Abstract
In 2001, in the online magazine Nerve, philosopher Peter Singer published a review of Dearest Pet, naturalist Midas Dekker’s book on the history of bestiality. In his review, “Heavy Petting,” Singer points out that the taboo against human-animal sex still prevails even though most other taboos against nonprocreative sex have given way. According to Singer, the persistence of this taboo in spite of documented evidence of interspecies sexual contact is indicative of our ambivalent relationship with animals. Human-animal interactions, Singer explains, have served a variety of purposes: labor, procurement of food, emotional fulfillment—and even sexual satisfaction. On the other hand, we have “always seen ourselves as distinct from animals and imagined that a wide, unbridgeable gulf separates us from them,” particularly in the western tradition from Genesis to the Renaissance to Kant.1 The recent proliferation of academic interest in animal studies seeks to interrogate these entrenched cultural perceptions about the human-animal divide.2
“After the new bride was dressed in rich attire and adorned with jewels, she awaited the dear bridegroom, and the pig entered, filthier andmuddierthan ever. However, shegraciously welcomed him by spreading out her precious gown and asking him to lie down by her side.”
—Giovanni Straparola, “The PigPrince”
“The princess began to cry, and was afraid of the clammy frog. She didn’t dare touch him, and now he was going to sleep in her beautiful, clean bed. The kinggrew angry and said: ‘You shouldn’t scorn someone who helped you when you were in trouble.”’
—The Brothers Grimm, “The Frog King”
“The queen … says openly that she would give a million for her frog,’ as she calls Alençon, to be swimming in the Thames … but her show of regret … is fictitious and feigned.”
—Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, commenting on Elizabeth’s reaction to one of her suitors
“He is like my little dog. As soon as he is seen anywhere, people know that I am coming”
—Elizabeth on her relationship to Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester
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Notes
The influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on the animal-bridegroom tale type is an important but separate line of inquiry. The beastly transformations in Ovid largely comprise gods exercising their power over mortals within a different hierarchal construct rather than contact between humans and animals. See Page DuBois, Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991). Several contemporary authors have also explored the animal-human romantic or sexual relationship in fairy tales, most notably Angela Carter in her short story collection, The Bloody Chamber (New York: Penguin, 1979).
Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look At Men in Public and Private (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), 244.
See Anne Duggan, “Nature and Culture in the Fairy Tale of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy,” Marvels & Tales 15, no. 2, (2000): 149–67.
See also Lewis C. Seifert, “Animal-Human Hybridity in d’Aulnoy’s ‘Babiole’ and ‘Prince Wild Boar,’” Marvels & Tales 25, no. 2 (2011): 244–60. In his discussion of d’Aulnoy’s treatment of the issue of animal-human hybridity, Seifert distinguishes “The Wild Boar” from her other tales in exploring “what might be gained from a hybrid subjectivity in which human reason is conjoined with animal instinct and human vice is counterbalanced by animal virtue.”
See Bruno Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment (New York: Knopf 1976), 288;
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blond: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996), chapter 7, “Reluctant Brides,” 273–97, and Tatar, Off With Their Heads, 141.
See also Lewis Seifert, “Pig or Prince? Murat, d’Aulnoy, and the Limits of ‘Civilized’ Masculinity,” in High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France, ed. Kathleen Perry Long (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002), 183–209.
For an account of the Grimm Brothers’ series of revisions of this tale, see Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 7–8. Tatar argues, “The Grimms’ transformation of a tale replete with sexual innuendo into a prim and proper nursery story with a dutiful daughter is almost as striking as the folkloric metamorphosis of frog into prince.” Brewer also insists, “It is plain in the earlier versions that they have sexual intercourse” but even in later versions “the story is obviously about love and especially sex. The relationship with the frog symbolizes the fear of sex, slimy, monstrous, nasty,” 38.
Jack Zipes, “What Makes a Repulsive Frog So Appealing: Memetics and Fairy Tales,” Journal of Folklore Research 45, no. 2, (2008), 112.
See Elizabeth W. Harries, “The Violence of the Lambs,” Marvels & Tales 19, no. 1 (2005), 54–66 for a discussion of the sacrificial act of violence in fairy tales. Harries’s article focuses on d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat,” in which a female cat’s return to animal form depends on the male, but she notes the violent action in “The Frog Prince” and comments that “the petulant princess, acting in a fit of pique (or perhaps sexual angst)” throws the frog against the wall. Harries adds that the “princess is of course a spoiled brat” Again, the princess’ behavior is seen as more blameworthy than the unreasonable demands of father and frog suitor.
James McGlathery, Fairy Tale Romance: The Grimms, Basile, and Perrault (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1991), 64.
See Gail de Vos, “The Frog King or Iron Henry,” in New Tales for Old: Folktales as Literary Fictions for Young Adults (Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1999), 771–808 for an overview of the Brothers Grimm revisions, critical interpretations, and popular adaptations of this tale.
See A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: The History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936)
and E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1943).
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfeld, Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 5.
Jeanne Addison Roberts, The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 4.
See chapters 7 and 8 in Maria Perry, The Sisters of Henry VIII (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998). See also Erin Sadlack’s helpful discussion of Mary’s strategy of agreeing to marry Louis on the condition that she could choose her second husband; in spite of his promise, Henry saw Mary’s second marriage as an act of defiance. The French Queen’s Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth Century Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2–5.
L. J. Andrew Villalon, “Putting Don Carlos Together Again,” Sixteenth Century Journal 26, no. 2 (Summer 1995), 347–65
and Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 120.
For more discussion of Catherine’s various marriage proposals for Marguerite, see R. J. Knecht, Catherine de Medici (New York: Longman, 1998), 76, 108, 134–5, 139.
Frederick Chamberlin, The Sayings of Queen Elizabeth (London: John Lane, 1923), 61.
See Debra Barrett-Graves, “‘Highly Touched in Honour’: Elizabeth I and the Alencon Controversy,” in Elizabeth I: Always Her Own Free Woman (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 43–60;
Sheila Cavanagh, “The Bad Seed: Princess Elizabeth and the Seymour Incident,” in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, ed. Julia M. Walker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 9–29;
Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I (New York: Routledge, 1996) and “Why Did Elizabeth Not Marry?” in Dissing Elizabeth (London: British Library, 2009), 30–59.
Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 2.
Ilona Bell, Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 8.
Penry Williams, Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life and Legend (London: Continuum, 2011), 28.
Wallace MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 172;
David Loades, Elizabeth I (London: Hambledon Continnum, 2003), 331. Catherine Loomis offers one of the most extended considerations of Elizabeth’s use of nicknames, pointing out that “Elizabeth was not always kind when she chose ‘a by-name given in sport’ for her courtiers” “‘Little man, little man’: Early Modern Representations of Robert Cecil,” in Explorations in Renaissance Culture. Special Issue: “Scholarship on Elizabeth I,” Guest Editor Carole Levin, 37 no. 1 (2011): 137–56.
Robert Lacey, Sir Walter Ralegh (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 46. “Water” may also reflected Raleigh’s own pronunciation of his name. Lacey also describes the rivalry between Hatton and Raleigh that acknowledged their respective nicknames. Hatton, jealous that Raleigh was replacing him in the queen’s affections, sent her several symbolic tokens, including a golden bucket that “symbolized water and thus referred to Raleigh.” Water, Hatton wrote to Elizabeth, was an unstable element and would only produce confusion. The queen assured Hatton that he was ever her sheep and that “no water or floods should ever overthrow them.”
Pauline Croft, “Can a Bureaucrat Be a Favorite? Robert Cecil and the Strategies of Power,” in The World of the Favorite, eds. J.H. Elliott and L.W.B. Brockliss (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 56.
Algernon Cecil, A Life of Robert Cecil First Earl of Salisbury (London: John Murray, 1915), 24.
P. M. Handover, The Second Cecil: The Rise of Power 1563–1604 (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1959), 245.
Stephen Budiansky, Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage (New York: Viking, 2005), 39.
Paul Hammer, “‘Absolute and Solemn Mistress of Her Grace?’ Queen Elizabeth and Her Favorites, 1581–1592,” in The World of the Favorite, eds. J. H. Elliott and L. W. B. Brockliss (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1999), 40.
Chris Skidmore, Death and the Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I and the Dark Scandal that Rocked the Throne (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011). Gypsies “had first arrived from the continent at the beginning of the sixteenth century …. Soon they became associated in the common imagination with a wide range of every imaginable crime from selling poisons to stealing horses and kidnapping children. They were also regarded as sexually promiscuous,” 127.
Derek Wilson uses the nickname as the title of his biography of Robert Dudley: Sweet Robin: A Biography of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester: 1533–1588 (London: Allison and Busby, 1981).
Harry Morris, “Ophelia’s ‘Bonny Sweet Robin,’” Publication of the Modern Language Association of America 73, no. 5 (1958), 602. Morris claims that “the name Robin was, in the sixteenth century, one of the cant terms for the male sex organ.”
Elizabeth Jenkins, Elizabeth and Leicester (New York: Coward-McCann, 1962), 129.
Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 55–56.
Peter C. Herman, “Authorship and the Royal I: King James VI and the Politics of Monarchic Verse,” Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 4 (Winter 2001), 1502–03.
Alice Gilmore Vines, Neither Fire nor Steel: Sir Christopher Hatton (Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall, 1978), 28.
Walter Oakeshott, The Queen and the Poet (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), 26.
Wallace MacCaffrey, “Christopher Hatton,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 20 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 817–23.
Andrew J. Hopper, “Thomas Arundell,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 582–83.
Cited in Anne Somerset, Elizabeth I (New York: Knopf, 1992), 308.
Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlockd (Leeds, UK: Maney, 1988), 75–76.
Paul E. J. Hammer, “Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 15 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 945–60.
William Camden, The History of the Most Renowned Elizabeth (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 603.
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© 2012 Jo Eldridge Carney
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Carney, J.E. (2012). Men, Women, and Beasts: Elizabeth I and Beastly Bridegrooms. In: Fairy Tale Queens. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137269690_4
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