Tag Archive: madame d’aulnoy
by Christine A. Jones
Wonders and Marvels is pleased to kick off The History of the Fairy Tale Week with this intriguing piece by Christine A. Jones. Look for more original guest posts on the topic of the fairy tale in the days ahead, as well as giveaways (a chance to win a new fairy tale book every day Monday through Friday of this week.)
Fairy tales are how we imagine the unimaginable. Beans can be magic and grow to the heavens. Frightening beasts turn out to be great princes in disguise. And girls are saved from annoying home lives by fairies and talking animals. Crazy things can happen.
Fairy-tale history contains some really juicy stuff, not all of which made it into the Mother Goose canon. For instance, how about a girl who shows up at court dressed as a knight and becomes the queen’s lover? Crazy indeed! Well, during the 1690s three French women authors thought up an ingenious plot for fairy tales where girls did their fighting for themselves. They showed up at court dressed as soldiers and did battle for the king. In each case, in fact, they became the kingdom’s best warriors. They were valiant, but also gentle and kind, and knew how to fold laundry. A rare combination, to be sure. And in the longest and most famous of these stories, by Marie Chatherine d’Aulnoy, the cross-dressed heroine has to fend off the queen’s advances with all her might.
Okay, the girl warrior and the queen never become lovers, but the love triangle among the queen (who loves the knight), the knight (who loves the king), and the king (who loves the knight but cannot figure out why) makes up the entire plot of the story. Historically, there had been woman warriors in France by the seventeenth century, but none of them had had quite this much fun at court. Read d’Aulnoy’s story, “Belle-Belle or the Chevalier Fortunate”, in Jack Zipes, Beauties, Beasts and Enchantments: Classic French Fairy Tales (New York: New American Library, 1989).
Christine A. Jones is co-editing a fairy tale anthology and writing a book on early porcelain experiments in France. She is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Utah.
IMAGE: Chic girl pirate Anne Bonny.
All are invited to a weeklong celebration of the meaning and mystery of fairy tales.
Come hither into the marvelous, mysterious, complex and fascinating world of fairy tales for grown-ups at the Wonders and Marvels website all week beginning December 13. The History of the Fairy Tale week will feature guest blog posts, book giveaways, profiles of the earliest fairy tale writers, and much more.
“Fairy tales weren’t initially written for children. The earliest tales are full of sex, desire, and violence. Hardly the stuff of sweet dreams,” says cultural historian Holly Tucker, who curates Wonders and Marvels.
Among the guest posts from university professors and specialists of the fairy tale will be “5 Fairy Tales about Fairy Tales,” “5 of the Best Tales You’ve Never Read,” and “5 Reasons Why I Would Not Read These Fairy Tales to My Child.”
All week long, readers will be eligible to win copies of fairy tale collections such as The Complete Tales of Charles Perrault (Oxford University Press.)
Those who wrote the earliest fairy tales were many times as colorful as their tales. Readers will be treated to the profiles of such fairy tale authors as Giovanni Francesco Straparola, Giambattista Basile, Madame d’Aulnoy, Charles Perrault, and Madame de Beaumont (author of “Beauty and the Beast.”)
Stayed tuned, as the fun begins December 13th. And if you haven’t signed up for the newsletter for updates, please do so here.
Graphic: The Frog Prince art ©Kris Waldherr 2001. All rights reserved.
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