Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (22 page)

In “Donkey-Skin,” the king and the princess engage in a battle of wills until she finally escapes his unnatural advances; the flirtatious game Donkey-Skin and the prince play, on the other hand, leads to a natural and appropriate marriage. The story seems to divide neatly into a “before/after, wrong/right” pattern. But there are also significant parallels between the two parts of the tale: the prince and the father both desire Donkey-Skin for her beauty and her royal essence, and although voyeurism is less inappropriate than incestuous advances, male desire for a female object of rich, royal splendor operates in each case. Furthermore, in both parts of the story, Donkey-Skin herself uses the dresses—first to renegotiate her role in one royal family and then to obtain another, more socially sanctioned royal position. Donkey-Skin may be applauded for her escape from her father and her resourceful strategy in winning the prince, but she is entirely complicit in a system in which she is the target and recipient of the male gaze, reflecting back his desire. She also participates in a class hierarchy that demonstrates utter disdain for the lower classes, or “all the trash.” In spite of the prince’s claim that he would marry anyone who could wear the ring “no matter what class or lineage,” the tale does not subvert class structures, for Donkey-Skin is already a princess.

Thus, the beautiful dresses in “Donkey-Skin” are not merely accessories that enhance beauty or serve as magical survival tools: they are symbols of wealth, royalty, and exclusivity. Clothing is not transformative as much as it is reformative, for the magical gowns enable Donkey-Skin to retrieve and reveal her original identity as princess. Sumptuous clothing alone seldom confers royal status; in the fairy tales in which commoners become royalty, social elevation is never achieved merely through dress. On the other hand, without it monarchy is unattainable.

D’Aulony’s “The Blue Bird” also demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between clothing and royalty.
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This tale begins with a familiar premise: a queen dies and leaves behind an inconsolable king and a beautiful daughter, the Princess Florine, but in due time the king remarries a cunning widow with a daughter of her own, the ugly Truitonne, so called because “her face had as many spots as a red trout.” When another king, Charming, arrives to woo one of the princesses, the queen stepmother tries to make her own daughter the more attractive choice: “When the queen heard of his coming she employed all the embroiderers, and all the dressmakers, and all the craftsmen, to make things for Truitonne. She begged the king to give Florine nothing new; and, by bribing her maids, she had all her dresses, and wreaths, and jewels taken away the very day that Charming arrived, so that when the princess wished to deck herself she could not find so much as a ribbon.” Florine has nothing to wear but a “dirty little frock; and so much ashamed of it was she that she sat down in a corner of the hall when King Charming came in.”

Even in her shabby clothing, Florine captures Charming’s attention, and after he pays her a compliment she says, “Your majesty, I must tell you I am little accustomed to wearing so poor a dress as this, and I should have liked better had you taken no notice of me.” The king assures Florine that fine clothing is not necessary: “Madam, your incomparable beauty already adorns you too well for you to need any other aid.” The queen, enraged at Charming’s attention to her stepdaughter, imprisons her and then nearly tricks Charming into marrying Truitonne by disguising her as Florine. When Charming realizes that he has been duped and refuses the marriage, one of the queen’s fairies turns him into a blue bird as punishment. In order to torture Florine further, the queen and Truitonne, “in gorgeous apparel” and “royal mantle,” visit her in prison and pretend that Charming and Truitonne are married. They taunt Florine with presents from the royal wedding: “They spread out before the princess gold and silver stuffs, jewels, laces, ribbons, in great baskets of gold filigree work... Truitonne never forgot for a moment to make the king’s ring flash; and Princess Florine, no longer able to hide from herself her misfortune, begged them with cries of despair to take all these miserable presents out of her sight.”

Florine’s recognition of her misfortune and her lost status is largely based on materiality. When the king, in his bird form, discovers that Florine is in prison, he flies to her window every night and their love is rekindled. Periodically, the king flies back to his own kingdom to retrieve gifts—costly jewelry, ribbons, and various trinkets—so Florine can dress up for his nightly visits. For a king who had earlier insisted that Florine’s beauty needed no artificial enhancement, he is determined to adorn her in a royal manner: “Never a day passed but he made some present to Florine, a pearl necklace, or rings with the most brilliant jewels and of the finest workmanship, clusters of diamonds, bodkins... She never decked herself except in the nighttime to please the king.” Their love is sustained by this arrangement: he provides the adornment and she dresses up for him. Eventually, the queen discovers Florine putting on “such gay apparel” and her wrath initiates another series of hardships and separation, but when Florine’s father dies, the princess is liberated from prison and crowned queen. Once her kingdom is secure she disguises herself as a peasant and sets off to find King Charming. After another series of trials, the lovers discover each other, and their reunion does not occur without a reference to clothing: “He found her wrapped in a light robe of white taffeta, which she wore under her old clothes.”

“The Blue Bird” reveals a tension that is evident in numerous fairy tales in which clothing is central to the plot trajectory or to the construction of characters’ identities. On the one hand, an underlying sentiment suggests that clothing does not make the man, or the woman, that one’s true essence is internal and demonstrated through one’s demeanor and actions. But this impulse is overpowered by the more dominant insistence that clothing is more than superficial, that it is the necessary outward manifestation of royal worth. Because these protagonists often endure significant hardship, magnificent dress is often seen as a reward for suffering—hence the term “rags-to-riches”—and the tales are then considered subversive endorsements of the possibility of upward mobility. But the dazzling dresses in fairy tales are seldom awarded to the lowly; rather, sumptuous clothing elevates the already highborn or reaffirms previous royal status, upholding the status quo and demonstrating the inseparability of the internal and external proof of royal worth.

Queens in numerous tales are invested in their clothing and know how to use dress strategically, but as with “Donkey-Skin” and “The Blue Bird,” kings and princes also participate in what queens wear. In d’Aulnoy’s “The Ram,” a variation of a story most familiar to us from Shakespeare’s 
King Lear,
 the king’s interest in clothing is evidenced in his demand for obeisance and flattery from his three daughters. Even his favoritism for his youngest daughter, Merveilleuse, is manifest through clothing, for “the king her father gave her more gowns and ribbons in a month than he gave the others in a year.”
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While the king is away at war, the daughters decide to have special dresses made to celebrate his victorious return: “The three princesses had ordered three satin gowns to be made for themselves—one green, one blue, and the third, white. Their jewels were selected to match their dresses. The green was enriched with emeralds; the blue, with turquoises; and the white, with diamonds... When the king saw his lovely daughters in such splendid dresses, he embraced them all tenderly.” The king then asks each princess to explain the symbolism of her dress insofar as it reflects her love of him and his achievements. The first two daughters explain how their dresses can be seen as tributes to his military victories. Merveilleuse’s answer, in contrast, is directed not outward to his glorification but to herself. She chose white, she explains, “because, sire...it becomes me better than any color.” The king is angry with her answer but is then appeased by her explanation: “My motive was to please you.”

The king then poses another challenge, asking his daughters to explain what they dreamed of the night before his return. The responses of the first two daughters involve clothing: “The eldest said she had dreamed that he had brought her a gown with gold and jewels that glistened brighter than the sun. The second said she had dreamed that he had brought her a golden distaff to spin herself some shifts.” The king is pleased with these answers that suggest his beneficence, but then Merveilleuse explains that she dreamed her sisters were married and at the second sister’s wedding the king offered her a golden vase to wash her hands. The king is furious with what he believes to be a demeaning answer—that she would expect the king to serve her through the washing ritual. In “Snow White” fashion, the angry king sends a servant to take Merveilleuse “into the forest, and to kill her, after which you will bring me her heart and tongue.” The servant is unable to murder Merveilleuse and the princess escapes to the forest where she discovers the idyllic realm of a king who has been transformed into a ram under a vengeful fairy’s spell. The ram provides a luxurious life for Merveilleuse and she eventually “came to love him. A pretty sheep, very gentle and very affectionate, is not unlikely to please one, particularly when one knows he is a king, and that his transformation will eventually end.”

Merveilleuse’s queenly aspirations and the lavish material lifestyle make it easier for her to endure her exile from court. When Merveilleuse hears that her eldest sister is to be married, she asks to attend the wedding. King Ram “provided her with an equipage befitting her birth. She was superbly dressed, and nothing was omitted that would increase her beauty.” Since everyone assumes Merveilleuse is dead, she is able to pass unrecognized at the wedding: “As soon as she appeared, she dazzled everybody by her glittering beauty and the jewels which adorned her.” As she promised, Merveilleuse returns to King Ram and life proceeds happily until she hears of the upcoming wedding of her second sister. Again, the ram grants her permission as well as the means to make a magnificent appearance, but he begs her to return soon. At the wedding, Merveilleuse astonishes everyone with her splendor, especially the king, who offers her a golden basin to wash her beautiful hands. Merveilleuse then reveals herself and the meaning of her dream: that once her other two sisters were married and queens of their own kingdoms, Merveilleuse would be the heir to her father’s crown, signified by his offering her the golden basin.

The tragic ending of “The Ram” is unusual in fairy tales: Merveilleuse is so satisfied with her queenship that she forgets about the ram, who dies of despair when she fails to return as promised. Only when she is going out to “ride in a triumphal coach and show herself to everyone in the city” and sees the dear ram “stretched breathless on the pavement” is she slightly remorseful, but now she is sole queen, not a queen consort as she would have been had she stayed with the ram.

Merveilleuse, like Cinderella, Donkey-Skin, and Florine, now has the power of the throne and the wardrobe to prove it. To a modern sensibility, these heroines’ preoccupation with gorgeous clothing may suggest narcissism, superficiality, and conspicuous consumption. At the same time, they reveal a shrewd understanding that attaining and preserving their positions as queen necessitates a sumptuous sartorial display. In order to be queen, she has to dress the part.

Early Modern Queens: The Queen’s Wardrobe

In the first biography of Elizabeth I, published in 1625, historian William Camden described the fashion obsessions of late-sixteenth century England:

“In these days, a wondrous excess of apparel had spread itself all over England, and the habit of our own country, through a peculiar vice incident to our apish nation, grew into such contempt...the Queen, observing that to maintain this excess, a great quantity of money was carried yearly out of the land to buy silks and other outlandish wares to the impoverishing of the commonwealth... She commanded therefore by proclamation that every man should within fourteen days conform himself for apparel to a certain prescribed fashion, lest they otherwise incurred the severity of the laws: and she began the conformity herself in her own court.” 13

Like many of his contemporaries, Camden viewed the preoccupation with fashion as a sign of arrogance and superficiality, but he noted the economic and political consequences as well, the “impoverishing of the commonwealth.” Though Elizabeth attempted to curb sartorial excess through sumptuary legislation and enforcement at court, Camden explains that such measures were ultimately in vain. Sumptuary laws were always notoriously difficult to enforce, but perhaps Elizabeth’s ineffectiveness also unveils the complex relationship between a queen and her own wardrobe.

Recent scholarship acknowledging the significance of clothing in the early modern period has focused on the byzantine iterations of sumptuary legislation, the upsurge of textile manufacture and trade in an increasingly global economy, and the role of fashion in the creation of selfhood and nationhood.
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In their important work
Renaissance Clothing and the
 
Materials of Memory,
 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass discuss the ways in which clothing—including production, ownership, exchange, use, and display—was at the core of an early modern concept of self: “To understand the significance of clothes in the Renaissance, we need to undo our own social categories, in which subjects are prior to objects, wearers to what is worn. We need to understand the animatedness of clothes, their ability to ‘pick up’ subjects, to mold and shape them both physically and socially... For it is through the coronation service—the putting on of a crown and coronation robes—that the monarch becomes a monarch.”
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The notion that a person’s internal essence is distinct from his or her superficial clothing was emerging in the early modern period, but far more prevalent was a belief that clothing permeates, constructs, and defines the wearers.