a gallimaufry

rats and fairies

Yes, it’s true, Helen has been slack about posting here this week. She’s been making us, for instance, for her daughter’s birthday present. It’s lucky that four-year-olds are so easily pleased (we are carefully posed so you see us in our best light). We’re Rapunzel and the Three Bears (according to the recipient). (How would that story work, I wonder?)

Helen’s also been making us. We’d like to be able to tell you that we were made with love, but there was a lot of cussing involved, especially over the making of Pink Fairy’s wings. We’re all based on or inspired by Margaret Bloom’s book Making Peg Dolls.

Now we’re all having a party in the Three Bears’ cave (this was made by Helen’s aunt, who is very clever and creative). We’ve got gin out the back. We can’t pass on any bookish news, but we thought we might tell you the story of the rat, or Rat Saga, as it became. This occurred on Wednesday. Don’t worry if you are sensitive! We can assure you that it’s a story with a happy ending for all concerned! See – we are all smiling!

During the night Helen was awoken by the thunder of tiny cat paws and a loud squeak. She realised immediately what had happened. That thug Puss had caught a rat and brought it indoors to scoff in the bathroom, only to discover that the rat was not dead; and the rat had made a break for freedom into the sitting-room with Mister Puss in hot pursuit. Not fancying rat guts all over her manky but still serviceable rug, Helen got out of bed to investigate. Before she could conduct a proper search, her daughter had bounced out of bed to find out what was going on. Preferring her child not to witness blood and violence just before she went back to sleep, Helen stopped, put her back to bed and returned to bed herself. She couldn’t hear any munching sounds so hoped for the best. A few hours later there was a big scuffle and a lot of squeaking. She got out of bed again, closed her daughter’s bedroom door and switched on the light.

Beside the sofa sat Mister Puss looking unusually angelic. No sign of a rat, so Helen guessed it was hiding beneath the sofa. Her sympathies at this point were with the rat. In any case the siege of the sofa could conceivably continue indefinitely and she didn’t think it practical or desirable to conduct daily life with a rat in her sofa. So she picked up Mister Puss and shut him into the kitchen, deaf to his cries of rage. Then she opened the front door a bit, as it’s handily next to the sofa, hoped the rat was as clever as rats are reputed to be and returned to bed. At six she rose to discover she’d forgotten to raise the door shutter. As she started winding it up, she saw the rat stroll past her and creep back under the sofa. She poked about under the sofa with an umbrella until she felt quite confident the rat had got the general idea and left. A little later she let the furious and swearing Mister Puss back into the sitting room. He went to the sofa but displayed no interest in it thereafter, so Helen decided that the job was done and the rat was gone.

But was it? [ominous music]

That evening, Helen was out teaching and her partner K and Mister Puss were ensconced on the sofa by the fire, watching the television. At one point K casually looked down and there, on the floor beside him, sat the rat, also watching the television. K moved and the rat retreated under the sofa. So K heaved the sofa over onto its side, and there was the rat and there also was a heap of cat food. At some point the rat had crossed the sitting-room, entered the kitchen and helped himself to the contents of Mister Puss’s dish – and unless rats carry lots of food in their cheeks like hamsters, he must have done this several times. Without anybody noticing.

The exposed rat didn’t seem terribly frightened and sauntered under a nearby table. K called to Mister Puss, who ignored him. He picked up Mister Puss and placed him in front of the rat. Mister Puss examined his toenails, looked at the ceiling, spotted something interesting on the other side of the room... K fetched him again but again Mister Puss immediately walked off. The rat was impassive. So K put on a pair of thick leather gardening gloves, picked up the rat and carried him outside. The rat was very cross about this and bit the gloves a lot and shrieked. K shoved him out into the garden and closed the door. He removed his gloves, set the sofa back on its feet and settled himself down to watch the television again. Then he heard a scritch, scritch, inside the sofa... He upended it again and there, peeping out of the hole in the bottom of it (it’s a second-hand sofa and a bit battered) was Mister Puss, who had crept in there to play and now didn’t want to come out again.

The end. Pass the gin!

(‘Make no mistake. I am still king. Soon all will bend to my will. Tremble, minions!’)

Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories, by Diane Purkiss

What do you think of when you think of fairies? A dead ancestor? A household help? Something tiny  in a sparkly pink skirt? Fairies have been all of these, and in this fascinating book Diane Purkiss traces their biography in British culture from their origins as child-eating demons right down to Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies and little girls’ fancy dresses.

‘Human nature’, writes Purkiss:

seems to abhor a blank space on a map. Where there are no human habitations, no towns, where villages dwindle into farms and farms into woods, mapping stops. Then the imagination rushes to fill the woods with something other than blank darkness: nymphs, satyrs, elves, gnomes, pixies, fairies.

But what exactly are fairies? To answer this, Purkiss advises us to look at what fairies do. Her conclusion is that:

A fairy is someone who appears at and governs one of the big crises of mortal life: birth, childhood and its transitions, adolescence, sexual awakening, pregnancy and childbirth, old age, death. She presides over the borders of our lives, the seams between one phase of life and another. […] She is a gatekeeper, and she guards the entrance to a new realm. Like all gatekeepers, she is Janus-faced, ambiguous: she has a lovely face, a face of promise, and a hideous face, a face of fear.

Broadly speaking, Purkiss’s thesis is that fairies are what we create to fill the dark places during times of transition, anxiety, uncertainty. They are identified with the Other: demons, ghosts, foreigners. And when people talk about fairies, it’s not necessarily because they believe in them but because they offer ways of speaking about the unspeakable.

The origins of fairies, Purkiss proposes, can be found in the ancient cultures of lands bordering the Mediterranean, to the nymphs, Lamiae and Gorgons of Greece, and even further back to Mesopotamian and Egyptian child-killing demons. These are the creatures of nightmare, the explanations for unnatural deaths. Many of them have died prematurely, or are infertile, and are compelled to visit their circumstances on others, slaying the young, sucking the life from babies even as they appear to suckle them. The fairies of mediaeval and early modern Europe continue to be associated with birth, sex and death, and prey on humans – handsome young men and babies especially. But they can offer occult knowledge or gold to those who dare to deal with them, and some fairies – hobs, brownies – will even clean your house if you leave out a dish of milk in payment. I’m still looking for those fairies.

Fairies provide ways of talking about and even justifying infanticide, incest, sexual deviance and sudden death. They also become associated with colonialism. Shakespeare and A Midsummer Night’s Dream get the blame in Purkiss’s eyes for the beginnings of the tiny, ‘cute’ fairy, whose apogee is in the Victorian era. The threat of the fairy dwindles with its size: it becomes possessable rather than possessing, an object to be purchased, consumed. While the scary fairy is more or less squashed by the Enlightenment, the pretty little fairy scampers around the stage in tights and spangles, popping out of trap-doors and flying on wires as theatres embrace new technologies. No longer a seductive revenant dressed in black, the fairy becomes childlike and innocent and Purkiss shows it as contributing to changing ideas about childhood during the nineteenth century. Fairies are linked to nationalism and war at the beginning of the twentieth century and thereafter lose any remaining cultural resonance for the majority of the population. Now that our planet is mapped, Purkiss argues, ‘Aliens are our fairies’.

(Henry Fuseli, Prince Arthur and the Fairy Queen, a scene from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, oil on canvas, c. 1788; Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; found here)

As you can guess from this very crude outline, this book covers an enormous amount of ground and Diane Purkiss has done an admirable job in creating a clear, coherent ‘biography’ from masses and masses of information including a couple of thousand years of literature, court records including Scottish witch trials, newspapers, folkloric research and philosophy. Because of fairies’ association with the Other, their history becomes a history of attitudes to difference and objects of fear. It is also fun because, while I wouldn’t and couldn’t pick a fight with Purkiss over her scholarship, she is unafraid to reveal her biases and thus invite discussion of her interpretations. And that is an attitude I like, although her wit is often barbed. Cruelly she mocks teeny tiny sparkly fairies, the works of Marion Zimmer Bradley, middle-class mummies, Puck, the now-defunct chain of shops called ‘Past Times’, do-gooders, which is amusing if you’re not included in her scorn, perhaps less so if you are … And she doesn’t have much time for people who do actually believe in fairies. They might want to avoid reading this book.

My copy of Troublesome Things is second-hand. The book is still in print, but like its subject, since its beginnings it’s changed its name (a couple of times: At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, Nymphs and Other Troublesome Things seems to be its US title and Fairies and Fairy Stories: A History is its current British title) and its appearance: the original cover illustration of a detail of Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Fella’s Master Stroke has been updated to something pink and Flowery Fairyish which I rather think Purkiss must loathe…

Hansel and Gretel

(Eleanor Davis, Witch House, 2007, 3-D model in cloth, wood, and acrylic; from here; the artist’s website is here)

You all know the story of Hansel and Gretel, don’t you? But you can read it here, if you like. Because in fact, on rereading it, I found there were elements I hadn’t remembered. That their mother was a stepmother, and that she was the moving force behind the abandoning of the children. That both parents had taken the children into the woods, not just the father. That each time, Hansel had pretended he was looking back to see something on the roof of the house – his little white cat, his dove – to hide his dropping of the trail of white stones or crumbs. That the parents had tied a bough to a tree to make a tapping noise like the tapping of an axe on a trunk and convince the children that they were still nearby when in fact they had crept home and left them alone in the forest. That after Gretel had killed the witch, a white duck carried them safely over ‘a great stretch of water’. That the stepmother had died while the children were in the forest. That the story ends thus:

Then all their cares were at an end and they lived in sheer joy together. My story’s done. See a mouse run. And whoever catches it can make a great big furry hood from it. (Joyce Crick’s translation from the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the Selected Tales.)

Joyce Crick’s note to the story explains that this ending was added in the fifth edition (1843) of the tales, when Wilhelm Grimm revised ‘Hansel and Gretel’ to reflect a version written by August Stöber (in Elsässisches Volksbüchlein). Crick writes:

In phrase after phrase the story now offers more purchase for moral judgement than the laconic discretion of the version in the first edition did. The stepmother is made harsher, the father more plagued by conscience, Gretel more weepy, Hansel more confident.

The famine which drives the family to the brink of starvation, the explanations and motivations for the characters’ behaviour, the white duck, these were all elaborations on the original story. There is a comparison of the first and fifth editions here, so you can judge the extent of the changes for yourself.

The stepmother was, until the fourth edition (1840), the mother. Marina Warner argued, as far as I recall since I don’t have a copy of From the Beast to the Blonde here, that the Grimms systematically turned the ‘bad mothers’ of their tales into stepmothers: this reflects a social fact – stepmothers often were harsher to their stepchildren and, in a world where food and other resources might be scarce and survival a struggle, often did favour their own children – and an emotional one – mothers must be nurturing and kind, they may not hate or kill their offspring, it’s an idea we simply do not like to entertain, even now.

In the woods lurks another maternal figure: the witch. If the stepmother is the Bad Mother, the witch is the Very Bad Mother Indeed. The delicious gingerbread house, the supper of ‘milk and pancakes with sugar, and apples and nuts’ and the ‘two lovely little beds with white sheets’ appear to be the attributes of a kind and loving parent, but alas, by the next day the old woman has locked Hansel in a cage to fatten him up and forced Gretel to be her skivvy.

The tale very clearly links hunger for physical food with hunger for maternal love. When Hansel and Gretel devour the gingerbread house, they’re not simply being gluttonous but desperately attempting to satisfy their craving for their mother. As Bruno Bettelheim points out in connexion with this story (in The Uses of Enchantment), the gingerbread house is in one sense the mother’s body, which literally feeds the infant. But the inhabitant of the house plans to feed upon the children. In this respect she is like the fairies I am reading about in Diane Purkiss’ Troublesome Things, fairies descended from Sumerian child-eating demons and lamia, who drain babies of life even as they appear to suckle them. In my family, adults – including me – often talk about ‘eating’ children: ‘I could gobble you up!’ But we’re not Sumerian child-eating demons: it’s a way of expressing our love. And this seems not freakishness on our part, but something quite common; well, between mothers and babies at least. And Maurice Sendak described his aunts and uncles as saying they would ‘eat him up’ when they visited him (they inspired the wild things in Where the Wild Things Are). And in your family?

Certain motifs in the story are connected by their colour, white: Hansel’s little cat and dove, who may be sitting on the roof; the shining white pebbles and the moon by whose light Hansel gathers them; the duck who carries the children safely over the water. These are the children’s helpers. But in the deceitful world of the gingerbread house, the milk and the white sheets on the little beds are part of the illusion of aid.

Despite its cheery themes of attempted infanticide and cannibalism, if any of the Grimms’ tales can be said to be for children, it is ‘Hansel and Gretel’. The children triumph through their own resourcefulness, they begin as powerless and abused but end the tale in control of their destinies and bringing home wealth to sustain the family. And they push their ‘mother’ into the oven! What could be more enjoyable for a child than vicariously doing that?

(Albert Weisgerber, illustration from Kinder- und Hausmärchen nach Sammlung der Brüder Grimm, retold by Hans Fraungruber; Wien & Leipzig: Martin Gerlach & Co., ca. 1900, from here; you can see the whole book here)

Illustration in text: Paul Meyerheim, illustration from Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1893; from here)

The Embankment, by T.E. Hulme

I first read this poem on a Tube train wall, aeons ago, when I lived in London and Poems on the Underground was introduced. (Is it still running? I do hope so.) I read it and loved it and had to get off the train immediately, whereupon I forgot the title and the name of the poet and could only remember the phrase about the ‘old, star-eaten blanket of the sky’. I never saw the poem again, but the phrase settled in my brain.

Then, last year, a dear friend gave me an anthology and the other night I found my poem! And here it is.

‘The Embankment’ (The Fantasia of a Fallen Gentleman on a Cold, Bitter Night)

Once, in finesse of fiddles I found ecstasy,
In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old, star-eaten blanket of the sky
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

(From Nicholas Albery (ed., assisted by Peter Ratcliffe), Poem for the Day: 366 Poems, Old and New, Worth Learning by Heart, London: Chatto & Windus, 2001)

The narrator’s calling himself a ‘fallen gentleman’ and using the antiquated ‘poesy’ make me think of him as a romantic; the first line seems, in rhythm and with the word ‘fiddles’, rather Irish. His ‘fantasia’ might be golden and ecstatic, but it’s contrasted with the ‘hard pavements’ and the need for ‘warmth’, ‘comfort’, and his anguished cry ‘Oh, God’: the grim reality of life on the streets. I think he’s a drunkard; do you? There is something of that wonderful, expansive sense of the world’s beauty which one feels when nicely drunk. A drunkard who dreams. But I also think that Hulme is referring to Oscar Wilde’s line from Lady Windermere’s Fan: ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’ And that seems a hopeful thought for a Monday morning...

oops

(Snowman and snowcatgirl visiting the dolls house; white paint, scarf manufacture and white cat hat* by me, faces, noses, buttons and bossing art direction by my daughter)
(*To make this I used a lovely book called Peg Dolls by Margaret Bloom)

I’m very sorry if you tried to leave a comment to my previous post and were unable to do so. Typepad suddenly got all frosty with me and my paying abilities. Now, magically, all seems fine again. Hurrah!