 In 1893, Marian Roalfe Coxe created an exhaustive index of Cinderella-type folktales. It's a pioneering work in the field, and as is typical for folktales, some of the stories get weird. One of them that especially stuck with me is “Le Chat Noir” – a story from Brittany, which goes in an almost Puss in Boots-like direction when the heroine gives birth to a kitten.
As the story goes: the beautiful Yvonne is mistreated by her stepmother, who favors her own ugly daughter, Louise. The stepmother has Yvonne’s beloved pet cow slaughtered. Mysteriously, beside the cow’s heart they find two little gold shoes, which the stepmother greedily claims for her own daughter’s troisseau. It so happens that a wealthy prince has heard of Yvonne’s goodness and beauty and comes courting. The stepmother takes advantage of this, gets the wedding set, and then on the wedding day, she locks Yvonne up and substitutes Louise. However, they are forced to cut off Louise’s toes and heels to get the golden shoes to fit her. As soon as the prince gets a good look, he walks out of the wedding in disgust, humiliating the family. The stepmother vows revenge on Yvonne, because clearly this is all Yvonne’s fault. She visits an old friend - a witch - who tells her to kill a black cat, make it into stew and serve it to Yvonne, who will die within the day. The stepmother carries out these instructions. However, Yvonne doesn’t die; she only falls ill and is sick all night, throwing up, which the narrator suggests may have saved her life. The frustrated stepmother turns to harassing Yvonne and her father until they decide to leave the country and sail away; then the stepmother tricks Yvonne’s father and unties the ship, causing it to drift away with Yvonne aboard alone. Yvonne lands on an island, where she makes her home. Fortunately, there’s an abandoned hermitage and plenty of food for her to live on. Less fortunately, after three weeks, she begins to feel ill, and realizes that she is pregnant. She gives birth to a black cat. Although startled, she decides "It was God who gave him to me; I must therefore receive him, without complaint, as coming from him, and treat him as my child, since that is his will." She treats the cat like any other baby and raises him lovingly. After a few months, he begins talking like a man and tells her he's going to cross the sea and get some food from the nearest town. Although she's nervous to let him go alone, she makes a satchel for him and he swims to the nearest town. There, he goes to the house of Monsieur Rio – first to steal food, and then to warn Monsieur Rio of an assassination attempt and rescue him from being framed of murder. In exchange, the cat asks Monsieur Rio to marry his mother. Rio really doesn’t want to marry a cat, but he’s honor-bound – and then absolutely dazzled when the cat brings in the lovely Yvonne. With Yvonne and Rio married, the cat asks that they visit Yvonne’s family. Her father is overjoyed, her stepmother and stepsister less so. At the welcome feast, the cat calls out the witch and has a battle of sorcery with her, before blowing fire and burning both her and the stepmother to ash. He then asks Monsieur Rio to cut him open. Rio of course doesn’t want to, but is finally convinced. When he does so, the cat becomes a handsome prince, who announces himself as the greatest magician ever. Analysis The story leaves many questions. The prince from the first half of the tale vanishes never to be heard from again, with Yvonne marrying Monsieur Rio instead. It’s not clear why the stepmother’s death spell causes pregnancy, although perhaps it is implied to be divine intervention, with Yvonne also happening to find a welcoming home on the island, and specifically relying on God when questioning why she just gave birth to a cat. Divine intervention might also explain why the cat is a wizard. This is actually two tale types stapled together – not uncommon in oral storytelling. The first section is a standard Cinderella type. The second part is an example of ATU 708, “The Wonder-Child.” In "The Wonder-Child," a typical plotline is that the heroine’s stepmother turns to magic and puts a spell on the heroine, so that she gives birth to a monstrous son. In "Le Chat Noir," the pregnancy seems to be a random side effect and Yvonne ends up marooned almost incidentally, but in most versions, it is intentional - the stepmother sets out to have her stepdaughter impregnated out of wedlock and thus disgraced and exiled - or even murdered for dishonoring her family. The stepmother, relying on social norms, intends to destroy the heroine's future, family connections, and social standing. And it almost works. But the heroine's child turns out to have magical powers, which he uses to find his mother a suitable husband and restore her to society, reconcile her with her family, and expose and punish the stepmother. "The Wonder-Child" is one of the tales closely related under the umbrella of the "Calumniated Wife" motif, listed right after Type 707, "The Three Golden Children." (So this is another story loosely connected to the Perseus type, which I looked at in a previous post.) In Calumniated Wife stories, the woman is often accused of giving birth to animals or monsters. The implied accusation is infidelity and even bestiality; hence, the harsh punishments placed on her until her true children return to expose the truth. In “The Wonder-Child,” she actually does give birth to an animal or monster through her enemy’s machinations. Her shame is compounded in “The Wonder-Child” because she’s a young, unmarried woman. Other Versions The combo with Cinderella in "Le Chat Noir" is unusual. The common thread seems to be the evil stepmother; I would guess this is why the storyteller connected them, consciously or unconsciously. A more straightforward version of ATU 708, “Le Chat et les Deux Sorcieres,” appears in the same collection as “Le Chat Noir.” This begins more simply with the stepmother consulting the witch. A Roma version, “De Little Fox,” has a fox who at the end transforms into a beautiful angel and flies away. In a South Slavonic story, “Der Sohn der Königstochter,” a jealous queen mixes ground-up bone from a graveyard into her daughter's coffee; this results in the birth of a son who is spotted all over (Krauss, no. 41). And in a Tuscan tale, a wicked stepmother consults a beggar-woman for a pregnancy-causing potion made of the blood of seven wild beasts. The potion works and her daughter is sentenced to death for supposed promiscuity, but the executioners spare her and leave her in the forest, where she gives birth to a seven-headed dragon. She names the dragon Meraviglia (Marvel or Wonder), and he grows up taking good care of her and eventually getting her a king for a husband. At the end, her stepmother is punished and the dragon turns into a man (Archivio, p. 524). Slavic variants I mentioned in my post on Perseus that in types of "The Three Golden Children," there are three routes the story can take. I looked at one popular route, where the children are replaced with animals and thrown into the water, but survive and go on a quest for magical items, then come back to prove their mother’s innocence. In another, the mother and baby are thrown into the water together in a barrel, wash up on an island, and the son later builds a palace to get his father’s attention. This version seems especially widespread in Slavic variants. The most famous version is Alexander Pushkin's 1831 fairy tale "The Tale of Tsar Saltan," where the queen's evil sisters falsely claim that she's given birth to a monster; she's set adrift with her son, who grows swiftly to adulthood. In a repeated motif, he turns into an insect to sting his aunts. (Here is a Soviet cartoon retelling with subtitles. And I had no idea, but the classic "Flight of the Bumblebee" comes from the opera adaptation of this story!!) Again, the sole difference here is that the son is falsely said to be an animal - suggesting a merging into "The Wonder-Child," where he is an animal. And there are examples which hit a middle ground, or where ATU 707 and 708 blend together. Walter Anderson, studying traces of a lost Russian manuscript from 1900, was able to reconstruct summaries of several tales. In one, wicked sisters replace their marvelous nephews with a puppy, a kitten, and an ordinary baby boy. However, when the mother is blinded and thrown into the sea in a barrel with the boy, he turns out to not be so ordinary after all - growing swiftly to adulthood and using his magic powers to will them to land and restore her sight. In some similar stories, like the Siberian “The Tsarevna and her three children” and the Bashkir “The Little Black Dog" (Berezkin) the rescuer role goes to the animals, such as a puppy or kitten, who were exchanged for the kidnapped biological children. This connects to stories where one or two of the queen's children not only remain with her in exile, but rescue their lost older brothers and perhaps free them from a spell by giving them their mother’s milk (Cosquin). It's also the same scenario again of the cat child - the animal used to doom the heroine, which instead ends up saving her and genuinely taking on the role of a beloved child. Analysis In "Le Chat Noir," the animal hero is a child born through black magic and wicked machinations. In "The Little Black Dog," the animal hero is switched for the heroine's real child. The themes blend across versions, but it's always the result of the villain's machinations, and the goal is the humiliation and destruction of the heroine. But the heroine does one thing that the villains don't expect. She accepts and loves her child - whether it's a cat, a dog, or a stranger child substituted for her own baby. Yvonne tenderly cares for her cat child; the maiden in the Tuscan tale names her seven-headed dragon son "Wonder." And then this child ends up not just saving his mother, but bringing her happiness and prosperity that she could only have dreamed of. The motif is similar to “Tatterhood.” This fairytale also begins with a woman consulting a mysterious beggar for magical help, leading to a supernatural pregnancy which results in a loud, ugly, chaos-causing child. Despite initial appearances, this child is a protector and sorceress who saves a family member and ensures her marriage to a king, before revealing her true, beautiful form. The motivation here is sisterly rather than motherly love, and the mother isn't all that great, but it's still an interesting parallel. The moral inherent across these stories is that when the unwanted, off-putting child is accepted, they end up saving the family. Sources
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Researching folktales and fairies, with a focus on common tale types. Archives
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