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Simulating oralities: French fairy tales of the 1690s
College Literature, Jun 1996 by Harries, Elizabeth W
10 See Perrault, Contes 75, and L'Heritier, Oeuvres meslees 163-4 (also reprinted in Perrault, vol. 239.
11 See his essay "Who are the Folk?" in Interpreting Folklore and Roger Chartier's analogous redefinitions of "popular culture."
12 In his essay "Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite," Ong makes it clear that "oral memory skills" and Latin were taught almost exclusively to boys. But, as far as I can tell, he does not see how narrow-and by the seventeenth century, how un-oral-his definition of "orality" is.
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13 See also Ruth Finnegan in Oral Poetry: "In practice, interaction between oral and written forms is extremely common, and the idea that the use of writing automatically deals a death blow to oral literary forms has nothing to support it" (160). She gives examples from British and American balladry, Irish songs, and American cowboy laments, as well as modem Yugoslavia.
14 The new word "mitonner" derived from cookery, where it means to simmer slowly. (It's related to the word "mie," the soft part of a loaf of bread, the non-crusty part-a word that was also used in seventeenth-century France for a governess, though that is usually thought to be short for "amie.") The word tends to have connotations of flattery, buttering someone up so that that person will do something for you. (Examples Furetiere gives in his Dictionnaire of 1693 include "This nephew mitonne his uncle, so that he will make his heir," and "this cavalier mitonne the old woman, so that she will give him her daughter in marriage.") But the word here seems to have slightly different connotations: the story-tellers at court seem to be treating their audience, the ladies of Versailles, as governesses treat spoiled children, catering to their wishes (perhaps in order to get into their good graces).
15 These include Erica Harth's study of women in the Cartesian tradition and Mary Vidal's work on Watteau. Benedetta Craveri summarizes their efforts and others' in her essay "The Lost Art."
16 See Robert 330-335 and Seifert, "Marvelous Realities" 1. Armine Kotin Mortimer also emphasizes the frame primarily as a representation of a closed and exclusive society.
17 See Tender Geographies, 22-24, 71-77. For a brief account of the way these practices affected the transmission of fairy tales, see Jack Zipes's introduction to Beauties, Beasts, and Enchantment, particularly 2-4, and his recent "Origins of the Fairy Tale" 20-23. Renate Baader also is helpful in understanding the role fairy tales played in the salons
18 This may be a camouflaged reference to the function of the salons in the late years of Louis XIV's reign, when he was increasingly influenced by the puritanical practices of Mme de Maintenon. See Dorothy R. Thelander's article, "Mother Goose and her Goslings," for a discussion of the "muffled aristocratic disaffection" (493) that the tales reveal.
19 In the dedication to Louis XIV's niece, Perrault argues that he has included tales that show what goes on "dans les moindres familles" [in the least important families] to give her and other potential rulers some idea of what the life of their subjects is like. L'Heritier, on the other hand, explicitly distinguishes her tales from popular ones; she says that tales told and retold by the folk must have picked up impurities, much as pure water picks up garbage as it flows through a dirty canal: "if the people are simple, they are also crude (grossiere)" (Oeuvres meslees 312-3).
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