Saviours with Razors, Penny-Anne Beaudoin, 5/6
Men’s Facial Hair
Shave and a haircut, two bits!
(Source Unknown)
And now a word about beards and moustaches in illustrations of fairy tale princes.
There isn’t that much. A review of the galleries at SurLaLune shows most of the princes clean shaven, a fact made all the more remarkable as beards were coming into vogue in the Victorian era, the time most of these illustrations were created. The dwarfs in the Snow White pictures frequently sport beards of various sizes and descriptions, but the princes, not so much. And why is that?
Historically, there has been a great deal of ambivalence in the area of male facial hair, and what it says about the wearer. The quintessential sign of virility and potency, it has also been associated with shiftiness and underhandedness.There are certain fairy tales in which a beard is clearly ‘the mark of the beast.’ Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard” for instance – an appropriate title for a story of a man who can’t get a date because of his blue beard. Well, that, and the fact that he’s had a whole string of wives go missing under mysterious circumstances. The Beast in Gabrielle de Villeneuve’s “Beauty and the Beast” is under a “terrible enchantment” that hides his princely demeanour beneath a shaggy coat of body hair. And in the Grimm Brothers own corollary tale “Bearskin,” a handsome soldier makes a deal with the devil for a lifetime of fortune if he can just survive the next seven years neither shaving nor washing. In each of these tales, facial hair is depicted as sinister, brutish, even repulsive. Politicians of today are encouraged by their handlers not to grow beards or moustaches as the electorate tends to believe a clean-shaven candidate is a trustworthy candidate, as opposed to a bearded one, I suppose. In his article on beards, Michael Brus quotes anthropologist Desmond Morris, highlighting the advantages of shaving:
1) it makes [men] look younger (babies are smooth faced);
2) it makes [men] look friendlier (it’s easier to read [their] expressions and see [them] smile);
3) it makes [men] appear cleaner.
(Michael Brus. Beards. Why Are They Such A Turnoff? Slate.com Aug.9, 2001)
Unsurprisingly, illustrators wanted to portray all these admirable traits in their hero-princes, much the same way they wanted to portray heroine-princesses as innocent and pure.
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