Fairy Tales Framed

Early Forewords, Afterwords, and Critical Words

Ruth B. Bottigheimer

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781438442204, 9781438442211
• eBook ISBN: 9781438442228
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

2012 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Most early fairy tale authors had a lot to say about what they wrote. Charles Perrault explained his sources and recounted friends' reactions. His niece Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier and her friend Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy used dedications and commentaries to situate their tales socially and culturally, while the raffish Henriette Julie de Murat accused them all of taking their plots from the Italian writer Giovan Francesco Straparola and admitted to borrowing from the Italians herself. These reflections shed a bright light on both the tales and on their composition, but in every case, they were removed soon after their first publication. Remaining largely unknown, their absence created empty space that later readers filled with their own views about the conditions of production and reception of the tales. What their authors had to say about "Puss in Boots, " "Cinderella, " "Sleeping Beauty, " and "Rapunzel, " among many other fairy tales, is collected here for the first time, newly translated and accompanied by rich annotations. Also included are revealing commentaries from the authors' literary contemporaries. As a whole, these forewords, afterwords, and critical words directly address issues that inform the contemporary study of European fairy tales, including traditional folkloristic concerns about fairy tale origins and performance, as well as questions of literary aesthetics and historical context.

III

Fairy Tales and Fairyland Fictions in France: Establishing the Canon

14

Fairy Tales and Fairyland Fictions in France

The nature of commentary on fairy tales and fairyland fictions in France differs dramatically from its history in form and content in Italy. There, authors and critics discussed the favola as a genre from the fourteenth century onward, emphasizing verisimilitude. Thus the magic elements in sixteenth-century restoration and rise fairy-tale plots elicited negative criticism. In contrast, the same tales, when translated into French in the 1560s and 1570s as part of Les Facetieuses nuictz de Monsieur Jean-François Straparole, excited no comment whatsoever among either critics or readers.

Romances, far longer than favole in Italy or contes in France, had magical elements and interludes and were approved of by critics. Both in France and in Italy, romances fed a universal appetite for chivalric adventures, which were read by, read to, or performed before rich and poor, literate and illiterate, men and women, boys and girls. Knockoffs of Boiardo's and Ariosto's literary epics, popular chivalric romances must have been perceived primarily as commercial ventures rather than as part of the landscape of high literature. Authors and critics might mention their cast of characters—virtuous knights and their ladies, villains (such as pagan knights, giants, and ogres), and fairy helpers—in passing, but did not elicit sustained critical comment.

The fairyland fictions that developed in France also existed in Italy as an integral part of chivalric romances. But in France more than in Italy, fairyland fictions played a substantial part in routine court entertainments, as the French court, backed by the resources of a centralized state, mounted lavish tableaux, spectacles, operas, and ballets featuring fairyland characters in fairyland settings. Louis XIV himself often performed the part of a fairy king, and his patronage of the genre deflected literary criticism of fairyland fictions, partly because the same centralized state that fostered the enactment of the performances also distributed the sinecures on which most literary critics lived. Thus Charles Perrault, ever a courtier, spoke warmly in praise of opera in his Parallèles, where he had an abbé voice unrestrained approval of the natural and aesthetic excesses of opera. Nothing, the abbé opined, could possibly be too fabulous, because such excesses delighted the young and the old, the simple and the clever.¹ In Perrault's Parallèle we have entered a period considerably later than that in which Louis delighted in viewing, and sometimes performing in, fairyland fictions. In the 1690s, Louis XIV, under the influence of Mme Maintenon, had turned away from such frivolities. And with royal favor essentially withdrawn, fairyland and féerie itself became fair game for its critics, who had first voiced their reservations three decades earlier. At that time the principle subject had concerned aspects of Christian marvels and miracles, and their proper use in literature.²

The Debate about the Marvellous is often discussed as a precursor discussion to the Debate between the Ancients and the Moderns, which however, focused more on the marvels of féerie. For supporters of the Ancients, first among them Nicolas Boileau, such marvels were anathema, and his longtime intellectual opponent, Charles Perrault, became a primary target for open as well as covert attack, as did contemporary women authors of fairyland fictions and fairy tales.

Before the 1690s, only one instance of an unambiguous telling of a fairyland fiction has been reported. It occurs in a letter that Mme de Sévigné wrote from Versailles to her daughter Mme de Grignan on 6 August 1677 describing the way a group of women at court took their time cooking up (mitonner) a story about an island of glass, where the most beautiful princess in the world lived. Emphasizing the strong presence of féerie, Mme de Sévigné averred that fairies breathed on the princess every moment of the day. She and her beloved the Prince of Delights arrived among their subjects one day in a crystal ball. It was so wonderful a sight that everybody (on the ground below) gazed upward at them. In an ironizing aside, Mme de Sévigné noted that the onlookers “doubtless” all sang, “Allons, allons, accourons tous / Cybèle va descendre.” Mme de Sévigné cited these lines from the recent (1676) opera Arys by Philippe Quinault and Jean-Baptiste Lully,³ clearly expected her daughter to recognize them. Arys, a musical tragedy, is about a man caught between his wife and the woman he loves, who virtuously withstands his adulterous advances. At the time, it was well known that Louis XIV identified personally with the main character because of his own unrequited, or at least unconsummated, love for Mme de Maintenon. Mme de Sévigné's playful aside thus shows the operatic world of official culture and the intensely observed preferences of a monarch intersecting with the private culture of storytelling among courtiers. It also offers an instance of a veiled yet nonetheless revealing insider's perception of a fairyland fiction at Louis XIV's court.

In France the genre of fairy tales similarly excited little comment until the 1690s. This French silence differed strikingly from the stream of writing on the subject in Italy, where Bartolomeo Lupardi had praised the genre, Girolamo Bargagli had dismissed it, and Andrea Calmo had used fairy tales to seduce a mistress (see pages 49–53). Why this silence about fairy tales, when Straparola's rise and restoration fairy tales, translated by Jean Louveau in Les facetieux nuicts had entered France in 1560 and, augmented by Pierre Larivey's translation of the tales of the second volume in the early 1570s, were published sixteen times by the early 1600s?

In the absence of direct references to restoration and rise fairy tales in seventeenth-century France, it remains unclear when fairy tales of the sort composed by Straparola and translated by Louveau and Larivey entered French popular culture. Several thousand people bought a copy of the Straparola book and most of them would have read the restoration and rise fairy tales they encountered there. But aside from the few owners who bound their copy so richly that it became a treasured possession, there is no information about the readers of Straparola's collection as a whole and of his restoration and rise fairy tales in particular until Mme de Murat mentions them in 1699 (see pages 204–205). Understanding the extent to which restoration and rise fairy tales existed in seventeenth-century France requires a different approach, a consideration of seventeenth-century terminology.

Terminology

Seventeenth-century French terms for brief narratives of the sort that might refer to fairy tales are legion. Some, like conte (tale), simply denote the genre of brief narratives. Others, such as bagatelle (trifle), deprecate their authors' compositions, although some authors' self-deprecation was more a form of self-praise, implying that such a bagatelle represented the least consequential products of their actual literary abilities.

Conte, the most general and the most often used term, refers to a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an ending, its shorter length differentiating it from the considerably longer nouvelle. Jean de La Fontaine made this distinction in the title of his collection of bawdy tales, Contes et Nouvelles en vers (Stories and Novellas in Verse 1664), some short and some long. Similarly, a conte differs from the much briefer fable, with its abbreviated action. The hypochondriac's daughter Louison makes this point in Molière's Le malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid, 1673) when she asks her father if she can divert him by telling him a conte or the fable of the Crow and the Fox (act II, scene 11).

When fairyland fictions and fairy tales first emerged on the pages of Mme d'Aulnoy's, Mlle Lhéritier's, and Monsieur Perrault's books, they maintained these distinctions about length: Mme d'Aulnoy was on firm ground in naming her tale “LÎle de la Félicité” a pleasant conte,⁴ while Perrault was downright assertive about his use of the term in the 1695 manuscript of tales he presented to Mademoiselle (see pages 125–126), enlarging the term on the handwritten title page, as

Contes

De ma Mère L'Oye

And subtitling each of the tales from the longest to the shortest as a conte in the following manner:

La belle au bois dormant

Conte

and embellishing the term decoratively at the beginning of “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Puss in Boots.”

For Perrault conte connoted neither verse nor prose, for he applied the term both to his verse “Peau d'Asne” and to his prose “Riquet à la Houppe.” But Perrault did attribute a measure of truth to the conte in writing that “Riquet à la Houppe” was like truth itself, in the sense of showing that everything is handsome in the one you love.⁵ Perrault's understanding of the conte differed from its often cited 1694 definition in the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française: “The common people call old wolf's tale, old wives' tale, Mother Goose tale, tale of the stork, tale told by a stork, donkey skin tale, tale to fall asleep by standing up, yellow, blue, violet tale, one-eyed tale, all those ridiculous tales told by old women to entertain and amuse children.”⁶ The phrases given in the dictionary seem antithetical to the implicit dignity in a narrative containing quintessential truth. But with respect to the nonsensical and nonrational aspects of his contes, Perrault would seem to be sharing the French Academy's dictionary definition. He may well have done so, since oversight of that dictionary had been one of his principal duties in his years as an academician.

The term nouvelle, in contrast to conte, had been clear and straightforward in seventeenth-century France. A rich Italian novella heritage had provoked a lively Italian discussion (see pages 13–66). Much of that discussion was translated into French, with the result that the concept of verisimilitude—that events depicted in a novella could have happened, even if they were highly unlikely to have done so—inhered in the seventeenth-century French understanding of the term. Thus Mlle Lhéritier's “Histoire de Finette” was, in her words, a nouvelle, because Finette's stratagems in escaping a violent lover were possible though unconventional. Perrault called the tale of “The Matron of Ephesus” and his own “Griselda” each a nouvelle, because the easy shift of the widow's affections in the first and the husband's extraordinary cruelty in the second, though unusual, were not impossible. Nouvelle also meant something never before heard of or seen, which was precisely what an author retelling an existing tale was supposed to achieve in retelling a tale.

The potential truth value, verisimilitude, required for a nouvelle did not yet extend to the term histoire in seventeenth-century France. Perrault used histoire and conte interchangeably, as in the title to his published tales, Histoires, ou Contes du temps passé, a title that suggests an equality between the two terms. That would change later, when in the mid-eighteenth century Mme Leprince de Beaumont distinguished sharply, and sternly, between the untruth of fairy tales (contes) and the truth of Bible stories (histoires).

Another term, conte de vieille (old wives' tale), evoked a population of elderly storytellers, old women too feeble to perform heavy work but still able to tell a story. The often-used term conte de nourrice (nursemaid's tale) does not seem to have existed in the seventeenth century. The place where a story was told was evoked by a sixteenth-century term conte de taverne (public or barroom tale) used by Guillaume Bouchet (circa 1513–1594),⁷ which interestingly enough fell out of use in the century that followed.

Yet other terms—narration and récit—characterized the tale's the oral mode of delivery. François Fénelon, for instance, described a child's oral delivery (narration) of a memorized story in a chapter in his book on girls' education, in which he discussed the use of histories for children.⁸ Mme d'Aulnoy invokes an oral delivery when she has the abbess in the frame tale of “L'Île ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Address to the Reader
• I: An Introduction to Fairy Tales and the Boccaccian Literary Model
• II: Fairy Tales in Italy: Early Authors, Theorists, and Critics
• III: Fairy Tales in France: Establishing the Canon
• Works Cited
• Contributors