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The poetics of enchantment (1690-1715).

Article Excerpt
This article addresses the woman teller's identity in the literary fairy tales of France. The author rereads prefaces and images that scholars have used to demonstrate the woman teller's literarity to argue rather for her "frivolity," a word the women themselves use to describe their writing. The essay finds that frivolity is an aesthetic principle at the heart of the women's poetic project that marks their difference from even the Modem partisans of the great literary debate. The principle of frivolity is captured in an image that recurs in prefaces by the writers: the "modern" fairy.

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In her study of Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's "La Chatte blanche," Michele Farrell characterized the fairy tale as a fundamentally mutable genre based on what she calls the "right to phantasize." (1) Farrell voices an opinion with which many critics of the French literary fairy tale would agree. In the 1690s, when Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy and Charles Perrault were writing their tales, there was no single set of practices that defined the genre and necessarily precluded other practices of plot, structure, or ending.

At the present moment, in fact, most critics who address the seventeenth-century French tale in its historical context take for granted the "inaugural status of this corpus" (Seifert, Fairy Tales 92). In an article aptly subtitled "Notes on Canon Formation," Elizabeth Harries begins with the premise that aristocratic women, not Charles Perrault, "began the vogue of writing fairy tales down at the end of the seventeenth century" ("Fairy Tales" 153). (2) According to Lewis Seifert, much recent scholarship on the women writers supports an even more specific claim, that "the contes de fees ... inaugurated many of the features that we now consider to be stereotypical of the fairy-tale form," such as the marriage closure (Fairy Tales 92). In light of current scholarship, it is not too presumptuous to say that the French tales of the 1690s, and notably those written by women, established the genre that we now know as fairy tale.

An intriguing version of this argument surfaces in criticism that addresses the ideology of the women fairy-tale writers and how their project differed fundamentally from Charles Perrault's. Two scholars, in particular, Gabrielle Verdier and Elizabeth Wanning Harries, have been instrumental in demonstrating how, for the women writers, the practice of writing fairy tales was an exercise in freedom. Their studies show how women writers founded the genre as an artistic and a social "right," to borrow Farrell's term; the right, precisely to write and to valorize the literary world of the salon. One of the novelties of their approach is that they base their claims not on fairy tales themselves, but on an examination of paratexts (frontispieces and prefaces) that depict the art of telling tales.

I propose to continue this discussion by revisiting some of the documentary evidence already brought to light through Verdier's and Harries's work, and incorporating my analysis into a broader picture of aesthetic theory at the end of the seventeenth century. My study examines how the women writers place Charles Perrault, author of the Mother Goose Tales and champion of the Modern cause, into the category of "ancient." They argue that they are more "modem" than Perrault. One explanation they give for the modernity of their work is that it is "frivolous" and "clever" entertainment.

In the prefatory pieces that frame their earliest collections of the fairy tales, the women cast themselves quite specifically as a tutelary influence that brings pleasure into the world in the form of frivolity The women writers cultivate what Marie-Jeanne L'Heritier calls a "silly" muse, and, as Henriette-Julie de Murat explains, let her reign in place of Perrault's tired Mother Goose. Through a reading of Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's allegory "Les Contes des fees" and its vignette, we will see, too, that the fairy became the symbol of the women's "trifling" artistic principles.

Through this discussion I want to illuminate an aspect of the fairy-tale conteuse that has been overlooked in readings of the prefatory documents--the emphasis the women writers place on frivolity and lack of purpose beyond entertainment. To clarify, I do not claim, nor do I believe, that the fairy tales are about women's laziness, silliness, or shallowness. On the contrary, as they exploit it and as I define it here, frivolity is not a theme, but an aesthetic principle in the work of the conteuses. I will consider the following possibility: for several reasons, it is precisely the goal of trifling that constitutes the women's artistic innovation. First, it establishes their opposition to didactic poetics and, second, it valorizes the pleasure they took in creative intellectual pursuits, such as the literary arts. In short, they were engaged in a poetic project that moved beyond the major literary debate of the 1690s, the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Finally, as an ensemble, the prefatory documents d emonstrate that the fairy tale exoticized the everyday anticipating a theme that informs the art of the early eighteenth century.

Trifling Fairies

In the earliest editions of their work, the women writers included stories about writing (for whom and for what purpose) and about sharing those stories (orally and in print). That is to say, they framed their collections of stories in narratives about their literary strategies. Frontispieces, avertissements, prefaces, dedications, and epistles provide insight into the writer's relationship to her own work. One of the most frequent observations in these prefatory texts is that the work is "mediocre" (Murat, "Avertissement"), "feeble and not well done" ("faible et pas bien fait"; Murat, "Aux Fees modernes"), written in a weak hand ("une plume aussi faible qui la mienne"; d'Aulnoy, "Aux Dames"), and the author's muse has become quite silly ("vous allez trouvez ma muse bien badine dans cet ouvrage"; L'Heritier, "Lettre" 116). As Elizabeth Harries comments, in several of her frame stories, d'Aulnoy creates characters that love fairy tales and then "points up the ignorance and the pretension of the characters, moc king them and their love for her own contes," which the narrator claims are "badly scribbled, since it was a woman who wrote it" (Twice Upon 67).

The prevalence of such dismissive statements is clearly suspicious, as each of the three women writers who made the statements above excelled in this mediocre art. Catherine Mann has persuasively argued that in contrast to Charles Perrault, "[...] les conteuses ont volontairement place leurs contes dans un contexte ludique en insistant d'abord sur leur valeur de divertissement" (129). Harries finds "without a doubt that d'Aulnoy is fooling" (67) when she appears to undermine her own authority as a writer. I briefly explore how the playfulness of the women's tales combined with the assertion of mediocrity comes to constitute what I call the "trifling aesthetics" of the literary conteuses.

To provide a context for a reading of frivolity in the women's texts, we might first look at what would have been the canonical response to frivolity as a literary technique and as a lifestyle. Literary trifling and leisure appear in a negative light in one of the earliest and most often cited critical tracts on the fairy tale. In 1699, Pierre de Villiers observed in the success of the genre evidence of the feminine taste for frivolity: "[...] la plupart des femmes n'aiment la lecture, que parce qu'elle aiment l'oisivete et la bagatelle; ce n'est pas seulement dans la Province, c'est aussi Paris et la Cour qu'on trouve parmi elles ce gout pour les livres frivoles [...] (286-87). (3) Frivolity consists for Villiers in lack of moral purpose, and women's fairy tales, he notes elsewhere, are nothing but meaningless diversion. Although Charles Perrault argued that frivolity had its place, even in the serious life, he also worried that his tales might seem entirely frivolous.

In the preface to "Griselidis" (1695), he clarified that "ces bagatelles n'etaient pas de pures bagatelles" (3). In addition to being a pleasure to read,...