Madame d’Aulnoy (c. 1650–1705) may be the female exception that proves the rule of male appropriation, for as the author of eleven volumes she becomes notable for her elegantly ornamented fairy tales, designed to delight the adult aristocratic tastes of Louis XIV’s court. As Dorothy R. Thelander establishes in “Mother Goose and Her Goslings: The France of Louis XIV as Seen through the Fairy Tale,” these “fairy tales formed a distinct socioliterary genre,” whose “roots lay in stories that peasant nursemaids and servants told children left in their charge, yet they were shaped for an adult and relatively sophisticated audience,” that “shared the ideals of the Paris salons, particularly those which cultivated the refinement of language and manners associated with the précieux.”14 It is perhaps a sign of how removed Madame d’Aulnoy is from les vieilles as hearth-side tale-tellers that in one volume of her contes de fées, she imagines them to be narrated by some women during a short carriage trip. I do not intend to dispute the issues of the Ancien Régime and salon tales, or of Perrault’s authorship, or of his style. My argument underscores, however, the observation of how regularly the tales are assumed and asserted to have their origins in a province definably female, and how the literary contes de fées become geared to an increasingly large circle of women readers—aristocratic ladies, mothers and nursemaids, governesses, young girls, and ironically the folk.
What surfaces during the period of the seventeenth century in which fairy tales become part of Western Europe’s literary as well as oral tradition are “tell-tale” signs of a twofold legacy. First, we have noted already how insistently literary raconteurs, both male and female, validated the authenticity of their folk stories by claiming to have heard them from young girls, nurses, gossips, townswomen, old crones, and wise women. The female frame narrator is a particularly significant indicator, because it converts into literary convention the belief in women as truth-sayers, those gifted with memory and voice to transmit the culture’s wisdom—the silent matter of life itself. Consider, for example, the term conte de fées. The terms fées and faerie derive originally from the Latin Fatum, the thing spoken, and Fata, the Fates who speak it. According to Andrew Lang, in his “Introduction” to Perrault’s Popular Fairy Tales (1888), “the Fées answered, as in Sleeping Beauty, to Greek Moirai or Egyptian Hathors. They nursed women in labour: they foretold the fate of children.”15 And Katherine Briggs, in An Encyclopedia of Fairies, cites the derivation from “the Italian fatae, the fairy ladies who visited the household of births and pronounced on the future of the baby.”16 These Italian, French, and English derivatives from the Greek and Latin, compel us to see the origin of fairy as closely related to female acts of birthing, nursing, prophesying, and spinning—as ancient myth makes plain. Recall the three Fates: Klōthō, the spinner, spins the thread of life; Lachēsis, draws it out, thereby apportioning one’s lifespan and destiny; and the dread Atropos, she who cannot be kept from turning the spindle, is “the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears,” who “slits the thin-spun life.”17 Contes de fées are, therefore, not simply tales told about fairies; implicitly they are tales told by women, descendents of those ancestral Fates, who link once again the craft of spinning with the art of telling fated truths. In these women’s hands, literally and metaphorically, rests the power of birthing, dying, and tale-spinning.
Second, it is not just the nature of the female raconteur, but also the context within which she tells tales in France, Germany, and England that reinforces associations between the literal and metaphorical spinning of yarns. Edward Shorter, among other historians of French popular culture, documents how in the veillées, those weekly gatherings of farm families, the women would “gather closely about the light of the nut-oil lamp,” not only to “spin, knit, or darn to keep their own family’s clothes in shape,” but also to “tell stories and recite the old tales. Or maybe, as one disgusted observer reported of the late-nineteenth century, they just ‘gossip.’ ”18 The veillée in some parts of France became sex segregated, often a gathering exclusively of women with their marriageable daughters, in which both generations carded wool, spun, knitted, or stitched, thus enacting the age-old female rituals. As Abel Hugo, one of Shorter’s nineteenth-century antiquarians, portrays it, “the women, because of the inferiority of their sex, are not admitted at all to conversation with their lords and masters. But after the men have retired, the women’s reign begins.…”19 Within the shared esprit of these late-evening communes, women not only practiced their domestic crafts, they also fulfilled their role as transmitters of culture through the vehicle of “old tales,” inherited from oral tradition or the filtered down versions from the Bibliothèque bleue, those cheaply printed, blue-covered penny dreadfuls sold by traveling colporteurs.20
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To have the antiquarian Grimm Brothers regarded as the fathers of modern folklore is perhaps to forget the maternal lineage, the “mothers” who in the French veillées and English nurseries, in court salons and the German Spinnstube, in Paris and on the Yorkshire moors, passed on their wisdom. The Grimm brothers, like Tereus, Ovid, King Shahryar, Basile, Perrault, and others reshaped what they could not precisely comprehend, because only for women does the thread, which spins out the lore of life itself, create a tapestry to be fully read and understood. Strand by strand weaving, like the craft practiced on Philomela’s loom or in the hand-spinning of Mother Goose, is the true art of the fairy tale—and it is, I would submit, semiotically a female art. If we then recognize the continuity of this community of female storytellers, then perhaps Madame d’Aulnoy or her carriage trade ladies differ only in status and style from Basile’s townswomen, the French vieilles, or English old wives and middle-class governesses. We may also wish to reconceptualize Madame d’Aulnoy, Mlle. L’Héritier, and Madame de Beaumont, not as pseudomasculine appropriators of a folkloric tradition, but as reappropriators of a female art of tale-telling that dates back to Philomela and Scheherazade. As such, they foreshadow, indeed perhaps foster, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emergence of a passion for romantic fictions, particularly among women writers and readers. Moreover, the “curious” socio-literary genres of the salon tale and Perrault’s nursery tales (contes naifs) may be reperceived as a midstage, linking the ancient oral repertoire of folktales to the later, distinctively literary canon that embraces collections of folk and fairy tales as well as Kunstmärchen, moral and didactic stories, and romantic novels in which fairy tale motifs, structures, and frame narrators exert a shaping influence.
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† From Karen E. Rowe, “To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale,” in Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1986), pp. 53–73. Copyright © 1986. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.
1. French and German terms for “fairy tale,” respectively [editor’s note].
2. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), bk. 6, pp. 143–51. All future references from book 6 will be cited parenthetically in the text by page.
3. Evening gatherings [editor’s note].
4. German for “female spinners” [editor’s note].
5. See also Cheryl Walker, The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 21–22.
6. Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (New York: New American Library, 1940), pp. 270–71.
7. Ann L. T. Bergren, “Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought,” Arethusa 16, nos. 1 and 2 (Spring and Fall 1983): 71. See also Ann L. T. Bergren, “Helen’s Web: Time and Tableau in the Iliad,” Helios, n.s. seven, no. 1 (1980): 19–34. For discussions of the shifting aesthetic theories of the relationship between art and literature, picture and poesy, see Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Richard Wendorf, ed., Articulated Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
8. Pertaining to signs [editor’s note].
9. Tales from the Arabian Nights Selected from “The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night,” trans. Richard F. Burton, ed. David Shumaker (New York: Avenel Books, 1978). See David Shumaker’s “Introduction” for comments on the presumed authorship that follow.
10. Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855), English author, who worked as a governess, as did her fictional character Jane Eyre. Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (1650–1705) and Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier (1664–1734), French authors who specialized in fairy tales. Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–1780), French author of many fairy tales, including “Beauty and the Beast,” who worked in England as a governess [editor’s note].
11. Peter Opie and Iona Opie, “Introduction,” The Classic Fairy Tales (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 20–21.
12. The Tale of Tales [editor’s note].
13. Literary fairy tale in German [editor’s note].
14. Dorothy R. Thelander, “Mother Goose and Her Goslings: The France of Louis XIV as Seen Through the Fairy Tale,” The Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 467–96. [“Précieux”: literati (editor’s note).]
15. Andrew Lang, ed., Perrault’s Popular Tales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888; repr. New York: Arno, 1977).
16. Katherine Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (New York: Pantheon, 1976), p. xi, as quoted in Thelander, “Mother Goose,” p. 487.
17. Bergren, “Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought,” p. 87, n. 5, suggests this provocative emphasis on Atropos, who otherwise might be translated “she who does not turn.” Bergren cites Thompson as the source of “she who cannot be kept from turning” the spindle itself.
18. Edward Shorter, “The ‘Veillée’ and the Great Transformation,” in The Wolf and the Lamb: Popular Culture in France from the Old Regime to the Twentieth Century, ed. Jacques Beauroy, Marc Bertrand, and Edward T. Gargan (Saratoga, California: Anima Libri, 1977), pp. 127–40. The first long quotation is taken from p. 129.
19. Abel Hugo, from La France pittoresque, 3 vols. (Paris, 1835), 1:238, as quoted in Shorter, “The ‘Veillée,’ ” p. 131. In Ethnologie et langage: La parole chez les Dogon (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), Geneviève Calame-Griaule similarly observes the “parole cachée” (concealed speech) among the Dogon women, who while spinning cotton whisper the stories of their men. It is also while mother and daughter spin that the mother teaches her daughter the necessary knowledge of marriage and sexual relations. These “confidences” are a mode dear to the Dogon women (“une parole féminine”), and as we have seen in European cultures, here too in an African tribe of the French Sudan the associations turn around the ideas of spinning yarn and of a secret, both skills and truths passed from mothers to daughters.
20. Peddlers of books [editor’s note].
MARINA WARNER
From The Old Wives’ Tale†
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Plato in the Gorgias referred disparagingly to the kind of tale—mythos graos, the old wives’ tale—told by nurses to amuse and frighten children. This is possibly the earliest reference to the genre. When the boys and girls of Athens were about to embark for Crete, to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, old women are described coming down to the port to tell them stories, to distract them from their grief. In The Golden Ass, Charite, a young bride, is captured by bandits, forcibly separated from her husband and thrown into a cave; there, a disreputable old woman, drunken and white-haired, tells her the story of Psyche’s troubles before she reaches happiness and marriage with Cupid: ‘The old woman sighed sympathetically. “My pretty dear,” she said, “… let me tell you a fairy tale or two to make you feel a little better.”’ The picture of another’s ordeals will console Charite and distract her from her own distress. William Adlington published his exuberant translation of ‘sondrie pleasaunt and delectable Tales, with an excellent Narration of the Marriage of Cupide and Psiches …’ in 1566; it is most improbable that a writer like George Peele would not have known this earliest recognizable predecessor of ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’.
In Latin, the phrase Apuleius uses is literally ‘an old wives’ tale’ (anilis fabula); the type of comic romance to which ‘Cupid and Psyche’ belongs was termed ‘Milesian’, after Aristides of Miletus, who had compiled a collection of such stories in the second century A.D.; these were translated into Latin, but are now known only through later retellings. The connection of old women’s speech and the consolatory, erotic, often fanciful fable appears deeply intertwined in language itself, and with women’s speaking roles, as the etymology of ‘fairy’ illuminates.
The word ‘fairy’ in the Romance languages indicates a meaning of the wonder or fairy tale, for it goes back to a Latin feminine word, fata, a rare variant of fatum (fate) which refers to a goddess of destiny. The fairies resemble goddesses of this kind, for they too know the course of fate. Fatum, literally, that which is spoken, the past participle of the verb fari, to speak, gives French fée, Italian fata, Spanish hada, all meaning ‘fairy’, and enclosing connotations of fate; fairies share with Sibyls knowledge of the future and the past, and in the stories which feature them, both types of figures foretell events to come, and give warnings.
Isidore of Seville (d. 636), in the Etymologies, gives a famous, sceptical definition of the pagan idea of fate and the Fates: ‘They say that fate is whatever the gods declare, whatever Jupiter declares. Thus they say that fate derives from fando, that is, from speaking.… The fiction is that there are three Fates, who spin a woollen thread on a distaff, on a spindle, and with their fingers, on account of the threefold nature of time: the past, which is already spun and wound onto the spindle; the present, which is drawn between the spinner’s fingers; and the future, which lies in the wool twined on the distaff, and which must still be drawn out by the fingers of the spinner onto the spindle, as the present is drawn to the past.’ These classical Fates metamorphose into the fairies of the stories, where they continue their fateful and prophetic roles. But fairy tales themselves also fulfil this function, quite apart from the fairies who may or may not make an appearance: ‘Bluebeard’ or ‘Beauty and the Beast’ act to caution listeners, as well as light their path to the future.
Although they do not have the same root, ‘fairy’ has come under strong semantic influence from ‘fay’ and ‘fair’, both of which may be derived ultimately from the Middle English ‘feyen’, Anglo-Saxon ‘fegan’, meaning to agree, to fit, to suit, to join, to unite, to bind. Thus the desirable has the power to inspire—even compel—agreement, as well as to bind. Binding is one of the properties of decrees, and of spells. Interestingly, this root also gives ‘fee’, as in payment, for transferrals of money too arise from agreed bonds, as a response to a desire, a need.
Although the ultimate origin, in time and place, of a fairy tale can never really be pinned down, we do sometimes know the teller of an old tale in one particular variation, we can sometimes identify the circle of listeners at a certain time and place. The collectors of the nineteenth century occasionally recorded the name of their sources when they took down the story, though they were not as interested in them as historians would be now. One salient aspect of the transmission of fairy tales has not been looked at closely: the female character of the storyteller.
Italo Calvino, in his 1956 collection of Italian Fiabe, or Tales, the Italian answer to the Grimms, drew attention to this aspect of the tradition, noticing that several of the nineteenth-century folklore anthologies he drew on and adapted cited female sources. Agatuzza Messia, the nurse of the Sicilian scholar and collector of tales Giuseppe Pitrè, became a seamstress, and, later, a quilt-maker in a section of Palermo: ‘A mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, as a little girl, she heard stories from her grandmother, whose own mother had to
ld them having herself heard countless stories from one of her grandfathers. She had a good memory so never forgot them.’ The Kalevala, the national poem of Finland, was collected from different oral sources and reshaped by Elias Lönnrot in the mid-nineteenth century in the form in which it is read today; Sibelius, who would compose many pieces inspired by the Kalevala’s heroes and heroines, heard the epic in part direct from Larin Paraske, a woman bard, who held eleven thousand lines of such folk material in her head. Karel Čapek, the utopian Czech writer most famous for his satire RUR (which introduced the concept of Robots), wrote an acute essay about fairy tale in 1931, in which he decided:
A fairy story cannot be defined by its motif and subject-matter, but by its origin and function.… A true folk fairy tale does not originate in being taken down by the collector of folklore but in being told by a grandmother to her grandchildren, or by one member of the Yoruba tribe to other members of the Yoruba tribe, or by a professional storyteller to his audience in an Arab coffeehouse. A real fairy tale, a fairy tale in its true function, is a tale within a circle of listeners.…
He himself remembered his mother and his grandmother telling him stories—they were both millers’ daughters, as if they had stepped out of a fairy tale. The traditio does literally pass on, as the word suggests, between the generations, and the predominant pattern reveals older women of a lower status handing on the material to younger people, who include boys, sometimes, if not often, of higher position and expectations, like future ethnographers and writers of tales.
So although male writers and collectors have dominated the production and dissemination of popular wonder tales, they often pass on women’s stories from intimate or domestic milieux; their tale-spinners often figure as so many Scheherazades, using narrative to bring about a resolution of satisfaction and justice. Marguerite de Navarre, in the Heptaméron, gives the stories to ten speakers, five of whom are women: they too, like the narrator of The Arabian Nights, put their own case, veiled in entertaining and occasionally licentious fantasy. Boccaccio, and his admirer and emulator (to some degree) Chaucer, voiced the stories of women, and some contain folk material which makes a strong showing in later fairy stories; the Venetian Giovan Francesco Straparola (the ‘Babbler’) reported the stories told by a circle of ladies in his entertaining and sometimes scabrous fantasies, filled with fairytale motifs and improbabilities, called Le piacevoli notti (The Pleasant Nights), published in 1550; the Neapolitan Giambattista Basile, in Lo cunto de li cunti (The Tale of Tales), also known as Il Pentamerone (The Pentameron), published posthumously in 1634–6, featured a group of wizened and misshapen old crones as his sources.
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