Author's Profile: Louise O. Vasvári <http://www.sunysb.edu/complit/cvs.htm> teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Her interests include Hispanic literatures, folklore, medieval literature, translation theory, and applied linguistics and she has published widely in these areas. She is particularly interested in the Libro de buen amor and she published over a dozen articles on various aspects of this text. Her most recent book is The Heterotextual Body of the "Mora Morilla" (London, 1999). Vasvári has published previously with CLCWeb "A Comparative Approach to European Folk Poetry and the Erotic Wedding Motif," in 1.4 (1999): <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb99-4/vasvari99.html>. E-mail: <lvasvari@pipeline.com> and <louise.vasvari@sunysb.edu>.
 

Examples of the Motif of the Shrew in European Literature and Film
 

1. The shrew-taming story is a masterplot of both Eastern and Western folklore and literature. The oft-told tale is concerned with the processes of power dynamics between a married heterosexual couple. Stories about shrewish wives reflect anxieties about insubordinate female behavior, a constant threat to what is supposed to be a male-dominated marital system. Popular storytelling in close-knit communities can fulfill functions of moral censorship of inappropriate gender roles in marriage. Oft-told tales like the shrew stories can also be a powerful source of social cohesion in affirming group rapport and shared values (see Norrick 199). Stories about shrews are always meant to elicit laughter, but their violent latent content exposes the politics of overpolarized notions of male and female subject positions within the institution of marriage.
 

2. In my earlier work, I sought to trace the continued vitality of the bundle of motifs which make up the shrew story from medieval Arabic and European versions to the present (see Vasvári "Pornografía," "Hit the Cat"). In this study, after briefly laying the comparative groundwork, I will discuss some Hungarian folk analogues. Then I will interrogate how the shrew's cultural capital was repackaged and made topical as a cinematic commodity in wartime Hungary in two films, Makacs Kata (Stubborn Kate) and A makrancos hölgy (Unruly Lady), both produced, significantly, in 1943.
 

3. In treating filmic interpretations of the shrew as part of the folklore tradition, I heed Linda Dégh's important challenge to folklorists to expand the parameters of what should be studied as folklore to include variants of the same items from oral as well as written, printed or electronically reproduced sources (see Dégh 1994, 1, 18-19). Folklore is to be judged not by its medium of transmission but by whether it is based on tradition, whether it is socially relevant, and how it is adapted to current needs.
 

4. In my analysis I shall use the term "story" to mean a central narrative, like that of the shrew, capable of maintaining an independent existence in variant forms and "motif" as one of a number of subplots into which the story can be broken down. The basic story of the shrew involves a man, often a new bridegroom, who tames his unruly wife. She is described usually as shrewish, but can also be lazy, or haughty, or have other "bad" qualities. The husband tames his supposedly unruly wife through a ritual process of physical or psychological abuse. Any of a number of secondary motifs may be present in a given telling of the basic story. These include a) the youth is a fortune hunter who marries the girl in spite of her bad qualities because of her dowry; b) a friend, or the future father-in-law, attempts to talk him out of the match; c) the shrewish bride has a (younger) docile sister, or, alternatively, even more shrewish mother; d) the taming process occurs on the way home from the wedding and/or at the groom's house immediately after; e) the taming may take as little as one night -- the wedding night -- or it may go on for an extended period, during which the husband avoids sexual contact with his wife; f) the groom may kill or torture one or several animals (one of which is usually a cat!) as part of the process of intimidating his wife psychologically; and g) he may also beat his wife and/or deprive her of sleep or starve her into submission. Typically, the story ends with the sudden and exemplary atonement of the young wife and an "ever-after" happy marriage. Sometimes, in a coda to the story, the father-in-law or a friend tries to imitate the husband's feat but by the time he tries it in his own marriage it is much too late because his wife already knows his true character. In this paper I shall only be able to concentrate on comparing variants of the most important central motif, the mode and length of the taming process and its relation to the sexual consummation of the marriage.
 

5. Jan Harold Brunvald catalogued over 400 oral and literary versions of the shrew story in thirty countries or national groups in Europe. Nevertheless, his catalogue is far from exhaustive, as he did not consider Eastern versions, related proverbs, nor any of the numerous modern film representations in various languages. My own interest is not merely in identifying more variants, but rather in excavating the underlying text from the various incoherent surface narratives. The analysis of the underlying text, which always exceeds the narrative, reveals a repressed latent content, which, as in many traditional stories and fairytales, can be shown to be violently sexual (see Carter 122; Butler 331).
 

Shrew Taming in East and West
 

6. An embryonic shrew tale is already present in the earliest surviving written version of Alf Layla wa-Layla (Thousand and One Nights), from the fourteenth century (see Mahdi). Versions of this tale, as we shall see, will reappear in Hungarian tradition. Many tales and proverbs continue to circulate today in oral tradition, such as the Egyptian "Kill a/your cat on the wedding night" and the more eloquent Maghrebi variant "Hit the Cat and Tame the Bride," whose cat motif we shall also see appear in Hungarian tales. It is those variants of Eastern oral tales which reached the West that were most likely to be textualized, and it is precisely in medieval Europe that we find the two most literary and at the same time most violent versions. In a thirteenth-century French fabliau a count performs a threefold ritual, killing his two greyhounds, his horse, and cutting off the ear of a servant, all for ostensibly disobeying him. All this is to strike terror in his new wife, whom he then proceeds to club almost to death. It is only after she is rendered unconscious that he takes her to the marriage bed. Because his bride supposedly learned her shrewishness from her mother, the young man then performs a bloody operation on his mother-in-law, where he pretends to extract her "balls" (couilles), the supposed source of her dominating behavior (Montaiglon and Renaud 1, 95-116; English translation in Brians 25).
 

7. In a fourteenth-century Spanish tale a bridegroom does not actually touch his wife but renders her totally docile by forcing her to witness the bloody decapitation of his dog, cat, and horse, none of which obeyed his order to bring him water to wash his hands before his meal (story XXXV in the Conde Lucanor, see Ayerbe-Chaux; English translation in Keller). When he then commands his wife to perform the same service they both understand that offering water for ablution is one of the degradation ceremonies that symbolizes feminine servility. For example, according to the Talmud, it is one of the three most intimate ways that a woman can serve a man -- along with making his bed and preparing his food, with all three serving as a prelude to the sexual act. In some regions of Central and Southern Europe there still exists a related ceremony, where the new wife has to wash her husband's and father-in-law's feet, while, reputedly, in some Arab tribes the bride must not only wash her husband's feet but also drink the water (see Erlich).
 

8. Variations on the type of violence committed by the husband to tame his wife can be very inventive in different versions. For example, in a popular Middle German version the husband kills his horse on the way home from the wedding. He then saddles and rides his wife the rest of the way, saddling being another symbolic degradation ceremony (see Boose; Hemming). Another German tale combines the motif of the husband subduing his wife by riding her like a horse, with his performing a surgical operation on his mother-in-law to remove her "angry kidney." In still another German version, the husband is afraid to beat his wife because he had promised his father-in-law that he would not do so; instead, he beats the cat while forcing her to hold it so that she gets scratched. In an English piece, often cited as a possible source of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, a timid husband finds another method of punishment by proxy. His wife considers herself too high-born to do housework, so he wraps her in a sheep's skin and beats the skin until he has tamed her. In a longer, even more sadistic version, called A Merry Jeste of a Shrewde and Curst Wyfe, Wrapped in Morrelles Skin for Her Good Behavior (London, 1580), the husband makes good his threat to make his wife's "bones all crackle." He beats her unconscious and then wraps her bleeding body in the flayed and salted hide of his old horse, claiming that this is supposed to function as a magic charm to cure her of her wickedness. Like his predecessors, this husband also articulates clearly that the major form of subservience he demands is sexual: "For this I trow will I make her shrinke / And bow at my pleasure when I her bed" (see Vasvári, "Pornografía").
 

9. The most famous literary adaptation of the shrew story is Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, which picks up many of the usual motifs, such as the groom, Petruchio, being a fortune hunter in search of upward mobility through marriage. Kate's father would be only too happy to be rid of her, especially as he must do so before he can marry off her younger and tamer sister, Bianca. The direct violence against animals so central to the earlier history of shrew-taming is missing in Shakespeare. The tradition is, however, clearly echoed when Petruchio makes clear that he will tame Kate herself as if she were an animal, using on her the exact strategies of starvation, sleep deprivation, and psychological torture used to domesticate wild hawks. Shakespeare also subtly echoes the cat torture motif so prevalent in proverb versions by naming the wild bride -- nameless in most folktale versions -- "Kate", homonymous with "cat," hence Kate, the cat. That the naming is intentional becomes clear from Petruchio's first words of greeting to Kate, a prolonged display of his power of naming, renaming, and nicknaming her: "Good morrow, Kate -- for that's your name, I hear." Ignoring her own insistence on being called the more formal "Katherine", he proceeds to call her ten variations of "Kate": "plain Kate, bonny Kate, Kate the curst, Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom, Kate of Kate-Hall, my super-dainty Kate" (II. 1. 183-94), adding soon thereafter another litany of Kates, with an obvious pun on "wild Kate" and "wildcat": "For I am he am born to tame you, Kate,/ And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate / Conformable as other household Kates" (II. 1. 278-81).
 

The Hungarian Tradition
 

10. There are a number of versions of the shrew story and related stories of stubborn wives catalogued in Dégh (1955-1960: nos. 27, 35, 69, 86, 87) and in Olga Nagy (nos. 45, 46, 49, 51, 52, 54), with some translations and summaries in English available in Ortutay (nos. 23-25) and Dégh (1965; 1969, 335). I discuss here three that connect in particularly interesting ways with the Arabic and European tradition briefly describe above. A story from the Transylvanian Hungarian (Székely) tradition, sometimes called "Szerencsés Jancsi" ("Lucky Johnny") or "Az állatok beszédje" ("Talking Beasts") is a convoluted embroidering of the story already present in the fourteenth-century manuscript of the 1001 Nights, about a shepherd who is about to die due to the his wife's nagging. He has learned the language of animals and he hears his dog and rooster discussing his fate. The dog expresses his regret, but the rooster says that he can keep his ten wives in line by beating them and if their master cannot even keep one in line then he deserves to die: "nekem hány feleségem van, s én ennek a soknak tudok parancsóni. Eccer elkottyintom magamat, s látod, mind bejönek utánnam enni, s neki csak egy van, s azt se tudja megtanyittani. Hát akkor ott hajjon meg!" (the text in Hungarian is phonetic; "I have many wives and I can command them all. I beep once and they all come running to eat after me and he has only one and even he can't teach. Well, then, he should die!"). On hearing this, the man jumps out of his coffin, beats his wife to a bloody pulp, and she then becomes obedient from that day on. The fact that it is precisely a rooster who teaches the husband how to dominate his wife suggests that there is a latent sexual content to this tale as well. Roosters in folk tradition are not really known for beating their wives but for satisfying them sexually, as in the proverb to the effect that one rooster can satisfy ten hens but ten men cannot satisfy one woman (for example in the Italian un gallo basta assai bene a dieci galline, ma dieci uomini possono male o con fatica una femina sodisfare (Decameron III.1; see Vasvári, "A Comparative Approach" <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb99-4/vasvari99.html> on what I have called the "pornithological" lore of the rooster). Yet in another story a young woman is unhappy with being given in marriage not to a young man but to an impotent sixty-year old husband. With the help of her equally crafty mother, she tests his tolerance for her misbehavior with the familiar threefold escalation of trials, finally driving him to his grave. Her second husband, unlike the first, is up to the job of taming her, which he does in as cruel a way as in any of the stories in the tradition. First he pours scalding potato water on her body, then has the cat scratch the boils, then sticks feathers into the wounds, and finally has the neighboring children pick off the feathers one by one (Dégh no. 87). In a further version of the cat theme a man with a lazy wife orders the cat to prepare dinner. When it does not obey, he beats it to a pulp. He repeats this a second time, but his wife still does not catch on. The third time he ties the cat to his wife's back so that when he beats it, it claws the woman. Now she finally begs her husband on her knees to leave the cat alone, promising to do its work (Ortutay no. 25). Note how this story shares with the fourteenth-century Spanish tale the insistence on demanding the cat to do an impossible service and shares with the German tales the displaced beating of the wife by beating the cat.
 

11. Finally, let us look at another, more complex song (collected in 1912 in Garamkissaló, Hont County, Slovakia), which combines oral and literary traditions (see Honko, no. 370). The song in form and content belongs to the specific category of wedding songs performed at the wedding ceremony (these songs are often either humorous or obscene or both) (see Vasvári, "A Comparative Approach" <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb99-4/vasvari99.html> for examples of the genre in Hungarian). This text is sung to the bride as the accompaniment to the rite of combing out her hair and putting it into a bun in the style of a married woman. It belongs to the "instructions to the bride" genre, where older women instruct the bride in what to expect in marriage. The first three stanzas instruct the bride in how to be appropriately subservient to her husband, feeding him the best morsels, being silent about his carousing in the tavern, and keeping her mouth shut even if he beats her. The last stanza recommends to the husband that if his wife should turn out to be nyelves, that is, to have a mouth on her, then he should beat her:
 

Tanuld, asszony, az uradat megbecsülnyi, és övele mindenekben egyesülnyi;/ ha kocsmába megy, hallgass / ha megnyúz is, ne jajgass / ha urad ver/ hej, huj, ha urad ver!/ Ülj tüzhelre, guzsalyodra, forgass orsót, / mikor urad fog forgatnyi pinteskorsót: / szomjúhozzál, ha iszik