The Mouse Turned into a Maid

The mouse turned into a maid is an ancient fable of Indian origin that travelled westwards to Europe during the Middle Ages and also exists in the Far East. Its Classical analogue is the Aesop's Fable of "Venus and the Cat" in which a man appeals to the goddess Venus to change his cat into a woman. The fable has the themes of incomplete transformation and, in the Indian form, of a succession of more powerful forces. It has received many treatments in literature, folklore and the arts.

It is Aarne-Thompson type 2031C. Another tale of this type is The Husband of the Rat's Daughter. The theme of metamorphosis is also treated in The Cat Turned into a Woman.

The story found in the Panchatantra relates how a mouse drops from the beak of a bird of prey into the hands of a holy man, who turns it into a girl and brings her up as his own. Eventually he seeks a powerful marriage for her but discovers at each application that there is one more powerful: thus the cloud can cover the sun, the wind blows the clouds about but is resisted by the mountain; the mountain, however, is penetrated by mice. Since the girl feels the call of like to like in this case, she is changed back to her original form and goes to live with her husband in his hole.

The fable was eventually translated into Pahlavi and then into Arabic, but before a version of any of these works had reached Europe the fable appeared in Marie de France's Ysopet as a cautionary tale against social climbing through marrying above one's station. The creature involved is an ambitious field mouse who applies to the sun for the hand of his daughter. He is sent on to a cloud, the wind, a tower, and then the mouse that undermines it, to the humbling of his aspirations.

The theme of keeping to one's class reappears in a Romanian folk variant in which a rat sets out to pay God a visit. He applies to the sun and to clouds for directions, but neither will answer such a creature; then he asks the wind, which picks him up and flings him on an ant-heap - 'and there he found his level', the story concludes. A less harsh judgement is exhibited in Japanese and Korean variants where the father seeking a powerful match for his daughter is sent round the traditional characters of sun, cloud and wind, only to discover that he too has his place on the ladder of power. It is interesting to note that all these are animal fables and lack the transformation theme. In the Japanese case a rat is involved and in the Korean a mole.

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