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Simulating oralities: French fairy tales of the 1690s
College Literature, Jun 1996 by Harries, Elizabeth W
Recently several writers have attempted to look at the conversation of the salons in its relationship to French intellectual and artistic life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.15 While acknowledging its elusiveness, they have brought out some of its crucial features: the allusive word-play, the emphasis on repartee and collaborative exchange, the emphasis on improvisation, the absence of weighty "sujet." Erica Harth believes that the salons became "a discursive dead end for women" (17)-and, if one is primarily interested in women becoming recognized as philosophers, this is probably true. But I see the discourse or, to use a less weighty term, "talk" of the salons as a literary proving ground-not only for the novel, as DeJean has shown, but also for fairy tales. Just as salon talk influenced the suggestive brushstrokes of Watteau's canvases, it also provided the airy framework for the castles and enchanted islands that were staples of the fairy tales women wrote.
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And here I mean "framework" in a rather literal way. Though Perrault often used the dialogue form in his more "serious" works- the Parallele des anciens et des modernes (1692), for example- he abandoned it when he wrote his Contes, preferring to create the naive, solitary voice of "Ma Mere Loye" [Mother Goose]. His women contemporaries, however, saw in the give and take of salon dialogue a useful way to introduce and frame the stories they were writing. Though they may not have collaborated on individual stories (I have found no evidence that they did), they situated themselves and their stories in this sparkling, collaborative interchange. Both Raymonde Robert and Lewis Seifert argue that the framing device was primarily to give a nostalgic illusion of "social cohesion" or class solidarity.16 I want to argue here, however, that the frames had another, narrative function.
Reading tales like L'Heritier's "The Adroit Princess" (1696) in their original form, in fact, we discover that most later editions and translations have wrenched her tales out of their conversational frame. "The Adroit Princess" is dedicated to Mme de Murat and begins as if L'Heritier were carrying on a dialogue with her:
Vous faites les plus jolies Nouvelles du monde en Vers; mais en Vers aussi doux que naturels: je voudrois bien, charmante Comtesse, vous en dire une a mon tour; cependant je ne sai si vous pourrez vous en divertir: je suis aujourd'huy de l'humeur du Bourgeois-Gentilhomme; je ne voudrois ni Vers, ni Prose pour vous la conter: point de grands mots, point de brillans, point de rimes; un tour naif m'accomode mieux; en un mot, un recit sans facon et comme on parle. . . 229-30)
[You create the most beautiful "nouvelles" in the world in verse, but in verse as sweet as natural: I would like, charming Countess, to tell you one in my turn; however, I'm not sure it will amuse you: today I feel like [Moliere's] Bourgeois Gentilhomme; I don't want to use verse or prose to tell it to you: no grand words, no startling effects, no rhymes; a naive tone suits me better; in a word, a story ["recit," which retains the aura of the oral] told without any ceremony and as one speaks....]
