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Description
Although many people credit Charles Perrault with the innovation and early development of the French literary fairy tale, Marie-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, comtesse d'Aulnoy, a Norman aristocrat who had a Parisian salon on the Rue St. Benoit, actually published the first French fairy tale in 1690, anticipating Perrault by at least four years. (1) D'Aulnoy's tale "L'ile de la felicite" ("The Island of Happiness") was interpolated into her first novel, a nouvelle historique with a romanesque plot entitled Histoire d'Hypolite, comte de Duglas (The Story of Hippolytus, Earl of Douglas). The fairy tale, which tells the story of Adolphe, a Russian prince who gets taken by the wind to the enchanted Island of Happiness and lives there in paradise with Princess Felicite for three hundred years, has often puzzled critics because of its atypical ending. Adolphe and Felicite never marry. Instead, the prince returns to Russia to earn a glorious reputation in battle and is murdered en route by Father Time. Felicite, upon learning that Adolphe is dead, closes up her palace forever, and the Island of Happiness becomes a harbor of eternal grief and despair.
In recent decades, feminist scholars have taken special interest in "Erie de la felicite," not only because it was written by a woman and because it lacks the usual "happily ever after" conclusion, but also because a feminist sociopolitical agenda seems to inform the tale. When situated in the French tradition of seventeenth-century women writers, for example, Princess Felicite's Island of Happiness seems to represent a feminist utopia reminiscent of Madeleine de Scudery's "Land of the Sauromates" in "Histoire de Sapho" ("The Story of Sappho") (Artamene ou le grand Cyrus [1649-53; Artamenes, or The Grand Cyrus], vol. 10), where salon conversation is foregrounded and social institutions that affected women intellectually, such as marriage, are revised. (2) But in debating the extent to which "L'ile de la felicite" should be related to the social concerns and literary agendas of seventeenth-century French women writers, critics have generally overlooked an important fact: when d'Aulnoy first introduced the fairy tale to her salon contemporaries, she did not intend the tale to be read as an independent story. Rather, she situated it in a very specific exterior "reality"--that of its framing novel, Histoire d'Hypolite. (3)
As we shall see, the interpolation of "L'ile de la felicite" into Histoire d'Hypolite constituted a highly premeditated authorial strategy--one that allowed d'Aulnoy to introduce the fairy tale as a literary rather than an oral genre (by literally interpolating the tale into the French literary tradition), while also asserting control over how her salon contemporaries would receive, interpret, and eventually reproduce the fairy tale as the latest mondain (worldly) generic innovation. (4) First, the interaction between "L'ile de la felicite" and the novel that frames it established certain assumptions about the relationship between teller and tale. Specifically, Histoire d'Hypolite allowed the extradiegetic reader to become acquainted with the personality, social situation, and personal dilemmas of Hypolite, the novel's main protagonist and intradiegetic "author" of the interpolated story. Second, the presence of the framing novel enabled members of d'Aulnoy's salon public to see a relationship between the tale and the literary context from which it emerged. In this case, the novel provided a kind of exterior reality, which the fairy tale was shown to mirror and to revise. D'Aulnoy's interpolation strategy thus infused the first French literary fairy tale with an aesthetic of production and an aesthetic of reception that endeavored to build what Stanley Fish has described as an "interpretive community of readers" (1-17). In this case, d'Aulnoy taught an intimate circle of salon authors to recognize the interpolated fairy tale's capacity to comment on contemporary reality and encouraged them to further mondain interests by creating their own novel/fairy-tale combinations in the decades to come. By showing her contemporaries that fairy tales were not merely amusing stories isolated from the reality in which they were created, d'Aulnoy rallied her salon peers to aid her in the development of a powerful new literary enterprise that would have the potential to engage and even to transform the sociopolitical climate of late-seventeenth-century France. (5)
Literary Models for the Interpolated Fairy Tale
D'Aulnoy's decision to interpolate "L'ile de la felicite" into a novel as opposed to another literary genre affirmed the fairy tale as the most recent innovation in a continuum of salon-inspired literary creativity. In some ways, Histoire d'Hypolite appears to pay homage to the nouvelle historique, a genre innovated in the salons of the 1660s by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de Lafayette, and her contemporaries. Just as Lafayette began her famous novel La Princesse de Cleves (The Princess of Cleves) (1678) with a pseudo-historical description of the French court of Henri II, so d'Aulnoy began Histoire d'Hypolite by harkening back to the English court of Henry VIII, another royal court of the previous century. Julie, the heroine of d'Aulnoy's novel, also resembles Lafayette's heroine in her quest to live in accordance with a self-conceived and self-imposed conception of virtue. The Princesse de Cleves refuses to marry Monsieur de Nemours even after her husband has passed away, and Julie willfully overrides her natural inclination for Hypolite even after she discovers that her real father, the Comte de Warwick, is still alive and has granted her permission to annul her marriage and marry Hypolite instead (2: 77). (6)
Although its moderate length and setting in a recent rather than remote historical context evoke the nouvelle historique of the 1660s and 1670s, the plot of Histoire d'Hypolite more closely follows the conventions of the early-seventeenth-century baroque novel, also a product of salon collaboration, with its many quasi-magical chance encounters and multiple episodes (Godenne xii, xiv, xviii). D'Aulnoy's contemporaries would thus have understood the novel's plot as harkening back to romances that were the dominant form in fiction during the first half of the century, such as Artamene ou le grand Cyrus, and Clelie (1654-60) by Madeleine de Scudery. Like Aronce and Clelie, the main protagonists of Scudery's eponymous novel, Hypolite and Julie undergo a series of tests and trials that defy every stretch of the imagination before they are eventually united in marriage. These similarities reveal that d'Aulnoy was conscious not only of her immediate literary predecessors but also of her position in a long tradition of women writers who intermittently used literature to undermine the authority of Louis XIV. As Joan DeJean has pointed out, Scudery's romances are generally viewed as a celebration of women's vitality during and immediately after the Fronde, when "the making of history was approached as a literary enterprise, and especially a commemoration of woman's power to inspire military heroism" (Tender Geographies 46). (7) By associating her fairy tale with the baroque and historical novels of the seventeenth-century salon tradition on the level of both structure and plot, d'Aulnoy promoted the fairy tale as the latest literary innovation through which a new generation of mondain authors could foreground issues important to them as intellectuals and articulate a need for social change. (8)
The subtle references to the works of d'Aulnoy's female literary predecessors that Histoire d'Hypolite contained also emphasized to members of d'Aulnoy's intellectual circle that literary fairy tales should be composed as interpolated narratives rather than as independent stories. The frame narrative of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, for example, which seventeenth-century readers would have considered essential to the meaning and import of the novellas told by the ten intradiegetic storytellers, clearly serves as a model for d'Aulnoy's own framing novel--particularly in the moments leading up to the point in which the fairy tale is told. (9) Just as the ten storytellers of the Heptameron seek the healing waters at the spa town of Cauterets, so is Hypolite drawn to the spa town of Bourbon to recover from wounds inflicted upon him in a duel with Julie's husband, the Comte de Bedfort. And just as the Heptameron's devisants make their way from the springs to the Abbey of Our Lady of Sarrance before they begin telling stories, so also Hypolite travels from Bourbon to the Abbey of Saint Menoux before entertaining the abbess and the young nuns with a fairy tale. (10)
Literary allusions that urge d'Aulnoy's readers not to separate the tale from its framing novel transcend the level of plot association, however, and are present within the tale itself. "Erie de la felicite" refers both to the story of "Psyche," a framed tale originally interpolated into Apuleius's second-century A.D. novel, The Transformation of Lucius or The Golden Ass, and to the sixteenth canto of Tasso's Italian Renaissance epic Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), likewise an independent interlude that plays an integral role in a larger work. As Zephire picks up Adolphe to begin the journey to the Island of Happiness, he points out the similarities between Adolphe's situation and that of Psyche, who gets carried off to Cupid's palace of love in Apuleius's novel, saying: "Je vais vous enlever, Seigneur ... comme j'ai enleve psyche [sic] par ordre de l'amour, lorsque je la portai dans ce beau Palais qu'il lui avait bati" ("I am going to carry you off, my lord ... just as I carried off Psyche, at the god of love's orders, when I took her to the beautiful palace that he had built for her" [2: 155-56]). (11) Later, when Adolphe feels it is time to leave Felicite, the hero himself makes a direct reference to Tasso's epic, specifically to the ending of its romantic episode, in which the hero, Renaldo, decides to terminate his sojourn on the island of the enchantress Armida. Explaining that, like Renaldo, he must... |
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