Donkey Skin (Fairy tale)

Author: Charles Perrault

Time Period: 1501 CE–1700 CE

Country or Culture: France; Western Europe

Genre: Fairy Tale

Overview

Cinderella stories abound in the world of fairy tales, and there are numerous versions in which the main female character is forced to flee her home covered in the skin of an animal that has been important to her father’s kingdom. The reason for flight in most of these stories is a sexual pursuit of the daughter by her father. These stories fit into the Aarne-Thompson tale type 510B: “The Father Who Wanted to Marry His Daughter” (also titled “Unnatural Love” or “The Dress of Gold, of Silver, and of Stars,” depending on the source). The plotline of the tale often has the story starting with the girl’s mother on her deathbed making her husband promise to marry only someone as beautiful and intelligent as she. When a period of time has passed after the queen’s death, the king realizes that the only woman who can fulfill this promise is his daughter, and he begins to pursue her hand in marriage. The princess makes four demands of her father in attempt to avoid the incestuous relationship: three of the requests are for gowns that reflect the heavens, and one request is for the skin of the animal that provides her father’s riches. When the king produces all of these items, the princess flees to another country, where she works as a servant until she is discovered by the prince of the land and rescued from her lowly position.

“Take heart,” she said, “all will now go well! Wrap yourself in this skin, and leave the palace and go as far as you can. I will look after you. Your dresses and jewels shall follow you underground, and if you strike the earth whenever you need anything, you will have it at once. But go quickly: you have no time to lose.”

So the princess clothed herself in the ass’s skin and slipped from the palace without being seen by anyone.

“Donkey Skin”

Charles Perrault’s story “Peau d’Âne” (“Donkey Skin”), first published as a poetic piece in 1694, is one of the best known of the animal skin variations of the Cinderella tale. Several years after its first publication in Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec moralités (Stories or tales from times past, with morals) in 1694, the verse was rewritten as a tale, with Robert Sampler attributed with being the first to translate Perrault’s work into English in 1729.

Perrault (1628–1703) is credited with being one of the first collectors of folktales in France. He took stories from Indo-European oral tradition and rewrote them for his culture. His versions of the old tales were famous for a simple format embroidered with courtly traditions that would appeal to his contemporary audience. Since Perrault was part of a courtly group of men and women who manipulated the traditional oral tales of the day into literary stories, he was influenced by a number of independent thinking women (such as Madame d’Aulnoy and the Comtesse de Murat) who organized salons where they could share their own thoughts on the events of the day. These women commented on political topics as well as issues that directly affected them, including family relations, marriage, and motherhood. The fact that his heroine in “Donkey Skin” is free-thinking and willing to create her own destiny rather than giving in to her father’s demands may be directly correlated to the opinions expressed by these women (Windling 32). Perrault’s inclusion in these salons reinforces the idea that his intended audience would have been an adult one.

The story remained popular in its prose form through the Victorian period when it began to be revised to soften the content for a more innocent or younger audience. At the midpoint of the twentieth century, it began to lose popularity as a result of the problematic sexual overtones at the beginning of the tale. Interest in the tale, however, began to rekindle as feminist critics started to consider this forward-thinking princess who fights against a patriarchal hierarchy in which the woman’s role is often passive and who learns to embrace the tools she can use to change her status in life.

Summary

Perrault’s “Donkey Skin” is a Cinderella variant set in a kingdom where the king’s wealth is obtained when “bushels of gold pieces tumbled out of [a prize donkey’s] ears” (Perrault 1). The story starts, as is common in fairy tales, with a king, a queen, and a princess. The queen is dying, but before she gives up her last breath, she tells her husband to remarry. Though this seems benevolent of her, she places a condition on his choice of a wife: “Wait until you have found a woman more beautiful and better formed than myself” (1). The king grieves for some time before his advisers convince him to look for a new wife.

The search for a new bride fails because the queen’s condition is impossible to fulfill. Eventually, the king recognizes that the only woman who comes close to his wife’s beauty is her daughter. Horrified at the thought of marriage to her father (step-, adoptive, or natural, depending on other editors’ versions), the princess seeks help from her fairy godmother. The fairy godmother, who is comparatively shortsighted, tells the princess to ask for three magnificent dresses: one that “exactly matches the sky” (2), one “of moonbeams,” and one “of sunshine” (4). When the king provides the dresses, the princess despairs, and the fairy godmother tells her, “There is only one thing to be done now . . . you must demand the skin of the ass he sets such store by. It is from that donkey he obtains all his vast riches, and I am sure he will never give it to you” (4–7).

The fairy godmother is, once again, wrong in her estimation of what the king will do to marry the princess. He promptly has the donkey killed, and the skin is delivered to his daughter. As a result, the princess uses the donkey’s hide as a covering and flees from the kingdom with the fairy godmother’s help. In order to make up for her lack of foresight, the fairy godmother provides protection for the princess by hiding her from the searchers and making a way for the princess’s riches to travel secretly with her. The princess travels for some time before she finds a kindly farmer’s wife who will take her in and give her work and lodging. She proves to be a hard worker, but she continues to wear the donkey’s skin as a covering, so she is considered the lowliest among the servants.

One day, the prince of the kingdom where the princess now resides stops to rest at the farm where she works. While exploring the house, he peers through the keyhole of the one door he cannot open. Inside the room, he sees the most beautiful princess wearing her dress of sunshine. After returning home, the prince falls into despair over the beautiful girl’s identity. He becomes so ill that his parents believe he will die, so they ask what will save him. He requests a cake baked by the girl who resides in that room, Donkey Skin.

The princess takes care in making a cake for the prince. She cleans herself thoroughly, dresses in “a shirt and a bodice of shining silver” (Perrault 11) and bakes a cake from the best ingredients she can find. While making the delicacy, her ring falls into the dough and is baked into the cake. The prince devours the cake, almost choking on the ring, but he realizes that it is his key to finding the girl after whom he pines. Like the glass slipper in the traditional Cinderella story, the ring will only fit the prince’s true love, so his parents arrange for all of the women from the kingdom to be tested. Princesses, daughters of the nobility, “shopgirls and chambermaids . . . scullions and shepherdesses” (12) are all rejected as unable wear the ring. Finally, the prince asks why Donkey Skin has not been brought before him. When she is presented, wearing her dress of moonbeams under her donkey hide covering, she wins the hearts of everyone in the kingdom as her cloak falls away to reveal her in her dress of moonbeams, a sight that is so overwhelming to the prince that he collapses at her feet.

The story ends with a wedding and a coronation. Donkey Skin’s father attends the wedding with his new wife, and all is forgiven. The prince and princess take the place of the king and queen who “were tired of reigning” and become “so much beloved by their subjects, that when they died, a hundred years later, each man mourned them as his own father and mother” (15).

Bibliography

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The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. Trans. Neil Philip and Nicoletta Simborowski. New York: Clarion, 1993. Print.

Goldberg, Christine. “The Donkey Skin Folktale Cycle (AT 510B).” Journal of American Folklore 110.434 (1997): 28–46. Print.

Perrault, Charles. “Donkey Skin.” The Grey Fairy Book. Ed. Andrew Lang. New York: Dover, 1967. Print.

Pilinovsky, Helen. “Donkeyskin, Deerskin, Allerleirauh: The Reality of the Fairy Tale.” Realms of Fantasy (June 2002): 26–33. Print.

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