These poems are most readily available in the Geoffrey Brereton’s Penguin Book of French Verse, vol. 2. The texts appended to the essay are from that source. The English here is my own, meant (like the glosses provided by Brereton) only to facilitate reference to the French originals.
The drama of
human sexual love is subject to endless variation in expressions of the immense
power of the human erotic dynamo. Every
individual probably experiences a great variety of identities and relations
with a single beloved over a course of time. In general, perversions and
fetishes develop from a single-minded concentration on what might engage an
ordinary lover for a moment every now and then.
For instance, while exclusive BDSM tastes are rare, doubtless everyone
has momentarily experienced the wish to overmaster another, to gratify a drive
for power rather than sensual pleasure, to indulge a selfish rather than a
thoughtful impulse. By the dictate of
nature herself, the boundary of such play is death.
Such an extreme dialectic
between love and death, today the stuff of tabloids and films, was often
expressed in ballad-type songs. Two
early French folk songs, first recorded from the fifteenth century, may be
juxtaposed to form a diptych illustrating variations of the theme that might be
called love gone awry, distinguished from such harmonious conflations of love
and death as Wagner’s Liebestod in which to die is called höchste Lust
(highest desire or delight). This
mystical transport was associated by Wagner, who had been led by Schopenhauer
to India, with a longing for nirvana. [1] In “La Blanche Biche” (“The White Doe”)
and in “Renaud le tuer des femmes” (“Renaud the Killer of Women”) love
and death are joined in more sinister fashion.
In the first, the woman proves a victim, while in the second she
triumphs over her would-be attacker.
The lady in “La
Blanche Biche” at times becomes a white doe and in that form is hunted and
killed by her brother Renaud. The story
is akin to countless tales of human to animal transformation, many of which
feature a magic deer. These include the white
deer upon which Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty rode and the thousand-years-old
animal of Emperor Xuanzong. Lenape, Chickasaw, and other native American
groups told stories of supernatural white deer.
Yet today in the Ozarks people speak of Snawfus, the ominous white deer.
Among contemporary evocations of the
power of such animals, I am just now thirty miles from a shopping center called
White Deer Plaza [2] and I understand that the character of Gus on the Netflix
series Sweet Tooth, is a deer-human hybrid, though not white.
Celtic analogies
are far closer to the song’s French roots.
The Celtic god Cernunnos was depicted as a man with the antlers of a
deer; indeed, his very named derives from “the horned one.” Oisin’s mother Sadhbh was transformed into a
doe by Fer Doirich for refusing his advances.
Oisin’s own name means little deer.
According to Chretien De Troyes' Erec et Enide, King Arthur’s
court conducted an annual hunt after a white stag. David I of Scotland, while violating taboo by
hunting on the feast of the Holy Cross, has a vision of that same cross between
a white stag’s antlers seen by Sts. Eustace and Hubert. In Marie de France’s Guigemar the
knight of the title kills a white doe and is placed under a spell which may be
undone only when he as entered an unselfish love relationship.
The beauty of
white deer and the rarity of their appearance suggested that such animals
signaled an intersection of human and divine realms, and these contacts are
depicted as dangerous as often as they are exalting. “La Blanche Biche” ends with a horrible
display of the lady literally turned inside out, dismembered and displayed in
the kitchen and described in a macabre manner by the victim herself.
Ma tête est dans le plat
et mon coeur aux chevilles
Mon sang est repandu
par toute la cuisine
Et sur less noirs charbons
mes pauvres os y grillent.
(My head is in the dish
and my heart on pegs.
My blood is spilled
throughout the kitchen
And on the black coals
my poor bones are roasting.)
This implication
is reinforced by numerous parallels in other songs, particularly those from
Scotland. Thus in “The Bonnie Hind” a
young man, long away at sea, unknowingly has sex with his sister who, when she
discovers their relationship, commits suicide, causing him to laments the loss
of his “bonnie hind.” The man’s name is
even Randal, corresponding to the French Renaud. [3] Just as in the ancient story of Oedipus, this
song of the people depicts the most monstrous transgression imaginable, and the
oblique ballad dialogue of “La Blanche Biche” makes the crime seem so
very dreadful that it may only be only
suggested.
The
representation of the woman’s sexuality as a white doe implies a quasi-divine
character but at the same time a vulnerability.
The song is in a way like a sensational pulp fiction story with the
popular appeal of its sex and violence, ultimately resembling Grand Guignol or
a contemporary horror movie in the extremely graphic final stanza. Listeners [4] or readers might be in turn
thrilled by the image of the doe’s beauty, moved by her defenselessness, and
shocked by her death.
In “Renaud le
tuer des femmes” another Renaud, as wicked as the first, meets quite a
different end. The handsome but sinister
lover carries off the fair lady and, when she says she is hungry, shocks her by
saying that she may eat her own hand and drink her own blood. He threatens her with death, saying he has
already done away with thirteen women. Preparing
it seems to die, she, asks him for the sake of propriety to turn away as she
disrobes, and he, with a delicacy surprising in a killer, does, allowing her to
turn the tables, catch him unawares, and toss him into the pond to his death.
The song is one
of a large family of very similar narratives, distributed across Europe [5]. In
“May Colvin” and some versions of “the Outlandish Knight” the woman escapes by
the same ruse as in “Renaud le tuer des femmes,” while in “Lady Isabel
and the Elf-Knight” and “The Gowans Sae Gae” she convinces him to “sit down a
while, lay your head on my knee” and then employs a sleep charm. “The Water o Wearie's Well” has her asking
for a kiss and then grabbing him, while in “The Outlandish Knight” she asks him
to cut down the shoreside nettles for fear they would sully her body. In some Danish variants she strategically
distracts her antagonist by asking him to remove his mantle to avoid spattering
it with blood or offers to delouse him. [6]
In each of these it is the lady’s
own wit and courage that save her life, while in Perrault’s version of “Blue
Beard” the wife’s siblings rescue her. This
retelling is thought to be influenced by accounts of Breton king Conomor the
Accursed [7] whose wife and victim Tryphine requires the aid of St. Gildas to
return to life. This denial of agency to
the woman is hardly incidental. While
the contemporary reader will doubtless see the narrative as a heroic story of a
strong and wily woman, Perrault extracted quite a different “moralité,”
helpfully appended for the reader’s edification.
La curiosité, malgré tous ses attraits,
Coüte souvent bien des regrets ;
On en voit tous les jours mille exemples paraítre.
C’est, n’en déplaise au sexe, un plaisir bien léger;
Dès qu’on le prend, il cesse d’ètre,
Et toujours il coüte trop cher.
(Curiosity, in spite of its appeal, very often brings
regret. One sees a thousand examples
every day. It is, with all due respect
to the sex, a very slight pleasure which, when one takes it, ceases to be, and
costs too much every time.)
Perrault continues under the title
“autre moralité”:
Pour peu qu'on ait l'esprit sensé,
Et que du Monde on sache le grimoire,
On voit bientôt que cette histoire
Est un conte du temps passé;
II n’est plus d’époux si terrible,
Ni qui demande l’impossible,
Füt-il malcontent et jaloux,
Près de sa femme on le voit filer doux ;
Et de quelque couleur que sa barbe puisse ètre,
On a peine à juger qui des deux est le maítre.
(If one looks at this grim story with a sensible attitude,
you will instantly see that it is a story of days gone by. There is no spouse who would ask the impossible
of his wife, nor would he be so jealous and malcontent. Whatever color his beard may be, it is hard
to tell who is the master between the two.)
For Perrault the lesson of the story is
not that a young woman must look beyond wealth in selecting a lover and must
respond to danger with energy and enterprise, but rather that “curiosity” and,
presumably, disobedience, to which women are particularly inclined, leads to
problems. Unsatisfied with the statement
of this surprising inference, Perrault then enlarges upon it by implying
disapproval of the lessening of patriarchal authority in marriage. The terrible beard, the symbol of maleness,
has lost its power. [8]
Yet more than
three hundred years later the monster of sexism has retained disproportionate,
even murderous, force. While lacking
both the playful farce of fabliaux and the earnest aspirations of
courtly love, these songs depict a far darker erotic derangement in which
sensuality has become lethal aggression.
Both narratives might remind a modern reader of newspaper headlines,
since domestic violence remains commonplace world-wide. The immense libidinal energy, when blocked,
does not vanish, but rather surges with new and sometimes violent expression. Stories in song of brutal attacks on women
occasioned by incest, rape, adultery, or simply an extra-marital affair are not
only entertaining for their sensationalism; they are also based on lived
experience. These early French folk
songs represent two possible outcomes: in one the woman is consumed, while in
the other she survives. In each the
explosive destructive force of machismo provides a dramatic and sinister
antagonist.
1. Peter Bassett,
“The Use of Buddhist and Hindu Concepts in Wagner's Stage Works,” The
Wagnerian, January 1, 2014.
2. Mme. d’Aulnoy
included a version of the white hind story with a happier ending in her book of
fairy tales. The Abbots Bromley Horn
Dance, dating from the eleventh century, is an extraordinary survival in which
villagers yet today dance brandishing reindeer antlers along with a number of
other characters including Maid Marian, a fool, and a hobby horse. St Nicholas, of course, drives a team of
reindeer.
3. Other Scots songs
on the theme of incest include “Lizie Wan,” “Babylon,” “The King's Dochter Lady
Jean,” and “Sheath and Knife.”
4. The song has often
been recorded by French (by Tri Yann, for instance) and Canadian performers (including
Michel Faubert).
5. The story is classified as 312 in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther
Index.
6. See Holger Olof
Nygard, “Narrative Change in the European Tradition of the ‘Lady Isabel and the
Elf Knight’," The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 65, No. 255
(Jan. - Mar., 1952) for a survey of Scandinavian variants. Among the many other variations of the story
are “Tam Lin” where the man threatens extortion or rape but not murder, he
turns out to be an enchanted man whom the lady frees from his thralldom to the fairy queen. “Johnny Sands” is a late comic epigone in which
the trick leading to death is played by a long-suffering husband ridding
himself of a termagant wife.
7. The story appears
in Alain Bouchard, Grands Chroniques de Bretaigne (1532).
8. Unlikely as it
seems, this interpretation remained dominant.
In 1808 an anonymous retelling was published as Bluebeard, or the
Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience.
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