Fairytales have not always been the fluffy Disney-esque stories we read to our children at night, once upon a time they were unpleasant stories of rivalry, jealousy and an incredible amount of violence and debauchery.
When I was a child fairytales bored me, they were flat, meaningless stories that preached crusty morals about being do-gooder females. Our revolting folklore tales were cleaned up by 18th century storyteller Charles Perrault in order to entertain French aristocrats who were so gentille the mere mention of blood or copulation would make a lady keel over. In turn the Brothers Grimm took many of Perrault's adaptations and a handful of German folklore and mashed them up into a bright ball of fluffiness.
Sadly these tales stripped of thier crude motifs lose a lot of their intial meaning. Freud may have coined the phrase 'penis envy', but looking back at the attitudes towards women in these old tales its easier to believe that men have been(and perhaps still are)scared, envious, intriguded and fearful of the power of the womb.
Bruno Bettlehein explored how fairytales become symbolic of children growing into adults. Every single heroine in the fairytales of the Western world are pretty industrious girls no older than 13. Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel were all supposed to be girls reaching menstruation, and with menstruation comes the ability to bear children. Of course these girls never follow a smooth course to a happy ending, they are obstructed by people jealous or frightened by their developing sexuality, namely old crones or promsicious men. Little Red Riding Hood is the obvious example, a girl who conspiciously wears the colour of menstruation whilst wandering around a wood completely alone save for the ravenous male wolf whos enticed by the sight and smell of this young woman. Bettlehein suggests the absence of parents in these tales plays upon a bildungsroman theme, that by removing guardians (or making them utterly useless) it shows how young women must make their own decisions in life.
There is however a recurring theme of parental neligicance in womb envy, being incestuous fathers. In The Bear by Giambattisa Basile a king seeks out a new wife after being widowed, and looks towards his own daughter as his bride. He keeps her locked within the castle and her only escape is by wearing a bearskin (or donkey, or goatskin depending on the variations)to avoid having sex with her father. The entrapment of the pubescent daughter shows the father is aware of the girl's sexuality, sees it as a threat to his own power as a man so he decides to keep her for himself.
Basile also recorded the earliest version of the sleeping beauty story, named Sun Moon and Talia. The father is distressed when the heroine, Talia pricks her finger on the spindle, the spindle being a phallic symbol and the blood drawn from Talia showing a loss of innocence. The King presumes she is dead and sends her body to a country estate to never be seen again. However another king finds Talia in the estate, and not being able to wake her, decides to rape her in her sleep. What a lovely tale to tell the kids! Talia gives birth, still comatose to twins who wake her up by sucking the poision out of her finger. The princess's deep sleep marks her period into sexual maturity, the rape is an act of dominance and power of the male upon a dormant womb. When Talia wakes up and seeks out the king who violated her, she comes across his evil wife who also shows womb envy because after years of marriage she remains barren while Talia gives birth to twins in her sleep.
It's interesting to note in The Grimm's 'cleaned up' version of the tale, the young girl in her comatose state is made unttainable by being placed in the top room of a tower surrounded by a thicket of thorns. The thicket is a protective barrier against the girl's virginity that only the most virtuous of men can enter . In a more literal interpretation, the thicket is the virgin's freshly grown pubic hair which acts as the gateway to a princess's womb.
Our fairytales were not born out of social niceities as we know them today. It wasn't about morals and karmic outcomes for do-gooders, they were tales about humanity. Jealousy, anger, betrayal, courage, friendship, family roles and restraints. They were about real people in bizarre fantasy landscapes which mean to tell us more about human behaviour than what we should or shouldn't do. Sexuality is the greatest motivaton in the human psyche, and to those male storytellers all those years ago, the womb and feminine sexuality was an admirable mysterious and unattainable quality. Sex is all about the hidden, fetishes are fetishes because we don't understand them, they are secrets. In folklore the womb is a secret and all men want to know.
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