Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (13 page)

What sets the early versions of this tale apart from many animalbridegroom tales is that the princess—perhaps because of her privileged social status—is not as acquiescent as some of the impoverished women of other stories: this princess slams the frog against the wall. Scholars have offered various explanations for this transformative act of violence, but it has remained one of the more disconcerting and puzzling episodes in the fairy-tale genre.
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Bruno Bettleheim argues that in this coming-of-age story, the princess must be jolted out of her childish narcissism to the “happy shock of recognition when complete closeness reveals sexuality’s true beauty.” According to Bettleheim, the princess must first learn that we cannot always “expect our first erotic contacts to be pleasant, for they are much too difficult and fraught with anxiety.”
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James McGlathery places the princess’s violence more squarely within the context of a family dynamic in which it is necessary for the young girl to rebel against her father so can she move from daughterhood to wifehood.
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Maria Tatar is less optimistic about interpreting a tale that “rewards indignant rage,” concluding that, like “Well of the World’s End,” a British counterpart, “the message encoded on this tale is impossible to decipher.”
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These various readings are consistent in the impunity awarded to the frog and the father, while keeping a scolding didactic eye trained on the princess. The predominant interpretation of “The Frog Prince,” which focuses on the cautionary message about the importance of keeping promises, is troubling. The king is allowed to maintain his honor code and the frog is rewarded with an attractive mate, but the princess is the one who must learn to honor her word, to obey her father, and to embrace sexuality. Furthermore, these readings confidently assume that the outcome, so clearly focused on the fulfillment of male desire, is for the princess’s own good, who might well have viewed her “reward” in a different light.

These readings also minimize the princess’s anger, explaining her act of violence as pubescent anxiety, a necessary gesture toward wifehood, a sign of passion that neatly turns to sexual readiness. Rather, I argue that she throws the frog against the wall because she is furious at her powerlessness and forced acceptance of a slimy animal as a mate. She is not allowed to resist father or suitor, though perhaps her royal status affords her more opportunity for protest than the impoverished brides of previous tales. However, given the fact that female anger cannot be comfortably accommodated within a patriarchal ethos, it is not surprising that subsequent versions of the tale have replaced the princess’ violent volley with a more submissive gesture—a kindly kiss.
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Apparently, the adage “Before you find your prince, you have to slam a lot of animals against the wall” does not comply with conventional models of feminine comportment or popular notions of heterosexual romance.

Two points are common to the animal bridegroom tales: one, the narrative’s emphasis and sympathies center on the beastly hero. Whereas the male protagonists may display some undesirable behaviors, the spotlight shines largely on their welfare and particularly on how the achievement of their well-being enables a restoration of social equilibrium. Second, insofar as we are concerned with the female protagonist, what matters is her ultimate submissiveness. A princess may express her displeasure more explicitly than her lower-born counterparts, but ultimately, she is also expected to curb her pride and demonstrate her resignation; only then can the beastly-born hero resume his rightful place in the world. These tales, then, are fundamentally about the preservation of a social order in which a man’s transformation and reestablishment in that order is dependent upon the debasement of a woman through bestial association. Why is it that such an effective means of preserving the status quo is to animalize the female in order to elevate the male?

The medieval and early modern worldview from whence these tales arose was grounded in an intensely hierarchical framework, long familiarly known as the Great Chain of Being. For several decades, this concept became axiomatic in Renaissance studies with A. O. Lovejoy’s book in 1936, 
The Great Chain of Being: The History of an Idea
and with E. M. W. Tillyard’s influential 
The Elizabethan World Picture
of 1943.
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Lovejoy posited the Great Chain of Being as the paradigmatic lens through which people from the Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century made sense of their worlds;
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Tillyard’s analysis of the early modern period argues that this cosmic order was “taken for granted...in the collective mind of the people.”
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According to the schema that Lovejoy and Tillyard extrapolated from Renaissance literature, drama, sermons, and visual art, especially an oft-cited illustration from Didacus Valades’s 
Rhetorica Christiana,
 man is placed below God and the angels but above animals, vegetables, and minerals. Within all these categories are further intricate sub-hierarchies; for example, it is widely presumed that women are on the same axis as men yet secondary to them. Woman occupies a position between man and animal.

In recent decades, however, many critics and new historicists in particular have challenged Lovejoy and Tillyard’s argument as overly reductive. Jonathan Dollimore argues that it “is not that Tillyard was mistaken in identifying a metaphysic order of the period,” but that “Tillyard’s world picture, to the extent that it did still exist, was not shared by all.”
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Where Tillyard finds evidence at every turn that the Great Chain of Being was universally understood and endorsed, new historicists see in this same evidence sites of ideological struggle and dissent: as Dollimore claims, the Great Chain of Being was not monolithic, it was “an ideological legitimation of an existing social order, one rendered the more necessary by the apparent instability, actual 
and
 imagined, of that order.”
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Feminist scholars have also challenged the concept, which Jeanne Addison Roberts refers to as the model “with which virtually all students of the Renaissance have been indoctrinated as basic to their study.”
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Like the new historicists, Roberts acknowledges that the Great Chain constituted a dominant lens: Roberts cites several instances in Shakespearean drama that are derived from the hierarchical worldview, but she also points out that this model worked by “illuminating by omission or by oblique reference the marginal, the partially repressed, the hidden premises, and the terrors of the texts” and she argues that other patterns operated as well.
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In fact, Tillyard’s work remarkably manages to almost entirely avoid references to women other than to criticize Eve’s unbridled appetite or to scold the Duchess of Malfi for daring to court a man below her station, and he makes astoundingly few references to Elizabeth, for whom his “world picture” is named.

Whereas the beastly bridegroom fairy tale type appears to affirm the Great Chain of Being construct, it does so only after revealing the potential instability of that order. A male is displaced from his appropriate place on the ladder, usually because of female action in the form of a queen’s pregnancy wish or a malevolent fairy’s curse. In his beastly birth or transformation, his animalization places him below the female. For the male to reassert his superior position, the female must be made inferior through enforced marriage to a beast and its associative animalization. In her diminishment and humiliation she becomes the agent for his restoration in the social order in which man, woman, and beast have all reassumed their appropriate hierarchical roles.

Early Modern Queens: All the Queen’s Men or What’s in a Name?

Women’s submission to arranged marriages, so prominent in fairy tales, is even more prevalent in the historical record. In the early modern period, it was understood that women of royal families in particular were commodities in the international marriage market. To improve diplomatic ties with France, Henry VIII arranged the betrothal of his younger sister, Mary, to Louis XII. Obedient to her brother’s will, the 19-year-old princess quietly agreed to marry the 52-year-old king, said to be somewhat senile and suffering from severe gout.
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When Henry’s daughter Mary was only 9 months old, an eventual marriage with Charles of Spain, later Emperor Charles V, was proposed, and shortly after, she was considered a potential partner for the Dauphin of France. Neither match occurred, but Mary remained valuable diplomatic property throughout her childhood.
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As were many of the queens in the animal-bridegroom tales, Catherine de Médicis—herself a pawn in an arranged royal marriage—was also a tireless matchmaker for her many children, particularly when the marriages could be politically profitable. Catherine oversaw her daughter Claude’s marriage to Duke Charles of Lorraine and her daughter Elizabeth’s to Philip of Spain, once Mary Tudor’s death freed him to marry again. Both these unions were apparently harmonious; however, Catherine’s marriage arrangements for her youngest daughter, Marguerite, proved less felicitous. Catherine first proposed Marguerite as bride to Philip’s heir, the troubled Don Carlos. The eccentric and intemperate prince had suffered severe head injuries from an accident, which exacerbated his violent and destructive tendencies, and he eventually died after a period of imprisonment.
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The prince’s compromised state was no secret, but Catherine was more concerned about an alliance with Spain than with her daughter’s best interests. Fortunately for Marguerite, the Spanish were not tempted by Catherine’s offer, but that the queen mother even suggested the match is a reminder that individual preferences were easily sacrificed for political gain.
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In 1572, Marguerite was ordered to marry Henri de Navarre, a marriage designed to stabilize tensions between France’s warring Catholics and Huguenots.
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Instead of reconciling political and religious factions, however, the grand wedding in Paris became an occasion of mass destruction when thousands of people were slaughtered in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. True to its ominous beginning, Marguerite and Henri’s marriage was tumultuous, providing neither personal happiness nor political harmony, and it eventually ended in annulment.

Most royal women—sisters, daughters, widows—were not queens regnant and thus were expected to submit to the marriage partners arranged for them. Those who ruled in their own right, such as Mary Tudor and Mary, Queen of Scots, were able to choose their own husbands, even if their choices were ill-placed. Even then, their councilors proffered advice about their selections and the articulation of the king consort’s power. All queens were expected to marry and procreate to ensure dynastic continuity, and if they were ruling queens, they were further expected to keep national interests in mind in their selection of a spouse. The most prominent example of a queen pressured to marry was the one who so famously resisted it: Elizabeth I.

Throughout her nearly 45 years as queen of England, Elizabeth was the focus of political machinations and intense speculation about her marital status and reproductive potential. In the early part of her reign, her subjects and political advisors eagerly hoped for an heir to the throne. Their particularly anxious concern over the future of the succession carried over from her father’s rule, when Henry VIII played political games with the succession of his own heirs. Well into the middle of her reign, Elizabeth was still urged to marry in favor of a strategic political alliance and in the hopes that she could still bear a child. Elizabeth frequently declared herself open to the possibility of marriage and she entertained numerous proposals, some at length. Yet, she eventually turned down every one of her suitors, claiming famously at one point, “I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married.”
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Figure 2 Portrait of Queen Elizabeth
(RPH 74611)

Elizabeth’s vacillations over her marriage proposals and her ultimate decision to remain single have been thoroughly explored and debated. Her traumatic adolescent episode with the Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour; the impact of her father’s volatile marital record; her mother’s execution; her lifelong love for the unpopular Robert Dudley; her political advisors’ inability to agree on a suitable marriage partner; and her unwillingness to share her political power are among the arguments advanced to account for Elizabeth’s refusal to marry.
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These various theories, and more likely a combination therein, are convincing, but they all end at the same point: Elizabeth remained an unmarried queen. In spite of her overwhelmingly successful rule, there was still considerable anxiety about her marital status, not just because of worries over the succession or missed opportunities for a political alliance, but because a single woman in power was such an anomaly.

Elizabeth I’s very presence arguably constitutes one of the most dramatic challenges to hierarchical constructs, which surely accounts for how little Tillyard had to say about her monarchy. As queen, Elizabeth was superior to all her subjects, but as woman, she was inferior; the instability of her position caused persistent cognitive dissonance in the minds of the Elizabethans. But as Carole Levin, Louis Montrose, Susan Frye, and others have demonstrated, Elizabeth was masterful in negotiating and manipulating gender roles in response to particular circumstances and constraints. Levin points out that Elizabeth “was able to capitalize on the expectations of her behavior as a woman and use them to her advantage; she also at times placed herself beyond traditional gender expectations by calling herself king...her success came from how fluid and multifaceted her representations of self were.”
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