13

Female Tricksters

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her fiction.

—Oscar Wilde

While the majority of trickster figures around the world are male, for which reason I have primarily used “he” instead of “she” in describing trickster characters, there are female tricksters as well as tricksters who can shape-shift from male to female through a transsexual or transgender slight of hand. Then again, there are tricksters who are hermaphrodites. Esu, a trickster of the Yorbu of Western Africa, is often portrayed in statuary as paired—both male and female—or as a single bisexual figure—even though he performs tremendous feats with his notorious penis, he/she is also often holding her prominent breasts:

Certainly [Esu] is not restricted to human distinctions of gender or sex; he is at once both male and female. Although his masculinity is depicted as visually and graphically overwhelming, his equally expressive femininity renders his enormous sexuality ambiguous, contrary, and genderless.1

As remarkable and powerful as these bisexual manifestations of Esu are, it is too often the case that when it comes to the female tricksters they are portrayed as being devious and manipulative, reflecting the misogyny of cultures the world over which give preference to the male and cast women as second-class citizens: in the case of state-level societies we see women often reduced to chattel. Trickster literature is littered with stereotypical witches, temptresses, sexual predators, and whores: women who use evil cunning and subtle wiles to manipulate and control men. On the other hand, as in all stories, interpretation is key to meaning, and even in stories where dominant men control women there is often the hint of inherent feminine power at the core of these tales—power that men find dangerous and threatening. When told by men, this power is seen as ominous, but looked at in another light such stories not only reveal the hysterical fear men can have regarding powerful women, but the very fact that women are not the “weaker sex.”

The first known historical folk tale of a female trickster is “The Two Brothers,” from Egypt of the thirteenth-century BC (This story, of course, comes from a state-level society, not a tribal culture). In this story, the Queen attempts to seduce her brother-in-law, who rebukes her. She then lies to her husband, telling him that his brother has tried to engage her in a sexual liaison. The King is inflamed and murders his brother. The nearly identical story is played out in the biblical story of Joseph, where Joseph is seduced by Joseph’s master’s wife—Potiphar—from Genesis 3.9:

[7] And it came to pass after these things, that his master’s wife cast her eyes upon Joseph; and she said, Lie with me.

[8] But he refused, and said unto his master’s wife, Behold, my master wotteth not what is with me in the house, and he hath committed all that he hath to my hand;

[9] There is none greater in this house than I; neither hath he kept back any thing from me but thee, because thou art his wife: how then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?

[10] And it came to pass, as she spake to Joseph day by day, that he hearkened not unto her, to lie by her, or to be with her.

[11] And it came to pass about this time, that Joseph went into the house to do his business; and there was none of the men of the house there within.

[12] And she caught him by his garment, saying, Lie with me: and he left his garment in her hand, and fled, and got him out.

[13] And it came to pass, when she saw that he had left his garment in her hand, and was fled forth,

[14] That she called unto the men of her house, and spake unto them, saying, See, he hath brought in an Hebrew unto us to mock us; he came in unto me to lie with me, and I cried with a loud voice:

[15] And it came to pass, when he heard that I lifted up my voice and cried, that he left his garment with me, and fled, and got him out.

[16] And she laid up his garment by her, until his lord came home.

[17] And she spake unto him according to these words, saying, The Hebrew servant, which thou hast brought unto us, came in unto me to mock me:

[18] And it came to pass, as I lifted up my voice and cried, that he left his garment with me, and fled out.

[19] And it came to pass, when his master heard the words of his wife, which she spake unto him, saying, After this manner did thy servant to me; that his wrath was kindled.

[20] And Joseph’s master took him, and put him into the prison, a place where the king’s prisoners were bound: and he was there in the prison.

[21] But the LORD was with Joseph, and shewed him mercy, and gave him favour in the sight of the keeper of the prison.

Tales of dangerous seductresses occur worldwide, where the woman entices a man and brings about his downfall. They occur in tribal as well as state-level societies, so this theme is very ancient and certainly reflects fears of responsibility on the part of the male. For unlike chimps and bonobos, the human male is required by the biology of the pair-bond (and the corresponding terms of society—marriage) to give of himself to his mate and offspring. Here we see how this newer disposition, fueled by evolution, toward monogamy/pair-bonding/marriage conflicts with the much older case of promiscuity in our species. Of course questions of paternity are always paramount in the minds of men (as mentioned previously), so control of women’s reproduction has been an insane obsession. This is why virginity has traditionally been seen as universally important across human cultures—so a man is secure in the knowledge that no other male DNA has entered “his” woman before he has penetrated her. But men do not just have sex with their wives. The double standard is pernicious: it’s all right for a man to sleep with as many women as he wishes, while the woman is supposed to remain chaste. Of course, this is mathematically impossible, and some women who (for whatever reason) were not married, took sexual partners for pay, or for love—giving up any claim to virginity—while often ruining their chances for matrimony and/or ruining their reputations in the community. The male, often on the prowl for more sexual partners, could easily find himself in a dalliance with such a woman (a non-virgin), become amorous and then find himself in a position of becoming a father. (As we have seen, evolution programs us to act in certain ways that have nothing to do with logic—contrary to the Catholic Church’s stance procreation is often the farthest thing from our minds as we engage in sex). Even though women are of the utmost value to men in tribal cultures, and are often a reason for warfare (to capture more women), evolution has left our species with a legacy of the double standard where women have typically been seen as either the Madonna or the Whore. It’s important to realize that even though such mindsets are tied to our biological evolution, that does not mean society is incapable of overriding such dispositions. The importance of virginity in the West has declined to the point of nearly zero, due to birth control, the Women’s Movement, and societal views on sex, even though it lives on in many places in India, Africa, and Asia. Yet, at the same time, the old double standard has not abated. Men still worry about entrapment from women, and men who are promiscuous are never seen as sluts or whores. They are studs.

The first time I heard a Vagina Dentate story was while visiting a medicine man friend on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, back in the early 1970s. Selo Black Crow was a “holy man” of the Ogallala Sioux. He related a story to a group of us one afternoon as we were looking out over his 800 acres scattered with buffalo, just a few miles east of Wanblee, South Dakota. Selo said his mother had told him this story when he was a child—that there are women who have teeth in their vaginas, and that because of this a man should always be on the watch for such women, and all women in general, for you could never know when a female might be one of these and get you—gnawing off your penis when you went inside of her.

Little did I know at the time, this is a myth that has occurred in a variety of cultures around the world (not made up by Freud, as some believe, though he made reference to it). In a similar vein, years earlier, as a fourteen-year-old working in the cornfields of Illinois, detasseling corn, I heard a story from our team leader who had been to Vietnam. He told us that the Vietnamese women prostitutes would often insert razor blades into their vaginas to shred the penises of American soldiers. Though complete myth, it was an image that scared the hell out of us young boys working our way through the flatlands of Illinois. These are both trickster stories, to be sure, but here the female Trickstar is cruel and evil, with nothing of the enchanting, comic quality found in so many of the male trickster tales.

There are a host of stories that paint women as tricksters of this type—with women being portrayed in a hideous fashion. And of course, there are numerous taboos in cultures around the world where menstruating women are seen as evil or dangerous (I have come across this belief many times, even in tribal people today). Sometimes, the fact that women must be put away from the tribe in separate huts has undergone a revisionist interpretation as a “sacred” time for the woman, but a closer look at the ethnographic literature shows that it is male fear of women’s blood that initiates these practices and that there is a negative connotation to menstruation. The traditional interpretation given by anthropologists and folklorists in the past (such as Campbell), that primal men somehow feared (or were jealous of) the life-giving abilities of women may or may not be true. But for many cultures, blood is considered “life,” hence the worldwide fascination with sacrifice and blood-letting, for animals, or humans. Recall that Cain killed Abel because God was not satisfied with Cain’s sacrifice of grain. It had to be blood. I am inclined to believe that it is fear of blood itself, coming from the reproductive area of women’s bodies that frightened men. It was unexplainable, and did not seem to be natural, in that it was not observed in other animals. It was seen as powerful, but usually an evil power.

Some female trickster stories that appear negative can be reinterpreted through a feminist critique that makes the villain the heroine. A reinterpretation of Eve as culture hero is such an example. She becomes the one who brings enlightenment and consciousness to humanity, instead of the evildoer, seducing mankind into a life of misery. (Such an interpretation was actually conceived by early Christian Gnostics nearly 2,000 years ago. However, such interpretations are far and away historically rare [or hidden] in our society. Indeed, many of those Gnostic texts that were sympathetic to women were burned by the soldiers of the newly Christianized Roman Empire.)

Marilyn Jurich, in her seminal study of female tricksters, Scheherazade’s Sisters, asks why the woman/devil connection is so prominent: “Are women then, even more unscrupulous and malicious than this very archetype of evil? [Does this] mean that women are by nature diabolical or, at least, tainted?”2 The Old Testament presents a raft of other “evil” women: Delilah, who cut Samson’s hair and took away his power. Then there were Lot’s virgin daughters, and his wife. Lot had offered his daughters up to the men of Sodom to rape instead of sodomizing the male ambassadors from God whom Lot had been hosting. But the people declined. As the daughters are escaping, with their mother and father, from God’s wrath at the evil of the city, Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt because she disobeyed God’s command by looking back at the sacked and burning city. Later Lot’s daughters trick their father into having sex with them in order to perpetuate the human species, by violating the incest taboo. The moral of the story shows them to be damned.

Cultures around the world reiterate this theme of bad women (for all the underlying reasons we have seen). But this is not always the case. Going against the grain, the biblical story of Tabor is one in which craftiness on the part of a woman pays off. Tabor, a widow, tricks her father-in-law into impregnating her, thereby securing her future, though she takes her life into her own hands by this action—for a man was allowed to sleep with as many prostitutes as he desired—but a woman accused of sexual misconduct could be burned at the stake.

The tale of Scheherazade is the most famous case of all where a woman is able to turn the tables and on a man. This story is the frame which begins The Arabian Nights, and it is a story of cunning and survival in which Scheherazade outsmarts the King and saves her own head, as well as the heads of many other women in the kingdom.

Both wives of King Shahzaman and his brother are found to have secret lovers, so the wives and their lovers are executed. Thinking that all women are evil, the two brothers plot revenge upon womankind, especially the young maidens who are of age to marry. A new bride is brought to the King each night, but after having sexual relations with her, each bride is executed the following morning. This goes on and on, until Scheherazade bravely asks to be the next bride. But she has hatched a plan with her sister, Dinarzad. After the King has sex with Scheherazade, Scheherazade’s sister, Dinarzad, enters the chamber and suggests that Scheherazade tell the King a story before her death. So Scheherazade begins telling the stories of The Arabian Nights, carefully crafting each tale so that the King is left in suspense evening after evening, for a thousand nights, until the King falls in love with Scheherazade, eventually marrying her, and together they have three children. Not only does Scheherazade end up in the most prestigious position in the kingdom, she saves the lives of countless other women through her act of sacrifice and stealth. As Marilyn Jurich says in Scheherazade’s Sisters:

To understand what constitutes the “tricks of women,” it is necessary to look at the trick itself. The trick by its very nature is left (sinister or devious), underhanded, rather than right (straight or direct), truthful, on the level. Its natural connection, then, seems to be with the diabolical, for evil is dark and secret and takes us unprepared. The trick works because it is covert and often contrary to what we anticipate. . . . Tricks and women form a natural association; both have been traditionally suspect, regarded with a mixture of suspicion and awe, and both depend on cunning and indirection. The notion of a woman playing tricks, then, compounds our fascination, even as it confirms our expectation. The nature of trickster, then, is substantially intensified in the dealings of the woman trickster, the trickstar. Sometimes her artifices shock us, motivated as they are by malice and self-interest. At other times, her caprices amuse; and we admire her ability to contrive her way out of confining, even life-threatening circumstances, and respect her determination to seek social justice for others. Tradition, however—that tradition supported by male power—often prefers to see the trickstar as menacing, her tricks as self-serving.3

Franchot Ballinger, in “Coyote, He/She Was Going There: Sex and Gender in Native American Trickster Stories,” also asks the question of why there are so few female tricksters. He goes through a possible litany of reasons—that anthropologists tended to speak with male informants, that EuroAmerican attitudes toward female tricksters would have prevented publication of female trickster stories, that in primal societies gender for trickster didn’t matter, or he asks whether it is the case that in patralineal cultures Tricksters are mostly male and that in matrilineal cultures they are mostly female. But none of these questions are convincing, with little evidence for justifying them. In matrilineal Pueblo cultures of the Southwest United States, Trickster is male in the form of Coyote, even if the Coyote story is told by a woman. All of these theories are strained, and while possibly true in a few instances, they cannot answer the larger question of Trickster’s maleness. Ballinger goes on to state that

in the few female trickster stories available to us, she is commonly the object of the satire. The questions arise: Is she satirized because she is a woman or is she satirized because she is a trickster who incidentally is female? What, if any, relationship exists between the trickster’s gender and the narrative elements in the stories? I believe that in most female trickster stories the protagonist’s trickster personality causes her to fall short of her community’s gender role expectations. She is, therefore, fair game for satire, as is the male trickster personality when he fails his society’s expectations, some of them gender-related, for example, when he fails both as a warrior and a chief in the Winnebago cycle or when he perverts his father’s role by marrying his daughter.4

Tales in which female tricksters are fallen women are obviously based upon cultural rules regarding what is required of women, but in addition, as Lori Landy says in Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women—tricksterism can also be a matter of opportunity.

In a sexist society, the male trickster clearly has the advantages of masculinity: mobility, autonomy, power, and safety. He is able to be a liminal figure who can move between the margins and centers of society as he deconstructs the power systems with his humor and trickery. In fact, his experiences in female form are often a period of stability, which he leaves behind to continue on his adventures. He performs his tactical ridicule in the public sphere, mocking and subverting the existing political, social, and economic structures. Obviously, women have not had the same opportunities for such a high degree of mobility (physical as well as psychological, social, economic, artistic, and political). Thus when scholars have looked for trickster figures using definitions based on the assumptions of the trickster’s masculinity, they haven’t found female figures who fit. In order to identify female tricksters in American (or any) culture, therefore, we must turn from the margins of dominant society to the centers of women’s space—the parlors, kitchens, and bedrooms of domesticity.5

When it comes to discovering living and mythic tricksters, Landay is right, that we have to look in new environments to discover new cases of Trickstars, but that argument only goes so far. Men certainly have had the advantages of mobility and visibility, but this explanation misses one of the central points of Trickster—that he generates humor. The main reason trickster tales are about male figures is that the testosterone-driven male, consumed with thoughts of sexual adventure and hierarchical dominance, who is willing to take great risks to satisfy his urges, creates a far more comical, outlandish character. Trickster tales most often revolve around desire and frustration. It is the male’s more pronounced reaching out (with his penis, his hands, or his inflated ego, or his drive to be top banana) that allows for the foil. His big ambitions make for a much greater fall. The male trickster is the fool because of his cravings for status, power, sex, food, and hedonistic pleasure; and trickster tales often infer the absurdity and shortsightedness of these desires—the senselessness of self-aggrandizement and the constant struggle for hierarchical dominance—which the Trickster often both symbolizes and mocks. When the comedy rests upon the quest for personal satisfaction, men seem to naturally have a lot more pretensions for stories to reveal, hence having greater comedic value. Comedy can only occur when there is a disconnect. There must be an imbalance for which laughter is the remedy. The tale, and the laughter that ensues, is in a sense an exorcism, the germ of which can be found in cultures around the world who believe that stories, narratives, confessions, songs, through the act of being told, also heal. Trickster stories often revolve around disparities between men and women. Humor is what society needs in the face of adversity. The pomposity of the male needs to be kept in check, for in the end both males and females must get along.

From a feminist perspective, the male trickster can be seen as the ultimate nightmare, the supreme sexist pig, and the epitome of hedonistic masculinity. But the fact that he is brought out in the open and laughed at takes him down to size. Women in tribal cultures are usually not shielded from trickster stories. On the contrary, women often take delight in these tales as much as men. But when there are stories of women tricksters (Trickstars), they often reflect another side of biology and culture as Ballinger suggests. Another dynamic is at work, in which the raucous laughter emitted from hearing the male’s stories, is absent. For the rules governing women’s behavior, when it comes to sexuality, marriage, and childbirth, are enmeshed in the double standard, and women have traditionally been caught in the snare of duplicitous regulation. So it follows that the female trickster would be confronting a whole other set of constraints imposed upon her than those imposed upon men (no matter whether the societies are patralineal or matrilineal). A different kind of humor emerges when a woman is the Trickstar protagonist, especially when the outcome for her is good. There are women tricksters who rise above oppression and enduring stereotypes, showing that women can be just as wily as men, just as smart, just as clever, and just as much in control—even when the world surrounding them is brutal and constantly against them. As a matter of fact, living in a world that has historically been dominated by men, one aspect of Trickster—antithesis of the status-quo—would seem most naturally to belong to women. For Trickster is notorious for challenging hierarchy. Trickster is the original rebel. To the male, being tamed can mean being wed, being responsible for a family, or being subservient in society. To the female, the dangers she must confront include being pregnant without a mate, being locked in a loveless marriage, and/or forced into servitude. Since she often has the force of tradition downgrading her because she is a woman, the female Trickstar must utilize alternative ways to achieve her own desires for freedom, when any kind of overt action is impossible. Maybe Ballinger is right, that there are more female trickster stories out there than we know—they are just hidden. Or maybe women advertising their real abilities in a trickster story would have not been as productive for them, as women, until recently, were often forced to wear the trickster mask in real life, a mask that said we are oblivious to the machinations of men. Some of the female trickster stories show this—the essential power and intelligence of women, their tenacity to survive the misogyny of male-dominated cultures that have controlled them and coerced them into stereotypes. In the story from India, we see that when women want to assert their intelligence they disguise themselves as men. Such folk legends found their way into numerous plots of Shakespeare’s plays, where women prove themselves smarter than the men who wish to control, dominate, or wed them.

Evil Woman Trickster Stories

The Toothed Vagina (Yurok, North America)

Coyote was wandering along when he noticed two girls harvesting hazelnuts. They had a guy with him they both liked, Cotton Tail Rabbit.

Coyote asked where they were spending the night and if he could camp with them, so they told him and said “ok.”

The sandbar in the river is where they camped. Rabbit slept at the girl’s feet, while Coyote got right between them, sharing a blanket, always pulling the blanket to just cover himself and complaining that the girls’ breasts were too big.

The girls hated Coyote and felt sorry for their friend Rabbit, so the three of them decided to get away from Coyote as fast as possible.

Rabbit said, “All right,” and they put logs on both sides of Coyote so he would think they were still there, and went across the river and stayed.

Coyote was really mad, but Rabbit, wanting the girls for himself, sent a trick that made Coyote drown, so he was nothing but bones. Coyote was really pissed. He came to a camp where there were kids, and he thought they all had to be Rabbit’s, so he set a fire and burned them all up. Then he heard a story. Apparently, there was a lady upriver who killed every man who slept with her through intercourse, because she had teeth inside her vagina. Outside her tepee was a yard full of bones.

As soon as Coyote saw this woman he wanted to have sex with her, but he gathered a bundle of sticks, and instead of his penis, he put one stick inside her instead. That stick was gnawed down to nothing so Coyote put another into her vagina. He did this ten times, but the woman couldn’t take this many times of having intercourse and died.

Coyote had “cured” this problem, saying, “From that time on Coyote made it safe for men to have sex with women.6

Teeth in the Wrong Place (Ponca-Otoe, North America)

Coyote was wandering when he heard of an old lady with two beautiful daughters. But if men tried to sleep with the daughters they were not heard from again. Coyote had to check this out, not believing it true.

When he got to the tepee, the old lady let him in and the two beautiful daughters fed him. People are crazy, Coyote said. These women are wonderful!

At nighttime the old lady put Coyote between the two girls to keep him warm. But the younger one whispered to him that she was not really a daughter of the old lady, who was a witch, but the other sister was the witch’s daughter. She herself had been kidnapped. The older “sister” would come on to Coyote, the young girl said, but the witch mother had put teeth in both of the girls’ vaginas in order to kill young men so the old witch could rob them of their goods. Coyote listened. He could hear the teeth in the girls’ vaginas, grinding.

Soon, the older “sister” did just as the younger girl had said. “Have sex with me,” she said to Coyote. But Coyote got a stick from the fire and put it in her vagina instead. Chips and wood slices soon began spitting out of her vagina. Then Coyote stuck an arrow into the girl and killed her, and then he killed the old lady witch in the same way.

Coyote told the younger girl he wanted to marry her, and they fled right away. Once they were far from that evil house, Coyote wanted to have sex with the girl. “But how?” she asked. “I have the same affliction! I have teeth in my vagina.” So Coyote knocked the teeth out of her vagina with a stick, leaving just one, which give them both extra stimulation when they did it, making the two very happy indeed.7

Proverbs 5: 3–8 (Hebrew)

3: For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil:

4: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.

5: Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.

6: Lest thou shouldest ponder the path of life, her ways are moveable, that thou canst not know them.

7: Hear me now therefore, O ye children, and depart not from the words of my mouth.

8: Remove thy way far from her, and come not nigh the door of her house.

Clever/Good Women Trickster Stories

Old Coyote Man Meets Coyote Woman (Blackfoot, North America)

At the dawn of time there were only two beings, Old Coyote Man and Old Coyote Woman, and somehow they met, recognizing immediately that they were identical, except that Old Coyote Woman saw that Old Coyote Man had something. “What is it?” she asked.

In his sack was a penis.

Old Coyote looked in her sack, and there was a vagina.

“Let’s put them into our navels,” said Coyote Man, but Coyote Woman thought they best be placed between each of their legs, then they realized that they fit together, and they began to make love. After awhile, they thought this might be the way to make people, but how should they look? Old Coyote Man got it all wrong, thinking that eyes and mouth should be lined up long ways on the face, and that the women should obey the men. But Old Coyote Woman put things right, which is why people look the way they do today.8

The Most Precious Thing in the World (Hebrew)

After ten years of being childless, a man wanted to divorce his wife, even though he loved her, so he went to Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, who tried to encourage the man to stay married, since he loved his wife, after all. But if nothing could fix this, he said they should have a feast to end the marriage, just as they had had a feast to begin their union. That way they could still part friends. This they had at a fine establishment in town, and at the feast, the wife made sure that her husband got drunk on wine. The husband said to her, before passing out, “Darling, procure the most precious things from our house before you leave.”

The man passed out in a stupor, and the wife had him carried back to the house of his father by the other guests. When the man woke he was flabbergasted to find himself at the house he had grown up in. “What is going on?” he asked.

“I did what you asked,” said the wife. “I took the most precious thing, which is you!”

The husband repented and nine months after that they had a son.9

The Wife Who Refused to Be Beaten (Kashmiri, India)

A wealthy mercantilist from Kashmir valley had a stupid son. The mercantilist hired the best tutors in the country, but the son was incapable of learning. He was lazy and wasted his time. The father began hating his son, but the boy’s mother loved him.

When he was old enough to be married, the mother wanted to find a mate for her son, but the mercantilist was against it: his son was just too dumb to be married. Yet, it was shameful to have a child not get married, and the mother kept asking her husband to find the boy a mate. The mercantilist was fed up, but one day he relented, setting a task for the boy. He gave his son three pansas and told him to go down to the market and purchase food with one pansa, to toss another pansa into the river, and with the last pansa to procure these things—food, drink, a thing to chew, something to plant in the garden, and he was to buy food for the cow.

The boy went to the market and purchased some food with one pansa. He went next down to the river and was about to toss a pansa into it, when the idea of that seemed ridiculous. Why waste a pansa? Yet, he wanted to do as he’d been told. Just then the daughter of an ironsmith appeared and saw that he was upset. He explained to the girl what his dilemma was, but she had a plan.

“A watermelon contains all the five things, buy one and keep the other pansa in your pocket instead of throwing it into the river.”

When he got home, the mercantilist’s wife was very happy and told her husband how smart their son actually was, but the mercantilist thought someone must have coaxed the boy, for this was beyond his mental ability. “Who told you to do this?” asked the mercantilist.

“A girl. An ironsmith’s daughter,” the boy said.

“I was right,” said the mercantilist, “but if you want to marry him off, let him get married to this smart girl.”

“Wonderful,” said the mother.

The mercantilist went to the hut where the girl lived with her parents, who were not home at the time. “They will be home soon,” the girl said, letting the mercantilist into their humble home. “My dad has gone to buy a ruby for a cowrie, and mom has gone to market to sell words.”

The mercantilist was perplexed, but he sat down to wait for the parents to return.

When the parents came back, they were shocked to see the rich mercantilist in their humble home, and they were more shocked when they heard that the mercantilist’s son wanted to marry their daughter. Gossip about all this ran throughout the village, and some people began playing tricks by telling the stupid son that he should beat the ironsmith’s daughter seven times a day to make her behave. (They thought that if the girl’s father found out he would end this marriage). The stupid boy actually went to the girl’s father and said he wanted to beat his future wife. The ironsmith wanted to end the marriage, but the girl did not. The night of the wedding, the stupid boy wanted to beat the girl with his shoe, but she said no, to wait, and if he wanted to beat her a week later, that was ok. But it was bad luck for a couple to fight their first week together.

The mercantilist’s wife decided their now married son should have money to travel and invest. “No,” the mercantilist said. “That’s like throwing money in the river.” But his wife talked him into it anyway.

The boy went out, traveling with a great caravan. He found a mansion in the midst of a garden where a most gorgeous woman coaxed him in for a game of chance. The stupid boy gambled away all of his money, losing it to this woman, including his servants and goods. When he was destitute, he was thrown into jail.

A man passing by the prison saw the young man and knew he came from his own country.

“Will you help me?” the boy called out to the man. “I can’t pay my debts,” said the stupid boy, and I must get these letters out to receive help from my father.

There were two letters—one he had written to his father, telling of his foolish deeds, and one to his wife, in which he lied and said he was successful and richer than ever before and would soon be home and beat her with his shoe.

The man who was to deliver the letters was illiterate, and he took the letters to the wrong people—the wife’s to the father, and the father’s to the wife. The father was happy about all the good fortune but didn’t know why his son was saying he wanted to beat his father with a shoe when he got back. The wife wondered why he wrote to her about his troubles when his father had the money to bail him out. The father and daughter met, and it was decided that the wife would take money to get the boy out of jail. So the wife dressed up like a man and arrived at the palace, saying she was the son of a wealthy mercantilist. Of course, she was invited to gambol.

A game was started, and the wife was very wise and won back all her stupid husband had lost, as well as everything that the wicked gambling woman owned. The wife stayed in disguise, went to the prison and released all the prisoners. She now had the wicked woman and all her servants indebted to her and captive, and the whole entourage marched back to the mercantilist’s and told him everything, while the stupid son went to his own house with all the money in boxes, except for one little box, which contained the stupid boy’s dirty clothes from prison.

Later on, the stupid son went to see his parents and saw his wife was there. He began to take off one of his shoes to beat his wife.

“No!” said his parents, “What is the matter with you?”

His wife opened the box of his dirty clothes from prison and said, “Don’t you remember wearing these?” She then revealed to him what she had done, pretending to be a man.

The boy’s jaw dropped to the floor. The mercantilist and his wife were ashamed of their son and enamored of their daughter-in-law. “She is too good for him,” said the mercantilist, and the wife finally agreed. “She keeps all the jewels and servants for herself,” he proclaimed.10