One sunny day a good frau was preparing the morning story for her children. But every tale she pulled out of the cupboard was somehow unsatisfactory, lacking in nutrition and moral fibre. Liberally sprinkled with elves and talking animals and very dubious behaviour, they would not sustain her offspring through a rigorous day at school. Fortunately the frau was resourceful; she whipped out her cooking pot, hung it over the fire and began to make a delicious soup. In she threw a handful of ‘Bluebeard’, a spoonful of ‘Six Swans’ and a dash of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, perhaps even a dusting of ‘Genesis’, and she simmered it all in a delicious broth of Catholicism.
I believe that’s the origin of this tale. A poor woodcutter and his wife have a lovely daughter; alas they’re poor and starving but Our Lady appears to the man while he’s working in the woods one day and tells him to bring his child to her and she will care for her as a mother. So he fetches the little girl, and Our Lady takes her up to heaven and it’s just great: ‘She had cake to eat and sweet milk to drink, and clothes made of gold, and the little angels to play with.’ When the girl is fourteen years old, Our Lady has to leave on unspecified business and hands over the keys to the thirteen doors of heaven; she may open all but one. Of course, the girl disobeys:
Now the forbidden door was the only one left, and she felt a great longing to know what was hidden behind it and she said to the little angels: ‘I won’t open it all the way, and I won’t go in, but I will unlock it, so that we can see through the crack just a little.’ ‘Oh no,’ said the little angels, ‘that would be a sin; the Virgin Mary has forbidden it, and it could well be your misfortune.’
(My friend Joyce writes that all the dialogue was added by the Grimms and I love the way the girl minimises her naughtiness – ‘I won’t open it all the way...’ – and involves her friends, assuming that they will want to have a peek too, there’s a real flavour of children’s behaviour there; I also love the prissiness of the little angels’ response.)
Behind the thirteenth door is the Trinity, ‘radiant and fiery’, and the girl not only gazes at it in wonder but puts out her finger and touches it, staining her finger indelibly gold. When Our Lady returns and asks for the keys, she asks the girl three times if she has disobeyed her – the evidence of the gold finger is pretty damning – but the girl persists in denying this. So she’s cast out of heaven into the wilderness and rendered mute. Life is miserable and involves a lot of eating of berries and lacking of clothes, but after a few years a king rides by, falls in love with her and takes her home to be his queen. Each year for the following three years she is brought to bed with child, and shortly after she has given birth Our Lady appears to her, returns to her the power of speech briefly and asks her to confess her sin – otherwise Our Lady will take her baby away. And each time the queen denies that she opened the third room and loses her child. Unpleasant rumours about cannibalism circulate and after the third occasion the king’s counsellors prevail upon him to have her burned at the stake. But the flames melt ‘the hard ice of her pride’ and in the nick of time she repents and shouts out, ‘Yes, Mary, I did open the door!’ A sudden cloudburst extinguishes the flames and Our Lady pops down with the three children and tells everyone, ‘Whosoever repents of their sin and confesses it is forgiven.’
What I find striking about this tale is the role of Our Lady. The villains – the witch in the gingerbread cottage, Bluebeard/Fitcher, the queen mother from many stories including ‘The Six Swans’ and some versions of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ – are replaced by the Virgin Mary, not usually noted for her cruelty. (Or child-snatching.) Acts which are evil in the other stories are used to good ends here, but it is perhaps a risky narrative strategy to associate Mary with the abuse of power. But I think you can also reflect them back and see ‘Our Lady’s Child’ as commenting on, interpreting, the stories from which it cherry-picks. By using these elements* as moral trials and just punishments, the storyteller implicitly points to their use in the original tales as testing experiences which spur some sort of emotional or moral growth. It’s a story that understands the power of other stories and does not make the mistake of dismissing them as ‘fairy tales’ of no worth.
The Catholic framework connects ‘Our Lady’s Child’, a story of a fall from grace through disobedience, pride and the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, with Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden. In the tale’s Christian age, of course, salvation is possible (with the help of the Church) through repentance. It’s a retelling of the Fall of Man with the happy ending of the New Testament tacked onto it. Suffering and even being burned at the stake are unimportant in the face of eternity. Yet it can also perhaps be read as the enactment of a mother–daughter conflict: the girl reaching adolescence and needing to assert her independence, which she chooses to do through disobedience and lying. (There are better ways to prove you are your own person, but then I imagine that Mary might be a little overwhelming as a mother.) Other stories which dramatise power struggles between (step)mothers and daughters tend to end with the daughter triumphant; here the mother’s potency is challenged but not overthrown. Fitting, of course, as a vehicle for a Church which emphasised the importance of obedience in Christian life.
Next week: The Tale of the Boy who Set Out to Learn Fear
* Admittedly the correspondence of Mary with the witch from ‘Hansel and Gretel’ isn’t used in this way, but she is the witch’s direct opposite, a nurturing rather than a devouring mother, as Bettelheim might put it.
(First illustration above: Heinrich Lefler and Joseph Urban, ‘Marienkind’, in Grimm’s Märchen, Vienna: M. Munk, 1905; found here. Second illustration, O. Herrfurth [?], found here; for a properly Catholic flavour!)