Monday, September 8, 2014

Frog Prince and Marriagable Age

Many critics interpret the frog in "Frog Prince", or the Beast in "Beauty and the Beast", to represent a young girl's anxieties about marriage. From Surlalune's annotations: "Some critics emphasize the phallic symbolism of the frog, theorizing that the story is about a maiden maturing and overcoming her fear and disgust for the male genitalia."
Margaret Evans Price

It's an interesting theory but I hadn't thought too much about it before, because I'm wary of the psychoanalytic tendency to see everything in fairy tales as phallic. But a recent rereading of the tale of the Frog Prince left me feeling that the Princess is disturbingly young to be getting married at the end. 

The only thing we know about her at the beginning is that her favorite plaything is a golden ball-so she's still young enough to have toys and enjoy playing catch more than anything else. Her actions seem to indicate the immaturity of a child-when confronted with the unwanted frog, she slams the door in his face and goes back to eating, or throws the frog against a wall. Critics have called her selfish, but really she's acting like any child would when basically tricked into making an unwanted promise-she offered the frog her dresses, jewels, and crown for her ball, but he didn't want them. Clearly she values her toy more than beautifying herself, which would be more associated with a maturing woman.
Margaret Evans Price

Throughout the whole tale, everything about her is little. The frog wants to eat from her "little plate" and drink from her "little cup," and after he knocks on the door he calls for the "Princess, little princess" to let him in. If she's small enough to be eating off of a differently sized  plate she would be way too young to marry. It seems reminiscent of Snow White, who, according to the Grimm version, is only seven years old at the beginning of the story; but in that story it's ambiguous as to how much time passes while she's with the dwarves (in some versions she ages as she sleeps). Also, in E.T.A. Hoffman's original "Nutcracker" story, Marie starts the story at seven and is married in a year to the Nutcracker Prince.

Why do these fairy tales feature princesses getting married at such young ages? Was there actually any society in which children really would marry?
Margaret Evans Price

According to wikipedia, although some cultures would marry off children as soon as they went through puberty, even then it seems that they were all at least 12 (although that still seems disturbingly young). But in many cultures, even in Medieval times, it was common for couples to marry around the age of 20-slightly younger if diseases like the Plague made life expectancy much shorter.

Still, there are always exceptions: "In the 12th century the jurist Gratian, an influential founder of Canon law in medieval Europe, accepted age of puberty for marriage to be between 12 and 14 but acknowledged consent to be meaningful if the children were older than 7. There were authorities with a claim that consent could take place earlier. Marriage would then be valid as long as neither of the two parties annulled the marital agreement before reaching puberty, or if they had already consummated the marriage. It should be noted that Judges honored marriages based on mutual consent at ages younger than 7, in spite of what Gratian had said; there are recorded marriages of 2 and 3 year olds.[2]"
Millicent Sowerby

Even in these cases it seems like the term "marriage" was more or less a betrothal. Yet Heidi Anne Heiner, in her annotations for Snow White, tells us that in past centuries, the age of seven was actually considered the transition from child to adult.

Given that many young girls would be married off at ages that we today would consider them to be children, was Frog Prince meant to disturb the listeners by showing them how wrong a practice that was? Or would it have been so commonplace in some cultures that they wouldn't even think anything of it? Do other versions of these tales have similarly childlike heroines? It makes perfect sense that, to a young girl, the idea of sex with an older man would seem as disgusting as sharing a plate and bed with a frog-practices that, Maria Tatar reminds us, indicate the intimacies of marriage more so than mere companionship.

Do any of you know more about the history of marrying ages? And what the young ages in fairy tales might mean?
Walter Crane
(I love all the hidden details in Crane's illustrations-on the bench on which the Princess is seated is a picture of a man handing a woman a ball, indicating the true nature of what is happening)

8 comments:

  1. Okay, as someone who was actually born equipped with the organ in question, I'm deeply confused as to how anyone could see frogs as being in any way phallic. Seriously, how do these two things seem similar to people?

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    1. Lol. I think it has more to do with frogs being slimy and gross, which is how a young girl not yet ready for sex might see male genitals? That in combination with the frog's requests-to eat off her plate, and especially sleep in her bed-he's obviously got more on his mind than mere friendship.

      But you're right, we should never be too quick to assume any imagery is automatically phallic because critics in the past have said so (especially when said critics interpreted pretty much anything as phallic).

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    2. Lol. Male genitalia is not slimey. If anything, sliminess would describe a female, right? Reading your explanation here, that a young woman may think that male genitals are gross, makes sense. Young people are taught "do not show that, its gross"... like maybe you should update that (please) because you come off as childish or ignorant of the texture and feel of testicals.

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    3. Thanks for your feedback. I think I was trying to summarize how other critics have seen the frog but used poor wording. I'll edit that part, I don't want it to be too distracting!

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  2. Both in Medieval England and modern Yemen, it has been legal for young women to marry when they were still children. It was, however at least technically illegal to force them to have sex until they were sexually mature (in some cases, an agreed-upon age is built in to the marriage contract).

    Enforcement of this gets tricky; one queen of England advised her son not to marry off her twelve-year-old granddaughter because, she said, men could not be trusted to honor such contracts. Since she herself had been married at twelve, with an agreement that no sex would take place until she was fourteen, perhaps she had her reasons for thinking this.

    And in modern Yemen, at least one ten-year-old has made headlines for seeking a divorce from a man who forced himself on her before the time specified in HER marriage contract. (She did get the divorce. Also, there are Yemenis who are working on improving on how their legal system addresses this sort of stuff.)

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    1. Thanks for commenting! This is all really fascinating. And it's making more sense that fairy tale characters about to get married may be so young. It's hard to imagine a world in which it would be common for children to be technically married, and living together (I assume), with only a contract stipulating the age of sex.

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  3. Sorry, got side tracked on the slime thing... anyway, I found this website because it just occurred to me that I did not know the moral of this story (and they usually have one). Now in my 30s I feel very differently about this story. Like the girl has to offer the male something sexual (even if she does not want to - thinks it's gross or not ready), for marriage. But marriage is so synonymous with sex that it's not a far stretch to say the moral of the story is teaching women that you must offer yourself sexual to a male to be loved because that is what they want.

    I don't know, though? I am a make fyi

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    1. Finding the "morals" in fairy tales are really quite a tricky business! Certain authors (like Perrault) had their own interpretations, and certainly in other cultures they would have emphasized certain messages, but I find that often those more didactic interpretations tend to contradict the actual events of the story. The Grimms tried to really emphasize the importance of keeping one's promises in their version, but then we're left with the still disturbing thought that a young girl might end up married when she isn't mature enough. Plus in this fairy tale, the ending used will drastically change the perceived message-if it's a version in which she throws the frog against a wall, we can see that as her being rewarded for saying "no" and defending herself (although her reward is, ironically, marriage to that same man...) as opposed to the idea that she kisses the frog, which does imply more that she must grant sexual favors unwillingly. Many will see the growth from disgust to acceptance as a transformation of a young woman into maturity, just in the fairy tale it happens instantly.

      So basically...there's no one right answer for the moral of this fairy tale! It depends who you ask and there's lots of possible ways to read into the tales

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