The Monster's Bride: Part Six

Pompeo Batoni - The Marriage of Eros and Psyche (1756)


"Apuleius' tale is the earliest extant forerunner of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale in Western literature, and a founding myth of sexual difference. It includes episodes the fairy tale 'La Belle et la bête' has made famous, from children's versions to films: the mysterious menacing lover, the jealous sisters, the enchanted castle where disembodied voices serve every wish and 'nectarous wines and appetising dishes appeared by magic, floating up to her of their own accord.' It echoes stories of Pandora and Eve when it relies on female curiosity as the dynamic of the plot, and the overriding motive force of the female sex. Punished for her disobedience, Psyche then has to prove her love through many adventures and ordeals; pregnant by Cupid, she struggles through one test of her loyalty after another until, finally, this Beauty is reunited with her Beast and adapts him, the god of Love, to the human condition of marriage, and they have a daughter, called Voluptas - Pleasure."

From The Beast to the Blonde by Marina Warner

The Monster's Bride: Part Five

Simon Vouet - Psyche Discovering Cupid's Identity (early 1600s)

'Psyche is forbidden to look at [Cupid]. When she can resist no longer and breaks her prohibition, lighting a candle to look at her lover while he sleeps, he vanishes, and with him all her enchanted surroundings. But Eros, mysterious, unknown, feared, exceeds all imaginable degree of charm when Psyche sees him in the night:

There lay the gentlest and sweetest of all wild creatures . . . his golden hair, washed in nectar and still scented with it, thick curls straying over white neck and flushed cheeks and falling prettily entangled on either side of his head . . . soft wings of purest whie . . . the tender down fringing the feathers quivered naughtily all the time. The rest of his body was so smooth and beautiful that Venus cold never be ashamed to acknowledge him as her son.

Psyche's failure to trust, and to obey, has cost her his adorable presence.'

From The Beast to the Blonde by Marina Warner

The Week in Review

Reading:

Immortal Monster: The Mythical Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film - Joseph D. Adriano

Interpreting the Moving Image - Noel Carroll

Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture - Cynthia Erb

Kiss of the Beast: From Paris Salon to King Kong - Tedd Gott and Kathryn Weir

The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film - (ed.) Barry Keith Grant

The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle - Fatimah Rony

From the Beast to the Blonde - Marina Warner

Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time - Marina Warner

Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism - Thomas E. Wartenberg

Viewing:

Rebecca - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1940)

Shadow of a Doubt - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1943)

Rear Window - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1954)

The Wrong Man - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1956)

Vertigo - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1958)

North by Northwest - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1959)

Psycho - d. Alfred Hitchcock (1960)

Listening:

Murder Ballads - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The Boatman's Call - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The Good Son - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The Monster's Bride: Part Four

Antonio Canova - Amor and Psyche (1796)

I never may believe
These antic fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever apprehends . . .
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing
A local habitations and a name . . .

A Midsummer Night's Dream, V, 1 - William Shakespeare

'The first beast of the West was Eros, the god of love himself. In the romance of Cupid and Psyche, Eros/Cupid makes love, unseen in the dark, to a mortal Beauty - Psyche - who rivals his own mother Venus in seductiveness . . .'

From The Beast to the Blonde by Marina Warner

The Monster's Bride: Part Three

Emmanuel Frémiet - Gorille enlevant une negresse (1887)

"After his involvement with the Museum d'histoire naturelle, Frémiet was surely familiar with the research of Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788-1868). In the successive volumes of his Antiquites Celtiques et Antediluviennes (1847, 1857 and 1863), Boucher de Perthes argued that the peculiarly shaped stones he had found among the bones of extinct mammals in the Abbeville region of France were actually primitive cutting and hunting implements fashioned by antediluvian peoples. At the time of their first publication, his theories were ridiculed by many, since they did not concur with the Christian Church's religious notions of the beginnings of mankind dating no earlier than 4000 BC. By 1887, however, Boucher de Perthes' discoveries were thoroughly vindicated. It is interesting to consider whether the ape's possession of a chiselled cutting tool in Frémiet’s Gorilla Carrying off a Woman depicts a pure gorilla or an ape that has evolved in intelligence one step towards the human condition. Certainly, the critics of the day were divided as to whether his new work promoted or argued against Darwinian theory.

In 1887, the state authorities were faced with acknowledging the celebrity of Frémiet’s life-size plaster and immediately acquired it; yet they were also confronted by its highly controversial subject matter. Frémiet himself had written to the chief arts administrator of the day, pleading that 'with your dual interest in the fine arts and in science, it is to be hoped that you will decide to acquire my sculpture, which really belongs in the Museum d'histoire naturelle'. This was not to be and despite Frémiet’s many entreaties, the work was stowed away until 1895 when it was consigned to the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, where it remains today. The sculptor was able to bring the work back to Paris briefly some years later, when he received a commission from an American collector for a life-size bronze to be cast from it. This enabled the sculpture to be once again exhibited to a huge audience, at the Exposition Universelle of 1900.

Its exile in Nantes failed to make Frémiet’s composition disappear as he had permission from the French State to edition bronze versions of the work in a reduced size, and these proved to be highly popular collectables. The ambiguous but compelling Gorilla Carrying off a Woman was also reproduced widely, by both engraving and photography. By all these means, Frémiet’s sculpture entered the public consciousness as one of the defining images of the time."

From Clutch of the Beast by Ted Gott

The Monster's Bride: Part Two

Emmanuel Frémiet - Gorille enlevant une negresse (1887)

"The 'Gorilla wars' of the 1860s and the entire weight of evolutionary debate attendant upon the theories of Darwin, Huxley and others lay behind Emmanuel Frémiet’s decision to revisit the gorilla in 1887. As Bartlett recounted in 1891:

Always seeing a plaster cast of a gorilla at the Garden [the Jardin des Plantes of the Museum] and regretting the destruction of the one he had made in 1859, decided Frémiet to make another group of the same subject, but differently and more compactly treated. Its appearance in the Salon of 1887 created an immense sensation and, as usual, a wide division of opinion. The few best artists and art lovers pronounced it, independent of subject, a great masterpiece, while many wholly condemned it, because of its subject.

Frémiet’s life and career had also changed significantly in the three decades that lay between his first and second versions of the Gorilla. From the 1860s Frémiet had become fascinated with creating meticulously accurate reconstructions of the appearance and armour of military figures from Roman times to the Middle Ages. His St George and the Dragon 1891, for example, casts the Christian saint in the guise of a medieval warrior, whose armour is based on actual examples of the period that the artist studied in France's Imperial Army Museum. A deep interest in the sciences of prehistoric archaeology and palaeontology also ran alongside Frémiet’s fascination for medieval reconstructions, leading him to create a number of sculptures depicting the struggles of Stone Age peoples. In July 1875, a month after the death of the esteemed animalier sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, Frémiet was named as Barye's replacement to the post of Master of Zoological Drawing at the Museum d'histoire naturelle.

When Frémiet created the 1887 version of the life-size Gorille enlevant une femme (Gorilla carrying off a woman), it carried the same power to shock audiences as its predecessor of 1859. The immediacy and solidity of its depiction of a wounded primate locked in mortal combat with a living, struggling woman was far removed from the passivity of even the best taxidermists' efforts then on display in the world's museums. While gorillas had by now become familiarised within both scientific and public discourse, living specimens of the great ape were still highly prized and exotic items for those zoos lucky enough to possess one. The life-size Gorilla carrying off a woman was another controversial triumph for Frémiet, who had last received a medal at the Salon in 1851. He now carried off the Salon's coveted prize, the Medal of Honour.

Whereas the 1859 sculpture had depicted a female gorilla dragging away an arguably 'naturally selected' dead trophy, Frémiet upped the ante in 1887. The woman was now Caucasian and very much alive, even presaging an art nouveau nymph in her curvaceous struggle with a visibly male primate. Frémiet no longer made his viewers play mute witness to the triumphant swagger of a murderous beast, but took them right into the heart of a much more ambiguous battle, set in the Stone Age.

The 1887 sculpture further muddied the waters by alluding to controversial new archaeological discoveries. Rather than being an innocent victim, the woman wears part of a gorilla's jawbone as a hair adornment, indicating her status as a Stone Age predator. She is part of a prehistoric hunting party that has been attacking the gorilla as edible prey. Moreover, it is her companions at whom the beast grimaces and snarls - those who have hurled the lance that pierces the left shoulder of the gorilla. The chiselled rock which the ape grabs in self-defence might well have belonged to his attackers, for it resembles a cutting tool from the Palaeolithic era."

From Clutch of the Beast by Ted Gott

The Monster's Bride: Part One

Emmanuel Frémiet - Gorille enlevant une negresse (1859)

"In 1859, the French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet (1824-1910) alarmed the jury of the Paris Salon by submitting a greater than life-size plaster composition, Gorille enlevant une negresse (Gorilla Carrying off a Negress). The jury found it to be too confronting for both its graphic violence and for its proximity to current debates about evolution. In that same year, Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a work that acted as a flashpoint for evolutionary theory. For decades prior to the appearance of Darwin's landmark text, scientists and theologians struggled to reconcile a barrage of new discoveries in the fields of archaeology, geology and comparative anatomy with traditionally held beliefs concerning the world's and humanity's creation.

By 1859 Frémiet had already established a national and international reputation as a master sculptor. He had caught the imagination of visitors to the annual Paris Salon in 1843 with his life-size plaster sculptures of both wild and domestic animals that were astonishing for their faithfulness to nature and lifelike qualities. Frémiet’s three-dimensional evocations of domestic pets proved especially popular in his early career, bringing him increasing critical acclaim and the financial reward of official patronage. He seemed, however, to have seriously blotted his copybook with the Gorilla Carrying off a Negress, at least in the eyes of the more conservative controllers of the art world. Frémiet himself recalled:

At a time when a lot of noise was being made about mankind and apes being brothers, it was an audacious idea; and my work proved even more aggravating since, the gorilla being the ugliest of all the primates, the comparison was hardly flattering for humans ... The jury's condemnation was unanimous. My work was declared to be seriously offensive to public morality, and it was banished pitilessly from the Salon.

Alfred, Comte de Nieuwerkerke, the chief arts administrator, quickly intervened and a place was found for the artist's sculpture, despite its official rejection from the items accepted into the Salon proper. The Gorilla was installed towards the entrance of the Salon's sculpture section, set back in a niche behind heavy green velvet curtains. While the conservative jury surely hoped to marginalise the work, this special treatment - or maltreatment - served only to create a cause celebre around Frémiet's sculpture. Parting these curtains to obtain a glimpse of the censored work became de rigueur for adult visitors to that year's Salon. According to the artist, women were especially titillated by the piece, whose composition was certainly confronting. The sculpture not only depicted a murder, but also seemed to allude to ravishment, visualising the worst fears of many about the planet's largest and most human-seeming primate. Reading the sculpture in this way, the critic Charles Baudelaire took exception to its subject matter:

Why are we not given a crocodile, a tiger, or any other wild animal that might eat a woman? Because this is not about eating, but rape! It is the ape alone, this gigantic ape at once so much more and less than a man, which has at times shown a human appetite for women ... To be honest, such subjects are beneath the dignity of so talented an artist, and the jury has done well to reject this sordid topic.

It is perhaps not surprising that Gorilla Carrying off a Negress, which was destroyed in 1861 and is now known only from a handful of photographs, was disturbing to viewers in 1859. The gorilla itself was still a newly discovered and much misunderstood species, and this added scientific and speculative weight to the frisson produced by Frémiet's sculpture."

From Clutch of the Beast by Ted Gott

The Discreet Agony Of Impossible Intimacies: Part Four (Grotesqueries)

Production still from King Kong (1933)


'Like myths and fairytales, art and film encode cultural contradictions, moral dilemnas and dominant ideologies; they rewrite, re-vision and remake cultural fables, like that of Beauty and the Beast. In the period following the Enlightenment, the nature of aesthetic value and judgment changed. Modern art, literature and later film, illustrated the grotesque in order to define beauty, made monsters to delineate the bounds of normality, set beasts in opposition to humanity, and created racial others in order to construct a normative (white) subject.

When ideals of beauty were recognised as dependent on human appreciation, the grotesque emerged as a foil to beauty - and the thoroughly modern monster was born.

In 1927 Victor Hugo describes the grotesque and its relationship to beauty as the key to modern aesthetics: 'It is everywhere; on the one hand, it creates the deformed and the horrible, on the other the comic and the buffoon'. Serving as contrast to the sublime, the grotesque is placed at the vanguard of progress in the arts; it gives birth to a modern form of beauty made up of violent contrasts. On the grotesque he suggests further that: 'in the age of romaticism everything bears witness to its intimate and creative alliance with Beauty. Even the most naive popular legends explain at times with an admirable instinct this mystery of modern art. Antiquity would not have made Beauty and the Beast'. Precursors such as Apuleius's classical story of a divine lover mistaken for a monster do not rely in the same way on the visualisations of the grotesque and its contrast with beauty - Cupid is never really a beast.'

From 'It was beauty killed the beast': Modern Monsters from Frankenstein to King Kong by Kathryn Weir