guilty of contaminating the court that they all deserve death. The servant charged with carrying out the execution protests that the queen should not be killed for delivering monstrous babies since “an infinite number of women have done this and continue to do this.” Aberrant births in fairy tales are met with horror but this servant understands them to be an inevitable and not entirely uncommon phenomenon.

This series of tales describes only a portion of the monstrous progeny that populate the fairy tale canon. In most tales, the monstrous children survive and are ultimately transformed into or revealed as humans. However, in each iteration the trauma surrounding the monstrous delivery, alleged or real, and the suffering of the queen and child are profound. What can we make of the recurrent occasions of the queen’s monstrous childbirth and the ensuing consternation?