7 Butchering Girls

7 BUTCHERING GIRLS Red Riding Hood and Bluebeard For heroines of the ‘innocent slandered maiden’ type we can expect a murder attempt, but the tale does not really centre on the murder episode as such, and the heroine for her part does not do a great deal to avert her fate, although she may show considerable initiative in variants where she is disguised as a man. Other tale-plots are, however, considerably more inclined to indulge an appetite for ghoulish horror, at times apparently for its own sake, and the ‘compassionate executioner’ is not likely to be on standby either. Tales of plucky young girls who elude being devoured or murdered by an animal or human predator are well entrenched in the modern repertoire. The best known are Little Red Riding Hood (Little Redcap) and Bluebeard; both are often felt to be tales of relatively limited distribution and obscure early history. Once more there is a great deal of further exploration still to be done. Red Riding Hood (AT Type 333)1 The Perrault version of Little Red Riding Hood is the first available example of the modern tale, and also the best known: The girl in the red cape has to cross the wood on an errand to her grandmother. In conversation the wolf elicits details of her errand, comes to the grandmother’s house by a different route, and swallows both. Not until the Grimms does there appear to be a happy ending, in which the wolf is forced to disgorge the victims still alive and is then himself killed by having his belly weighted with stones; a second wolf in a clumsy doublet attack is then drowned in a water butt. There is also an all-animal version, in which a wolf swallows all but one of seven goat’s kids, and once more is drowned (AT Type 123). In the most extensive modern discussion, Jack Zipes accepts the theory that the tale itself is of little more than local distribution in western Europe in the first instance, with an evident epicentre in lycanthropy trials as late as the seventeenth century in provincial France.2 But the picture is always changing. We should note an earlier and different looking tale at least in neighbouring north Italy. In Boccaccio’s Decameron (9.7) there is a rather more ordinary wolf-meets-girl story: Talano d’Immolese dreams that his wife Margarita is caught by a wolf, and warns her not to go to the wood the next day. She is at the best of times a quarrelsome wife and goes into the wood, suspecting that her husband has a lover’s assignation there. She is indeed caught by the neck by a wolf, and is only rescued by chance by some shepherds; she bears the marks on her neck and is more respectful of her husband in future. This is obviously, like Red Riding Hood itself, capable of being ‘read’ as a cautionary tale, but this time a more obviously adult one: the woman is married and there is the suspicion of the husband’s affair. The wolf does catch the woman, and is forced to let her go; but there is no gross violation of probability as there is in the wolf’s disgorging a child alive—let alone talking to her in the first place. The anticipatory dream of capture in an animal’s mouth and dispute between husband and wife over the value of the dream gives the story affinities with Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale; but it does deserve at least a mention in the context of Red Riding Hoods. Equally unmentioned in discussion of any Red Riding Hood canon are examples where the victim is not a girl but a boy—a possibility which might serve to qualify some of the more extreme feminist readings of the 3 Copyright © 2000. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. tale. A modern Persian example runs as follows: EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/2/2016 11:32 AM via COUNCIL ROCK HIGH SCHOOL NORTH AN: 60882 ; Anderson, Graham.; Fairytale in the Ancient World 66 Account: s1837674 A little boy is sent through a wood by his mother to take food to his father who is working in the fields at the other side. He meets the wolf and the usual conversation takes place; the wolf gets to the house where the father is staying, but he is not at home. When the boy comes home the wolf invites him to rest in bed. The boy takes his clothes off and comes to bed beside the wolf, and once more the usual conversation takes place; the boy is under the impression till the last moment that the wolf is his father—who returns in time to kill the wolf with a single stroke. It is not clear whether this is a radical remodelling of the Perrault version: it certainly owes nothing to the oral strain of the tale that survives in France in Delarue’s now well-known nineteenth-century peasant version from Nièvre,4 with the girl forced to drink the grandmother’s blood, but pleading a call of nature to escape. It seems odd that the wood is there and the dialogue so closely identical, even though oral recital tends to maintain the ‘jingle’ element as the most stable. (‘All the better to “x” you with…’). It seems suspicious that the two paths through the wood are kept as they occur in Perrault, and oddly inconsistent to have it necessary for the father to be staying far enough away to require lodgings if a child is to be sent on an ordinary errand. It may simply be the case that this is a ‘remake’ for a more male-oriented society, or that it is a man’s version in a society where women may have their own tales.5 But even if that is so, it establishes that there may be reason for a male version in the Near East. There are other such versions: Tom Thumb may be swallowed first by a cow, then by a wolf, and is able to entice the wolf home and encourage it to eat too much to escape before calling on his father, who kills the wolf and rescues him.6 Andrew Lang published a French literary version in which the girl is called Little Golden-hood (‘the colour of fire’) in which the magic golden cap was made by the witch-grandmother and is eaten by the wolf, burning his throat and bringing about his capture.7 Little attempt has been made to ask whether this much-loved fairytale is as old as the Ancient World. Perhaps the most completely satisfactory all-round analogue from antiquity is to be derived from a notice in Pausanias (6.6.7–11) about the famous boxer Euthymus of Locri in southern Italy. He was visiting nearby Temesa when he heard about a custom currently taking place there. Every year they had to offer a virgin ‘bride’ to a local spirit—of one of Odysseus’ crew, long ago stoned to death as a rapist. The spirit—known by the neutral term of Heros—had a temple precinct in which the virgin had to be left (in Callimachus the spirit simply calls for a bed, and for those who brought her not to look back).8 Euthymus entered the shrine, took pity on the girl, accepted her offer of marriage in return for saving her, fought and defeated the spirit, and drove it into the sea. Pausanias had also seen a picture of Euthymus’ feat— in which the spirit was depicted as dark and terrifying and wearing a wolfskin. We have no actual swallowing of the girl and no red in her clothing, but the evidence relating to Callimachus’ version indicates that in the rite defloration normally took place. Otherwise we have everything we need: deaths for the wolf-man involving first stoning, then (presumably) drowning; Euthymus as the huntsman; an enclosure with a bed, as in the fairytale’s cottage scene; and a sexual motif. We have the wolf named in the picture as Lykas (‘Mr Wolf’); but the ‘girl that got away’ remains unnamed. There are a number of other candidates. If none is so good a match, a number actually involve the element or implication of ‘red’ in the girl’s name or general identity. We can begin by asking whether any ancient hunter associated with a girl named ‘Miss Red’ also killed a wolf-man? No single mythographic source offers us an answer, but when we combine two scraps of evidence, one from Greek tragedy and one from later mythological narrative, we find a candidate. We are told in Euripides’ Heracles that the hero has an enemy Lycus (‘Mr Wolf’), who has killed Heracles’ father-in-law Creon and the hero’s own wife Megara and her children; Heracles will of course despatch him in due course. And we also know from the Megara attributed to Moschus that Megara, the wife of Heracles, had a sister Pyrrha (‘flame-red’). We have no details, but we are entitled to infer that the reasons for Heracles’ vengeance on Lycus include the desire to protect the surviving members of his wife’s family.9 We might put it briefly like this: ‘hunter Heracles kills wife-killer Wolfman; sister Redgirl survives’. Nor is this obscure Pyrrha the only ‘flame-red’ candidate available.

Load more