Why does Donkeyskin’s donkey shit gold?
Many years ago, I was struck by the similarity between two very well-known fairy tales from Charles Perrault: Cinderella and Donkeyskin. Because they are so famous, there is no point in recollecting them in detail here, but let me re-tell them in parallel, in a way that will highlight that each other precisely inverts most of the narrative elements of the other.
At the beginning of the tales, the heroine, who lives with her father and whose mother has died, finds herself in a rather unstable and socially threatening relationship with her family. Cinderella is being put too far away from her sisters (same-sex members of the same generation) who treat her like a servant; while Donkeyskin is being dragged too close to her father the King (opposite-sex member of another generation) who wants to marry her. In order to maintain this remoteness, the sisters of Cinderella demand that she performs time-consuming chores; while Donkeyskin, in order to delay this incestuous closeness, imposes on her father that he brings her several dresses, ending up with the skin of his magical donkey. These stratagems only work for a while: while Cinderella, with the help of magic, finishes the chores early enough to escape and attend the Prince’s ball, disguised as a princess, Donkeyskin’s father, with the help of magic, produces the dresses, forcing Donkeyskin to escape and go into hiding, disguised as a servant.
This is where the Prince meets the heroine, but only briefly, and all that is left from the encounter is a fashion accessory — Cinderella’s slipper, and Donkeyskin’s ring. The Prince then does everything possible to find his beloved again, and that involves testing all the feet or hands of the women of the kingdom to see if they are small enough to accommodate the slipper or the ring.
Finally the heroin is recognized, marries the Prince and they live happily ever after.
Excellent stories, and their outlines are indeed exactly matching one another in a mirror, in a rather fascinating way. We can think about this pair of tales as a group of transformation where elements from one reappear into the other inverted.
This fact is remarkable enough in itself, but there are two major elements in each tale that do not appear to be directly inverted in the other. First, the necessity of having the heroin marry the Prince means that Cinderella’s transformation into a princess, by way of a magical illusion, finally becomes reality — while Donkeyskin merely returns to her original state of princess.
Second, the donkey shits gold.
Now that’s intriguing: there is nothing in Donkeyskin’s narrative economy that would require that the donkey shits gold. She could have taken any skin from a regular donkey to escape. And her father already had much trouble coming up with the previous dresses. Where is this coming from?
It makes intuitive sense that these two discrepancies are somehow related. So let’s try to put them in a relation of mutual symmetry. Let’s start with Cinderella’s narrative necessity: the passage from the illusion of being a princess to actually becoming a real one.
In Cinderella, the function of this illusion is to make Cinderella (appear) rich, and create the circumstances where the meeting with the Prince can occur. The counterpart in Donkeyskin, the way by which the meeting becomes possible, is the dissimulation under the skin of the donkey (and the Baking of the Cake by the illusory servant). We have thus a rapport between the function “becoming rich” of the illusion, and the function “dissimulation” of the donkey.
This rapport must have as well a reverse, going into the opposite direction, that would include how, at the end of Cinderella, the dissimulation of Cinderella’s real nature is becoming actual and real, the opposite of being an illusion. So, something in Donkeyskin must be in rapport with the function “actualisation” (the opposite of illusion) of the dissimulation — the fact that the ultimate finality of Cinderella’s dissimulation is to become real.
OK. Time for some theory. Let’s brush up on our Claude Lévi-Strauss, and in particular the article “The Structural Study of Myth”, re-published in 1958 in his book “Structural Anthropology”. In this article Lévi-Strauss postulates that any group of variants of a given myth can be described by what he called the Canonical Formula: Fx (a) : Fy (b) ≈ Fx (b) : Fa-1 (y), that organises the similarity of rapports between functions (x and y) and terms (a and b) appearing in the myths, provided that we proceed to a double twist, one of the terms being inverted and becoming a function, exchanging its place with the function that was associated to the other term.
If we plug our narrative elements into the canonical formula as follows, we can summarize my earlier statement more or less algebraically: given “a” the illusion, “b” the donkey; “x” the act of becoming rich and “y” the act of dissimulation, we have: the function “becoming rich” of the illusion (in Cinderella) is to the function “dissimulation” of the donkey (in Donkeyskin) what the “unknown term” in Donkeyskin is to the function “opposite of illusion / actualisation” of the dissimulation in Cinderella.
Solving for Fx (b), we see that it’s the function “becoming rich” of the donkey.
And this is why Donkeyskin’s donkey shits gold.
PS. As it should be obvious, none of the above should be taken too seriously: I’m not a folklorist nor an anthropologist, Lévi-Strauss’ formula was never intended to be applied to modern fairy tales, etc. etc. The only goal of these amusing remarks was to give a glimpse of what is going on in some of the research in social sciences, and how some vaguely mathematical-looking formulations can be “good to think with” to produce actual anthropological or philosophical insights.
