Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (20 page)

Furthermore, although wigs and makeup helped cover the effects of aging, they were also used by younger queens. The scholarship on early modern cosmetics reveals the popularity and controversy of beauty enhancements; if Elizabeth used face paint and wigs, she was not alone in using such means to stay on the right side of the beautiful/ugly binary.
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Jeanne d’Albert, the future mother-in-law of Marguerite de Valois, wrote to her son: “As for the beauty of Madame Marguerite, I own that she has a fine figure; as for the face, there is too much artificial aid, it annoys me, she will spoil herself, but paint is as common in this Court as in Spain.”
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If a younger queen used “artificial aid” to accessorize and enhance, an older queen may have felt even more pressure to maintain her image as beautiful monarch. The perception and presentation of Elizabeth in her later years recalls the unfortunate Grognon in “Gracieuse and Percinet,” who desperately “stuck in the best made glass eye that could be found, painted her face to make it white, and dyed her red hair black” to compete with the younger and more beautiful princess. Because her reign was so long and prominent, Elizabeth may have seemed more conscious than most queens of the need to embody a superior beauty.

Elizabeth’s appearance and its centrality to her self-representation have been the subject of many excellent analyses,
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but in the context of the parallel discourse of queenly beauty in fairy tales, one aspect of Elizabeth’s ongoing beautifying project deserves attention: her internalization of the comparative beauty framework. Elizabeth’s mercurial jealousies of the women whom her favorites courted or married have also become part of the unmarried queen’s narrative, but the one particularly complex and prolonged rivalry was with another queen: Mary, Queen of Scots. The political rivalry between these two powerful monarchs was perhaps inevitable given contemporary religious instability, but their power struggle was also played out in the arena of beauty, just as the elder queen in Snow White feared the threatening encroachment of the younger would-be queen.

Like Henry’s younger sister Mary, the other French queen, Mary, Queen of Scots elicited superlative praise from the time her mother, Queen Mary of Guise, displayed her naked infant body to the English ambassadors. When she was ten and living at the French court of Henri II, the Cardinal of Lorraine wrote glowingly: “She has grown so much, and grows daily in height, goodness, beauty and virtue, that she has become the most perfect and accomplished person in all honest and virtuous things that is possible to imagine”
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The encomia continued into her adulthood. Ambassador Thomas Randolph told William Cecil, in familiar superlative fashion, that Mary was “the finest she that ever was.”
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When Nicholas White met Mary at the beginning of her captivity in England he also wrote to Cecil that “she is a goodly personage who hath withal an alluring grace.”
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White’s comment displays a common thread in descriptions of Mary, that her physical beauty elided with her demeanor, which some found charming and others manipulative. Scotsman George Buchanan, who became a harsh critic of Mary in his later years, wrote : “Her excellent beauty and transcendant parts, by her being bred at court, were set off to the best advantage, though that inclined her too much to insincerity.”
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That insincerity may well have been a subtext of Mary’s alleged concern for Elizabeth when the English queen contracted smallpox in 1562. After Elizabeth recovered, Mary wrote to her, “I thank God with all my heart, especially since I knew the danger you were in, and how you have escaped so well, that your beautiful face will lose none of its perfections.”
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Mary and Elizabeth both eagerly sought information about the other’s appearance, a near obsession undoubtedly perpetuated by the fact that they never met. Mary’s ambassador James Melville recorded an anecdote that encapsulates the spirit of competitiveness as well as the nimble thinking required of his profession. When Melville visited the English court in 1564, Elizabeth asked him pointedly to compare her to his queen. Melville’s delicate responses recall the ambassador in d’Aulnoy’s “The Hind in the Woods” who chose his words so carefully to avoid the wrath of the Black Princess. After the encounter, Melville wrote, “Her [Elizabeth’s] hair was more reddish than yellow, curled in appearance naturally. She desired to know of me, what color of hair was reputed best; and whether my Queen’s hair or hers was best; and which of the two was fairest. I answered, ‘The fairness of them both was not their worst faults.’ But she was earnest with me to declare which of them I judged fairest. I said, ‘She was the fairest Queen in England and mine the fairest Queen in Scotland.’ Yet she appeared earnest. I answered, ‘They were both the fairest ladies in their countries; that her Majesty was whiter, but my Queen was very lovely.’”
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Melville’s adroit answers only encouraged Elizabeth to continue searching for assurance of her superiority and she eventually pressed him to admit that she excelled Mary at playing the virginals and dancing. Melville’s account eerily evokes the elder queen of “Snow White” as she repeatedly consulted the mirror for affirmation of her beauty: here, the ambassador becomes the unwilling voice behind the mirror.

For Elizabeth, the need to consult the mirror’s reflective power may have eventually exhausted her. Elizabeth sought praise of her beauty throughout her reign, but in her later years, her awareness of her mortality was manifest in her nearly superstitious avoidance of actual mirrors. In his 1603 memorial of Elizabeth, 
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, Henry Chettle wrote “that shee never could abide to gaze in a mirror or looking-glasse: no not to behold one, while her head was tyred and adorned, but simply trusted to her attendant ladies for the comeliness of her attire.”
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Chettle’s observation is ambiguous: although he sees Elizabeth’s gesture as a sign of humility, it could also be read as a vain refusal to acknowledge her aging body. John Clapham, writing just a few months later, offered a more explicit interpretation: “It is credibly reported that, not long before her death, [the Queen] had a great apprehension of her own age and declination by seeing her face, then lean and full of wrinkles, truly represented to her in a glass: which she a good while very earnestly beheld, perceiving thereby how often she had been abused by flatterers whom she held in too great estimation, that had informed her to the contrary.”
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D’Aulnoy’s “The Blue Bird” highlights female obsession with the mirror’s powers of affirmation. The tale includes an episode in which a young queen is on a quest to be reunited with her betrothed, King Charming.
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As she makes her way to his kingdom, she must scale a grand mountain, a challenge made more difficult because the surrounding area “was one sheet of mirror.” Fairy tale quests are filled with temptations and distractions, but d’Aulnoy’s mirror is particularly spectacular: “All round were ranged more than sixty thousand women looking at themselves with the utmost delight, for this mirror was more than two leagues wide and six high; and there everyone saw herself as she wished to be. The red-haired maiden saw herself with fair ringlets, and brown hair looked black. The old dame saw herself young again, and the young never grew aged there.” D’Aulnoy’s magic mirror exchanges the truth-telling properties of an actual mirror with the distorted representations of beauty that flatterers bestowed, particularly upon queens. “In short, all one’s defects were so well hidden that people came from the four quarters of the globe. It was enough to make one die of laughing to see the grimaces and the affectations of the greater number of those vain creatures.”

In his analysis of the various anecdotes about Elizabeth and her aversion to “the looking glass,” Louis Montrose suggests that what is at stake is an aging queen who “was part of a venerable misogynistic discourse in which old women were assigned an especially ignominious place. And this discourse was but the underside of that which venerated youthful female beauty and grace.”
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The competition between beautiful and ugly, young and old, one woman and another, exerted an ongoing pressure on Elizabeth and other queens who struggled to fulfill expectations that belied the ravages of time and the realities of the fallible human body. When Elizabeth’s rival in beauty, the auburn-haired Mary Stuart, was beheaded, the “executioners lifted up the head...then her dressing of lawn fell from her head, which appeared as grey as if she had been threescore and ten years old, polled very short.” That Mary went to her death wearing a wig has been seen by some as characteristic vanity, but in the culture that expected perpetual beauty from its queens, it is arguably a proud and poignant gesture.

The dichotomous perceptions and descriptions of early modern queens and their fairy tale counterparts uncover the high social and political value placed on beauty. Queens or would-be queens could be sharply critiqued for the flaws in their appearances but they could also be found guilty of vanity, superficiality, and rivalry for trying to fulfill the beauty mandate. Although they well understood the empowering effects of a beautiful appearance, queens in early modern fairy tales and fact also internalized the demands of the insistent voice behind the mirror, becoming complicit pawns and rivals in the quest to be the fairest one of all.

CHAPTER 6

THE QUEEN’S WARDROBE: DRESSING THE PART

“As she was splendidly beautiful, and her clothes were bedecked with pearls and rubies, the people were dazzled by such a magnificent appearance and adored their incomparable queen. Consequently, the king was so happy that he could not even express his joy.”

—Jean de Mailly, “Blanche Belle”

“The King went to meet them on the road, making it appear that he was going out hawking with his falcons; and, presenting himself to the Queen... He then kissed her, and afterwards embraced all the English princes and barons who accompanied her... The Queen was very magnificently dressed, both her gown and head gear being of the English fashion, and very costly, both in jewels and goldsmiths’ work. Her gown was of gold brocade with a white ground.”

—On Princess Mary Tudor’s marriage to Louis XII of France

“She requested that she be given some time to change her clothes before she appeared before her lord and master. In truth, the people could hardly keep from laughing because of the clothes she was wearing.”

—Charles Perrault, “Donkey-Skin”

“I have nothing for chemises; wherefore, by your highness’ life, I have now sold some bracelets to get a dress of black velvet, for I was all but naked.”

—Catherine of Aragon to her father, King Ferdinand, from the court of Henry VII

In the early modern period, the possession of beauty was considered a sine qua non for queenship even if human imperfections and individual preferences meant that the ideal was often unattainable. Queens were expected to be similarly impressive in their dress, wearing clothing that was magnificent enough to reflect the superiority of their position. A queen could do little to change her physical attributes, other than using cosmetics or a wig for a modicum of improvement, but a wardrobe could be controlled and manipulated in the ongoing project of creating a particular self-image.

Early modern fairy tales feature myriad dazzling dresses as do the expense accounts and inventories of early modern queens. The sumptuous clothing of royal spectacle satisfied public curiosity, but more importantly it articulated and affirmed monarchical status: the splendid dress of gold and silver that Cinderella wore to the ball was meant to convey her eligibility as the prince’s bride just as the costly gold brocade gown Mary Tudor wore upon her arrival in France was meant to establish her worth as queen consort to Louis XII.

Whereas lavish wardrobes were arguably a sign of personal indulgence and vanity, clothing was literally a part of Stephen Greenblatt’s now familiar notion of “self-fashioning,” the deliberate crafting and formulation of identity and self-representation. In a rigidly hierarchical culture, defining a self through clothing also meant circumscribing what others could wear: careful regulation of fashion was a means of preserving and upholding the exclusivity of the monarchy. The continual if ineffective attempts at delineating social status through sumptuary legislation reveal how deeply clothing practices were seen as a challenge to political stability and order. In the emergent material and consumer culture of the early modern period, clothing was a loaded signifier of status for everyone, but it carried a particular weight for monarchs and especially for queens.

A queen’s anxieties over reproduction and her children’s succession were an exaggeration of what women of other classes faced: if all women worried about having healthy babies and securing a family legacy, those same risks were magnified for queens, who were burdened with the public and political dimensions of those roles. In the arenas of beauty and dress, however, the queen’s position complicated kinship with other women. Whereas women across the social spectrum might be concerned with their appearance, a queen was expected to be more beautiful and fashionable than all other women: in her singularity as queen she was determined by superlatives and separation. But if being the “most beautiful” posed a formidable challenge, being the best dressed was within reach.

The magical ball gown in “Cinderella” is only one of the many magnificent dresses in the fairy tale canon. In countless tales, queens and would-be queens repeatedly rely on clothing to attain and secure their royal positions. For both fairy tale and early modern queens, clothing was a means of signaling the degree of power they sought or held. The dependent status of queen consorts and princesses, however, meant that a king could exert his control over them through clothing. Indeed, kings themselves were extraordinarily invested in fashion—not just in their own royal trappings but in the wardrobes of their queens and other women in the royal circle. This interest created a vexed relationship in which a queen’s clothing became a means of reflecting a king’s own majesty; because royal clothing was a literal manifestation of power, it was used both as punishment and as reward according to royal whims. Both in fairy tales and in the historical record, issues of gender roles, social status, and political empowerment were reified through the clothing women wore as they strove to “dress like a queen.”