Neil Bowen on
“Fairy tales’ perennial popularity may have a great deal to do with their imagination of the apparently impossible – or once-impossible – transformations or metamorphoses” (Pauline Greenhill, ‘Wanting (To Be) Animal: Fairy-Tale Transbiology in The StoryTeller’, p. 32).
“In many cultures, the animal-groom is depicted as an exceptionally disgusting or frightening beast, as in Giovan Francesco Straparola’s ‘Pig King,’ Giambattista Basile’s ‘The Serpent’ (both from Italy), or in the Russian ‘Snotty Goat.’ The grooms in arranged marriages may well have been perceived as noxious by their young brides, who, full of anxieties about marrying, are taught their culture’s lessons about the sacrifice of female desire and/or the transforming power of love. Older versions of these tales stress female acceptance of male sexuality and the civilizing effect of female virtues on brute desire. More recent versions, like the stories in Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber (1979), stress the virtues of the beast and their opposition to the evils of civilization” (Carole G. Silver, ‘Animal Bride, Animal Groom’, in The Greenwood Encyclopedia Folktales and Fairy Tales, ed. Donald Haase, p. 41).