Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship Read Online Free PDF

“[The king] who since he could not have children would say at every hour of the day and wherever he happened to be, ‘O heavens, send me an heir to my state so that my house will not be left desolate!’” 21 Similarly, in “The Enchanted Doe,” a king appeals to the heavens: “There was once a certain king of Long Pergola named Ionnone who had a great desire to have children and was always praying to the gods to make his wife’s belly swell up.” Hoping to appease the gods, the king is especially hospitable to passersby, but he eventually grows impatient and hammers his door shut against all visitors. Soon, a wise man appears and advises: “Get the heart of a sea dragon and have it cooked by a young virgin who, at the mere odor coming from the pot, will find herself with swollen belly; when the heart is cooked, give it to the queen to eat, and you’ll see that she’ll immediately become pregnant too, as if she were in her ninth month.” 22 The recipe is so powerful that it can impregnate young virgins as well as the queen. Nancy Canepa argues that whereas Basile’s Pentamerone involves numerous extended portrayals of kings, their representation is overwhelmingly negative; she points to “ineptitude” as one of the many ways in which “these kings prove themselves deficient.” 23 Whereas these monarchs’ plaintive appeals for fertility assistance might exemplify their incompetence, we could also argue that these are occasions—albeit rare—of the king’s participation in what was otherwise perceived as a female crisis. 24
    More often, in both male and female authored tales, the king is quickly erased from the pregnancy crisis, as though to absolve him of any responsibility, and the narrative spotlight turns to the queen. Straparola’s “The Pig Prince” illustrates how the pregnancy wish is typically resolved in the tales that provide a more extended resolution to the fertility problem: one day, as the queen was “walking in her garden and picking flowers, she suddenly felt tired. Upon noticing a spot covered with green grass nearby, she went over to it and sat down...soothed by the sweet songs of the birds on the green branches, she fell asleep. Now, by chance, three proud fairies flew by in the air while she was dozing.” The fairies recognize the queen’s dilemma and wish her into pregnancy. 25
    D’Aulnoy’s similar version of this tale, “The Wild Boar,” portrays a queen more proactive in her pleas for help: “Once upon a time there was a king and a queen who lived in great sadness because they had no children. Though still beautiful, the queen was no longer young, so she did not dare look forward to having any children. This tormented her a great deal. She slept little and was always sighing and praying to the gods and all the fairies to give her what she wanted.” This queen’s communion with the natural world is also more pronounced: “One day while she was strolling in a small woods, she gathered some violets and roses and also some strawberries. As soon as she had eaten some of the strawberries, she was overcome by a profound urge to sleep.” As the queen sleeps, she dreams that three fairies fly overhead and bestow her with the gift of pregnancy, and her dream is soon realized. 26
    In these and the many tales that follow a similar arc, there are three simple factors common to the impregnation scenes: the queen is outdoors in the garden or the woods, she falls asleep, and she ultimately conceives because of the intervention of one or more fairies. The queen’s response to her plight is typical of a fairy-tale protagonist’s paradoxical agency and passivity: her move to an alternative space acknowledges the need for action but her resourcefulness is limited, for she invariably relies on or is subject to supernatural, and primarily female, intervention.
    The association between the sexualized female body and the natural world has been thoroughly scrutinized in feminist and