Simulating oralities: French fairy tales of the 1690s

College Literature, Jun 1996 by Harries, Elizabeth W

I think we need to develop more nuanced categories of the oral-categories that will permit us to see the ways oral practices that do not derive from the ancient techniques of rhetoric taught in schools continue to leave their traces in written texts. The nostalgia for the oral that permeates most written narratives can take on very different forms. The orality that has left its marks in many fairy tales is rarely the disputational "harangue" of Ong's schoolbased oratorical rhetoric, and not always the pseudo-folk situation that is sketched in Perrault's frontispiece. Rather the women of the 1690s attempted to reproduce the conversational ambience of the salons that had formed them as writers. As Joan DeJean has shown in Tender Geographies, "the conversational style...is originally a female concept, invented in the salons and reinscribed in prose fiction when, following Scudery's example, women found a new power base in the republic of letters" (47). While her claim seems too broad, forgetting the conversational basis of earlier texts like Plato's dialogues or the Decameron, DeJean rightly emphasizes the importance of conversation in women's writing of the later seventeenth century in France.

Like the earlier novels by Scudery or Villedieu, the conteuses' tales grew out of the competitive, scintillating dialogues that were an integral part of the salons. First fairy tales were a diversion in the salons, one of the many collaborative "divertissements" that formed part of salon culture, like riddles, metamorphoses, portraits, and "maximes d'amour"; then they were written down. But both practices seem to have continued simultaneously throughout the 1690s; as Roger Chartier has said, "the opposition of oral and written fails to account for the situation that existed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century when media and multiple practices still overlapped" (170).13 This was true in popular culture, where evening tale-telling coexisted with the publication of fairy tales in chapbooks and colporteur literature. And, I believe, it was equally true in the aristocratic practices of the salons. Tale-telling and tale-writing went on simultaneously, as many of the frontispieces suggest.

Like all oral cultures, the culture of the salons is difficult to recover. We know much more about it than about many other oral cultures, because the participants were literate; they wrote about what went on at the salons in their letters, memoirs, even novels. But it was fluid, ephemeral, constantly changing. The evidence we have of the ways stories were told and received is spotty and unreliable-found mostly in letters like Sevigne's and novels like Segrais's Les Nouvelles francaises ou les divertissements de la princesse Aurelie (1656), about the group around the Grande Mademoiselle during her exile at Saint-Fargeau, or La Force's Jeux d'esprit (1701), about the "divertissements" that the Princesse de Conti promoted during her exile at Eu in the early seventeenth century. Madame de Sevigne, in her letter of August 6, 1677, suggests all the artificiality and the incongruities of a fairy-tale-telling scene at court-as well as its links with the opera-in order to establish the oral situation in which it took place: