One of the best-known Animal Bride tales of medieval Europe is the story of Melusine, written down by Gervasius of Tilbury in 1211. A count meets Melusine beside a pond and falls in love with her. She agrees to marry on one condition: he will never see her on a Saturday, which is when she takes her bath. They wed, and she bears the count nine sons — each one deformed in some fashion. Eventually the count breaks the taboo, spies on her bath, and discovers her secret. Every seventh day, his wife is a woman from the waist up and a serpent below. When the count’s trespass comes to light, Melusine transforms into serpent shape and vanishes — appearing thereafter only as a spectral presence to warn of danger. In medieval tellings, the monstrous sons are evidence of Melusine’s demonic nature — but in older versions of her story Melusine is simply a water fairy. The emphasis of the older tales is on the husband’s misdeed in breaking his promise, thereby losing his fairy wife, rather than on his discovery that he is married to a monster.
In the fifteenth century, a wandering alchemist by the name of Paracelsus wrote of magical spirits born from the elements of water, earth, air, and fire, living alongside humankind in a parallel dimension. These spirits were capable of transforming themselves into the shape of men and women, and lacked only immortal souls to make them fully human. A soul could be gained, Paracelsus wrote, through marriage to a human being, and the children of such unions were mortal (but lived unusually long lives). Several noble families, it was believed, descended from knights married to water spirits (called “un-dines” or “melusines”) who had taken on human shape in order to win immortal souls. Paracelsus’s ideas went on to inspire the German Romantics in the nineteenth century — in tales such as Goethe’s “The New Melusine,” E. T. A. Hoffman’s “The Golden Pot,” and especially Friederich de la Motte Fouqué’s “Undine,” the tragic story of a water nymph in pursuit of love and a human soul. Fouqué’s famous tale, in turn, inspired Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” along with other literary, dramatic, and musical works of the Victorian era. Many folklorists consider such tales to be part of the Animal Bride tradition, depicting as they do the union of mortal men and creatures of nature.
In the years between Paracelsus and Fouqué, fairy tales came into flower as a literary art of the educated classes, popularized by Italian and French publications that eventually spread across Europe. Animal Bride and Bridegroom tales were part of this enchanting literary movement. Giambattista Basile’s Il Pentamerone, published in Naples in the seventeenth century, included several stories of the type — such as “The Snake,” about a princess who marries a snake, loses him, and then must win him back. Later in the century, the term “fairy tale” (conte de fées) was coined by the writers of the Paris salons, who drew inspiration for their tales from folklore, myth, medieval romance, and prior works by Italian writers. A number of the contes were by women who used the metaphoric language of fairy tales to critique the social systems of their day while avoiding the notice of the court censors. In particular they railed against a marriage system in which women had few legal rights: no right to choose their own husband, no right to refuse the marriage bed, no right to control their own property, and no right of divorce. Often the brides were barely out of puberty and given to men who were decades older. Unsatisfactory wives could find themselves banished to a convent or locked up in a mental institution. The fairy-tale writers of the French salons were sharply critical of such practices, promoting the idea of love, fidelity, and civilité between the sexes. Their Animal Bridegroom stories reflected the fears common to women of their time and class, who did not know if they’d find a beast or a lover in their marriage bed. Madame d’Aulnoy, for instance, one of the leading writers of the contes, had been married off at age fifteen to an abusive baron thirty years her senior. (She rid herself of him after a series of adventures as wild as any fairy story.) By contrast, the lovers in d’Aulnoy’s tales are well matched in age and temperament; they enjoy books, music, intellectual pursuits, good conversation, and each other’s company. D’Aulnoy penned several Animal Bride and Bridegroom tales that are still widely read and loved today, including “The Green Snake,” “The White Cat,” “The White Deer,” and the tragic tale of “The Royal Ram.”
Madame de Villeneuve, author of “Beauty and the Beast,” was part of the “second wave” of French fairy tales in the following century, but arranged marriages were still the norm when she sat down to write her classic story. The original version is over one hundred pages long and is somewhat different from the story we know now. As the narrative begins, Beauty’s destiny lies entirely in the hands of others, and she can do naught but obey when her father hands her over to the Beast. The Beast is a truly fearsome figure, not a gentle soul disguised by fur; he is a creature lost to the human world that had once been his by birthright. The emphasis of the tale is on the Beast’s slow metamorphosis as he finds his way back to the human sphere. He is a genuine monster, eventually reclaimed by civilité and magic.
Sixteen years later, Madame Le Prince de Beaumont, a French woman working as a governess in England, shortened and revised Madame de Villeneuve’s story; she then published her version, under the same title, in an English magazine for young women. Tailoring the story for this audience, Le Prince de Beaumont toned down its sensual imagery and its implicit critique of forced marriages. She also pared away much unnecessary fat — the twisting subplots beloved by Madame de Villeneuve — ending up with a tale that was less adult and subversive, but also more direct and memorable. In Le Prince de Beaumont’s version (and subsequent retellings) the story becomes a didactic one. The emphasis shifts from the transformation of the Beast to the transformation of the heroine, who must learn to see beyond appearances. She must recognize the Beast as a good man before he regains his humanity. With this shift, we see the story alter from one of social critique and rebellion to one of moral edification. Subsequent retellings picked up this theme, aiming at younger and younger readers, as fairy tales slowly moved from adult salons to children’s nurseries. By the nineteenth century, the Beast’s monstrous shape is only a kind of costume that he wears — he poses no genuine danger or sexual threat to Beauty in the children’s version of the tale.
In 1946, however, Beauty and her beast started to make their way out of the nursery again in Jean Cocteau’s remarkable film version, La Belle et la Bête. Here, the Beast literally smolders with the force of his sexuality, and Beauty’s adventure can be read as a metaphor for her sexual awakening. It is a motif common to a number of Animal Bride and Bridegroom tales from the mid-twentieth century onward, as an adult fairy-tale revival brought classic stories back to mature readers. One of the leaders of this revival was Angela Carter, whose adult fairy-tale collection, The Bloody Chamber(1979), contained two powerful, sensual riffs on the Animal Bridegroom theme: “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride.” With the works of Carter and other writers of the revival (A. S. Byatt, Tanith Lee, Robert Coover, Carol Ann Duffy, etc.), we find that we have come back to a beginning. Contemporary writers are using animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation. just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many, many centuries past.
One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he’s exotic, almost appealing. Where once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it’s been tamed and cultivated (or set aside and preserved); the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives “the wild” a different kind of power; it’s something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods — they come from a place we’d almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, and limitless. Likewise, tales of Beastly Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within each of us — and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us — cat and mouse and coyote and owl — and the Others who live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illusion, fiction and the lives we live. Those lines, however, are drawn in sand; they shift over time; and the stories are always changing. Once upon a time a white bear knocked at the door. Today Edward Scissorhands stands on the porch. Tomorrow? There will still be Beasts. And there will still be those who transform them with love.