Grandmother's footsteps

Photograph: Courtesy of Marlborough Fine Art, London

'A foolish story, such as is told by garrulous old women' is how the Oxford dictionary defines an old wives' tale. Despite being treated with contempt over the centuries, these narratives served not only to amaze and appal children but to teach them coded lessons about the realities of life, from toilet training to pregnancy, argues Germaine Greer

In the 1980s, when I had my little house in the Montanare di Cortona, friends with small children often came to stay. If the nippers hadn't had a rest, the glimmering evenings and long suppers on the terrace were apt to collapse in screaming cacophony. We had no TV and the radio was in Italian, so I had no way of keeping the children still and quiet during the siesta other than to tell them a story. Therefore, after lunch, when the day was at its hottest, I would pile them on to my big bed and, propping myself up with pillows in the middle, I would tell them the story of the most beautiful frog in the world, as, one by one, they fell asleep.

The littlest ones fell asleep first and so missed a good deal of the story. Everybody missed some, because it was hard to tell which of the heap of children was still awake, and I had to keep on with my tale until I was sure everyone was fast asleep. That meant that each time, before I could get going on the next episode, we had to have a synopsis. I would pretend not to remember where we had got to, and bumble and mumble, until the children, desperate to prompt my memory, had retold the story themselves, and the little ones had asked their questions. In this way I learned what they had understood and what misunderstood. What was more, the children's concerns worked their way into the story. Did the beautiful frog enjoy eating live creatures? Did they suffer? Why did the bee have to die after it had stung the stork? Why did the bee beg the frog to eat her before the ants arrived? Why does the spider have such revolting table-manners? Can a frog cry?

What I was doing was as old as the human race, and women have always done it. Even the most refined aristocrat of antiquity would have been told nursery stories by his first attendants, who were illiterate slaves and peasants. When it came to building a fanciful narrative of his own, he would recycle the same elements, changing them fundamentally in the process. The idiom of the original tale had to be standardised, and the events reinterpreted, to make the kind of sense that educated people would recognise, even to the point of ironic subversion of the fantastical elements in the story. Illiterate women went on providing the staple of the repertoire at the same time as educated people were turning their own variants of the tales into literature. As long as neither the women nor the children they told their tales to could read, the two kinds of tale-telling could flourish side by side.

The first collector of popular tales for print is known to us now as Gianfrancesco Straparola, who was connected with the Venetian publisher Comin de Trino. As Stra-parola means something like crazy talk, we may be sure that this was not the real name of the author of the Piacevoli Notti (1550–1556). Following the convention established by Boccaccio's Decamerone (1353), the Straparola tales are set in a framing narrative, a 13-day party at the palace of the Bishop of Lodi on the island of Murano during carnevale; the narrators are 13 ladies. Two of the tales are recounted in dialect, one in Bergamasco and another in Paduan. The Straparola stories are pretty good examples of the kinds of stories old peasant women tell. The fashionable lady who tells the five stories on the second night pretends that the second of her tales is set in Bohemia, but it soon becomes clear that we are dealing with a story about the people living on the shores of the lagoon.


A poor spinner has two daughters, Cassandra and Adamantina. When she dies she has nothing to leave her daughters but a box of tow. Cassandra spins a pound of it into thread and sends Adamantina to market to sell the thread and buy bread with the proceeds. Adamantina meets an old woman who has in her lap a doll, of a kind manufactured in Marghera and Mestre and known as a poavala. Adamantina falls in love with the poavala and persuades its owner to take the thread in exchange for it. When she arrives home with the doll and no bread, Cassandra is so disappointed that she flies into a rage and beats Adamantina so soundly that she can barely move. Adamantina does not retaliate. At bedtime she brings the doll close to the fire, takes off its clothes, lays it on a woollen cloth, and, putting a little olive oil in the palm of her hand, gently massages its belly and lower back. Then she wraps it in the softest cloths she can find and lays it in bed beside her. She has not finished her first sleep when the doll begins to cry, Mamma, mamma, caca! (The missing c in cacca betrays Venetian dialect.) Adamantina gently asks the doll to wait until she has spread her apron under its bottom. The doll bears down and fills the apron with gold coins. This she does night after night, and the orphan girls have all their modest needs supplied.

A jealous neighbour steals the doll and tries the same trick, but this time the doll produces a stinking mess of faeces. Infuriated, the neighbour throws the doll out of the window and on to a heap of rubbish in the street. Peasants collecting the refuse to spread on the fields as manure throw the doll on to their cart and carry it off to the mainland. The king, riding by on his way to the hunt, feels a call of nature, gets down from his horse and voids his bowels. His servant can find nothing better to offer his majesty to wipe his behind on than the rag doll. No sooner has the king thrust the doll between his buttocks than it bites him hard and will not let go. Try as they might, the courtiers cannot detach the doll, which not only sinks its teeth deeper and deeper into the royal rear, but uses its hands to twist and wring the king's sonagli (his hanging bells) until he sees stars. To cut the old wives' story short, Adamantina hears of the king's plight, comes to fetch her beloved doll, ends the king's agony and marries the king, and they live happily ever after.

This is not one of the Straparola stories that his aristocratic successors chose to imitate. It stems directly from rural living conditions, in which the management of human waste is essential, complex and demanding. Where there are no toilets, no nappies and no piped water, babies' attendants simply hold them clear of tables or chairs or other people as they excrete. When they can toddle, little girls are dressed in skirts with no knickers and little boys in split trousers, as they gradually learn how to tell what they need to do and where to squat to do it, but there are many accidents along the way. A story like this keys into the manifold anxieties connected with toilet training and with the management of a small baby, which often fell to an older child, when its mother was needed elsewhere. Rubbing a baby's stomach with warm olive oil is a good way to ease gripes and stimulate a bowel movement. As the context of Straparola's retelling is the entertainment of literate people, his version of the tale is self-consciously rustic, while straightforward ribaldry has become suggestion. The framing narrative follows it with a riddle involving sonagli, to which there is an obvious, obscene answer. When the lady who offers it is scolded, she turns the tables by providing an equally valid non-obscene answer. Such ironic jeux d'esprit are utterly foreign to the old wives' tale.


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