Simulating oralities: French fairy tales of the 1690s

College Literature, Jun 1996 by Harries, Elizabeth W

Perrault, like the king in the Arabian Nights, pays apparent homage to the skills and cultural power of the female story-teller. He pretends to reproduce her voice, in a peculiar kind of narrative cross-dressing. But he appropriates that voice and that female figure for his own purposes-and, at the same time, represents her as unable to write.20 The story-teller is female, but the story-writer is male.

Perrault attempts to create the illusion that he is reproducing story-telling as it existed in the oral popular culture of his day; his simulation of its practices became the dominant style and ideology of the fairy tale, as we see in the Grimms' prefaces and most writing on the fairy tale up to our time. But the women who also participated in the invention of the written fairy tale in France created a very different illusion- the illusion that the story is told within the conversational space of the salons. All these writers try to give the impression that the stories are being told aloud. They all simulate oralities, but the oralities they simulate are radically different and their methods of producing the illusion of orality even more so. Perrault simulates the oral by imitating (or inventing) the language and world of the folk and the image and voice of the woman tale-teller. Aulnoy, L'Heritier, and Bernard, however, reject the models of orality and of femininity that Perrault both accepts and promotes. By framing their tales with traces of salon conversation, they represent their tales as part of an aristocratic oral culture. By writing their tales down, they contest the notion that women can only tell the tales that men transcribe and transmit. And, in a final paradox, these women include traces of the oral as part of their attempt to create a new model of femininity: the woman who not only talks-by the fireside to children or in the salon- but also writes.21

ENDNOTES

1 Marina Warner's book From the Beast to the Blonde, which pays considerable attention to these women writers, appeared only after this article was completed. I haven't been able to take full account of her arguments-and my disagreementshere. But I think she is wrong to say that writers like Aulnoy ever assumed the persona of "the lowerclass older woman" (166).

2 See Maria Tatar's discussion of various imitations of this scene in Germany and England in the nineteenth century, and the accompanying illustrations (Figures 8-14), in The Hard Facts, 106-114. She notes that the middle-class grandmother replaced the lower-class nurse in later illustrations, and that she is sometimes represented then as reading from a book. Caveat: the frontispiece in Marina Warner's new book is said to be the Perrault 1697 frontispiece. But it isn't; it must be from a later edition.

3 For a particularly interesting instance of this traditional association, see the discussion of Les evangiles des quenouilles [The Gospel of the distaffs], a fifteenth-century MS divided into viellees, about the tale-telling and talk of an exclusively lowerclass women's group, in Danielle Regnier-Bohler's "Imagining the Self: Exploring Literature." (See also Warner 36-39 and passim.)