Fruit Brides & Material Promiscuity
Fairytales, Metamorphosis, and Relational Ontologies
Harvest of Pomegranates by Michelangelo Cerquozzi
This lecture was written for my session of Joanna Gilar’s course Rewilding Fairytales
In a distant land there lived a king with seven sons who worried about his youngest unmarried son. When the king questioned her son he responded
“Father, I desire to find a wife that’s beauty is comparable to rose petals on white sand. As shocking as a scarlet drop of blood on snow.”
“Well, then you must seek beyond the realm of the human and find yourself a fairy bride.”
The prince set out, traveling through the forests on the westernmost coast of his father’s kingdom. His shoes wore out and his beard grew long. He felt himself as wild as the animals he encountered. One day, while he washed in the shallows of a river, he encountered a traveling holy man. The prince was charmed by the man’s tales and soon confessed his royal status and the aim of his quest. The holy man was sympathetic and agreed to turn the prince into a parrot so that he could fly to the magical island where a fairy princess lived inside a pomegranate fruit guarded by seven dragons. “You must fly there and pluck the fruit and return to this kingdom without looking back. If you look back, you will undo this magic.”
The parrot prince took wing and after flying for a day and a night arrived at the island. As a parrot he was small and quick and managed to fly under the leathery wings of the massive dragons, plucking the magical pomegranate, but as he went to take off with his prize, he made the mistake of looking back.
The seventh dragon took this moment of hesitation to spew forth flames that consumed the parrot prince, turning him into a pile of ash.
The holy man had made camp on the beaches closest to the island and waited for the prince to return. When he finally grew impatient and flew to the island himself, he found the prince reduced to ashes. “Wake up and resume your form!” The holy man resurrected the prince, and the ash hovered in the air before weaving back into the glossy feathers of a parrot. Encouraged by the holy man to try again, the prince retrieved the pomegranate for a second time from below the leathery wings of the dragons.
“Quick, we must go!” The dragons gave the holy man and the parrot chase. The holy man transformed the parrot prince into a fly so that when the dragons arrived at the holy man’s hut back in the prince’s kingdom, they did not see the parrot or prince and gave up their chase.
“Become again the form of a man!” The fly expanded and was once again a human prince. The holy man handed him the magical pomegranate. “Return home and then release your fairy bride from within the fruit.”
Once back in his father’s palace, the prince went to the garden and used a knife to slice the red leather of the pomegranate skin. No sooner had he made a cut then the fruit curled away revealing a fairy princess with skin as creamy as milk and lips as crimson as wine. He was so overcome by her beauty that he swooned.
As the fairy princess tried to revive the prince, a young servant girl arrived to draw water from the nearby well. She questioned the fairy princess who she did not recognize and learned that she was the magical bride of the handsome prince.
“What a hideous dress though!” The servant girl was cunning. “How can I judge your beauty when you disguise it? Here, trade clothes with me and then let us look into the well water at our reflections to judge who is the real beauty.”
The pomegranate princess exchanged garments with the servant and then joined her at the well. But the servant girl quickly pushed the princess into the well.
Upon waking, the prince was initially suspicious of the servant girl but finally agreed that she must be the princess and took her back into the palace to introduce her to his royal family. They wed that same night.
Still, the prince remembered a beauty that his new wife did not seem to possess. Was it all a dream? He wandered from his marriage bed back to the garden where he saw a white lotus flower floating in the air. He plucked it from the air and brought it with him back into the palace. The false princes was alarmed by the iridescent white petals of the flower. It was surely a magical flower! Worried about the prince’s fascination, the princess waited till he departed and then shred the flower, scattering it out the window. The petals landed amongst the spice garden of the palace kitchen. When the cook came to pick mint, she was shocked to find that the mint sprout was vibrating and squawking! It spoke to her in a human voice, insisting that the prince had married an imposter! The alarmed cook cast away the mint onto a creeping vine that wound its way back under the prince’s window. The servant princess was alarmed by the tenacious green tendrils and ordered her servants to cut it back. But a small fruit sprouted from the vine as it was pruned, tumbling into a jessamine bush where the palace gardener’s daughter was weeding. She took the fruit home and the gardener’s family watched with disbelief as the fruit melted away to reveal the new incarnation of the beautiful fairy princess who had survived many different vegetal permutations. The gardener’s daughter and the princess became fast friends and the fairy princess granted her magic to aid in her chores and gardening tasks. One day, when they finished with work, they braided flower garlands together. The fairy princess instructed the gardener’s daughter to deliver the garland of flowers to the young prince.
The prince was overwhelmed by the beauty of the garland gifted to him by the gardener’s daughter. The flowers were exquisite – crimson and cream – and they remind him of someone. The pomegranate princess! He began to suspect his wife was an imposter and the flower garland was a message sent from his real bride.
But the false princess is once again aware that her husband’s fascination with the garland is dangerous. She demanded that her husband have the pretty girl who lives with the gardener executed, saying she would like the girl’s heart as a gift.
After weeks of refusing, the prince finally acquiesced. The fairy princess begged the gardener and his family to scatter her body parts to the four winds and to throw her eyes up into the air after her execution.
Although heartbroken and confused by this tragedy, they agreed. When they threw her eyes up into the wind they were buffeted into the branches of a tree where they grew feathers, wings, and became a pair of lovebirds.
Many moons later, the prince who was nagged by a sense of having forgotten something important, journeyed into the forest to hunt. When he took a break to drink from his water skin below a flowering tree, he overheard two birds speaking with human language. They spoke of a fairy princess who was killed by a servant girl who assumed her royal identity to wed a young prince.
“I was right!” the prince exclaimed. “Please, help me birds. Help me find a way to be reunited with my real bride!”
All it took was his request. The pair of birds disappeared with a flash with feather and glitter and flower pollen and then in their place was the fairy form of the beautiful pomegranate princess. This time the prince did not swoon. He recognized her beauty as belonging to his true beloved and grasped her hand, begging for forgiveness that it had taken him so long to realize he had been fooled.
When they returned to the palace they banished the servant girl in punishment for her impersonation. The prince happily wed his true bride and rewarded the gardener’s family for caring for his beloved while he was deluded. The gardener’s family was doubly blessed by the magic of the fairy princess who returned to them with magical seeds for flowers and fruits that promised them good fortune and wealth. The princess and the gardener’s daughter wove garlands together to celebrate being reunited.
~~
This my retelling of Anar Pari – the pomegranate princess folk tale that comes to us from India.
A prince seeks a magical wife in a fruit but can only reach her by becoming a bird. The bird dies and is reborn. The bird is transformed into a fly. Then back into a man. A woman comes out of the fruit that is then replaced with another woman. The fairy princess is translated through the well, through death, into the form of a lotus flower, a mint plant, a creeping vine, and then a fruit. She is born again as a girl, killed, returned as lovebirds, and then finally reincarnate as a fairy bride.
While this tale may seem utterly bizarre, it is actually representative of a common story form known as “The Three Oranges” that crops up across the world, perhaps dating back to the ancient Egyptian tale of the Two Brothers, classified as tale type ATU 408 in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index of folktale types. Scholars have some of the dominant refrains that show up in what I’ve been calling “fruit bride plots”. A prince seeks a bride and is turned into a bird. Another woman replaces this fruit bride at a certain point. The prince finds more fruit – most commonly three – and then the real bride is once again revealed. A reflection in water allows for another woman to steal the princess’s identity. but through a series of metamorphoses, the prince and the princess are finally allowed to reunite in human form.
It is very easy as a modern reader primed to prize mechanistic paradigms of proof and quantification to misunderstand the “fanciful” nature of a fairytale as somehow invalidating it as a mode of truth-telling. Women do not come out of fruit. Prince’s do not turn into parrots and flies. We can not be killed and come back to life.
But what if anthropocentrism and human individuality are the real fairytales?
First, let’s remember all stories have a root system in bodies. For most of human history, knowledge transmission has been oral. All narratives, all wisdom, all important information, has been an embodied chain of telling and retelling. The fairytales that get written down have been transmitted, reincarnated, and retold to suit specific audience and demands, for many hundreds of years before they are solidified on the page. Oral knowledge never goes extinct, because it keeps evolving and changing each time it is resurrected by a new voice issuing from a new teller, seeking to updated an older narrative to a particular, audience, community, and wider ecology. Before we had the idea that truth is static and quantifiable – that it can be hoarded, stored, and owned – we knew that stories were living transmissions -more verb than object. Before we stored our information in computer, we stored it in books, and before we had books, we had bodies.