Rachel M. Esposito: The Tiger's Bride
"Like the tiger in the night, I devour all flesh, I drink all blood, until ... in sensual ecstasy,
having drunk all blood and devoured all flesh, I am become again the eternal Fire ..." [a]
I.
I love the above lines from D. H. Lawrence.
But Lawrence wasn't the only English writer to evoke the feline spirit and dream of becoming-tiger. Angela Carter also fantasised about entering into unholy matrimony with a tiger and losing her all too human skin, and it's Carter's short story 'The Tiger's Bride' that I'd like to look at here ... [b]
II.
Essentially, 'The Tiger's Bride' was Carter's reimagining of Beauty and the Beast [c]:
A beautiful young girl moves in with a mysterious masked figure, known as the Beast, after her father loses her to him in a game of cards. The Beast is eventually revealed to be a tiger masquerading as a man. Having fallen in love with him, the young girl agrees to become his mate and transforms into a beautiful tigress; the suggestion given that this is as much her true nature as it is his [d].
Usually, this tale is discussed in the familiar terms of power, identity, and otherness; often from a feminist, psychoanalytic, or postmodern perspective [e]. There's nothing wrong with that, but neither is there much point in simply offering another analysis in and on the same terms and seen through the same critical lens.
And so, here, I'll at least try to say something vaguely novel, whilst, at the same time referring to work first presented at Treadwell's back in 2006 [f].
III.
Carter's perversely sensual fantasy of animal transformation raises one key question: is there a fundamental and non-negotiable human nature, or a fixed type of being that is uniquely human and therefore not open either to evolutionary change or magical metamorphosis?
For essentialists of all kinds, the answer to this onto-theological question concerning being and becoming will be a very definite Yes. But for those who reject all such idealism and happily affirm shape-shifting and parahuman hybrids, preferring as they do to conduct their thinking in terms of constant mutation and change, the answer has to be No.
Personally, my sympathies are with the latter; i.e. those who believe in the the dynamic and interchangeable nature of forms. I'm also sympathetic to those who, like Carter, put forward the shocking idea that even virgins born on Chistmas day might prove to be as amoral and as savage as any beast.
Having been handed over by her father to the Beast, Beauty can't help wondering what the exact nature of his beastliness might entail and, prior to her first meeting with her husband-to-be, she recalls the stories her English nanny used to tell her when she was young in order to frighten her. She remembers too how she first discovered the secret of the sexual mystery from watching farmyard animals copulate.
When Beauty first sets eyes on La Bestia she is struck by his size and crude clumsiness, as well as his odd air of self-imposed restraint; "as if fighting a battle with himself to remain upright when he would rather drop on all fours" [155-56]. For all that, he is not much different from any other man, although wearing a mask "with a man's face most beautifully painted on it [… and] a wig, too […] of the kind you see in old-fashioned portraits" [156].
The Beast has but a single demand to make of Beauty when she is brought before him; "to see the pretty young lady unclothed nude without her dress" [160]. Shocked and insulted, Beauty laughs scornfully at the request and tells him that if she is to be treated like a common whore then she expects not only to be fucked, but also given "the same amount of money that you would give to any other woman in such circumstances" [161].
This hurts the Beast and he sheds a tear, which, Beauty hopes, is one of shame.
However, this doesn’t stop him from making the same request for a second time - with the same results: "Take off my clothes for you, like a ballet girl? Is that all you want of me?" [163], cries Beauty, and again the Beast is forced to shed a tear.
Eventually, when one day out riding, the Beast decides that since she will not reveal herself naked to him then she must be prepared to see him undressed. As he starts to remove his human disguise and finery, Beauty's composure deserts her and she finds herself on the brink of panic as the Beast reveals himself to be: "A great, feline […] whose pelt was barred with a savage geometry of bars the colour of burned wood” [166].
Beauty can't help noticing the subtlety of his muscles, the profundity of his tread and the "annihilating vehemence of his eyes, like twin suns" [166]. She feels her breast ripped apart as if she had suffered a marvellous wound and she realises that since the tiger will never lie down with the lamb, then she, Miss Lamb, must learn how to run with tigers.
Having come to this fateful conclusion, Beauty finally decides to strip:
"I therefore, shivering, now unfastened my jacket, to show him I would do him no harm. Yet I was clumsy and blushed a little, for no man had seen me naked and I was a proud girl. Pride it was, not shame, that thwarted my fingers so; and a certain trepidation lest this frail little article of human upholstery before him might not be, in itself, grand enough to satisfy his expectations […]" [166]
Continuing with the narration of her tale, Beauty says: "I showed his grave silence my white skin, my red nipples, and the horses turned their heads to watch me, also, as if they, too, were courteously curious as to the fleshy nature of women." [166]
Having finally conceded to his original request of her, the Beast informs Beauty that she is free to return to her father. But, of course, she now finds herself so taken with the Beast's inhuman nobility that she doesn't want to leave him. Rather, she wants to stay and learn how to feel happy in her own nakedness; for the idea of living without clothes still left her troubled and she rightly connected it to a loss of her humanity:
"I was unaccustomed to nakedness. I was so unused to my own skin that to take off all my clothes involved a kind of flaying. I thought the Beast had wanted a little thing compared with what I was prepared to give him; but it is not natural for humankind to go naked, not since first we hid our loins with fig leaves. He had demanded the abominable. I felt as much atrocious pain as if I was stripping off my own underpelt […]" [168]
Still, despite the cost, Beauty gives herself to the Beast of her own accord. He, in turn, abandons his human disguise and no longer wore strong perfumes to mask his own distinctive animal scent. Beauty is still concerned about his ferocity and the fact that he might yet gobble her up, but perhaps, she reasons, his appetite need not mean her death.
The story concludes with a very lovely and highly erotic scene that any zoophile or therianthrope must surely treasure; a scene typical of Angela Carter in that it profoundly disrupts "both our expectations […] and our customary moral and aesthetic response" [g]:
"I squatted on the wet straw and stretched out my hand. I was now within the field of force of his golden eyes. He growled at the back of his throat, lowered his head, sank on to his forepaws, snarled, showed me his red gullet, his yellow teeth. I never moved. He snuffled the air, as if to smell my fear; he could not.
Slowly, slowly he began to drag his heavy, gleaming weight across the floor towards me.
A tremendous throbbing […] filled the room; he had begun to purr.
[…] The reverberations of his purring rocked the foundations of the house […] I thought: 'It will all fall, everything will disintegrate'.
He dragged himself closer and closer to me, until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue, abrasive as sandpaper. 'He will lick the skin off me!'
And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shiny hairs. My earrings turned […] to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur." [169]
IV.
What, then, are we to make of this zoosexual fantasy of transformation?
Clearly, it challenges traditional moral understandings of the human, the animal, and the relationship that exists between them.
Of course, some might dismiss it on the grounds that in being a magical as well as a sexual fantasy, it has nothing to tell us about the so-called real world. And Carter herself concedes that the tale, unlike the more respectable short story, makes no attempt to imitate life or faithfully record everyday experience.
But for Carter, this is precisely the strength and importance of the tale; in transfiguring the mundane via the extraordinary, the tale challenges our usual assumptions and beliefs about the world and doesn't betray its readers into false certainty and common sense. Tales are always of the unexpected and set in a world wherein the rules governing the boundaries between the true and the false, or concerning identity, are not entirely suspended, but made far more fluid than in ours.
As a matter of fact, Carter's reimagining of La Belle et la Bête is not actually all that radical. It's violence, amorality, and sexual content is found in many of the earliest folk versions that pre-date the more sanitized fairy tales written in the 18th and 19th centuries. Essentially, Carter is reviving an oral tradition in which girls and women are far from helpless or submissive; in which they are, on the contrary, shrewd, quick-witted, and highly skilled.
But as significant as this aspect of the tale is, for me, what really fascinates is that it belongs to a tradition concerning metamorphosis or animal transformation fantasy. Carter too is clearly intrigued by the dialectic of continuity and change and to what extent our humanity is simply skin-deep; if not merely a matter of clothing.
We are obliged to ask the following questions: In stripping naked, and in then stepping out of her very skin, has Beauty realised or lost an essential self? Has she been effectively raped and devoured, or sexually fulfilled via a becoming-animal?
It's because such questions make many people uncomfortable - particularly as they are raised within a zoosexual context - that, strangely enough, the overtly bestial content of this and other such tales is often entirely overlooked.
Indeed, it almost makes one wonder if the idea of sex between young girls and beasts isn't something inconceivable to them. But, probably, it simply shows fear; either the fear that our humanity is not so essential and determined after all, or the older, more irrational fear that bestiality will result in the birth of monsters ... [h]
Illustration by Aleksandra Waliszewska [i]
Notes
[a] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', Twilight in Italy, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 117.
[b] 'The Tiger's Bride' can be found in Angela Carter's astonishing collection of short fiction published as The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, (Golancz, 1979).
In this work, Carter doesn't so-much offer us her own versions of traditional fairytales, as reactivate the latent violence and sexual politics at the heart of such well-known stories as 'Little Red Riding Hood' and 'Beauty and the Beast'. Some have described Carter's writing style as a form of queer gothic feminism, although more usually it is considered to be magical realism. Concerns with female identity and female empowerment are pretty much present throughout, as are supernatural elements often involving metamorphosis.
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories remains one of my favourite books by any author and I would encourage torpedophiles to read (or re-read) it. It can be found on the Internet Archive: click here. However, please note that page numbers given here refer to Angela Carter's collected short stories, published as Burning Your Boats, (Vintage, 1996).
[c] La Belle et la Bête is a fairy tale written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and published in 1740. It was rewritten and published in the form most people now know it by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756. Scholars have traced the origin of the story back over 4000 years, although, ultimately, it's impossible to know where or when a story was first told.
[d] I will offer a closer reading of the text in Part III of this post.
[e] See for example a series of online articles by Ana Isabel Bugeda Díaz under the heading 'Postmodern Retellings 101', which includes a discussion of Angela Carter's 'The Tiger's Bride': click here.
The author cheerfully condemns Western dualism, anthropocentrism, rationalism, patriarchal society, the denial or exclusion of Otherness, etc. whilst speaking positively of desire, animality, emotional intelligence, and the need to subvert traditional narratives. Again, I've no problem with this, it's just that it now strikes me as formulaic and a bit old-fashioned.
[f] I'm referring to the six-part series of essays Zoophilia (published as Vol. III of The Treadwell's Papers, Blind Cupid Press, 2010). In particular, I will be referring to the fifth of these essays, on animal transformation fantasy.
[g] Caroline Walker Bynum, 'Shape and Story: Metamorphosis in the Western Tradition' (Jefferson Lecture, 1999): click here to read online.
[h] As a matter of biological fact, human-animal hybrids, or parahumans,
cannot be bred sexually; attempts to mate a human and a chimpanzee have
been made, but they inevitably failed. However, synthetic biology
and genetic engineering does potentially open the way for a world in
which such inter-species hybrids become possible.
[i] To find out more about this Polish artist visit Marta Lucy Summer's blog Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: click here.
