Les Contes de fees et les nouvelles de Madame d'Aulnoy : L'Imaginaire feminin a rebours de la tradition

Modern Language Review, The, Oct, 1999 by Robin Howells

Les Contes de fees et les nouvelles de Madame d'Aulnoy (1690-1698): L'Imaginaire feminin a rebours de la tradition. By ANNE DEFRANCE. (Histoire des idees et critique litteraire, 369) Geneva: Droz. 1998. 361 pp. 53 SwF.

Mme d'Aulnoy was the first to publish a fairy-tale (albeit within a novel and with no fairies). She was subsequently the most prolific and successful of the mainly female authors of 'adult' contes de fee. In the upsurge of critical attention to these women writers in the last fifteen years she has had the greatest share. Anne Defrance offers a broadly semiotic and psychoanalytic account of d'Aulnoy's early tale and the eight volumes she published in 1697-98 (twenty-four lengthy tales, twelve of them serially framed within 'nouvelles'). Part I of Defrance's study looks at figures of the storyteller and listeners in the frame narratives. In this neglected area she valuably brings out the authorial narcissism of the liminary 'Saint-Cloud' episode, and the contrasting burlesque deprecation of provincial literary enthusiasms in the Nouveau gentilhomme bourgeois. Part II studies character-types in the tales: good and bad fairies (who are also author-surrogates); animals (generally secondary roles unless they are royals metamorphosed: Le Prince marcassin and the like); fathers and mothers (the latter stronger if also crueller). Part III deals with allusions to classical mythology (following Bernard Magne in the quest for Modernism, and noting the unique importance of Psyche as intertext). The last section finds in the tales the expression of various 'fantasmes', notably oral and scopic (nicely used to give coherence to the doubly-playful Le Prince Lutin). The Conclusion is followed by a good bibliography and an index of tale-titles. Bibliographical data, however, are too often presented inconsistently or defectively (in footnotes, or as on page 344). There are a few printer's errors (notably p. 81).

D'Aulnoy's tales are found to reveal 'feminism' and practice 'subversion'. But Defrance's account is much less simple than that of some recent American interpretations. While discovering criticism of kings and of power, she recognizes that d'Aulnoy is also offering a mirror (and a reassurance) to the leisured aristocracy that she herself had managed to rejoin. Finally (p. 328) Defrance comes close to conceding that d'Aulnoy's tales show no coherent ideological position (as, prima facie, one might expect.) There is perhaps a tension in Defrance's own project, which tries both to be descriptive (long analytic surveys in multiple short sections) and to interpret in various ways the mass of material. Interpretation is sometimes forced (Part III), imprecise, or inconsistent. The book's historical introduction (pp. 11-15) is curiously thin. The sense of period culture can be shaky. Framed tales are not a renewal of the Heptameron (as claimed pp. 31, 35) but standard practice throughout the seventeenth century (L'Astree, Le Roman comique, Clelie, La Princesse de Cleves), to which d'Aulnoy's narrative presentations are far closer. The notion that an 'ecriture negligee' is feminine is not new (p. 83) but common since the mid-century. One even encounters 'LaRochefoucault' (p. 49) and Corneille's 'Nicodeme' (p. 90, n. 13). There are no comparisons with the imaginaire of other female authors, only a few hesitant contrasts with La Fontaine or Perrault. (It is claimed that Perrault's 'intention moralisante' is absent from d'Aulnoy's position (p. 57), contrary to the important quotation on page 72.) To my mind Parts I and IV of this book are the most useful, along with the skilful and quite judicious synthesis offered in the Conclusion.

ROBIN HOWELLS BIRKBECK COLLEGE, LONDON