THE ALIENATION OF ENCHANTMENT (on drugged sleep in three-nights tales)

The Search for the Lost Husband is a very widespread tale, closely related to Beauty and the Beast and The Master-Maid. Sometimes it seems like it's a default ending for fairy tales. 

A young woman marries a supernatural male, who seems monstrous at first in the daytime, only appearing human (and unreasonably attractive) at night. The wife breaks a taboo, and her husband vanishes. She then searches the world until she finds him and they are reunited. 

The shero is a woman, and her opponent is usually one as well - an enchantress who's trapped the husband, or a rival princess who wishes to wed him. In their notes, the Grimms wax a little poetical on how the story is about the heart being tried so that "everything evil falls away in recognition of pure love." There's also an interesting note about, in this case, light being an ill omen and darkness being good.  ​This goes back to the taboo. Often, she takes a candle and spies on her husband in the night to see his human form, or attempts to break his spell/curse by other means.

Karen Bamford has a good analysis. The wife's journey is an act of atonement; she does penance for sinning against her divine husband, and wins him back through toil and effort. 

In many cases, her long journey takes her through some kind of otherworld. In an Arabic version, "The Camel Husband," the young wife goes to the land of the djinn. The land East of the Sun and West of the Moon is a place beyond the bounds of the physical world and the laws of nature. Psyche (although her story is rather 425B, Mother-in-Law's Tasks or Son of a Witch --no offense to Aphrodite!--) literally goes through hell (ie Tartarus; she just has to ask Persephone for some beauty cream --while avoiding Charon, Cerberus, the Eumenides, the Fates, and other assorted denizens of the classical underworld!--).

This quest allows her to finally truly break the spell on her husband and resurrect him from a "metaphoric death" (Bamford). In many tales, the wife visits the husband during the night, while he lies in a drugged sleep, and tries repeatedly to awaken him. In "Nix Nought Nothing," (AT 313, ie Master Maid) the husband falls into sleep similar to Sleeping Beauty (genderflipped as a Sleeping Beau), ditto in "El sueño de san Juan" (AT 437; Aurelio Espinosa, A.R. Almodóvar, the frame story of the Pentamerone), and only the true bride can symbolically raise him from the dead with the power of love. In Cupid and Psyche, Cupid lies wounded for quite some time.

I found a Japanese folklore site that had an interesting perspective. (As seen through Google Translate, but whatever.) The bride's or groom's animal shape is the physical body (karada), and their human shape represents the soul or heart (kokoro), but that non-physical part of the self belongs to the otherworld. Death and rebirth are required to truly bring it into the real world. So then you have stories like the "Frog Prince" or "The White Cat Bride" where the enchanted animal spouse/fiancé must be thrown against a wall, burned to a crisp, or have their head cut off. 

The folklorist Jan-Öjvind Swahn summarizes the AT 425 tale-type as follows: ‘A mortal woman breaks the taboo which is incidental to her association with a supernatural male, and he thus disappears. She searches for him, finds and regains him.’ The AT 425 tale-type is an old story – one of the oldest – with over 1500 versions on record from all over the European language area and beyond.4 According to Richard Dorson, these ‘are only a fragment of the mass of variants that could be accumulated from the living oral tradition’. Donald Ward states that AT 425 ‘has achieved an acceptance through time and space and among peoples of the most diverse cultures as [has] no other magic tale’.

He disappears when she violates a taboo, frequently an oath of secrecy about his condition. To regain him she must perform a penitential search, overcoming apparently insuperable obstacles, such as climbing a glass hill (glacier?), as in the Scottish ‘The Duke of Norroway’ and the German Eisenofen, or crossing the sea, as in the German ‘The Singing, Springing Skylark’, or, as in the Italian ‘King Crin/Re Porco’ and many other worldwide questers in this tale-type, wearing out seven pairs of iron shoes, seven iron mantles, seven iron walking-sticks, and seven iron sun-hats. Her search usually entails the protagonist’s emotional and physical abjection: the shero of the Scottish ‘The Hoodie-Crow’ must wear horseshoes on hands and feet to pick her way over a hedge of poison thorns.When the bride of ‘Sorrow and Love’ pursues her betrothed, she has ‘only thin slippers on, and soon began to look more and more like a tramp. Gave away all her jewellery in exchange for food ... Did not know how to beg, as she had been brought up a lady. Asked everywhere for ... [him], but no one knew the name. Nearly starved’. However, the AT 425 shero is usually aided in her quest by three female helpers–usually crones, sometimes her husband’s relatives – who give her three valuable objects; they may also impose tasks, such as filling a bowl with tears. When she at last finds her husband – ‘east of the sun, and west of the moon’, in the words of the well-known Scandinavian version – he is about to be married to another; the true wife bargains with the false one, exchanging the three gifts for three nights in the same room as her husband. On the first two nights the husband sleeps, drugged by the rival bride, while the shero pleads for recognition. So, in ‘The Duke of Norroway’, she sings: 

Seven lang years I served for thee, 
The glassy hill I clamb for thee, 
The bluidy shirt I wrang for thee; 
And wilt thou no wauken and turn to me?

When he finally awakes – as if from the dead – and recognizes her, the spell is broken: he rejects the false bride and embraces the true one. It would obviously be impossible to ascribe a single meaning to a tale so old and so various. A story’s significance changes with each retelling.20 However, the remarkable stability of the tale-type over time and space allows us to risk a few generalizations. First of all, it is woman-centered; indeed, Swahn believes that ‘it developed almost exclusively in a female milieu’. It thus resembles the South and Southeast Asian ‘women-centered tales’ identified by A. K. Ramanujan: tales ‘told by older women about women and often to younger women’, in which ‘saving, rescuing, or reviving a man, often solving riddles on his behalf, becomes the life-task of the heroine (read: shero). In such tales females predominate .... The antagonists are usually women ... [and] her chief helpers also tend to be women.’ Ramanujan also notes that ‘marriage begins rather than ends the story; a separation ensues, and then a rescue of the male by the female’. The protagonists in these stories, Ramanujan continues, ‘are true cousins of the feisty heroines (read: sheroes) in Shakespeare’s comedies that owe their plots to Italian novellas, which in turn are related to tales in the 1001 Nights and the Kathaasaritsagara/Ocean of Story.’ Since it is a female-centered tale, we see things from the protagonist’s point of view. Thus her husband is both beast and god; monstrous and beautiful; frightening and desirable. The tale-type is also clearly about the sexual initiation of the female; the transforming power of erotic love; and the domestication of the male, the mysterious and foreign Other.

The AT 425 (Lost Husband) / AT 313 (Master Maid) protagonist typically pays for her ‘sin’ by the ordeal of the search that characterizes this tale-type. Her journey is thus like a pilgrimage – an act of atonement – and not surprisingly, in some versions she actually dresses as a pilgrim (she is outright called "la peregrina" across Spanish lost-husband tales, whether with beastly bridegrooms or master maids). Her search also has some of the features of an otherworldly journey: in Apuleius, Psyche must literally go to hell (ie Tartarus, in order to get mother-in-law Aphrodite a jar of Persephone's beauty cream); in an Arabic version, ‘The Camel Husband’, the heroine travels ‘into the land of the Djinn’, crossing ‘the boundary between the world above and the world beneath’. (Sub-type J, unique to the Irish-Gaelic tradition, is actually named ‘the maid who serves in hell’). This arduous search is also redemptive, since it finally allows the shero to break the spell on her husband, bringing him back from a metaphoric death, and restoring him to his true identity. The eponymous camel husband in the Islamic tale above tells his wife, ‘you have opened the way for my return. From today I can live not as a camel, but as a man.’ In most versions (and again, the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ sub-type presents an exception), the husband’s alienation from his true self is expressed in his betrothal to another woman, the rival whom the shero has to supplant. The happy re-marriage that concludes the plot is thus at once the shero’s triumphant achievement and the reward for her labours.

Like the protagonist in Basile’s ‘Pinto Smalto’ (AKA Laboulaye's Perlino, which masterfully weaves Snow Queen elements into his French retelling!), who makes her own ideal husband (husbando?) by hand, Giletta di Narbona refuses all her suitors. --The motif of the husband literally constructed by the female protagonist also appears in Calvino’s ‘The Handmade King’ (Il reuccio fatto a mano), Italian Folktales, 489–93. In a West Virginia variant, ‘The Dough Prince,’ the handmade husband (‘straight, tall, and very handsome’) leaves the heroine to campaign against some bandits ‘in some far-off land’, where he is captured by the ‘queen of the palace’; see Ruth Ann Musick, ed., Green Hills of Magic: West Virginia Folktales from Europe (Lexington, 1970), 149. See also ‘Master Semolina’, in Folktales of Greece, ed. Georgios Megas, trans. Helen Coloclides (Chicago, 1970), 60–5.-- She pays for her inordinate desire with the pain of Beltramo’s desertion (to fight in foreign wars, maybe against the Habsburgs? - Austria is mentioned as the enemy in Shakespeare's AWtEW) on their wedding day; and his subsequent written refusal to return to France from Italy. Like the typical AT 425/AT 313 shero, too, Giletta embarks on a search for her lost husband, and as a pilgrim, she presumably travels on foot, a constant feature of the traditional search. She also finds her husband sexually in thrall to another woman, and bargains for the opportunity to spend the night with him. Finally, she begs him to recognize her as his true wife on the basis of her labors, and the story ends with their happy remarriage.
In Shakespeare's adaptation AWtEW, in any case, Bertram figures in Helena’s ‘idolatrous fancy’ as this fairytale's bridegroom: he is both a young god and a savage beast. Like the ‘handsome youth’ Pintosmalto or Perlino made of sugar, almonds, gold (pure gold thread for literal golden hair) and precious jewels (literal emerald orbs, pearly whites, and ruby lips) in the Italian tale, Helena’s Bertram is a love-object fashioned by desire.
By presenting the heroine’s flight from the Roussillon as an act of genuine self-abnegation, rather than a conscious stratagem, Shakespeare sacrifices the logic of the source tale: as many critics have complained, it is difficult to reconcile Helena’s stated intentions in act 3 (self-immolation) with her opportunistic orchestration of the bed-trick in act. But Shakespeare gains a great deal: not only does he mitigate anxieties about his heroine’s display of agency, he heightens her resemblance to the immensely sympathetic and popular AT 425 and 313 shero, whose travel and travail are acts of atonement.

In the AT 425 and 313 tales the act of recognition itself is enough to free the husband from enchantment. At the end of ‘The Hoodie-Crow’, the husband declares, ‘That is my married wife ... and no one else will I have’, and at that very moment the spells fell off him, and never more would he be a hoodie’. The simplicity of this ending satisfies because it is generically appropriate: we accept it just as we accept the original premise of a corvid’s marriage to a human girl. Shakespeare, however, famously problematizes his folk-tale materials, arousing different, conflicting generic expectations.6 Most readers want more from Bertram than the few words Shakespeare allows him: as Susan Snyder observes, ‘the intractable baseness of its hero ... makes the happy ending feel not inherent but imposed by fiat.’ Or, as Carolyn Asp puts it succinctly, ‘The frog prince remains a frog until the end and the princess chooses to overlook his slimy skin and love him warts and all.’

Is Shakespeare's Helena/Gilletta self-denying as her soliloquy in 3.2 implies, or self-seeking as her actions in Florence may suggest? Some of these contradictions dissolve, I believe, if we acknowledge Helena as ‘the wife who searches for her lost husband’, a figure who is typically at once obsessive and saintly; indeed, the obsessiveness is an aspect of the saintliness. Crucially in this narrative tradition, the wife forfeits her husband through her own fault: she is responsible for his disappearance, as Helena insists that she is to blame for Bertram’s flight. Like Helena’s, the wife’s quest for the lost husband is at once a penitential pilgrimage and a rescue mission. She redeems him from the alienation of enchantment, symbolized in the person of the rival bride (Parisian noblemaiden Maud Lafeu in Shakespeare's AWtEW), not simply by her wit, but also through her suffering and with external aid. Both agent and patient, she embodies a powerful stereotype of female sheroism.