Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (4 page)

Basile offers a few exceptions. In “The Three Crowns,” the king responds passionately to the royal couple’s childlessness: “[The king] who since he could not have children would say at every hour of the day and wherever he happened to be, ‘O heavens, send me an heir to my state so that my house will not be left desolate!’”
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Similarly, in “The Enchanted Doe,” a king appeals to the heavens: “There was once a certain king of Long Pergola named Ionnone who had a great desire to have children and was always praying to the gods to make his wife’s belly swell up.” Hoping to appease the gods, the king is especially hospitable to passersby, but he eventually grows impatient and hammers his door shut against all visitors. Soon, a wise man appears and advises: “Get the heart of a sea dragon and have it cooked by a young virgin who, at the mere odor coming from the pot, will find herself with swollen belly; when the heart is cooked, give it to the queen to eat, and you’ll see that she’ll immediately become pregnant too, as if she were in her ninth month.”
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The recipe is so powerful that it can impregnate young virgins as well as the queen. Nancy Canepa argues that whereas Basile’s
Pentamerone
involves numerous extended portrayals of kings, their representation is overwhelmingly negative; she points to “ineptitude” as one of the many ways in which “these kings prove themselves deficient.”
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Whereas these monarchs’ plaintive appeals for fertility assistance might exemplify their incompetence, we could also argue that these are occasions—albeit rare—of the king’s participation in what was otherwise perceived as a female crisis.
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More often, in both male and female authored tales, the king is quickly erased from the pregnancy crisis, as though to absolve him of any responsibility, and the narrative spotlight turns to the queen. Straparola’s “The Pig Prince” illustrates how the pregnancy wish is typically resolved in the tales that provide a more extended resolution to the fertility problem: one day, as the queen was “walking in her garden and picking flowers, she suddenly felt tired. Upon noticing a spot covered with green grass nearby, she went over to it and sat down...soothed by the sweet songs of the birds on the green branches, she fell asleep. Now, by chance, three proud fairies flew by in the air while she was dozing.” The fairies recognize the queen’s dilemma and wish her into pregnancy.
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D’Aulnoy’s similar version of this tale, “The Wild Boar,” portrays a queen more proactive in her pleas for help: “Once upon a time there was a king and a queen who lived in great sadness because they had no children. Though still beautiful, the queen was no longer young, so she did not dare look forward to having any children. This tormented her a great deal. She slept little and was always sighing and praying to the gods and all the fairies to give her what she wanted.” This queen’s communion with the natural world is also more pronounced: “One day while she was strolling in a small woods, she gathered some violets and roses and also some strawberries. As soon as she had eaten some of the strawberries, she was overcome by a profound urge to sleep.” As the queen sleeps, she dreams that three fairies fly overhead and bestow her with the gift of pregnancy, and her dream is soon realized.
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In these and the many tales that follow a similar arc, there are three simple factors common to the impregnation scenes: the queen is outdoors in the garden or the woods, she falls asleep, and she ultimately conceives because of the intervention of one or more fairies. The queen’s response to her plight is typical of a fairy-tale protagonist’s paradoxical agency and passivity: her move to an alternative space acknowledges the need for action but her resourcefulness is limited, for she invariably relies on or is subject to supernatural, and primarily female, intervention.

The association between the sexualized female body and the natural world has been thoroughly scrutinized in feminist and eco-critical theory.
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In his study on theories of reproduction in the early modern period, Gelis argues that immersion in the natural world was perceived as essential for the woman seeking pregnancy: “A young wife worried at the non-appearance of children after several years of marriage might well repair to sacred trees, blessed springs, or old and venerated stones... It was only primordial elements like stones, trees, water and wind...that could put an end to a stubborn infertility which was seen as opposed to the very nature of womankind.”
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That the queens in these tales so routinely seek an outdoor sanctuary confirms this need for a separate and more sympathetic space than the one provided by the king’s court.

The sexualized import of the sleeping female figure in fairy tales has also been widely discussed, most prominently in relation to the variants of the familiar “Sleeping Beauty” tale type. From Basile’s “The Sun, Moon, and Talia,” to Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty,” to Robert Coover’s postmodern novella, 
Briar Rose,
 the association with the sleeping heroine and pregnancy is made in both subtle and blatantly disturbing ways.
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In his analysis of “Sleeping Beauty,” Bruno Bettleheim argues that the sleeping state provides the necessary quiescence as the female prepares for the active demands of pregnancy and motherhood.
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However, the Sleeping Beauty tale type also involves the active—sometimes violently so—participation of the male in sexual union, whereas in most pregnancy-wish tales the king is conspicuously absent.

Straparola’s “Biancabella and the Snake” may be one exception that offers a surrogate male participant. A powerful ruler wants a child, but “God had not granted” his wish, so “one day as his wife went walking to amuse herself in one of the gardens, she became very tired and sat down at the foot of the tree, where she fell asleep. While she dozed sweetly, a little grass snake crawled to her side and slipped in beneath her clothes without her ever feeling a thing. Then it entered her vagina and carefully made its way into her womb, where it rested quietly.”
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From the Bible to Emily Dickinson to Freud, the phallic imagery of the snake has become axiomatic, though Straparola’s narrow fellow in the grass is more gentle and feminized than threateningly virile. Indeed, many early modern depictions of the snake, particularly the serpent in the Edenic garden, were feminine.
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The sleeping queen’s passivity, however, is important in that the nature of a woman’s contribution to the act of conception and the formation of the fetus was a point of debate in early modern reproductive discourse about aberrant births, which we will explore in the next chapter.

Thus, in the tales that begin with a royal couple’s pregnancy wish, the king quickly disappears from this phase of the narrative while the queen is left to resolve the crisis; she seeks an alternative space in a feminized natural world, and in her sleeping state her body is vulnerable to forces beyond herself. Those larger forces are invariably female, for the most significant contribution to the queen’s fertility crisis comes from the female fairy world. Holly Tucker discusses the pivotal role played by fairies in tales that involve pregnancy and argues, as Marina Warner and others have, for a connection between literary fairies and early modern midwives: “Fairies do more than attend the birth scene; they also orchestrate every state of reproduction. They predict conception and, if angry, cast spells of infertility. They determine the circumstances and outcome of pregnancy by providing—or withholding—aid to the mother-to-be... Early modern tales consistently make clear the shared genealogy of fairies and midwives.”
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The next chapter will explore how the fairy world’s resolution of the queen’s infertility leads to critical and controversial royal pregnancies and confinements, but here it must be emphasized that in the tales concerned with the inability to conceive, the queen’s impregnation occurs almost exclusively in a female sphere marked by the intervention of the fairy community, whereas the king’s role has been effaced. A king would take credit for siring a healthy heir, but the ultimate responsibility to reproduce is ascribed to the queen.

Therefore, it is not surprising that in the face of infertility, the queen seeks assistance from a female-empowered world.

The expression of desire—the proverbial fairy-tale wish—is a common feature of the genre, and one of the most frequently expressed wishes is the longing for a child. Even when the pregnancy wish is not central to the subsequent narrative, the queens’ persistent reproductive laments offer a historical reminder of the royal directive to procreate and the desperation of early modern queens as they sought various resources to help them conceive.

Early Modern Queens: Catherine de Médicis and Mary Tudor

Just as fairy-tale queens relied upon the natural world and supernatural intervention to resolve their infertility, so also, early modern queens availed themselves of all manner of assistance, including prayers, pilgrimages, and potions. At times, the pressure to conceive was so intense that women falsely believed they were pregnant. For most women, reproductive desires and processes are highly personal matters, but a queen’s childbearing life was closely watched by her circle at court and speculated upon by the anxious public. When a queen did become pregnant, the occasion was cause for widespread celebration: Isabella of Spain’s daughter, known to history as Queen Juana the Mad, became pregnant shortly after her marriage to Philippe of Burgundy, and one of the ambassadors wrote to her parents from the Netherlands, “She is so gentle and so beautiful and fat and so pregnant that the sight of her would console your Highnesses.”
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Queens were watched closely for any signs of pregnancy, one of which was the odd pregnancy craving. Fairy tales and folklore are also filled with accounts of prenatal desires, especially for certain foods. Basile’s “Petrosinella” and Charlotte de la Force’s “Persinette,” early modern iterations of the “Rapunzel” tale popularized by the Brothers Grimm, describe women whose longing for a certain vegetable is so overwhelming that they agree to give up their newborn children in exchange. D’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat” also includes an episode in which a pregnant queen’s “violent urge” puts her in “great despair”: passing by an orchard, “she saw great trees laden with fruits which she imagined to be so delicious, she would eat of them or die.”
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This queen also trades away her daughter for the desired food. Such powerful urges can lead to disastrous bargains and these tales may, as Holly Tucker points out, “appear initially to reinforce the predominant notion that women cannot be trusted to live within the boundaries of moderation,” but the less extreme manifestations of pregnancy cravings were a welcome confirmation of a normal pregnancy.
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On February 23, 1533, the Spanish ambassador at the English court, Eustace Chapuys, reported that Anne Boleyn hinted to some courtiers that she was pregnant by announcing a sudden craving for apples. The king said that this was a sign that she was with child, which she denied, but then laughed and left the room. Chapuys and others read this episode as a clear sign of Anne’s “enceinte” condition.
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Anne’s successor, Jane Seymour, also had cravings when she was pregnant which sent a number of people scrambling to fulfill her wishes. John Husee, servant to Lord Lisle, the governor of Calais and his wife, Lady Honor Lisle, wrote that “the Queen’s grace...is with child” and that the “King commanded me to write to you for some fat quails, for the Queen is very desirous to eat some but here be none to be gotten.” He wrote again a few days later pressing them to send the quails “which the Queen greatly desireth. Her Grace is great with child.
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The procurement of quails for the pregnant queen became a matter of some urgency and is discussed in several subsequent letters. The quails were finally supplied and enjoyed and the gift helped Lady Lisle’s daughter, Anne, secure a position as one of Queen Jane’s ladies-in-waiting.

Unfortunately, anecdotes of queens happily enjoying their pregnancies are few whereas the historical record is filled with accounts of queens desperately attempting to become pregnant. Of the many queens who have left historical traces of their own pregnancy wishes, Catherine de Médicis’ fertility crisis was perhaps the most publicly enacted. Catherine de Médicis of Italy became a queen of France—first a consort and then a ruling queen mother—as a result of a politically volatile arranged marriage. Born into the powerful Médicis family of Florence and orphaned at infancy, Catherine was left under the protection of a series of Renaissance popes and cardinals. When Catherine was 12 years old, she was betrothed to the Duke of Orléans, who would later become King Henri II of France. The wedding took place when both Catherine and Henri were only 14, but not too young to be expected to take their procreative responsibilities seriously. According to Antonio Sacco’s dispatch to the Italian government, on their wedding night Catherine’s eager father-in-law, François I, observed the young couple in their matrimonial bed; he “wished to watch them jousting” and then emerged from the chamber to announce proudly that “each of them jousted valiantly.”
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This anecdote does not confirm consummation, though it is an indication of the carefully scrutinized and public nature of royal marriages.

In spite of this ostensibly auspicious beginning, the couple was childless for the first decade of their marriage. When Henri was in his late teens, he began an affair with Diane de Poitiers, a widow 19 years his senior, and coincidentally, Catherine’s distant cousin. Their relationship lasted until Henri’s death and rendered Diane a significant political and personal influence throughout Henri’s reign. The liaison was conducted openly and signaled proudly by their official imagery: as Sheila Ffolliott explains, “The borders between what was his/ hers/theirs were deliberately blurred. He wore ‘her’ colors. The polyvalence of symbols used by both permitted each to display a crescent in his/her device... Iconographically speaking, wherever Henri went, Diane was sure to go.”
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Given the intensity of Henri and Diane’s affair, Catherine’s childless state may not have been entirely surprising; however, the court grew increasingly worried when the Dauphin Francois died in August 1536, leaving Henri heir to the throne.