Fairy Tale's Unpleasant Bodies

The other day, I was discussing a column with Fabled Magazine editor, Natasa, and mentioned that I'd had quite the day learning all about sewerage systems for a planning application. The contrast between sewerage and fairy tales tickled our fancy, but... is it so wrong? Or do fairy tales have a dirty little secret?

Yes, yes they do! It's a secret that would delight any metaphorical twelve-year-old boy, and I say this as a grown woman who will laugh at a fart joke. In my teens, I read sixteenth-century Michel de Montaigne's essays and discovered the underlying humanity of the fart and all associated toilet humour. Forgive this digression, because in his essays, I found such gems as:

"In the midst of a discussion, and in the presence of his followers, Metrocles rather injudiciously let off a fart. To hide his embarrassment he stayed at home until, eventually, Crates came to pay him a visit; to his consolations and arguments Crates added the example of his own licence: he began a farting match with him, thereby removing his scruples."

"And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses."

Montaigne reminds us that our physical bodies aren't always pleasant, but they are the physical centre of our humanity. It's actually okay. Even funny. For a self-conscious teen, Montaigne was a wonderful, philosophical comfort.

Portrait of Michel de Montaigne

The truth is, crude humour is socially levelling and there's a lot of humour around sewerage, pooping, farts, and bottoms in fairy tales. This isn't surprising. Such humour has likely been with us since Neanderthals first squatted to 'do their business.' If we have to live with the less pleasant parts of our bodies, we might as well have a giggle, reminded that everyone with a body, from a Queen to a peasant, is in the same boat. Indeed, we are - for all our lofty thoughts - still physically centred in these surprising, often unpalatable bodies.

I'm going to share a few of my favourites tales laced with farts and poop, not to put too nice a point upon it.

Giambattista Basile is the king of vulgar humour. His baroque tales run the gamut from crudity to splendor. He thoroughly understood the comic and political impact of contrasting the nastier bodily aspects with the beauty and nobility of his characters. One of my favourites is the tale of Viola, a merchant's daughter who lives by her needle. She defies the attentions of a prince, despite her family's frustration and fear. One day, her sisters contrive to be rid of her, dropping her into their neighbour's garden - their neighbour being an ogre. The ogre is about in his garden and lets loose a great big fart. Viola, landing behind him, shrieks. So as he spins around, he sees the beautiful Viola standing there. Having heard of mares being impregnated by winds, and having a rather shaky knowledge of procreation himself, he assumes that Viola is his daughter and consequently dotes upon her. The hilarity of the ogre's mistake undoes the expectations of a more violent kind of ogre. In fact, the prince is the far more dangerous creature in the tale.

In Basile's tale of the goose, poverty-stricken sisters, the younger being Lolla, sell the yarn they have spun to buy a goose. They love it so that it sleeps in bed with them. The goose begins to defecate coins, setting them up nicely with an income. But a jealous neighbour asks to borrow the goose. She and the other neighbouring women are hoping for coins, but the goose instead has a bad case of diarrhoea from all the food they feed it. They wring its neck and throw it out the window, into the garbage. A passing prince has a dodgy tummy and slips into the same alley for an emergency - ah - evacuation. He uses the apparently dead goose to wipe his behind, but the goose, revived, latches on instead. Fortunately for him, Lolla comes upon the scene, delighted to see her beloved goose. The goose lets go of the Prince's bottom and runs towards her for a kiss. The prince is amazed, learns the story, and marries the girl. Who knew diarrhoea could lead to true love? But that's kind of the point. The prince is lowered by physical inconvenience and the peasant girl is raised as his saviour.

Charles Perrault's tale of Donkeyskin has a donkey who defecates wealth, too. When the princess, in an effort to avoid marrying her father, asks for a series of impossible-to-fabricate dresses prior to marriage, the king keeps producing them. She finally asks for the skin of the donkey and with that upon her back, flees the kingdom with the literal source of all the kingdom's wealth. That wealth evaporates without life, though, and the skin becomes simply a means of rendering herself repellent, thereby concealing her identity. 

The donkey with gold écus. Illustration for 'Donkey Skin' by Charles Perrault (1628-1703) Anonymous illustration.

Perhaps my very favourite sewerage-related tale is, surprisingly, the rather prim Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier's tale of the discreet princess, Finette. This features in issue two of Fabled Magazine through the wonderful Jane Harrington, but safe to say, Finette understood a castle sewerage system. Finette and her sisters are shut in a tower by their father to protect their virtue. Unfortunately, Finette's sisters need all the protection they can get when a terrible lech of a prince drops by - and it still isn't enough. Finette, on the other hand, is highly intelligent. She convinces the prince he's about to have his way with her when she invites him to wait upon a bed. Only, she previously rigged the bed. He jumps on, the bed breaks, and he is deposited into the sewerage drain. I can't tell you how much I love that scene. Essentially, she disposes of the prince as his behaviour warrants. I suspect she had a good laugh too.

What the fairy tales tell us is that, as Montaigne reminds us, we are physical beings and sometimes that's not altogether pleasant, but it is part of life and can even be turned to our advantage. And so we can accept, even revel in, the gross along with the enchanting. In fact, I'm about to try taking a photo of my steers with a copy of Fabled Magazine - just for Instagram fun. Please cross your fingers it doesn't fall into a brand new cow pat.