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“If Thou Be Woman, Be Now Man!”

Not Shifting Sexes—Madame d’Aulnoy’s “Belle Belle or the Knight Fortuné”

Before we turn to ATU 514, we look at the related tale type ATU 514**, “A Young Woman Disguised as a Man Is Wooed by the Queen,” because it demonstrates how the narrative can be rendered more sex normative (though it remains gender nonconforming).⁶ Those few other folklorists who have included ATU 514 in their studies tended to show discomfort about the tale and/or its relation to tradition, and presume its links to ATU 514**. Stith Thompson called “The Shift of Sex” “a story which was developed by literary writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which has been collected in a few countries from oral raconteurs” (1946, 55).⁷ In fact, accounts of cross-dressing adventurous warring women (who sometimes magically or miraculously change sex) appear in various forms of French popular literature dating from at least the twelfth century. They include the Roman de Silence (twelfth century), in which the heroine is raised as a boy; Ide et Olive (fourteenth century), an epic in which a woman cross-dresses to escape incest with her father; and from the same century, Osre, a play in which the heroine cross-dresses to escape her murderous husband; and Miracle de la fille d’un roy, about a princess who dresses as a man to escape her father’s incestuous intentions (Carol Harvey, personal communication).

However, Elisée Legros suggests that “The Shift of Sex” is a “quite altered” version of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s “Belle Belle or the Knight Fortuné” (1962, 99), the “only one of Mme. Aulnoy’s tales . . . constructed around a disguise” (Mitchell 1978, 72).⁸ This narrative begins, as do some versions of ATU 514, with a noble but poor father sending his daughter, Belle Belle, off to war in his place.⁹ She receives a magical horse from a fairy in disguise whom she helps. Dressed as a man, Belle Belle becomes Fortuné (Lucky) upon reaching an inn in the city (and is then referred to using male pronouns): “She arrived in a beautiful populous city. She attracted all eyes, and people followed and surrounded her, and everyone said: ‘Has anyone ever seen a more handsome, better made, and more richly dressed knight; how graceful he is in handling this superb horse.’ The people welcomed him with great ceremony, and he reciprocated in a polite and civil manner. When he wanted to enter the inn, the governor, who had admired him while walking by, sent a gentleman who begged him to come to his castle” (d’Aulnoy 1998, 223–224).

Fortuné acquires seven human magical helpers, Strong-Back, Fleet-Foot, Good-Shot, Quick-Ear, Impetuous, Drinker, and Glutton, on their way to join the king’s army. The queen (the king’s sister) falls in love with the disguised knight, while Belle Belle is attracted to the king:¹⁰ “Fortuné could not help gazing from time to time at the king. He was the best-looking prince in the world, in all ways considerate, and Belle Belle, who had by no means renounced her sex by taking a dress that hid it, felt a genuine affection for him” (d’Aulnoy 1998, 233). When the queen finds that her feelings are unrequited, she tricks the king into sending Fortuné off to do impossible tasks, which he completes thanks to his magical helpers. Eventually he vanquishes the king’s enemy, again assisted by his helpers. The queen becomes so angry over Fortuné’s lack of interest in her that she tells the king that he has attacked her, and he is sentenced to death. Her servant, also in love with Fortuné, gives the queen a slow poison. Fortuné is tied to the stake but when his coat and vest are removed so he can be stabbed, his biological sex is revealed. The queen dies and the king marries Belle Belle (see Barchilon 1975; Carver Carpasso 1987; Paton 1907; Ritchie 2003).¹¹

Clearly, this narrative renders both sex/gender identity and sexual orientation extremely complex. Belle Belle knows she is not Fortuné, and she struggles with her unrequited love for the king and lack of interest in the queen and her servants: “I love a king without any hope that he loves me, nor that he knows how much I suffer” (d’Aulnoy 1998, 234).¹² Pronoun use in the tale demonstrates sex/gender as a potentially queer performative (see Butler 1999). Crucially constructed in social discourse rather than in costume alone, Belle Belle is not referred to as male when she changes clothes, nor even when the fairy gives her a man’s name; “she” becomes “he” only once s/he arrives in a town where other people admire the handsome, rich knight. Her explicit performativity (see Schneider 1997) becomes particularly striking when d’Aulnoy juxtaposes the dual identities of Belle Belle and Fortuné, as in the would-be execution scene that reveals Belle Belle’s womanly attributes: “what was the astonishment of the assembly when they discovered the alabaster bosom of Belle Belle! All present understood that this was a girl unjustly accused. . . . the people, who loved Fortuné, freed him” (d’Aulnoy 1998, 267; our emphasis). Within a few sentences of her revelation of Belle Belle’s sex to the other characters, d’Aulnoy reverts to the male “Fortuné,” naked female breasts notwithstanding!

This tale has been analyzed primarily from psychological and historical/political economic perspectives.¹³ The latter tend to highlight the tale’s “significant statements, challenges, and—most crucially—questions about the nature of the social order,” according to Lisa Brocklebank. She sees “the cross-dressed figure as a touchstone to contest official order and socially constructed representations of power . . . a potent critique of the status quo that begins with an examination of gender norms . . . By highlighting the performativity of gender and gender relations, [“Belle Belle”] also call[s] into question the production of other modes of power that claim a ‘natural’ status to sanctify their existence and dominance” (2000, 127). “Belle Belle” simultaneously critiques masculinity and sociopolitical hierarchy, “emasculating the male king and empowering the female peasant” (135).

Anne E. Duggan suggests that “writers such as Charles Perrault identified salon women, or ‘independent’ women, as a threat both to the rule of men and to the monarchy” and that d’Aulnoy countered this view by creating “idealized feudal and matriarchal worlds, based on reciprocal relations between all nobles, regardless of their gender” (1998, 199–200). In “Belle Belle,” d’Aulnoy “proposes . . . the re-establishment of the former alliance between the feudal nobility and the monarchy, along with the participation of noble women in political affairs” (203). Belle Belle resembles actual cross-dressing and troop-leading salon women, and her story “creates utopic spaces based on notions of civility in order to provide a ‘place’ . . . for . . . disenfranchised nobles” (199).

Others have seen “Belle Belle” as a reflection on and critique of contemporary notions of masculinity, rather than a comment on femininity and women’s roles.¹⁴ For example, Adrienne E. Zuerner notes that “although cross-dressing violated biblical and social codes, the text reiterates that Belle-Belle [sic] disguises only to serve the crown and thereby recuperates transvestism for an indisputably worthy cause . . . [The] transvestite heroine . . . [balances] ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ traits (kindness and military acumen, artful discourse and physical and moral courage, filial loyalty and skillful diplomacy)” (1997, 196–197).¹⁵

The king’s love for Fortuné is a “challenge [to] seventeenth-century norms of masculinity. Male homoeroticism . . . necessarily denaturalize[s] masculinity since man is seen to abandon his ‘naturally’ superior position” (203).¹⁶

Similarly, Francis Assaf discusses “Belle Belle”’s relation to social roles. He specifically addresses its implicit criticisms of the laws of succession preventing female heirs from inheriting the crown and male domination in general by “showing how a supposed inferior becomes indispensable to the restoration of monarchical power, power which, unfortunately, she seems to suggest, remains ultimately in the hands of weak and incompetent men, unable to manage their kingdom or to carry out even a defensive war” (2003, 273). The specifics of Assaf’s description, perhaps even more than the narrative itself, suggest an analogy to Joan of Arc, as Belle Belle would have to d’Aulnoy’s contemporaries.¹⁷

The psychological analysis by Amy Vanderlyn DeGraff, in contrast, sees the tale as indicative of what she calls “the voyage of self-development” (1984, 61). Belle Belle “must outgrow the phase” of being in disguise in order “to move on to heterosexuality.” Fortuné’s reaction to the queen’s “passion” for him is “problematic,” because “instead of revealing her female identity, a revelation that clearly would have ended her problems with the queen, she chooses to remain silent.” Instead, “Fortuné is not quite ready to give up her disguise because emotionally she is not quite ready to move on from this stage of indeterminate sexuality to a mature stage of heterosexuality” (66). In conclusion, “Although Belle-Belle’s masculine disguise kept her desexualized thereby enabling her to explore and discover aspects of herself, nevertheless the time had come to accept her sexuality and a mature heterosexual relationship. Not doing so was potentially destructive to Belle-Belle. Doing so would mean the attainment of happiness and many of the riches life has to offer. The story ends with the wedding of Belle-Belle and the king” (67).

In addition to the heterosexism, homophobia, and transphobia of the foregoing, DeGraff fails to understand Belle Belle/Fortuné’s transgender position. Indeed, the character’s reluctance to reveal biological sex is a rational choice. The text itself suggests that the tale’s perspective on the concluding marriage may not be as univocally positive as DeGraff suggests. Fortuné relinquishes his identity only when the marriage date is decided, when Belle Belle takes up women’s dress; “Belle Belle returned to her woman’s clothing and appeared a thousand times more wonderful in them than she did in those of a knight” (d’Aulnoy 1998, 268). Further, the tale’s final section deals almost entirely with Belle Belle’s concern for her horse, who disappears. She searches for him for four days. When he magically reappears with her family and guardian fairy, her love for them all receives the most narrative attention, not her relationship with her future husband. The ending is evidently happy for Belle Belle, but in general, DeGraff fails to take notice of the ambivalence in this fairy-tale plot, and of the genre as a whole (see also Howells 1997).

Anne Defrance, in the penultimate chapter of her work on d’Aulnoy, similarly sees “Belle Belle” as pertaining to homosexuality, but notes the different approaches it takes to same-sex attraction among women and among men. Belle Belle’s cross-dressing mends the original castration.¹⁸ Yet the men in the tale, who should be powerful (in a patriarchal political economy), are controlled by women—the father by his daughters, and the king by his sister. Even Fortuné is subject to the queen’s machinations. The helpers, the horse, and the fairy’s magic wand remain true possessors of the phallus, which is thus underlined as imaginary, as symbol (1998, 309–320). The queen’s attraction, unlike the king’s, is manifestly heterosexual; she wants the love of someone who presents as a man. In fact, then, the undisciplined heterosexual attraction of a woman (the queen) is punished, whereas the same-sex attraction of a man (the king) is rewarded with heterosexual marriage.¹⁹

Christine Jones’s sophisticated analysis, simultaneously attentive to the text, tradition, and the actual representation of transgender, points out that the queen’s death at the end is not “necessary . . . because she is no longer a threat to the courtly couple once Belle-Belle’s identity is made public. Her elimination is desirable, however, since she comes to embody sexual monstrosity in the narrative. The queen serves, then, as a symbol of sexual misconduct and its consequences. Significantly, fear of such misconduct is traditionally associated with the transvestite, but is here entirely displaced onto the Queen and the transvestite incurs no blame for having inspired sexual desire in women. The Queen becomes the narrative scapegoat for the condemnation of homoerotic desire.” Tellingly, however, the queen’s role is pivotal and eventually positive in the narrative: “The Queen’s attempts to kill Fortuné ultimately facilitate the restoration of the King’s fortune” (2003, 394). The double role of this condemnation of the queen’s desire—it transfers “this vice” from Belle Belle/Fortuné to the queen—”dissociates sexual and political order.” In the end, the principal named character becomes “a valiant and powerful woman in power without the perfunctory masculine persona” (395).

The tale offers considerable opportunity to explore both lesbian and gay possibility. While Belle Belle herself remains consistently attracted to a man, refusing the queen and her servant, the latter two characters can be understood in recognizable lesbian terms. That is, their desire for Fortuné may involve a conscious attention to her/his butch presentation (see Case 1988/1989; Quimby 1995). They seem uninterested in anyone else. Belle Belle’s change of clothes changes neither her felt gender identity nor her sexual orientation. Others define Fortuné as male—to Belle Belle’s consternation in the case of both the king, who fails to recognize her as female, and of the queen, who fails to deduce that she is not male. But the Belle Belle inside Fortuné’s male clothes, as it were, remains female and heterosexual. Her maleness is enacted exclusively at the level of a performance that does not render its subject fundamentally male. Her case may remind some of the tragic twentieth-century John/Joan case, in which an identical male twin whose genitalia had been damaged in a botched circumcision became a test subject for psychiatrist John Money’s conviction that sex/gender identity was a matter of nurture, not nature. Despite surgical, hormonal, and behavioral interventions attempting to render “John” female, his resistance and fundamental rejection of these endeavors ultimately supported the idea that sex/gender identity (at least in his case) was resistant to such intrusions.²⁰

Lacking an actual sex change, “Belle Belle” is clearly ATU 514** (see also Tubach 1969, 134) rather than ATU 514.²¹ Yet in his work on “the great fairy tale tradition,” Jack Zipes includes “Belle Belle” with Giovan Francesco Straparola’s “Constanza/Constanzo,” Giambattista Basile’s “The Three Crowns,” and Henriette Julie de Murat’s “The Savage” (more or less related tales involving similar gender disguise, magical helpers, and eventual marriage to the king) under the rubric of “Disguised Heroes.” Describing the central protagonists as male—heroes, not heroines—despite their biological sex shows Zipes’s recognition of their fundamentally male roles (2001, 159–219). Assaf comments: “We see in this tale a synthesis of reality and the marvellous which makes the story possible and even plausible” (2003, 271).²² It is, then, perhaps more realistic than ATU 514’s instantaneous magical sex change. We appropriate his insight to our own—that d’Aulnoy’s narrative, and even more its traditional counterpart in ATU 514, expresses transgender imagination and transgender possibility quite explicitly throughout.

“The Shift of Sex”

Renowned folktale scholar Bengt Holbek considered “The Shift of Sex” anomalous.²³ His problems with ATU 514 resulted from his classificatory imposition of a heterosexual pair in the division of tale modes. The protagonist’s sex change precluded the tale fitting into his structural division of masculine and feminine. He argued that “in a masculine tale, the two main characters are the low-born young male . . . and the high-born young female . . . Conversely, the two main characters of the feminine tale are the low-born young female . . . and the high-born young male” (1987, 417). “The Shift of Sex” initially involves a lowborn young female and a highborn young female—not a possibility in Holbek’s scheme—but resolves into a lowborn female-to-male transsexual—thus, male—and a highborn female: his masculine tale. Yet that designation fails to reflect the tale’s hyperfeminized narrative conflict between the girl and the princess.

ATU 514 is not the only tale to raise problems with Holbek’s gendered schema, as Risto Järv’s work helpfully explores. First, Holbek’s actual attribution of some types is questionable. For example, he calls ATU 312 (“Maiden-Killer [Bluebeard]”) a masculine tale (1987, 167), though the protagonists are a lowborn female and a highborn male, which qualifies it as a feminine tale in his classification.²⁴ Second, though a change of the protagonist’s sex within a particular tale is uncommon, the interchangeability of protagonists’ sex from one version to another is not. In ATU 720 (“The Juniper Tree”), while the character “persecuted by the step-mother and devoured by the family” (Järv 2005, 53) is a boy in the Grimms’ version, in many others it is a girl.²⁵ Such variability calls into question Holbek’s presumption that protagonists’ sex can define the narrative’s gendered focus. It raises further problems with his association of masculine tales with male tellers and feminine tales with female tellers; “we may expect to find a definite correspondence between the sex of the narrator and the ‘gender’ of the tale” (1987, 167). Following Holbek’s logic, “The Shift of Sex” and “The Corpse Eater” would have tellers and audience confined only to transfolk.

Finally, naming tales “masculine” or “feminine” also presumes the primary protagonist’s gendered actions. Many of Holbek’s masculine tales open with the (male) hero seeking his fortune, and his feminine tales with the heroine on the threshold of marriage. ATU 514 again raises a problem, because it begins with a girl who seeks her fortune and ends with a marriage that raises her/his social status, as is usual for a male character. However, tales like “Peg Bearskin” (ATU 711) (see Greenhill, Best, and Anderson-Grégoire 2012) also have plucky female heroes whose actions, until the very end of the story, are more like those of the male fortune seeker than of the female bride-in-waiting.

Different versions of “The Shift of Sex” published in English and French, as well as English or French précis of versions or tale types collected in other languages, offer an opportunity to explore this narrative across time and space as an expression of trans imagination, and specifically as a discursive manifestation of transsexuality. Some forms, for example, in Greek tradition, as discussed by Mariléna Papachristophorou, do not include transgendering moves. She suggests: “The ecotypal forms deal with the same radical change of nature as AT 514, even with an upheaval of the natural order; it could take the form of an overt transsexualism, an unexpected rejuvenation, a humanization, a transformation of death to birth, or an inversion of source/origin. In spite of local differences, the problematic remains the same: it is always about a desire to transgress natural laws, to change the human condition; it is about a woman who, having become other, begins a new life cycle” (2002, 202). We concur that there are similarities in those tales that deal with other forms of transformation. However, concerned as we are with transgender and transsex specifically, we do not deal with them here.²⁶

An Armenian version of ATU 514 begins with an old woman who “dressed her daughter in boys’ clothes, so that she could play with the neighbours’ children.” S/he finds the king’s daughter, who is lost, and on returning her, gets instruction from the horse Luzilar: “When the king asks you to make a wish, tell him you desire to possess me, and nothing else.” When s/he does so, the king replies: “Luzilar is worth my entire kingdom . . . If I give her to you, I might as well give you my daughter too!” After the wedding feast, “the princess realized that her husband was a woman like herself” (Downing 1972, 83). The princess and queen conspire to make the king send “the girl” on a series of three impossible tasks. Following Luzilar’s advice, s/he succeeds. When s/he completes the final one, the victim, a mother devil, curses her: “If thou be man, be now woman! If thou be woman, be now man!”²⁷ On the husband’s return, the wife tells her father, “I find that my husband is a man after all . . . I would not change him for any other” (86).

A Greek version more closely resembles “Belle Belle,” with a father (not mother) with three daughters (not one), summoned to the army. Each daughter offers to go in his place. The elder two fail tests of bravery, “but the youngest showed herself capable of playing the warrior and dressed as a youth she went off to war, helped always by her faithful horse who possessed . . . the gift of speech.” Sometimes the protagonist’s apparent gender finds ambivalent acknowledgment, such as that s/he “acquitted herself manfully” (our emphases), and as a result the king and queen choose her/him as husband for the princess. Just like in Belle Belle, once s/he is recognized as male, the description generally changes to male pronouns: “The supposed bridegroom set a sword between himself and his bride,” and when the princess is dissatisfied, the monarchs conspire “to get rid of him.” The “impossible and fatal” quests are successful. The sex change involves giants who “cursed her ‘If you are a boy you shall be turned into a girl; if you are a girl you shall be turned into a boy.’” And yet ambivalence remains; “the heroine became a boy and her marriage was happily concluded” (Dawkins 1953, 298; our emphases).²⁸

The narrative itself offers no indication that the princess or her parents have any suspicion about why the husband puts a sword between her/himself and her/his wife. But it is clear that the character’s sex/gender raises a problem. We draw attention to the pronoun switches in Dawkins’s précis because they indicate where a fairy-tale collector (or teller, we do not know which) locates the change of sex/gender identity. In this version, the only time the protagonist becomes “him” is in the context of the sexual relationship (or lack thereof) between her/him and the princess, before her/his corporeal alteration. Yet the “he” of this section reverts to “she,” even though his body has become male.²⁹ Thus, the tale’s denouement queers the narrative: “Then the girl—but now she was a boy—went to the house and told them to get water ready for a bath. She went into the bathhouse and had a good bath and then went to her wife. She let down her hair and said to her wife: ‘A long time since I had my hair combed; come and comb it.’ When the wife saw the hair she thought it must be a girl. But when they went to lie down the sword at once disappeared from between them. Next day she went full of joy and told her mother” (Dawkins 1953, 311).

Another Greek version has the protagonist initially male and becoming female because of a fairy’s curse. Then, after going to war, and following the same sequence, s/he is cursed by a “gigantic negro”: “If you are a man be a woman, if a woman, then become a man” (Dawkins 1953, 300; see also Chauvin 1904, 43). Dawkins’s collection notes an Albanian version in which the transformation results because a king wants a son and has a daughter instead. “To save the girl’s life the angry and disappointed king was induced to believe she was really a boy.” Her/his horse helper assists her/him in getting cursed (as above) by the jinn, and “she became a boy and so saved her life” (Dawkins 1953, 301; our emphases).

Another Albanian version (translated into French), closer to Dawkins’s Greek version, has a father who must go off to war or send a son, but has only daughters. The first two propose that their father should provide them with husbands.³⁰ “Marry me [to someone], she said. And the second said the same as the elder. But the youngest in turn said, Father, reassure yourself, because I will go to war” (Dozon 1881, 107–108). Further, the narrative switches between male and female referents and pronouns, but tellingly, the magical and knowing horse always refers to the main character as “my master,” not “my mistress.” Queerly, having accomplished her/his first heroic deed, the hero is referred to as male, and usage reverts to female pronouns only to illustrate the transformation s/he undergoes: “The girl felt that she had changed into a boy, and said to her horse, ‘Gallop on, my horse, I was a girl and I have become a boy, I was a mare and I have become a stallion’” (120). Equally queerly, the French uses the female/feminine form of the verb “to become,” even when s/he has transformed to boy and stallion.³¹

A version from the Cape Verde Islands also queers the narrative extensively. A prince (apparently uncomplicatedly male) named Bonito dreams of the beautiful Aldraga Jiliana (implicitly female), “enchanted at the bottom of the sea, seven towers of Babel, who lives on the Gold Mountain, where no male fly ever goes, much less a split of a human.” He is so upset by his dream that “when in the morning the servant brought him coffee, he did not take it” (Parsons 1923, 281). Helped by his magic horse, Bonito kidnaps her. However, she will not speak, and the king announces that he will marry her to anybody who can make her do so.

“Then came Marco, he had an enchanted mule” (Parsons 1923, 283). Though Marco is identified with male pronouns throughout, the queen asserts that Marco “is not a man.” He cries in despair, but the magical mule (always “she”) assists him with a supernatural test, advising him to not “take the fruit of women, take only that of men” (284) when he goes to a farm with Bonito. The mule kills Bonito’s magic horse to distract him so that he and Marco do not bathe together, though they “undressed to their drawers.” Having passed these tests, Marco and Aldraga are married. The queen sends her servant to spy on their wedding night, and she hears Aldraga calling to Marco, “Come, let us lie down, because I come from a country where woman marries woman” (285). The monarchs plan to murder Marco. He hears a voice calling “Marta, Marta!”—his godfather San Pedro, who informs him that he has come to save him: “‘I came to put on you, all finished, what a man has.’ Then he became a man withal.” When the queen arrives to murder him, “Marco took his male organ, he gave it to the queen in the mouth, he broke all the teeth in her mouth” (286).

The brutal rape that provides the denouement may seem rather unexpected, but it underlines a transformation in Marco/Marta from someone who cries at the prospect of a problem (culturally feminized), to a physical male—and a hyperviolent one at that. Nevertheless, this tale suggests lesbianism in Aldraga’s lack of consternation that Marco is apparently female. Since she does not reappear in the story, the audience does not know how she feels about Marco’s transformation.

Sex Change in Folktales

Given its anomalous qualities, it is not surprising that considerations of ATU 514 are few. W. Norman Brown explores the discursive deployment of the motif of sex change in Hindu narrative. “The notion that a human being may suffer a change of sex is familiar to the West” (1927, 3). But when “the purposes for which the motif is employed” are “to make good the pretence that a girl is a boy” (6), such narratives offer a good gloss for the action in “The Shift of Sex.”³² Remarkably for Brown’s time, in tracing “the origin of the idea,” he notes that “there is, first, the frequent desire of members of one sex to belong to another.” (Note that he does not limit that desire to women who wish to be men, and thus avoids patriarchal presumptions of the primacy of maleness.) Though he comments that these stories could be “mere wish fulfilment,” his evaluation of transgendering desires as “frequent” was by no means a majority view among academics of his time—nor, indeed, of the early twenty-first century. Likewise, though he also notes that “there are definite types of sexual perversion that might supply a starting point for the notion” (22), his confusion and conflation of sexuality with transgender is not uncommon even in some recent thinking (as described in Stryker and Whittle 2006). Further, his recognition of what would now be termed intersex is remarkable: “There are physiological phenomena that might be mentioned in this connection, especially hermaphrodism” (Brown 1927, 24).

Brown’s work looks progressive in contrast with that of Jessica Hooker, who gives passing attention to ATU 514 among other stories in which women dress as men. Asking “what happens to fairy-tale women who deviate so far from traditional female roles as to clothe themselves as knights and take up arms[?]” she responds, “A major message . . . appears to be that women may not pass entirely into the male sphere of action with impunity.” Her argument echoes Raymond’s, though Hooker does not cite it. Disappointed that sword-bearing women either don’t retain their weapons permanently or they relinquish their original sex, Hooker comments, “Women who take up the sword have two options: to be re-domesticated by a husband, or to sacrifice their femininity and become actual men, for in wielding this power symbol of masculinity they represent an intolerable threat to male physical dominance” (1990, 178). Drawing on folktale representations of military women, she argues that “on the one hand, the heroines are vindicators of adventurous womanhood; they are models of valour and confidence and far outshine the male characters in the stories, seemingly proving that anything a man can do a woman can do better. However, in each case the girl loses her femininity completely by the end of the tale. Also, none of these heroines is fully accepted or appreciated until after her transformation” (181). Yet in “The Shift of Sex,” the protagonist welcomes her imposed transformation—that is, s/ he desires transsexual embodiment. Further, the princess/wife’s acceptance of her husband’s change is unmitigated by concerns about inauthenticity that female-to-male transsexuals (FTMs) face in contemporary North American cultures—that is, the idea that they are not “real” men. The princess simply expresses herself satisfied with her husband and asks that he no longer be assigned dangerous tasks.

Donna Lanclos directly considers the role of ATU 514 in Hispanic societies as expressing the psychological transformation required of biological boys, following feminist Nancy Chodorow’s (1978) theories of human development. Though culturally focused, Lanclos’s reading, like Hooker’s, is less sophisticated and paradoxically less current than Brown’s. For example, she contends that this story couldn’t be about “hermaphrodism” because it “occurs in fairly low percentages in all populations” and yet “the tale has a meaning which resonates with a much greater percentage of the population” (1996, 73). We agree that ATU 514 tales speak to nontranssexuals, including the present writers, but Lanclos’s presumption seems a too-close reproduction of Holbek’s proposition that if men tell and appreciate masculine tales and women, feminine tales, then only transpersons could tell and appreciate transgender tales. Research with actual tale audiences indicates that appreciation of and identification with a story do not depend upon a gender match with the main protagonist (e.g., Stone 1997; see also Werhun and Greenhill, forthcoming).

Lanclos presumes that “The Shift of Sex” is a men’s tale about men’s experience, and is thus of interest primarily to men. She repeats the transphobic errors of Raymond and Hooker, apparently unable to conceive of the protagonist’s transsexual transformation as anything but a loss of womanhood: “Had a woman told the tale, the protagonist might have exercised her will within feminine roles. Perhaps a tale like AT 514 should not be interpreted as an instance of ‘wishful thinking’ in tale-telling by women, but rather as a tale told by men, about men. I suggest that AT 514 is a boy’s tale . . . symbolic accounts of the journey a boy raised in a traditional Hispanic family must take on his way to manhood” (1996, 74). Lanclos compounds her error by presuming uniformity between female and feminist views, suggesting that any female teller would create/reproduce only bold and forceful women. Yet even Bruno Bettelheim recognizes that “whatever the sex of the hero,” a story can be relevant to any teller or listener. Arguing the relation of fairy-tale characters to children’s development, he suggests that “the male and female heroes are . . . projections onto two different figures of two (artificially) separated aspects of one and the same process which everybody has to undergo” (1976, 226). In his discussion of audiences, if not in other details of his analysis, Bettelheim is absolutely correct.³³

Both “Belle Belle” and versions of “The Shift of Sex” offer arguments addressing what Judith Halberstam and others call “female masculinity.” They “pry apart” masculinity’s relation to maleness (Halberstam 1998, 2), making one or both available to (hitherto) female-identified persons. For the main character in ATU 514, the resolution of acquiring a male body and using it for sexualized purposes—in at least one case, that of rape—allows not only phallic power but also phallic expression. S/he—starting off female, ending up male—instantiates what appears to be a classic transsexual narrative, beginning by dressing as male and doing male work, and finally being transformed through others’ interventions into a biological male. Belle Belle readily accepts the circumstances that place her in male clothing and roles, but does not apparently desire a male sexual identity. Nevertheless, s/he by no means unequivocally embraces the return to female gender, diverting herself before her marriage with a search for her beloved horse! Arguably these two characters situate themselves at different locations on what Halberstam calls a “masculine continuum” (1998, 141–173).³⁴

Magic Paradoxically Defines Normality

Lewis C. Seifert’s comments about fairy-tale unreality as a privileged mode through which to explore cultural paradoxes resonate well with our understanding of “The Shift of Sex.” In its many variants and near relatives, this tale works to produce ways for individuals to express feelings about their sex/gender identity that contradict conventional interpretations. That the story further achieves this process by complicating the relation between sex/gender identity and sexual attraction allows it to work magic to reconcile reality. As Marina Warner suggests, “Fairy tales . . . often seek to define, within a romantic contest, appropriate male and female conduct, to endorse the correct version and—usually—reward it . . . [Some] stories dramatize trials of identity in which the heroine . . . is concealed . . . and her sex is put to the proof” (1994, 135). The notion that the sex of a heroine—or for that matter a hero—must be tested and proved through narrative opens the possibility that humans, apparently male or female, may not be what they seem (and indeed, it echoes notions of sex/gender as performative). Within the versions of ATU 514, the cross-dressing, genderfucking, and possible lesbianism/bisexuality of the protagonists never attract a narrator’s negative commentary within the tale. Instead, the situations in which the protagonists find themselves become complicated by the reactions of others. The intolerance of forces beyond the main character him/herself drive the problems s/he encounters, the obstacles s/he faces, and ultimately, her/his sex change.

But Warner further notes “a strongly marked shift toward fantasy as a mode of understanding, as an ingredient in survival, as a lever against the worst aspects of the status quo and the direction it is taking” (1994, 415). She approaches Kenneth Burke’s (1973) famous notion of literature as “equipment for living.” Particularly for those whose living is arduous because they don’t fit their society’s notions of appropriate behavior, appearance, gender, financial solidity, and so on, the presence of even fantastical literary representations of alternatives that they may live on a daily basis can be profoundly meaningful. In later work, Cherie Werhun and Greenhill (forthcoming) follow up on this idea, asking individuals to identify particularly important works of fiction in their lives, and how those works relate to their experience and understanding. As such, as Catherine Velay-Vallantin comments, “In fact these narratives are stories of power” (1992, 10). “Our stories are nothing other than a symbolic questioning, in a representative mode” (12). The metamorphoses, disguises, and impossible tasks that serve as narrative devices in fairy tales may be closer to everyday experience than the most conventional among readers and hearers might guess. That these stories represent these transformations allows an opening of worlds—both for those who fit in, and for those who do not.