Mary de Morgan’s ‘The Wise Princess’: A Victorian Fairy Tale of Feminism and Self-Sacrifice
I’m endlessly fascinated by fairy tales, and what they can tell us about the times they were written in: people’s fears, hopes and ideals. So while I was browsing Project Gutenberg for interesting stories, I stumbled upon Mary de Morgan’s 1880 collection of fairy tales, The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde and Other Stories. The title story is wild and wonderful - about a princess who does not wish to marry, so turns her suitors into beads and strings them onto a necklace - and deserves a whole post to itself, but the one I want to talk about is the final story in the collection, ‘The Wise Princess’, which moved me to tears when reading it and has stuck with me ever since. (Illustration from the original publication below by Walter Crane.)
In this story, Princess Fernanda wishes to know everything. After she’s exausted her tutors ‘and learnt every language and every science’, she learns magic from a wizard until 'she knew the languages of all animals. The fishes came from the deep at her call, and the birds from the trees. She could tell when the winds would rise, and when the sea would be still. She could have turned her enemies to stone, or given untold wealth to her friends. But for all that, when she smiled, her lips were very sad, and her eyes were always full of care.’
She asks the wizard how to be happy, but he does not know. She asks her maid, a lark and a dog the same question, but still does not receive a satisfactory answer. (Interestingly, she meets a woman with a baby who says that she is happy, but right at that moment she is anxious because her fisherman husband is late coming home; Princess Fernanda responds, ‘Then you could not teach me.’ I wonder if this is the author’s way of saying that true happiness cannot be dependent on another person, or specifically, that a woman’s happiness cannot be reliant upon a man.)
Then she comes across the body of a young man killed in war, laid out in a church with a smile on his lips. Death, appearing as a white angel, tells her that he taught the soldier how to be happy while the man was doing his duty. Fernanda leaves the church and goes to the beach, where she sees a boy drowning and rushes to save him. She brings him to safety, ‘but the waves were so strong that she could scarcely keep above them. As she tried to seize the rocks, she saw Death coming over the water towards her, and she turned to meet him gladly. “Now,” said he, clasping her in his arms, “I will teach you all you want to know;” and he drew her under the water, and she died.’ When her body is found, cold and beautiful, she too has a smile on her lips.
Mary de Morgan was a feminist and a suffragette - author Kate Forsyth has written a fascinating article about her, titled Suffragette Mary de Morgan: England’s First Feminist Fairy Tale Writer?. This comes through clearly in both this story and others, here with a headstrong princess who wishes - and is allowed - to dedicate herself to studying. This subject was very timely: in 1869, a group of women known as The Edinburgh Seven became the first matriculated undergraduate female students at any British university, having all studied medicine, but they weren’t allowed to graduate or practice as doctors. Their story caught the attention of the press and advocates for women’s education and, four years before the publication of The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde, the Medical Act 1876 was passed, allowing women to graduate as licensed doctors.
The message of self-sacrifice, too, is strongly Victorian. Stemming from Christian theology, the Victorian view of self-sacrifice as a good and noble act can be seen in the romanticisation of the soldier’s death, as it can be in Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in Postman’s Park, London, where beautiful tiles - designed by and made by Mary de Morgan’s brother, William de Morgan - commemorate the lives, or rather deaths, of everyday people who died saving others. (If you’ve seen the movie Closer, you’ll know that Natalie Portman’s character takes her name, Alice Ayres, from a plaque here.)
The Victorian ideal of woman as ‘the angel in the house’ - a phrase from a poem by Coventry Patmore in which he describes his perfect wife - was subverted by the suffragettes themselves, who used religious imagery and words such as ‘crusade’ and ‘martyr’ to describe their cause. They often depicted themselves as Joan of Arc figures and portrayed Emily Wilding Davison, who was trampled to death by King George V’s horse in 1913, as an angel on the front cover of their journal.
Although this ideal clearly lasted beyond Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, we can also see the tide beginning to turn against it. Just as the idea that dying in war is a beautiful act was bitterly rebuked by Wilfrid Owen in his poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, written during World War I, a resistance can be found in novels such as May Sinclair’s The Life and Death of Harriet Frean (1922), which shows the devastating consequences of the protagonist’s Victorian upbringing, with its emphasis on selflessness, or E.M. Delafield’s Consequences (1919), where life in a convent causes only more suffering. The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice was never finished, after its creator George Frederic Watts died in 1904 and his widow lost interest in it.
Although I have conflicted feelings about message in ‘The Wise Princess’, it still moves me. Perhaps it’s because we still haven’t found the answer to ‘how to be happy’, or solved the struggle between caring for others and caring for ourselves.
What do you think about this story? I’d love to know if you have any more examples of fairy tales that reflect their times, examples of Victorian self-sacrifice, or works that rebelled against this ideal - please get in touch!
