Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (21 page)

Early Modern Fairy Tales: Magical Gowns and Tattered Clothes

Beautiful gowns figure largely in a number of fairy tales, but perhaps the most iconic dress is the one that enables Cinderella to capture a prince’s interest and a place on the throne. In the version popularized by Charles Perrault as well as in many variants, the eponymous protagonist uses gorgeous clothing to raise herself from her lowly state, which is signified by her gray smock and wooden shoes as much as by her household chores. Similarly, in d’Aulnoy’s “Gracieuse and Percinet,” the jealous Grognon tries to demote and punish the beautiful princess Gracieuse by stripping her of her royal dress, but her servants are disarmed by their awe at her “snowy white skin.”
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Gracieuse briefly escapes Grognon’s torture, but when the princess is rediscovered, “Grognon, delighted, dragged her by the help of her women into a dungeon, where she made her undress. They took away her pretty clothes, and put on a rag of coarse linen, and wooden shoes on her feet, and a rough hood on her head.” Heroines in fairy tales are persecuted through base clothing as much as through any other form of suffering.

Cinderella understands her society’s sartorial rules, hence her plaintive appeal to her fairy godmother when she wants to attend the prince’s fête: “‘But am I to go in these dirty clothes?’ Her godmother merely touched her with her wand, and her garments were instantly changed into garments of gold and silver covered with jewels. She then gave her a pair of glass slippers, the prettiest in the world.”
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The magical dress beautifies her so much that she is utterly transformed: no one at the ball knows who she is and her own sisters “did not recognize her at all.” Cinderella again becomes unrecognizable when she forgets her midnight curfew and her reverse transformation allows her to escape: “The guards at the palace were asked if they had seen a princess depart. They answered they had only seen a poorly dressed girl pass by, and she had more the appearance of a peasant than a lady.” At the end of the tale, the fairy godmother reappears to give “a tap of her wand to Cinderella’s clothes, which became even more magnificent than all the previous garments she had worn. The two sisters then recognized her as the beautiful person they had seen at the ball.”

“Cinderella” is a story about shifting identity and about clothing as a determinant of status, but in keeping with our tendency in popular culture to appropriate and even distort elements from fairy tales to serve our ideological purposes, “Cinderella” has come to exemplify a “rags-to-riches” ethic in which anyone who patiently endures suffering and hard work will eventually be grandly rewarded. In her study of Straparola’s fairy tales, Ruth Bottigheimer distinguishes “rags-toriches” or “rise” tales from “restoration” tales. Rise tales demonstrate that “even the most miserably poor boy or girl could gain enormous wealth,” whereas in restoration stories “heroes or heroines begin life amid wealth and privilege, are forcibly expelled from luxury into a life of squalor and struggle, and are restored to their initial status at the story’s end.”
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Though Cinderella is commonly considered a rise tale, the protagonist is in fact born a gentleman’s daughter who is temporarily displaced by a jealous stepmother but later marries a prince. Her ultimate royal elevation is superior to her previous status, but had Cinderella begun as a scullery maid and then become queen, the tale would have presented a more subversive challenge to the status quo. Cinderella suffers neglect and abuse, but it is not hardship that gains her entry to the queenship; it is the intervention of her fairy godmother and particularly the magical dresses that shape her into royal material. Cinderella’s grace and kindness may matter to the reader, but what the prince notices is not her patience or her ability to sweep the fireplace. He is impressed by her clothing and the synecdochal glass slipper, and it is only that magnificence which allows him to consider her his queen. Presumably, as king he will continue to supply Cinderella with a wardrobe befitting her station, but the conservative message of the tale is that she could only forward her royal eligibility through extraordinary dress.

Cinderella’s beautiful ball gown is imprinted on our fairy tale memory, but Perrault’s “Donkey-Skin,” another restoration tale, exposes the transformative power of clothing even more dramatically.
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In this tale, the princess protagonist is beloved and secure until her mother dies. On her deathbed the queen asks the king not to remarry unless he finds a woman who resembles her, a common motif in many early modern tales, which leads to the king’s incestuous desire for his daughter. When the princess is confronted with her father’s unnatural advances, she turns to her fairy godmother who advises that she pose an impossible demand: “Tell him that before you’d be willing to abandon your heart to him, he must satisfy some of your desires and give you a dress the color of the sky. In spite of all his power and wealth, and even though the stars may be in his favor, he’ll never be able to fulfill your request.” But the king orders his tailors to work under the threat of death and “the next day, they brought the desired dress, the most beautiful blue of the firmament.”

On the surface, the women’s strategy is obvious: to demand the unattainable so that the princess can escape the king’s aberrant desire. But the princess counters the king’s unnatural request with her own that equally challenges natural boundaries—a cosmic dress. Moreover, the language of desire is used in both cases—“he must satisfy some of your desires”—which creates a perverse similarity in their demands. In keeping with the tripartite schema of fairy tales, the princess requests a second dress the color of the moon and a third the color of the sun. Again, the royal tailors are reminded of the severe consequences should they fail, so each time they succeed in creating the desired dress. The king’s unrelenting incestuous demands direct our narrative sympathies to the vulnerable princess, but we cannot dismiss her ambivalent attraction to the dresses. After the first dress arrives, “the princess was overcome with joy and pain, for she did not know what to say or how to get out of the promise she made.”

The second dress is so beautiful that “admiring this marvelous dress, the princess was almost ready to give her consent to her father.” The third beautiful dress similarly confuses her. An appreciation for supernaturally beautiful dresses is not equivalent to incestuous longing: the princess is clearly victimized by the king’s threats, but the fact that she is so tempted by the magnificent dresses may suggest a reluctance to abandon the power and allure that the clothing represents. Even though fairies are not infallible, it may seem curious that this fairy godmother did not immediately counsel the princess to run away rather than asking for clothing that would further enhance her attractiveness and her queenly eligibility—precisely what she would want to avoid in the face of the king’s advances. Thus, the narrative attention on the princess’s desire for the extraordinary dresses is brief but undeniable.

After the king successfully produces all three dresses, the godmother advises a change of tactics: to demand the skin of the king’s rare gold-defecating donkey who “is the major source of his money.” Again, the women underestimate the king, for he agrees to kill the donkey. The fairy godmother then encourages the princess to wrap herself in the animal’s hide, make her face “ugly by dirt,” and flee with her rich clothing. From this point, “Donkey-Skin” follows the plotline of many fairy tales in which the young protagonist must venture into the world to survive on her own, not just to avoid perilous situations but to discover a sense of autonomy through suffering and trials. In this phase, the first hardship that Donkey-Skin must endure is assuming the skin of a base animal, the symbolic manifestation of her fall from royal fortune to a bestial state. On the other hand, the donkey is not an ordinary farm creature but a symbol of the king’s wealth and power, just as much as the three dresses. As Philip Lewis points out, “the ass’s skin is the fourth and ultimate garment she receives...Notwithstanding its deceiving, animalizing effect on her appearance, the brutish garment grounds and sustains an association with the precious talent of the living, gold-making donkey, a producer of cultural capital.”
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Thus, the princess’s adoption of the bestial garment is not merely a sign of her immersion into the suffering of the natural world; rather, she is literally wearing a manifestation and reminder of her link with royal power and prestige.

Donkey-Skin finds her way to a farm where she is consigned to scullery duty, but she is disdainful of the other kitchen servants “who were nasty and insolent creatures.” She spends her Sundays alone, locked in her room where she puts on her beautiful dresses and looks at herself in the mirror, an act which makes her “satisfied and happy.” Donkey-Skin regrets that the room is so small that she cannot spread out the dresses’ trains, but otherwise, “she loved to see herself young, fresh as a rose, and a thousand times more elegant than she had ever been.” As in “Snow White” and numerous other tales, the affirmation from the mirror is narcissistically gratifying, but soon an even more powerful form of approval emerges when a prince stops by the farm for a cool drink on his way home from the hunt. The initial gaze comes from Donkey-Skin, who “from a distance...watched and admired him with a tender look. Thanks to her courage she realized that she still had the heart of a princess beneath her dirt and rags.”

Again, clothing is understood as a signifier of one’s station: although her royal essence, “the heart of a princess,” is still present in spite of “her dirt and rags,” it apparently takes “courage” to maintain that sense of self while wearing such embarrassing dress. Donkey-Skin’s next wish again makes reference to clothing: “How happy the woman who has captured his heart! If he were to honor me with the plainest dress imaginable, I’d feel more decorated than in any of those which I have.” The conflation of the wish for the prince’s recognition and the gift of a dress again suggests the powerful relationship between clothing and status.

The ritual of the gaze is reversed one day when the prince happens by Donkey-Skin’s room and cannot resist the urge to peek through the keyhole: “She had dressed herself up as richly and superbly as possible and was wearing her dress of gold and large diamonds that shone as purely and brightly as the sun. Succumbing to his desire, the prince kept observing her, and as he watched, he could scarcely breathe because he was filled with such pleasure. Such was her magnificent dress, her beautiful face, her lovely manners, her fine traits, and her young freshness that he was moved a thousand times over.” Desire and voyeurism merge and Donkey-Skin, aware that she is being watched, is happy to display her rich beauty with the help of her extraordinary dresses. The prince, so taken by the grand spectacle that he has observed, becomes lovesick and irrational, which recalls the earlier point in the tale when Donkey-Skin’s father, the king, also “noticed” her beauty and also became “mad” with love.

The prince finally announces that he “desired” a cake from Donkey-Skin “made with her own hands.” So Donkey-Skin “locked herself alone in her room to make the cake. Moreover, she washed her hands, arms, and face and put on a silver smock in honor of the task she was about to undertake.” As with her dressing-up ritual, Donkey-Skin again sequesters herself, washes to distinguish herself from the dirtied kitchen help, and dresses up. The glorification of domestic duties is commonly associated with female protagonists in fairy tales, but here the quality of the cake itself appears to be one more determinant of her status, for “there was never a cake kneaded so daintily as this one, and the prince found it so good he began ravishing it immediately”—his “ravishing” further highlighting his desire. But as Donkey-Skin was not taking any chances, she had also dropped her gold and emerald ring into the cake. When the prince discovers it he insists he will marry the person whose finger fits it, “no matter what class or lineage.” As with the Cinderella story in which many women try on the slipper until the winner comes forward, many women, from young princesses to “the servants, the kitchen help, the minor servants, and the poultry keepers, in short, all the trash...,” are allowed to try on the ring, but their fingers are all too large. Finally, Donkey-Skin is allowed to come forward and “when she drew a little hand as white as ivory and of royal blood out from under the dirty skin,” everyone was astonished. Before Donkey-Skin is presented to the prince as the winner of the ring contest, she asks to change the ragged clothing that everyone had mocked, and “when she arrived at the palace and passed through all the halls in her sumptuous dress whose beautiful splendor could not be matched...the ladies of the court showed their feminine politeness and divine courtesy, and all their charms and ornaments dwindled in comparison.” It is not enough that Donkey-Skin’s beautiful dress is astonishing, but it must be superior to the other women’s—its “splendor could not be matched” and all other ornamentation becomes comparatively meager.

Lüthi argues that “close and effective contact” with the natural world is essential to fairy tale aesthetics so that “the beautiful goldand silver-colored clothing [that] is the gift of the heavenly bodies...is the way the fairy tale brings man and nature together.”
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Carol Scott argues that the sparkling gowns in fairy tales can act as “powerful agents” in catching “the prince’s devotion,” particularly those dresses “allied with the heavens” in their imitation of the sun, the moon, and the stars: “Their celestial design incorporates the magic of the heavens, their power is unassailable.”
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Maria Tatar also notes the cosmic attributes of the transformative dresses in “Donkey-Skin” and related stories and argues that the dresses are evidence of nature’s benevolent intervention. In many stories, Tatar claims, clothing liberates women from a lowly condition: “Social promotion depends primarily on proof of domestic skills...but it also turns to some extent on the receipt of gifts from nature, gifts that endow the heroine with nearly supernatural attractiveness.”
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Lüthi, Scott, and Tatar maintain that the dresses’ celestial designs produce an affinity between the protagonists and the natural world as well as with high magic and the supernatural, but for our purposes the connection is even more specific. Dresses that are constructed in emulation of the heavens suggest a correlation between cosmic hierarchy and social hierarchy: the sun, the moon, and the stars occupy the furthest reaches in the natural universe just as the monarchy occupies the highest point in a political world.
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The description of the winning dress in d’Aulnoy’s “Finette Cendron,” a story related to Perrault’s “Cinderella” and “Donkey-Skin,” captures a similar celestial theme: Cendron “dressed herself in magnificent fashion. Her gown was made of blue satin and covered with stars in diamonds. She had a sun made of them in her hair, and a full moon on her back, and all these jewels glistened so brightly that it was impossible to look at her without blinking.”
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These dresses are not merely eye-catching because they are costly and beautiful but because of their associational aspirations to cosmic superiority.