Saviours with Razors, by Penny-Anne Beaudoin, 3/6
SurLaLune, arguably the most comprehensive fairy tale site on the internet, houses an extraordinary gallery of fairy tale illustrations from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With few exceptions, the depictions of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel are a veritable deluge of goldilocks; even Snow White, whose hair was “black as ebony” is sporting flaxen tresses in Hermann Vogel’s 1894 illustration! (Kinder und Hausmarchen.)
Deviations from the blonde tide are noticeable by their rarity. Jessie Willcox Smith, an American artist, offers a compelling portrait of a brunette Cinderella praying by the hearth in her 1911 illustration, perhaps congruent with her poverty and low social standing, or even a reflection of her being the cinder-girl, covered in ash and soot. Thomas Ralph Spence presents a dark-haired and particularly hirsute Sleeping Beauty (date unknown) in his painting, while John Duncan, in a reversal of modern styles, shows Beauty with black hair and blonde roots (date unknown). Dark-haired when she falls asleep, her hair grows out over time, and we see that she is in fact blonde. By the time the prince finds her, then, Beauty’s showing her true colour— the blonde hair of purity and goodness. I guess after a hundred years, no woman can keep her real hair colour a secret!
By far the most daring departure from the standard practice of representing fairy tale beauties as blonde, comes in Frank Cadogan Cowper’s Rapunzel (1900). In this breathtaking portrait, Rapunzel is pictured as a flaming redhead! Indeed, the whole painting is a blaze of crimson and burgundy hues, as if the artist had donned the rose-tinted glasses of love to paint it.
But these are the exceptions. As a rule, and in the absence of any denotative guidance from the text, illustrators imagined the heroines of these stories as blondes. And it's not just the German artists who might be charged with a certain bias towards a traditional Teutonic representation of beauty, but European and American artists as well.
And the question remains, why?
Part of the answer may lie in semantics. In English the word ‘fair’ can mean ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’ or ‘blonde; it's possible that, over the years, all three meanings were rolled into one, meaning good girls were beautiful girls, and beautiful girls were blonde girls, and blonde girls were good girls, and around and around we go.
Even today, we are surprised and disappointed when beautiful people do wrong, when their actions don’t match their attractive appearance. Beautiful people, especially beautiful women, should do only good. That way our world makes sense. And that, I suspect, is why we have so many pictures of gorgeous blondes in fairy tale illustrations, and why red hair is generally reserved for witches and grey hair for witches disguised as old crones, as in the Snow White illustrations where the stepmother/witch disguises herself as an old woman to gain admittance to Snow White’s sanctuary.
But what about the Little Mermaid? Ariel had long red hair, didn't she? Modern Disney animations have played around with hair colour a bit, with the Little Mermaid as a redhead and Belle in Beauty and The Beast as a fetching brunette. But Disney’s Cinderella? - blonde girl. Sleeping Beauty? - blonde girl. Rapunzel? - well, the Disney version is in production now, and, judging from the stills, Rapunzel is quite definitely a, say it with me now children, blonde girl!
Interestingly enough, the original Grimm Brothers’ stories show a far more democratic attitude toward beauty. Oh, the heroines are beautiful [a notable exception is the English/Scottish Kate from Kate Crackernuts - Ed] but often so are the villainesses. Snow White’s stepmother is described as “a beautiful woman, but proud and haughty,” and though we think of Cinderella as having ugly stepsisters, in earlier versions her sisters are “beautiful and fair of face, but vile and black of heart.” Outer beauty did not always signal inner goodness. But that is an idea that provokes a certain amount of anxiety in the human psyche and no small difficulties for illustrators—white hats on the bad guys! You can see the problem. Far more logical to keep white hats on the good guys and blonde hair on the good girls.
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