Simulating oralities: French fairy tales of the 1690s

College Literature, Jun 1996 by Harries, Elizabeth W

. . .we must give up the fiction that collects these sounds under the sign of a 'Voice,' of a 'Culture' of its own-or of the great Other's. Rather, orality insinuates itself . .into the network-an endless tapestry-of a scriptural economy."

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 132

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Fairy tales and orality seem intimately connected. We think of written tales as transcribing stories handed down orally for hundreds of years, as simply "putting into print" the traces of that long-standing tradition. Most writers of fairy tales have done their best to reinforce that impression: Charles Perrault's alternative title, "Tales of Mother Goose," suggests a traditional, spoken origin; the Grimm brothers work hard to create a simple and naive narrative voice; Hans Christian Andersen's stories often begin with formulae like "now then, here's where we begin" that imitate oral story-telling. I don't mean to deny that many fairy tales had been (and continue to be) part of an ongoing oral, popular culture, but I do want to show that our sense of access to that culture through reading fairy tales is an illusion-an illusion carefully and deliberately created by many fairy tale collectors, editors, and writers.

We can become conscious of that illusion by looking at another strand in the history of written fairy tales-the tales written by women in the 1690s in France. Unlike Perrault, their contemporary, these women only occasionally appealed to the oral, popular tradition and never attempted to imitate an illiterate or uneducated voice. Rather, they simulated a different kind of oralitythe conversation that animated the salons of the later seventeenth century. Most of the long, elaborate tales they wrote are set within a conversational frame, a frame that reproduces the milieu and the carefully formulated repartee that was part of salon culture. 1

The frontispiece of the 1697 edition of Perrault's Contes-a frontispiece that has become so familiar to us that we no longer see its full implications-defines one conception of the oral story-telling situation. Let's look at it again: the frontispiece gives us, in miniature, a version of what the traditional story-telling situation is traditionally thought to be. [Figure 1] The frontispiece shows a fireside scene: three fashionably-dressed children seated by a fireplace, listening to a simply-dressed older woman, perhaps a nurse, tell a story.2 The fire and the candle suggest that the story-telling is taking place in the evening, as in the traditional viellee; the lock on the door and the cat by the fireplace underscore the intimacy and the comforting domesticity of the scene. The older title of the collection, the title that Perrault had used for an earlier manuscript edition of the Contes in 1695, appears as a placard affixed to the door in the background, just above the spindle that is traditionally associated with women's story-telling: Contes de ma Mere Loye [Stories of Mother Goose].3 The writing on the placard is rather irregular and clumsy, compared to the elegance of the type used on the titlepage, just as the title on the placard contrasts with the more elaborate and distanced formal title: Histoires ou Contes du temps passe, avec des Moralitez [Stories of Times Past, with Morals]. In the physical set-up of the first edition, there is a subterranean tension between appeals to the aristocratic audience Perrault hoped to reach (as in the dedication to Louis XIV's niece, with its elaborate coat of arms) and appeals to a peasant story-telling tradition.

As Catherine Velay-Vallantin has pointed out, the frontispiece suggests the fictive reading situation that Perrault and his publisher wanted to prescribe, a simulation of oral tale-telling, or what she calls "factitious orality" (130).4 In his prose tales, Perrault mimes the voice of the peasant story-teller, always elegantly walking the line between the practices of writing and the supposed "oral" transmission "within a culturally more aristocratic mode of reading" (132). The frontispiece also suggests that the voice that Perrault is simulating is female. Women are often supposed to be tellers of tales: those anonymous, lower-class nurses and grandmothers who taught and entertained children by telling them stories. The murky legend of "Mother Goose" is an instance of this belief; Madame de Sevigne's letter of October 30, 1656, refers to it casually, as if this were part of the well-known lore about fairy tales:

Et si, Mademoiselle, afin que vous le sachiez, ce n'est pas un conte de ma mere l'oie,

Mais de la cane de Montfort

Qui, ma foi, lui resemble fort.

[And if, Mademoiselle, you must know, this is not a tale of Mother Goose, but of the drake of Montfort, there are strong resemblances between them.]

Perrault's frontispiece confirms the prevailing myth about the appropriate role for women in the transmission of fairy tales: as patient, nurturing conduits of oral culture or spinners of tales.

This belief has not really faded. As Trinh Minh-ha says, "The world's earliest archives were the memories of women. Patiently transmitted from mouth to ear, body to body, hand to hand.... Every woman partakes in the chain of guardianship and of transmission" (121).5 Trinh still imagines oral culture as literally handed down by women, in a particularly physical, intimate way ("from mouth to ear, body to body, hand to hand"). Women are still said to be the guardians of tradition, passing on to their children and grandchildren the stories of their culture. But, as folklorists like Linda Degh have shown, women are and were not the only, or even the primary, story tellers in most oral cultures.6 The myth of the anonymous female teller of tales, particularly strong in the legend of Mother Goose, is just that: a myth-but a myth that has several important functions and corollaries. If women are the tellers of tales, story-telling remains a motherly (or grand-motherly) function, tied (to use the language of the French feminist critics) to the body and nature, as we see in the quotation from Trinh. Stories are supposed to flow from women like milk and blood. And if women are thought of as tellers of tales, it follows that they are not imagined as the collectors or writers of tales. As fairy tales moved from oral tales to "book tales" (Buchmarchen, or tales that have been written down) to written, invented tales (Kunstmarchen), women were subtly relegated to the most "primitive" stage. Perrault's frontispiece may have been an attempt to etch his female writing competitors out of existence.

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Simulating oralities: French fairy tales of the 1690s

College Literature, Jun 1996 by Harries, Elizabeth W

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