From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  Little is known of the life of Aesop, founding father of fables, but the surviving scraps of biography inscribe him in a fairy tale of his own: born a slave, dumb and ugly, he frees himself through his goodness and cleverness. (V.-F.-E. Biennoury, Aesop in the House of His Master Xanthus, French, late nineteenth century.)

  Adopting the comic voice as a narrative tone constituted an acceptance of inferior status for their literary production; but in an ironical manner in itself. And this oblique, comic position, from which the status quo could be challenged and injustices described if not corrected, was hallowed by the classical tradition of the fable, as perfected by La Fontaine. Although L’Héritier renounced association with the Aesopian tale, her colleagues did not, and the genre’s features – didacticism, irony, and, not least, animal characters – intersect and overlap with the despised old wives’ tale. But another node, of crucial importance with regard to women writers of fairy tale, connects the two forms: the imagined social origin of Aesop himself.

  The storytellers grafted the Aesop of fable to an indigenous, homegrown – and female – figure of narrative tradition: the Story Stork, or Mother Goose, who shared with this imaginary Aesop a base social origin, credit for folk wisdom, and survival instincts. They responded to their situation with their own magic – lowborn, transformational, organic, and above all linguistic.

  When the fables of the legendary Brahmin sage Pilpay were republished in French in 1697, the unnamed editor risked some pointed remarks in his Note to the Reader: after comparing the fables to Christ’s parables, to the Talmud, to Lucian and Locman and Aesop, he concluded his panegyric of the genre:

  The greater number of monarchies in the Orient were despotic, and the subjects in consequence did not see themselves as free; as those peoples are ingenious, they found this way of being able to give advice, without risking their lives, to their kings, who treat them as slaves and do not give them the liberty to say what they think.6

  Between the start and the end of the sentence, a most interesting shift from the past tense to the present takes place, glidingly, unassumingly, and as it glides it travels not only across the years, but across the map as well, east to west.

  This ‘ingenious’ use of the cryptic fable became distorted, however, by different uses to which such literature was soon put, especially as a children’s readership was sought ever more keenly by English booksellers and printers in the early eighteenth century. The enthusiasm for the literary fairy tale crossed the Channel more swiftly then than many books from Europe today, and D’Aulnoy was one of the most successful authors, first for her Memoirs (see Chapter Seventeen), and then for her fairy tales. Tales of the Fairies appeared in 1699; other collections followed, in 1707 – two years after her death, and then again, in 1716 and 1721 and at repeated intervals through the century, predating the Perrault translation, first done by Robert Samber in 1729.7

  The huge enthusiasm for literary fairy tales just preceded and then overlapped with the reading public’s appetite for Oriental tales, inspired or adapted from the Arabian Nights, which the French orientalist Antoine Galland translated – and in some cases made up, it seems – in his French edition of 1704–17. This too was quickly Englished, though in a garbled and anonymous version. Indeed bowdlerization was a problem for all writers, and D’Aulnoy was vulnerable, especially when the printer-publishers were aiming at parents’ custom. Her stories lost ground before Perrault’s dryer worldliness; the grotesque, even cruel undercurrent of brutality, ugliness, and murder beneath the frothy, rococo atmosphere of a fête galante, made pedagogues and publishers anxious. She can indeed write with a sadistic eye: of an ogre she says, he ate people ‘like a monkey a chestnut’, and in ‘The White Cat’, one of her most successful, mischievous tales of metamorphosis, the cat courtiers go hunting for baby eagles and other nestlings.8, 9

  In some ways it could be said that D’Aulnoy’s own bluff was called, with unexpected results. Though she was named in her first English publications ‘that celebrated Wit of France, the Countess Danois [sic]’, her assumed persona, the lowclass older woman, her very opposite in social class and age and privilege, soon threatened to eclipse her and subdue the peculiar, strong flavour of her fantasy.10 Later editions of her fairy tales forgot the Wit of France’ and substituted Mother Bunch, and the stories’ contents and tone were accordingly modified.11 D’Aulnoy, in age, position and thematic interest, resembles a Scheherazade telling stories for her life far more closely than a gnomic old granny type. But for purposes of pedagogy, the latter was more suitable, while the general, semi-affectionate scorn in which wonder tales of all kinds were held needed a figure like Mother Bunch to despise and respect at the same time; the siren Scheherazade offered a different, and far more difficult challenge to appropriation.

  Two or three of D’Aulnoy’s fairy tales have become classics and are still told and retold in children’s collections – ‘The Blue Bird’, ‘The White Cat’, ‘The Yellow Dwarf’, ‘The Hind in the Wood’ – but they have often been heavily rewritten. Her sense of the grotesque and the satiric, her effervescence, her irony, her intoxicated pleasure in invention have been rubbed away in these versions. She can be comic as well as rococo, and the nursery editions which transmitted her, Georgian and Victorian, made her edifying by deadening her language, her tone, her chosen balance between the lyric and the mordant. For example, in French the heroine of ‘L’Oiseau bleu’ gives the concise, magical summons: ‘Oiseau bleu couleur du temps / Vole à moi promptement!’ (Blue bird, colour of time, Fly to me quickly!). In the English translation of 1721, this becomes:

  Come, my pretty, gentle Bird Whose livery is Blue,

  Thy Constancy is true to me,

  And mine is so to you.

  Then hither to thy Princess fly

  That on thee I may cast an eye.12

  D’Aulnoy’s forthright attacks on arranged marriage – spoken from the heart – turn pious in her transmitters’ mealy mouths.

  Sans doute elle [Truitonne] ignorait qu’un pareil marriage

  Devient un funeste esclavage

  Si l’amour ne le forme pas …

  A mon sens il vaut beaucoup mieux

  Etre Oiseau Bleu, Corbeau, devenir Hibou même

  Que d’éprouver la peine extrême

  D’avoir ce qu’on hait toujours devant les yeux.

  En ces sortes d’hymens notre siècle est fertile …13

  [Doubtless the Old Sow did not understand that that kind of marriage becomes deadly slavery if love doesn’t shape it… In my view, it’s much better to be a Blue Bird, a Crow, even become an Owl, rather than undergo the death sentence of always having what one hates before one’s eyes. Our times are fertile ground for these kinds of unions … ]

  These hard-hitting concluding verses of ‘The Blue Bird’ are rendered as:

  Rather than let the Hellish Truitonne

  Be equal to him in his Bed or Throne

  Would some kind Spirit now our Age direct

  That Interest may not be the Guide …

  Instead of Love Divine …

  Our Smithfield Bargains then would cease,

  And Wedlock throw her Chains aside …14

  In its own elaborate and artificial style, the literary fashion for fairy tale among women in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century France developed a latent aspect of the oral folk tradition to the point that it voiced open, partisan claims on their own behalf. Women’s power in fairy tale is very marked, for good and evil, and much of it is verbal: riddling, casting spells, conjuring, hearing animals’ speech and talking back to them, turning words into deeds according to the elementary laws of magic, and sometimes to comic effect. Women in fairy tale align themselves with the Odyssean party of wily speechmakers, with the Orphic mode of entrancement, with the Aesopian slave tradition of fabulism. Perceived with contempt as lesser, they adopted forcefully the despised conte.

  For the writers of contes during the new fashion for the elaborate, literary fai
ry tale were of course by no means crones, neither goose-brained, nor ass-footed, nor one-eyed, nor were they common folk from anybody’s point of view, but rather women (and men) like D’Aulnoy, of high status, the creators and frequenters of the ruelles, worldly, even influential, related to the independent women of the earlier generation, who had taken a leading role in the Fronde uprising of the nobles against the king, and then, after its defeat, developed the social ideals of préciosité as a polite revolt against the dominant culture. Fairy tales became part of this position of protest.15

  The précieuses had their male champions. Poets like Ménage, who had been equally lampooned by Molière, were enthusiastic devotees, more catholic than the pope in matters of feminism. Ménage had for instance published a biographical dictionary of women philosophers, which cited passages and references, and gave an entry to Hippo, the daughter of Chiron the centaur, as well as to Catherine of Siena and Héloïse.16 In collaboration with the epic poet Chapelain, Ménage mounted an attempt in the 1650s to include women in the Académie Française. But they failed, as we know, since Marguerite Yourcenar, a few years ago, became the first woman académicienne. When a woman poet, Catherine Bernard (1662–1712), actually won the prizes of the Académie on three occasions, she was ruled out of competition and debarred from collecting them – because she was a woman.17 Only exceptionally were daughters thought worth educating at all – by unusual fathers or guardians, as in the case of Madeleine de Scudéry, whose prolific romances of the mid-century, Le Grand Cyrus and Clélie, achieved such renown that, in spite of their length (ten volumes each and tens of thousands of pages), they were translated almost immediately into English.

  The Abbé Fénelon, who began his pedagogic career in a hostel for fallen girls in Saint-Sulpice, pioneered the idea of female education in his very first book, but he could picture only a limited curriculum: polite manners, embroidery and the rudiments of scripture, reading and writing. He warned: ‘Curb their spirit as much as you can to keep within commonly held confines, and teach them that their sex should have as delicate feelings of modesty about learning as the horror of vice inspires in them.’18

  Furthermore, the celibate ideal of the précieuses – to enjoy tendresse with men of equal intelligence and similar inclinations without the yoke of arranged marriages, their concomitant rejection of the economic basis of alliances, their argument for an end to the double standard which permitted male adultery but disgraced adulteresses – made them profoundly subversive, anomalous women within the social order of the ancien régime. The blunting of fairy tales as well as their infantilization, as they shed their context in pre-revolutionary society, has been one of the main changes to take place in their reception: the conservative romance of marriage and material comfort has usurped the fiery protest of a whole generation of French noblewomen against the serfdom of dynastic matrimony and mental inanition – and the two were bound together, as education was clearly unnecessary to the life of a châtelaine.

  If arranged marriages were abolished, women would be free to express their own desires – and this would spell the end of male authority in the household. As a réplique to the misogynists, led by Boileau – an old enemy – Perrault republished an early poem, ‘L’Apologie des femmes’, a rather touching hymn of praise to conjugal love, with a new preface.19 But Perrault, the champion of womankind, defender of old wives’ wisdom, painting his paragon of a wife, invoked her perfect ‘bouche enfantine’, her childlike mouth – ignorance as virtue.

  When Perrault began writing fairy tales – the first man in France to do so, and certainly the first académicien, he was interleaving partisanship in the dispute about women with another bitter intellectual wrangle, the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Defending fairy tales, he was not only defending women’s tales but also promoting native ‘modern’ literature against the Anciens, who proclaimed the complete superiority of Greek and Latin over all things local, vernacular and of comparatively recent date.20 To the Moderns, the fairy tale was a living shoot of national culture; to the Ancients, the genre was a bastard child of the vulgar crowd.21 Perrault was wriggling a little, trying to have it both ways, when he called in the classical comic tradition as forebear, but in the literary politics of the time he was bravely and firmly with the Moderns. He even composed a magnificent album of encomia to the great men of the century: in his opinion, Virgil and Apelles would have to yield pride of place to Frenchmen like Racine and Poussin.22

  The femaleness of the genre became crucial in the argument for the aboriginal, homegrown, patriotic identity of fairy tales. Nothing can be more homegrown than mother’s milk; and milk here can be taken to mean language.23 As we have seen, the ruelles ruled on the art of conversation, and the grammarian Vaugelas, in his Remarques sur la langue française, had written that ‘in case of doubt about language, it is ordinarily best to consult women’.24 Vaugelas published his book in 1647; dislike of women arbiters in society had sharpened in academic circles in the capital since then.

  But for different women fairytale writers in the circle in which Perrault moved, Mother Goose came to personify an imagined, primordial body of homegrown knowledge, which returned readers and listeners to their childhood and, through childhood, to their roots. They saw themselves as the guardians of language, its nurses, and its shapers.

  II

  Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon began making up fairy tales in the 1690s, and published Bigarrures ingénieuses (Ingenious Medleys) in 1697 – the very title, with its allusion to cunning and to motley, announces her enterprise of tale-telling, within the comic mode of tricksterism and fooling. She was born in 1664, the daughter of a poet, Nicolas L’Héritier, one of Louis XIV’s many historiographers, and though she belongs in age to the younger generation, she was very close to Charles Perrault; their mothers, Françoise and Paquette Le Clerc, were either sisters or cousins.25 Though her family were impoverished after her father’s early death (her mother may have taken in sewing to provide for her six children), Marie-Jeanne moved in high and learned circles in the capital. She became a fervent disciple of the older writer Madeleine de Scudéry, a frequenter of her ruelle or salon, and her great friend. She inherited the salon in 1702, after Mlle de Scudéry’s death, and until 1711 continued there the earnest cultivation of a new civility. Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier wrote the eulogy after her friend’s death, imagining a series of Petrarchan triumphs, almost entirely peopled by women – she did allow her own father, however, to attend the chariot of Clio.26, 27 She also penned a triumph for another bluestocking friend, Antoinette Deshoulières, in which she described her apotheosis on Parnassus and the torments of her detractors: Boileau is condemned to be bitten by Cerberus as many times as he has insulted women, while Mme Deshoulières is gathered into the company of the Muses as the tenth.28

  But even as she cultivated this lofty, precious intellectual life, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier was an outspoken partisan of the fairytale form, at the very time when it was being scorned by the dictionary of the Académie as a vulgar genre and a typical example of women’s foolishness. She countered with a series of apologias, set as prefaces to her fairy tales, where she identified her sources as her governess and her nurse – whom she affectionately called ‘ma mie’ which has no English equivalent except perhaps ‘Nanny darling’. They had told her tales over and over again, by the side of the embers when she was a child. As L’Héritier was writing fairy tales before Perrault, possibly as early as 1692, it is likely that they exchanged ideas on the subject, and that the figure of Perrault’s Mother Goose does not only conceal his handiwork and thinking, but also hers.29 In 1694, she added a madrigal as a comment on Perrault’s first published story, ‘Peau d’Ane’:

  Le conte de ‘Peau d’Ane’ est ici raconté

  Avec tant de naïveté

  Qu’il ne m’a pas moins divertie

  Que quand auprès du feu ma Nourrice ou ma Mie

  Tenaient en le faisant mon esprit enchanté.

  [The
tale of ‘Donkeyskin’ is told here with so much natural grace that it has entertained me no less than when, telling it beside the fire, my nurse or my darling nan held my spirit enthralled.]30

  The gouvernante acted as a hinge between the ranks of society; as a servant raised children in the nursery to prepare them to go ‘downstairs’, so the imaginary figure of the crone narrator was poised between high and low culture, a Mother Goose who has folded her wings. The post of governess indeed encompassed a broad range of ranks and birth: Mme de Maintenon, for instance, had taught her own gouvernante to read and write, but when she became in her turn governess to the royal bastards, she rose, spectacularly, to become the king’s mistress, reformer and morganatic queen. Pleasure in stories could unite literate and respectable (upwardly mobile) gouvernantes with peasants who were appointed to mind the children: the Bibliothèque Bleue, where the romances of the middle ages were printed, was staple entertainment for women of different classes. The devout Mme Guyon was sneered at for reading them, as we saw, but as entertainment they were hotly defended by L’Héritier.