In Quest of Ms. Mouse

The story of the mouse in search of a husband has been told many times in many lands over the last several thousand years. While the mutations of the story provide interesting material for the folklorist, there is particular fascination in tracing the varying social attitudes towards a marriageable woman, as they are represented in the fable.

One of the earliest versions is found in a folk tale from Greece, called The Mouse and His Daughter."¹ In this telling, the mouse father, proud of his possession, a beautiful daughter, wishes to find her "a worthy suitor . . . but not a mouse . . ." The father can find no one fit for "my little girl" until he approaches the sun, suggesting "I could not give her to anyone else, but someone like you"—that is, the strongest.

The sun confesses that he can be hidden by a cloud; the cloud claims that he can be scattered by the wind; the wind asserts that he is not really the strongest either because "he cannot blow a Tower down." As to the Tower, "to cut a long story short," he has digging within his walls a suitable husband for the beautiful mouse daughter—another mouse.

The Japanese also claim this tale under two titles: The Beautiful Mouse Girl,² and The Mouse's Wedding.³ Here both parents worry about a husband for their daughter "Lovely." None of her many suitors pleases them. The father says: "I am going to search for the most powerful being in the world" as a fit husband for Lovely. The father ends up before a blank wall, but within the wall lives a most powerful mouse, and a very obliging Lovely is happy to marry the mouse her father has found for her.

In these early versions, the socializing purpose seems subordinate to the wit and dry humor of the animal fable. This balance changes over the centuries, as we may see when the Greek fables ascribed to Aesop (500 B.C.) spread to India, where they became part of the Panchatantra or Five Books, written in Sanskrit about 200 B.C.⁴ The Five Books are a compilation of moral tales written by a holy man to educate a rajah and his three sons, and among them we find the tale of the marrying mouse.

There is an interesting difference between the Indian animal tales and the Greek fables on which they are based. In the Greek animal stories, the animals always act in accordance with what is believed to be their "natural behavior." As G. K. Chesterton defined it: in "Aesop or Babrius or whatever his name, a wolf is always wolfish; a fox always foxy." The Indian fable has a style of its own; here animals "are treated without regard to their special nature, as if merely men masked in animal form."⁵

In The Mouse Maiden, the heroine is at first a mouse dropped by a falcon into the lap of a childless guru as he meditates on the shore of the Ganges. In time she grows into a beautiful maiden; and when she is twelve years old, of marriageable age, her guru-father begins an unsuccessful search for "the strongest" as a bridegroom.

He looks only among the most powerful forces of nature—the sun, the cloud, the wind, and a mountain (which replaces the original wall or tower). All the powerful elements confess their own weakness and refuse the match. "Only between two persons who are well-matched in means and in blood should there be a marriage or friendship, but not between high or low."⁶ The caste system of like-to-like is maintained. Within the mountain is a strong, tunnelling mouse, and the maiden begs to be metamorphosed back into a mouse so she can enter his little hole in the mountain and join him in marriage.

The stories from The Five Books travelled by various routes into the oral and written traditions of all the countries of the world; and every country in its own way adopted the tale of the marriageable mouse, "The Mouse Maid Made Mouse...