Calvino, Stereotypes and Misogyny

The stepmother greets Hansel and Gretel. Illustration of Grimm's tale by Henry Ford (c1891)

I mentioned in earlier posts that Calvino’s Italian Folktales has considerable stereotyping. Looking back after reading the entire collection, I notice that although he is a conscientious and thoughtful editor, in his notes he praises any detail except the glaring attitudes to women. I’m trying to identify which, if any, of these tales I could tell my grand-daughter, and I’m struggling. 

I was able to find one scholarly article about the Italian Folktales, by Martin Beckwith (1987), which looked at a few tales in detail and identified how Calvino had changed them. The changes included making some of the tales slightly less gory and violent, not dissimilar to the Grimm brothers in their retelling. However, the Grimms were writing in the late 18th and early 19th-centuries. As a 20th-century editor and commentator, would you not feel it appropriate to address the misogyny? Do we believe that the inherent nature of folktales is that stepmothers are evil and most old women suspect? If Calvino had left his stories untouched, he would not have invited criticism of this kind. But he clearly felt entitled to edit them, so I believe he bears some responsibility for the stereotyping he is consciously transmitting. 

As for other stereotypes, I used a digital edition of Calvino’s Folktales to identify that nine of the stories feature stepmothers. All of these references are to evil stepmothers. For example:

[52] One day the stepmother slapped her for breaking a bowl, and Stellina left home, unable to endure any more.

[82] As soon as the king was gone, the stepmother queen went to all lengths to get into his room. She put opium into the wine of his servant …

[95] the stepmother beat the poor girl every day.

[121] The son remained with his stepmother, who paid him no mind whatever, since she was in love with a Moor and had eyes only for him.

Calvino is not alone in ignoring the stereotyping; many modern commentators seem to do the same. The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales (2014) has just one incidental reference to “misogyny” or “misogynist”. Is that not a key question to address in any modern-day evaluation of the fairy tale?

I am not advocating censorship of literature. We recognize aspects of Shakespeare that do not conform to modern values. But in the restricted world of the fairy tale, the message is hammered home in story after story. You could even say the primary message of many (most?) of the tales is for the hero (usually male) to find a rich or titled wife (who typically has little or no choice in the decision) and to overcome the obstructions of stepmothers and other miscellaneous curses. I'd love to explore how many violent deaths occur in the tales to women, and how many to men. 

Perhaps the only response possible today to the traditional folktale is to follow Angela Carter and to rewrite the stories completely to fit 21st-century values. Should we abandon traditional fairy tales and folktales? I am waiting to be persuaded otherwise.

Final judgement on Cnut the Great

Cnut and his wife Emma, from the New Minster Liber Vitae

Having now finished Timothy Bolton’s biography of Cnut the Great, I can’t resist appending to my earlier post with some additional points. 

The conclusion should be at the start

Bolton’s five-page conclusion makes the life of Cnut much clearer. General readers would find it easier to have this as an introduction or first chapter.

 Get beyond “Englishness”

For much of the book, Bolton admirably examines Cnut both from a Scandinavian and an English point of view. I haven’t read many books about early English history, but I expect the typical book by an English author will look at English sources, and not consider events and sources outside England. But sadly, at moments in this book and in the very last page of this biography, Bolton comes dangerously close to falling into the trap of nationalism. I simply don’t believe that a ruler like Cnut will have seen “English” and “Danish” in the way we regard these terms in the 21st century: 

England may have been of crucial importance to him, but he seems to have remained at heart a Scandinavian. [p129] 

That is not to say that Cnut did not strongly feel himself to be Scandinavian or that he did not really wish to embrace Englishness [p213] 

I don’t imagine William the Conqueror was too bothered about embracing “Englishness”, whatever that is, and I don’t imagine that Cnut was very interested in it either, apart from the political benefit of appearing as the right kind of ruler. In fact, being able to tell the English what they wanted to hear, and the Danes what they wanted to hear, even if it was diametrically opposed, is what strikes me as modern about Cnut. 

Use a contemporary image of Cnut

I mentioned in an earlier post that the book uses a cover image dating two hundred years after Cnut's death. Bolton presumably sanctioned the use of this anachronous depiction of Cnut as a knight in medieval armour, while he includes a fascinating contemporary image of Cnut as one of his plates. He states, on page 192, “This is one of the most widely discussed drawings of Anglo-Saxon history”. A section is shown at the top of this post. .

The British Library states the illustration is “near contemporary”. Talking of dates, this book is maddeningly vague about dates; it doesn’t give a date for the illustration.

The historian’s innocence

Sadly, the author reveals a charming innocence when it comes to evaluating Cnut. He is convinced that Cnut became sincerely religious later in his life. For evidence of this, Bolton mentions the gifts Cnut lavished on English religious institutions. What motivates philanthropy? 

M.K. Lawson suggested in 1993 that many of Cnut’s gifts to the Church may have been politically motivated, and I later followed that approach myself. To some degree we were both probably correct, but genuine piety sits at the heart of an array of sources close to him, and Church gift-giving must also have been a powerful force behind this benevolence. [footnote: A mix of the two motives is perhaps characteristic of almost all medieval donors.][p183] 

I find this astonishing. Bolton gives ample evidence of Cnut’s astuteness (he calls Cnut a “diplomacist”, not a term I have found in a dictionary) yet is convinced he was sincerely Christian. I’d want to see more evidence than giving gifts to churches. 

Cnut turning back the tide

Like it or not, this is what most people think they know about Cnut. Clearly, from Bolton’s description, it is based on a wrong reading of the texts. But to place this in an appendix and footnotes is rather childish. Bolton justifies his decision thus: 

I beg my reader’s forgiveness for my irascibility on this front, but when one spends the better part of one’s adult life researching Cnut, it is the first thing anybody asks you about, and it become as irritating as a stuck record. 

Find a copy-editor

The book would benefit greatly from an editor able to remove some of the unique word forms (“eschelons”) and dead phrases. The quote above mixes “one” and “you”. Another quote above describes “the heart of an array of sources”. Some more examples: 

It in the field of international politics … where we can see that Cnut … ploughed a novel and quite opportunistic furrow. [p158] 

It’s a shame, since the underlying research looks so good, that the book loses the reader in details, when it would be simple to provide a few signposts.

How great was Cnut the Great?

 

A 13th-century illustration of Cnut in combat with Edmund Ironside

We hear a lot about the growth of scholarly publishing but even so, it’s not every day that a new book is published about Cnut the Great. It seemed like a good opportunity to find out if Cnut was a candidate for greatness. After all, he successfully invaded England less than a hundred years before William the Conqueror, but somehow the date of his invasion (1013) is not known by everyone in the way that 1066 is. 

This book (by Tim Bolton, appearing in the long-lasting series “Yale English Monarchs”) got good reviews, but the experience of reading it, for this non-specialist reader, was decidedly mixed. It would have been so easy to make the book more accessible.

·       The author must assume we know the main facts already, but I’m afraid I did not. Why not add a chronology of major events? I kept having to check the Wikipedia entry for Cnut to establish where we were.

·       The cover illustration, although it may be referring to Cnut, dates from two hundred years after Cnut’s time. We are quite certain that Cnut did not wear clothes like that. Could an illustration not have been found that was contemporaneous with Cnut?

·       Speaking of illustrations, you would have a hard time trying to link the photos with the main text. There are eight pages of black and white photos, but it seems beyond Yale University Press to indicate in the text where the images might be. For example, a pencase lid was found in a 1961. “Reproductions of both its upper and lower faces are given here in this volume”, states a footnote on page 142. Why so coy? It is plate 4. Here we are in 2021, and book publishing hasn’t yet reached the point where the text can refer to the illustrations with any certainty.

Much, perhaps most of the book is conjecture. This is unavoidable when writing the life of someone for whom so few sources remain. But it leads to a lot of hypothetical assertion.  As an example of “history as it could have been”, how about:

Harald’s death must have had a profound effect on Cnut. In England in 1018 he cannot have expected that Harald would be dead within a few months, and indeed as his brother must have been in his twenties or very early thirties, it was unlikely. The emotional toll may have been great. The brothers seem to have been close. [p131]

As if that isn’t uncertain enough already, a footnote adds: “No source records Harald’s age, but he is unlikely to have been many years older than Cnut, who at this stage must have been in his twenties.”

 The book is an uneasy mix of an academic article, disputing with other scholars, and a general introduction. For a general work of history, I would not include the names of any of the recent scholars in the body of the text. If the author wants to cite the attribution, it can be done in the footnotes. Discussions with other scholars are for academics to argue in journals, not for a biography of this kind.

·       The index is of proper names only, and pretty selective at that: there is no reference to “English Channel”, or “North Sea”, or “Kattegat”. Yet there is an entry for London. The index appears to suffer from an unconscious English bias. There is no entry for Aarhus or Fyrkat, but there is an entry for Abingdon Abbey. Who makes these decisions?

·       In contrast, the footnotes frequently contain material that is highly relevant for the main argument. These should be promoted.

·       There are just two not very adequate maps, one of Denmark, one of routes from Northern Europe to Rome. No map of England, or maps of the places mentioned in the text.

·       There is a fascinating introduction, but this combines a real overview (very helpful) and a detailed description of sources (very intricate, valuable, but making little sense to the general reader until the relevant source is mentioned in the text)

Is the book worth reading? Absolutely! It makes effective use of whatever sources it can find, including archaeology, coins, and poetry. Most impressive, to my mind, is the way it makes a determined effort not to interpret the life of Cnut, a Dane, into the standard narrative of English history, making so many unstated assumptions about the national heritage. Because the English sources are so much more substantial than the Scandinavian records, Cnut tends to be seen through English eyes, but he seems to have been equally at home in England or in Denmark. His life is a fascinating example of monarchy in the days before the nation-state became implanted on everyone’s brains. Finally, mercifully, there is no mention (at least so far in my reading) of the one “fact” that everyone knows about Cnut: his trying to stem the tide.