Allying with Beasts: Rebellious Readings of the Animal as Bridegroom (ATU 425)

Abstract

This article analyzes the French fairy tale “La Belle et la Bête” (“Beauty and the Beast”), the German folk tale “Das singende springende Löweneckerchen” (“The Singing Springing Lark”), and the Spanish folk tale “El lagarto de las siete camisas” (“The Lizard with the Seven Shirts”) from the vantage point of feminist fairy tale studies and posthumanism. In particular, the article discusses the ways in which the female protagonists and their enchanted, beastly husbands become-with-each-other. The relationships between the female protagonists and their husbands are here taken as indicative of a recognition of the necessary, but often complex and disharmonic, allyship between the human and the nonhuman. The tales showcase different degrees of feminist potential and different ways of acknowledging such transcorporeal interrelations. Moreover, while they arguably transmit patriarchal and aristocratic lessons, their potential for challenging anthropocentric thinking emerges in an affirmative reading. Hence, this article seeks to demonstrate the eco-activist potential of the Western fairy tale tradition.

1. Introduction

A young girl, more beautiful and valorous than any of her siblings, is forced into an intimate relation with an anthropomorphized, frightening animal. Courageously accepting her destiny, the girl learns that her beastly companion is a bewitched prince whose spell her love can break. However, when one or more other women attempt to force the happy couple apart, it is only with intelligence—and some magic helpers—that the girl succeeds in saving her husband, ensuring their everlasting matrimonial bliss.

Such is the basic plot structure of the three fairy tales to be studied in this article, the French “La Belle et la Bête” (“Beauty and the Beast” (de Beaumont [1757] 1806)), the Grimm tale “Das singende springende Löweneckerchen” (“The Singing Springing Lark” (Grimm et al. [1837] 2015)), and the Spanish “El lagarto de las siete camisas”1 (“The Lizard with the Seven Shirts” (Espinosa 1946)).2 The tales belong to type 425 in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther (ATU) index: “The Animal as Bridegroom/The Vanished Husband.” While they are often read as didactic accounts of virtue rewarded or as symbolical accounts of the psychosexual development of girls, this article focuses on their central trope of human–nonhuman relations. My main research question is as follows: how are ideas of gender and animality constructed in interplay in ATU 425 tales?

With a contextual, feminist approach to fairy tale studies as foundation, I argue that posthumanist notions of relational becoming help identify an ecological content in these stories. By performing what I call “rebellious readings”, I emphasize how the female protagonist relates to her animal bridegroom and other nonhuman actors. The stories are selected with the intention of showcasing different degrees of acknowledgment of the value of the nonhuman. Thus, I claim that the Western fairy tale tradition has potential to challenge the patriarchal and anthropocentric value system often assigned to it.

2. Fairy Tales and Feminism

In psychoanalytic approaches to the genre, folk and fairy tales are regarded as expressions of a common human essence, with little attention to their culture- or gender-specific aspects. The extremely influential Bruno Bettelheim ([1976] 1991) regarded fairy tales as instruments of psychosexual development, with the trials and triumphs of the young hero standing in allegorically for an Oedipal process of maturation. For example, in Bettelheim’s analysis, “Beauty and the Beast” “foreshadows by centuries the Freudian view that sex must be experienced by the child as disgusting as long as his sexual longings are attached to his parent, because only through such a negative attitude toward sex can the incest taboo, and with it the stability of the human family, remain secure” (Bettelheim [1976] 1991, p. 308). Here, the trope of shapeshifting is considered a culture-independent narrative element, based in an alleged common human process of psychosexual development.

However, feminist scholars have problematized this viewpoint. Marina Warner (1995) argues that fairy tales should be considered to be anchored in sociocultural contexts where women play a key role. One of her examples is a reinterpretation of the character of the wicked stepmother who protects her own children while acting cruelly to the point of murdering the offspring of her spouse. Rather than an Oedipal allegory representing a transcendental feminine evil defeated by the unconscious, Warner argues that this trope reflects gender and power struggles in Early Modern Europe (Warner 1995, p. 213). It is well known that laws of male primogeniture incentivized women of high birth to cause the deaths of stepchildren who might else dispute the social rank of their biological children.

In a similar vein, Maria Tatar (1992, p. xxi) argues that many scholars are drawn to psychoanalytic readings exactly because they allow readers to disregard the fact that much fairy tale content is real. Tatar goes on to point out that Bettelheim’s analyses depend on a very specific view of gender roles, showing a rather accusatory attitude towards women and children even when they are victims within the fairy tale storyworld (Tatar 1992, p. xxiii). A crucial matter in feminist fairy tale scholarship is to highlight how these texts—and the ways in which they have been rewritten and reinterpreted—speak to palpable ethical dilemmas on the sociocultural as well as on a personal level.

Furthermore, these stories have to a large extent been narrated by women, from the bedside tales of mothers and wetnurses to the salon fairy tales of the 17th century French précieuses (Zipes 1994, p. 18). As Warner remarks, “if you accept Mother Goose tales as the testimony of women, as old wives’ tales, you can hear vibrating in them the tensions, the insecurity, jealousy and rage of both mothers-in-law against their daughters-in-law and vice versa, as well as the vulnerability of children from different marriages” (Warner 1995, p. 238). This also applies to what Jack Zipes (1994, p. 32) has defined as the first literary fairy tale for children: Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s version of “Beauty and the Beast”.3 The basic elements of this and other ATU 425 stories are known from ancient sources such as Apuleius’ “Cupid and Psyche” in The Golden Ass, “the earliest extant literary version of the tale” (Tatar 1992, p. 141). Madame Leprince de Beaumont may thus have drawn on several intertexts, with her most immediate inspiration being a version of the fairy tale published by the novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740.

Importantly, “Beauty and the Beast” “originated as a sex-specific tale intended to inculcate a sense of good manners in little girls” (Zipes 1994, p. 32). Comparing this tale to later, orally transmitted, versions of the same type thus enables a study of how the genre negotiates gender in tandem with ideas of the nonhuman. In addition, Zipes underlines that although Madame de Beaumont’s fairy tale was written to instruct young women in humility and patience when it comes to accepting their allotted husband, the story also suggests that women may be furnished with an innate good moral sense (Zipes 1994, p. 34). This represents a novelty at the time, indicating how fiction allows for differing and ideologically complex readings.

3. Rebellious Reading

Fairy tales demonstrate how societal attitudes to children and the process of becoming an adult shift and change (Tatar 1992, p. 20). Indeed, they register the anxieties and norms of the society in which they are transmitted, often conveying ethical pronouncements in both allegorical and direct ways. However, as Tatar remarks, “[f]airy tale figures rarely possess the moral stability with which they are invested through high-minded judgments and pronouncements (mainly for the benefit of children) inserted into the tale itself” (Zipes 1994, pp. 153–54). Indeed, as folklorist Kay Stone has shown, many women reinterpret female characters arguably depicted in a demeaning or misogynist way (Stone 2008, p. 43). This productivity inherent in all reader reception provides a key point of departure for the following analysis. Reading a fairy tale anew and making it matter is an important aspect of how these stories are remembered and transmitted. Thus, asking how they can be made to matter in a time when humans are becoming acutely aware of their troubled interrelation with the nonhuman world constitutes a rebellious act in parallel to how misogynist fairy tales have been repurposed for female identity development.

In order to understand the fluidity of fairy tales’ interpretive potential, I build on posthumanist and new materialist theories of affect. These attempt to bridge the materialist foundation of the environmental humanities and the constructivist viewpoints of gender studies. Affects are here defined, with reference to theorist Rosi Braidotti (2002, p. 104), as the capacity of a body to enter into relations. Furthermore, I understand the term “body”, following ecofeminist Astrida Neimanis, as any temporarily stable assemblage of parts, always subject to change in its continuous entering into new relations with other bodies (Neimanis 2019, p. 44). This theoretical framework moves the focus from beings to becomings, asking how bodies transform, relate and create possibilities for the unexpected and unthought.

Importantly, while feminists and other activism-inclined scholars have found fault with the supposed fixity and political weaponization of categories like “nature” and “matter” (cf. Gaard 2011), posthumanism allows us to regard matter as changing. While the ecofeminist attention to how nature is oppressed in structural parallel with the female has been charged with representing a limiting form of essentialism, Greta Gaard refers to the posthumanist scholars Stacy Alaimo and Susan Heckman’s comment that “the more feminist theories distance themselves from ‘nature,’ the more that very nature is implicitly or explicitly reconfirmed as the treacherous quicksand of misogyny” (Gaard 2011, p. 42). Posthumanism thus aims to take an affirmative view of the interconnections between what is traditionally considered human and nonhuman, without essentializing these categories. Cecilia Åsberg and Braidotti (2018, p. 3) show how feminist posthumanists build on feminist critiques that question the figure of the human and the idea that it is separate from nature. In this context, Haraway’s “feminist notion of all earthlings as ‘companions’ who ‘become with’ one another in mutual reciprocity offers respect for diversity and speciation processes without romanticizing hybridity” (Åsberg and Braidotti 2018, p. 9). Following these scholars, one might thus talk of a posthumanist ecofeminism.

Fundamentally, taking a posthuman perspective means acknowledging how the limits we draw around the “human” are dynamic and culturally conditioned. Similarly, instead of attempting to fix a text in a final interpretation, posthumanist theorists like Braidotti are concerned with the text as a body in becoming; a text is a “connection-making device” (Braidotti 2002, pp. 95–96). This is an important point in an affirmative approach: we are not primarily looking for ideologically problematic elements to “expose” or criticize in the fairy tales; what interests us is what they can become and how they can realize the fullness of their potential as rebellious texts.

Thus, in the words of Neimanis, I regard stories as amplifiers and sensitizers that “can be avenues for de-sedimenting our human-scaled perspective” (Neimanis 2019, p. 55). With this background, I define a rebellious reading as one that seeks to reinterpret texts in ways that go against the grain of their didactic, hierarchical normativity. These fairy tales are commonly criticized for depicting female self-sacrifice and for transmitting a limiting idea of women’s task of patiently working to change a brutal husband (Bacchilega 1997, p. 78). As ecofeminists and posthumanist scholars have underlined, the oppression of animals is interconnected with the oppression of women (Gaard 2004, p. 23; Birke and Holmberg 2018, p. 118), suggesting that the need to suppress animality in these stories is not just a metaphor for taming a pre-civilized form of sex but is also an expression of skepticism towards the animal and of patriarchal efforts to subjugate it. In this way, posthumanism allows us to acknowledge how the interplay between gender and animality in these tales can create new and unexpected interpretations. Here, the awareness of global ecological degradation and its roots in a parallel oppression of the non-masculine and nonhuman constitutes a new context with which these texts can be connected in order to become something else. Thus, I will argue that these tales also provide an opportunity to question what constitutes a “rebellious” act.

4. Affirming the Animal

Far from the harmonious viewpoint of a Romantic integration between the human and the nonhuman, posthumanism acknowledges the affirmative potential of discord, fright and violence that may also be part of relational becomings. Timothy Morton’s concept of a “strange stranger”, i.e., “the stranger whose strangeness is forever strange—it cannot be tamed or rationalized away” (Morton 2013, p. 123), is a useful analytical concept in this respect. In fairy tales, the act of shapeshifting between human and animal states is an occurrence that is usually accepted within the storyworld, acting as plot engine. An affirmative view of such hybrid creatures, then, does not suppose a Disneyfied ideology of harmony between humans and animals. Rather, it means acknowledging the potential inherent in the animal to trouble human habits of thought by virtue of its strangeness or perceived danger.

As ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant (1990) has demonstrated, the scientific revolution heavily builds on gendered tropes. From the Early Modern period through the Enlightenment all the way to modern high-tech science, nature has been conceived as a pristine object to be mapped and explored by the male gaze, in parallel with the virginal, female body. Furthermore, the male gaze is one of Olympic rationality, considering itself as outside and independent of the nature it studies—in the words of Donna Haraway (1988, p. 582), science performs a “god trick”. From this perspective, it is relevant to bear in mind Zipes’ remark on the utopian function of fairy tales: “there is a secret humane and imaginative world, the realm of the faerie, that is threatened by powermongers, rationalists, materialists, scientists, and the like. Without this world, i.e., without imagination, life would become drab and monotonous, and people would become like automatons” (Zipes 1994, p. 153). In other words, the genre embodies a science-critical tendency, not in flat-out rejecting the value of scientific findings—an absurd proposition in environmentalist contexts—but in providing a counter-image to the dominant rationalist and anthropocentric images of nature (cf. Stobbe 2017, p. 149). Indeed, the fairy tale was institutionalized in the same early modern era that modern science was developed, making many fairy tales describe, in Zipes’ words “the problems we have caused by trying to dominate nature and at the same time deny our very own nature” (Zipes 2006, p. 26). Therefore, as Braidotti (2019, p. 109) notes, “the empathic bond to non-human, including monstrous and alien others, has become a posthuman feminist topos.” Morton’s abovementioned concept of the strange stranger is a case in point.

By adopting a posthumanist, ecofeminist framework, this study belongs to a growing field of ecological re-evaluation of the Western fairy tale tradition (see Greenhill and Allen 2018; Stobbe 2017). For example, Pablo a Marca (2020) uses a posthumanist approach in studying Italo Calvino’s fairy tale adaptations. However, while a Marca uses the Deleuzian concept of becoming-animal, I will argue that the three fairy tales to be discussed below depict a becoming-with-each-other involving both human and nonhuman characters. The conceptual link between women, children, and nature, as well as the oppositional potential of this linkage, is a common trope in modern children’s literature and popular culture, which these media have borrowed from the Western fairy tale tradition (cf. Stobbe 2017, pp. 154–57). A rebellious reading of the fairy tales in question provides insight into how these links are constructed.

5. The Aristocratic Morality of “Beauty and the Beast”

In Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s fairy tale, the heroine, Beauty, grows up as the youngest daughter in a family consisting of her rich merchant father and her three brothers and two sisters. Beauty earns her nickname because of her outstanding looks. In keeping with 18th century ideas of physiognomy, the tale implies that they are linked to her good moral sense. Both her sisters are haughty and arrogant because of their father’s wealth: “They went to dances, to the theatre, on walks, and made fun of their younger sister who spent all her time reading good books”.4 The tale reveals itself as couched in a modern world of expanding international trade routes when Beauty’s father, having lost all his money, receives news that a ship with some of his merchandise has arrived. Hopeful that he will regain some of his fortune, he embarks on a journey. While Beauty’s sisters demand that he brings back gowns, Beauty only asks for a rose. Heading back home, their father picks a rose from the garden of an enchanted castle. Its master, the Beast, threatens to kill him, but allows him to exchange his life for that of one of his daughters. Taking the place of her father, Beauty gradually falls in love with the Beast. He reveals that he has awaited the love of a woman to be freed from his enchantment and turn back to the prince he once was. In the end, Beauty is rewarded with a happy marriage, whereas her sisters are punished for their wickedness by being turned into statues.

The central, celebrated concepts on the normative level of the narrative are beauty, intellect, and virtue. As long as he is enchanted, the Beast only possesses the latter trait, which turns out, in the end, to be enough to convince Beauty of his aptitude as a husband. Typical of the folk tale tradition on which the fairy tale is based, Beauty is contrasted with her older siblings. The value of her virtues in contrast to her arrogant, jealous and conceited sisters is transmitted in a strongly didactic tone. We are taught, for example, how Beauty is not only meek but also strives not to put her sisters in a worse light than necessary. When she asks for a rose, “it was not that Beauty cared for a rose, but she did not want to denounce the behavior of her sisters by her example, as they would have said that it was in order to stand out from them that she asked for nothing”.5 Thus, the good fairy tells her in the end, because she has known to value virtue over beauty and intellect, she deserves to find them all united in one person (de Beaumont [1757] 1806, pp. 30–31). This expresses an acknowledgment of identity as processual assemblage; these character traits are magically composed in the transformed prince thanks to Beauty’s patience and hard work.

In contrast to its German and Spanish parallels, Madame de Beaumont’s tale is a highly literary tale, characterized by its psychological commentary. It is interesting to note that Beauty’s high morals are amplified in her encounter with the Beast as a nonhuman being. Hence, her acceptance of the beast could be read as an acceptance of the brutality of men, embodied in an animal character which, following the establishment of the scientific worldview, is conceived as radically different from, and non-integrable with, the human.

In a rebellious reading, the fact that the chosen symbol for this brutality is a man-turned-beast is exactly the interesting point. On the level of the moral message, the Beast is clearly an allegory for the unwanted husband—the rich and aristocratic but old and ugly widower to which many young women of the period were wed. As Cristina Bacchilega notes, the ATU 425 type of story “repeatedly reenacts the patriarchal exchange of women, and affirms women’s collusion with the system” (Bacchilega 1997, p. 76). But, by acknowledging and daring to approach the bestial, women also counteract the patriarchy which is skeptical to and wishes to kill nonhuman disturbances—“strange strangers”. Indeed, Beauty avows to the Beast that “—There are many men who are more monstrous than you […] and I like you better with your appearance than those who, with the appearance of men, disguise a false, corrupted, ungrateful heart.”6 The moral message of the story depends on a redefinition of the concept of beauty as a question of perception: beauty depends on an assessment of a person’s moral stature. This stands in marked contrast to how Beauty’s sisters marry men who seem to be superficially attractive by their looks and manners, but who, in the end, make them unhappy.

Beauty’s relationship with the Beast, on the one hand, expresses the importance of approaching the nonhuman as valuable in and of itself. From the perspective of the Anthropocene, it is interesting to note that the trigger for Beauty’s confinement and her process of freeing the Beast is her father’s attempt at regaining his wealth by traveling to his recently embarked trading vessel. Not only does it suggest a yearning for monetary wealth; it also contrasts the risk of trading routes—the successful arrival of the vessel is a surprise—with a safe domesticity of toil and patience. The capitalist trade network on which Beauty’s family relies is one of the prime causes of the Anthropocene (cf. Malm 2016). Beauty’s frugality and meekness implies a rejection of this. In one sense, this can be taken as rewarding female self-sacrifice while sanctioning the girl’s need for satisfying her curiosity, a standard element in ATU 425 tales (Tatar 1992, p. 158). In a rebellious reading, however, it comes across as emphasizing the potential destructivity of capitalism.

Nevertheless, here the rebellious reading meets its limits. The plot of the fairy tale suggests that the nonhuman is valuable to the extent it can be tamed. Beauty’s reward for her morality, meekness, and patience is the Beast’s final transformation back into the prince he really was. As such, the tale would seem to represent an anthropocentric worldview in which humanity is the model of high virtue. “Beauty and the Beast” prioritizes aristocratic values and a subjugation of the bestial with the goal of its transformation into intellectual and moral aristocracy. Thus, while the tendency of Madame de Beaumont’s tale is anthropocentric, a rebellious reading helps us notice ecofeminist “leakages,” i.e., the critique of capitalism and its quest for immediate material satisfaction which the ideal aristocratic woman embodies.

6. Female Courage in “The Singing Springing Lark”

In “The Singing Springing Lark”, the conflict between arrogance and humility is absent, and the tale starts with the father’s quest. As in “Beauty and the Beast”, he asks his daughters what they want him to bring back. While the two older ones request pearls and diamonds, in parallel to Beauty’s sisters, the youngest, her father’s favorite, asks him to bring back a lark, suggesting a love for living, organic nature. When he tries to capture one, however, a lion appears and threatens to eat him for stealing his lark, lest the man offer the lion whatever comes first to meet him upon his return. As this tragically proves to be the youngest daughter, she is sent to marry the lion. An enchanted prince, he regains his human form at night, transforming into a lion in the morning.

In another plot twist, the enchanted prince is turned into a dove who has to roam about for seven years. Like Beauty, the girl follows him faithfully, although this is never coupled to aristocratic virtues, rendering the didacticism of the Grimm tale less apparent. The prince is transformed into a dove after his wife persuades him to join her for her sister’s wedding. He hesitates, as a ray of burning light would bring about his metamorphosis. She promises to protect him and encloses him in a specially built room where the panel cracks, letting in torchlight from the wedding procession. Thus, the female protagonist is torn between different bonds of loyalty, forcing her to pay a dear price but ultimately being rewarded. Again, this can be read as a praise of female self-sacrifice and virtue rewarded.

In the end, the prince is taken to a palace where he is to marry the princess, a sorcerer’s daughter. His rightful wife, however, has received helpful gifts from the south wind which allow her to trick the bride: she gives away her gifts in order to be allowed to sleep with the prince three nights in a row, trying to make her presence known. The bride makes him drink sleeping potion for the first two nights, but on the third he avoids it. As she makes her presence and identity known, the faithful wife helps the prince escape the palace of enchantment, and they live happily ever after. Where the confrontation between the father and the monster in such tales relies on a logic of power and “the law that might makes right” (Tatar 1992, p. 147), the princess’ choice of negotiating between different relations of loyalty arguably shows the value of seeking alternatives to a logic of power.

Indeed, “The Singing Springing Lark” demonstrates the need for a more fluid negotiation of human–animal relationships than what male authority figures are capable of, providing a different account of the value of the strange stranger than “Beauty and the Beast.” Already from the title, the changeable, hybrid ontology of the lion prince is suggested. The word “Löweneckerchen” is a hapax legomenon, formed from the word “Löwe” (lion), denoting the particular kind of lark the girl requests from her father—but which is never mentioned after the appearance of the lion. This may be read as a strange conflation of the delicate lark and the savage lion, indicating that both extremes can form part of the same body but only be actualized, or amplified, in particular assemblages.

When the lion presents the unfortunate father with his ultimatum, he clearly expects to be given one of his daughters in marriage: “then I will gift you your life and the bird to top it off in exchange for your daughter.”7 The man is understandably reluctant, but his servant convinces him by arguing: “‘does it necessarily have to be your daughter who meets you, it might as well be a cat or a dog’.”8 The servant’s attempt at avoiding the situation exemplifies Zipes’ remark that “[w]hat the fairy tale does […] is represent basic human dilemmas in tangible metaphorical forms that reflect how difficult it is for us to curb basic instincts” (Zipes 2006, p. 131). Crucially, the servant’s suggestion for a solution suggests how nonhuman life is expendable. This attitude will not only be punished by the loss of his master’s favorite daughter in what turns out to be a risky, although ultimately rewarding, marriage. It also contrasts with the daughter’s active form of allyship with her animal bridegroom and other nonhuman actors.

In this way, the female protagonist represents a different level of industry and problem-solving ability than the male characters. Indeed, when it comes to the father’s initial dilemma, one might wonder why he did not take more pains to ensure that someone other than his daughter would come to meet him on his return. (Why did he not dispatch the servant in advance and order him to send out a pig, for instance?) The obvious point that this would put the plot to a halt begs the question of why the servant is present in the first place; in orally transmitted fairy tales, characters are generally not introduced without any function, as it is difficult to keep several characters in mind at the same time (Olrik 1908, p. 23). One might argue that this detail underlines the anti-anthropocentric tendency of the story. By “sacrificing” the daughter, it is as if the text insists that the (female) human is no more valuable than animals.

Tatar notes that heroines in versions of ATU 425 like this Grimm tale give us a double display of courage, first in their determination to reason with the enemies, even when they take the form of ferocious animals and horrifying monsters, then in their unraveling of paternal authority. To the confrontational policies of father and beast, which give rise to violence by affirming the law that might makes right, the daughters respond with a diplomacy of negotiation.

(Tatar 1992, p. 147)

This could be regarded as a stereotypical way of highlighting soft feminine values as an antidote to violence, thus charging women with the responsibility of counteracting a violence over which they have no authority. But from a rebellious viewpoint, it may also be interpreted as acknowledging the need for a more fluid negotiation of human–animal relationships than what male authority figures are capable of. Thus, the tale seems to suggest that the relationship between human and nonhuman should not be one of avoiding danger, but of meeting it creatively and head-on.

7. Cyborgian Violence in “The Lizard with the Seven Shirts”

The heroines in the French and the German tales are both handed over to their enchanted husband because they ask their father for an element of natural beauty—a rose or a lark—for which the father is punished. In the Spanish folk tale “The Lizard with the Seven Shirts,” the encounter with the nonhuman world is violent and disharmonious from the outset, and there are few acknowledgments of natural beauty. Of the three tales discussed in the present study, this tale displays the strongest preoccupation with the often violent encounters between human and nonhuman actors.

Frustrated with her lack of children, a queen asks God to give her a son, even if it has to be a lizard. God punishes her by granting her wish. As an adult, the lizard prince marries his former wet nurse, Mariquita [“little María”]. On their wedding night, the prince takes off his seven shirts of lizard skin, appearing in a disenchanted state as a beautiful prince. However, after a period of marital happiness, the prince’s mother hides the shirts and the enchantment turns stronger than before. To save her husband, Mariquita and her son must go on a long journey. Where the Grimm heroine must walk for seven years, the wife and son in the Spanish tale have to wear out seven pairs of iron shoes before reaching their goal (Espinosa 1946, p. 296). As in “The Singing Springing Lark”, the heroine manages to win back the prince by tricking his new bride into allowing her to sleep with him for three nights.

“The Lizard with the Seven Shirts” stands out for its female agency as the prime mover in the unfolding of the plot. In “Beauty and the Beast”, the Beast is enchanted by a wicked, female fairy (de Beaumont [1757] 1806, p. 30). Here, however, the queen is punished by God for wishing to have a lizard as a son. As such, it can be understood in terms of early modern beliefs concerning women’s ability to influence the physical appearance of their offspring and avoid “monstrous” children (cf. Braidotti 1996, p. 292). This sheds light on the perceived lack of autonomy among the female characters in ATU 425-type stories, which “ceaselessly turn on the question of retargeting the object of the woman’s devotion” (Tatar 1992, p. 151). Reading this story in the historicizing manner suggested by Tatar and Warner, we might say that it is unlikely that the queen would have survived had she failed to bear children. Her, and Mariquita’s, constant efforts to enter into new affective relations constitute a becoming-rebellious in the sense that this is how women can improve their lives. This is likely their only opportunity to outweigh patriarchal dominance, emblematically represented by a punishing God.

In this tale, women’s affects of loyalty also benefit nonhuman others. Indeed, this fairy tale stands out from “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Singing Springing Lark” in that it is not the young girl’s loyalty to her father which makes her marry the beast. Rather, it is Mariquita’s mother who assures her daughter that this is the right choice, as the heroine is destined to break the spell: “her mother implored her to marry him in order to disenchant him.”9 As such, this tale arguably places more emphasis on female ingenuity, with the plot being driven forward by the schemes of the women surrounding the prince.

As indicated above, the gendered violence at the beginning of the story is one of its most striking tropes. The lizard prince eats the breasts of its first two nurses, an act that might be read as a forceful instauration of patriarchal order and a rejection of the vitality of the female. From the vantage point of posthumanist ecofeminism, moreover, it is no coincidence that this violence takes the form of a stop to the flow of breast milk. Citing breastfeeding as a transcorporeal practice, Neimanis (2019, pp. 32–33) discusses how it has historically been the subject of colonialism while at the same time emblematic of a female gift economy in opposition to the industrialized “Big Dairy.” Lactation, then, has the power to show how “sexual difference is indeed biologically marked […] but always within sociocultural valences of power” (Neimanis 2019, p. 164). The overdetermination of breastfeeding is crucial in “The Lizard with the Seven Shirts.” The infant lizard prince’s destructive behavior could be interpreted as a bestial thwarting of the attempt of patriarchy—the royal family—to harness the ever-flowing nurture of the female body. In performing this, however, the transcorporeal, relational flow of breast milk is interrupted, with the possible risk that the lizard dies of malnutrition, and thus never develops. From the point of view of the king and queen, the hope is likely that he will be tamed into a future heir to the kingdom. Here too, then, the beastly bridegroom might be said to represent male brutality. However, at the end of the day this brutality threatens the patriarchal organization of society as much as it threatens women, in a forceful allegory of the autodestructive forces of a patriarchy myopically oriented towards its own reproduction.

Mariquita is the third and final woman asked to serve as wetnurse and ingeniously agrees on one condition: “and she ordered that they make her two breasts of iron and that they fill them with milk from the back. And thus she breastfed the lizard until it was grown up”.10 Womanhood here surpasses biology and a facile harmony with the natural. Instead, it is helped into becoming by how the milk-filled breasts, a time-worn emblem of the female, are constructed and added to Mariquita’s body as a prosthesis. In a further allegorical reading, this could be taken as symbolic of how human technology is a necessary means of mastering the natural world, with the iron serving as protection from bestiality, while the externally delivered milk illustrates how the need for nutrition can be decoupled from the organic body in a technologized world.

Far from a tale of the estrangement between the human and the nonhuman, however, I claim that this is instead another tale of their affective, processual entanglement. Mariquita could be characterized as a transversal subject, temporarily assembled (cf. Marca 2020, p. 3), or, in the words of Haraway (2006, p. 120), a “cyborg [who] appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed.” The concept of the cyborg—a human/machinic assemblage—resembles Neimanis’s concept of a body in that it is a “frozen moment”, while the technologies constituting it “should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings” (cf. Haraway 2006, p. 130). Mariquita demonstrates an inventiveness transcending mere organismic provisions. Her and the lizard prince’s transcorporeal becoming-with-each-other is dependent on organic as well as inorganic assemblages. Of course, this is symbolic of the cyborgian, assembled nature of all bodies, with the iron breast trope coming across as an emphatic reminder of the arbitrarily drawn lines between organism and technology.

This sensual relationship foreshadows their subsequent becoming-royal-family through a successful act of patriarchal reproduction. In this respect, it is significant that the reptilic form of the prince alludes to an idea of the tempting-yet-dangerous phallic snake. In a more graphic manner than either of the previously discussed tales, then, “The Lizard with the Seven Shirts” depicts the heroine’s sexual awakening through a posthuman assemblage with a strange stranger.

The patriarchal violence of the lizard prince is also apparent in his brief relation to Mariquita’s two older sisters, whom he marries and murders, one after the other. His commandment of loyalty, in parallel to that of the enchanted prince in many other instantiations of this tale type, is that his wife must go to bed before him and stay awake while waiting. Their failure to carry this out makes him kill them on their wedding night (Espinosa 1946, p. 295). As third in line, Mariquita initially refuses, but her mother provides her with chili peppers to rub in her eyes in order to stay awake (Espinosa 1946, p. 295). The chili peppers, an important ingredient in cooking, might be said to allude to the domestic role of women. In contrast to the iron breasts, this fairy tale showcases an arguably more conventionally feminine kind of inventiveness. The same applies to the ways in which Mariquita tricks the princess using objects she obtains through three magical nuts, which she gifts the princess in order to be allowed to share the bed of her husband. In keeping with this version’s stronger emphasis on a Christian worldview, Mariquita receives the nuts not from natural forces but from “la Virgen”, i.e., the Virgin Mary (Espinosa 1946, p. 296).

Nevertheless, having worn out her seven iron shoes, she needs help to reach the final destination, the Palace of No Return.11 She calls out at the door of the palace of the eagles, where the golden eagle (“águila real”, literally “royal eagle”) tells her that he has just been to her husband’s wedding. He mentions another act of violence: “I have been to the party and by throwing me a bone they made me lame.”12 This somewhat elliptic tale might mean that the human party guests threw a bone of food at the eagle which broke his feet, in a curious actualization of the murder of animal companions inherent in the bone. The eagle transports Mariquita to the palace by flying, underlining her cooperative attitude to animals in contrast to the violence effected by the royal party guests. Mariquita’s affective assemblage with the eagle is reminiscent of that in the Grimm tale, but again, the Spanish version stands out by virtue of its emphasis on violence.

On arrival at the Palace of No Return, Mariquita tricks her husband’s new wife in a similar way to that of the protagonist of “The Singing Springing Lark”. It is hardly a coincidence that all the items Mariquita offers the queen in exchange for three nights with her husband—a spinning wheel, a spindle, and a golden ball of yarn—are typically domestic items. The one-upmanship of cunning between Mariquita and the queen suggests that this tale, too, reflects women’s experiences of fighting to win the man that will ensure economic security and social status in a society where this is the prime possibility for female assertion (cf. Warner 1995, p. 238). Indeed, there are several notable metaphors drawn from the sphere of common household objects in this version of the tale. At the end, the lizard prince pronounces the moral of the story by asking his subjects the following questions:

– If you had a key and lost it and were unable to find it, and you made another key, and then after a while you found the lost key—which one would you settle for, the first or the second?

  And they all answered:

  – For the first one 13

The prince develops this into a simile by explaining that the same thing happened to him, as he was married to one woman whom he lost, but has now found. As for the princess, he gives her back to her father, “since I have not touched her.”14 In one sense, then, the tale restores the patriarchal order of things, to the point of exchanging women back and forth between father and bridegroom. However, the metaphor of the key deconstructs gender hierarchies by suggesting that Mariquita “opens the door” to the lizard prince’s ascent to power.

Moreover, the “The Lizard with the Seven Shirts” features a strong religious undercurrent. Not only does the Virgin appear; the religious overtones of the protagonist’s name stand in clear contrast to the superficial name “Beauty” or the anonymity of the heroine in the Grimm tale. This indicates that this tale seeks to convey a mythical allegory to a stronger extent than the others. Moreover, it demonstrates how fairy tales often explain events that escape human control and suggest alternatives to an anthropocentric world order (cf. Zipes 2006, pp. 50–51).

In keeping with the often-alleged anthropocentrism of Christianity, the tale would seem to depict a vindication of human, especially female, ingenuity over a threatening, enchanted nonhuman world. Such a reading, however, would have to be balanced against Mariquita’s fearlessness with respect to the brutality of the lizard and her allyship with the injured royal eagle.15 As Tatar (1992, p. 12) has argued, while violence in fairy tales has a didactic, admonishing purpose, this sometimes crosses the line to a humorous fascination with gore. In this Spanish tale, the baby lizard prince’s maiming of his wet nurses’ breasts, as well as Mariquita’s solution, are far-fetched to a degree that makes it difficult to read them as warnings regarding matters of family life, e.g., as representations of the toil of childrearing. The relevant symbolic interpretation lies elsewhere: the nonhuman is depicted as dangerous and perhaps untameable but still necessary to relate to. Even though here, as in “Beauty and the Beast”, the princess is rewarded for her patience and hard work, the fact that the tale emphasizes violence and hybridity to a larger degree suggests that there are difficult yet feasible ways of relating to the strange stranger. Mariquita’s ability to seize the opportunity to work with, and thus become-princess in bodily assemblage with, the nonhuman world might be paradoxically necessitated by patriarchal forces.

8. Concluding Discussion

Feminist scholars have rightly noted how fairy tales reflect and convey patriarchal norms, leaving female characters with little opportunity for autonomous, rational action. Comparing ATU 425 tales with parallel tales featuring a male protagonist and a bewitched bride, Tatar argues that these tales underline stereotypes of women as ruled by emotion and men as able to act rationally (Tatar 1992, p. 160). However, this is problematic only to the extent that acting from passion is regarded as a liability. What I suggest is that male logic instead comes across as a damaging attitude that only leads to violence and destruction. From an affirmative point of view, the female characters’ orientation towards relationships, passions, and self-deprecation can be seen as a rebellious act against a patriarchal logic of force. Crucially, the heroines’ acts are, to different degrees, linked to an acknowledgment of the eternally transforming nature of the nonhuman world. As stated repeatedly, this does not imply a “harmonious” relationship between the human and the nonhuman. Haraway’s figure of the cyborg, depicted in Mariquita, implies a rejection of Oedipal and Marxist fantasies of an original unity that needs to be restored (cf. Haraway 2006, pp. 118–19). Rather, what especially the German and the Spanish folk tale arguably demonstrate is exactly the fundamental “disharmony” that may arise between the two, but which is negotiable and manageable by other strategies than that of patriarchal subjugation.

Thus, these tales also question what constitutes a rebellious act. It is not necessarily a question of fighting on the barricades. It can also mean, as in the case of the Grimms’ and the Spanish heroine, to take the full account of the potential for relating to the human–social world and to the nonhuman world, facing different sets of challenges along the way. Finally, the stories convey an ethical message of the value of persistence, patience, and hard work rather than seeking immediate satisfaction. This, too, is an interesting moral lesson in the context of the Anthropocene, where the satisfaction of immediate pleasures competes with, and often triumphs over, working for a higher goal in the long term. As such, the heroines might be said to rebel against a predicament tragically characteristic of our time: that of losing sight of the goal because one prioritizes pleasure in the present. Patiently striving in order to become-with an animal is not necessarily a way of succumbing to patriarchal expectations of marriage. It can also constitute a rebellious act against a reductive, patriarchal worldview which suffers from a lack of acknowledgement of both human and nonhuman bodies.