[In the essay below, de Dobay Rifelj analyzes the similarities in the ways Perrault and the Marquis de Sade viewed and represented women in their writings, finding the female characters passive and weak.]

In Perrault's verse tale “Griselidis,” Griselda's husband, the king, has locked her in a dark room and removed all the jewels and finery she was given as queen. Her reaction is emblematic of the presentation of women in Perrault's tales

Par un pur mouvement de sa bonté suprême,
          Il me choisit comme un enfant qu’il aime,
                                        Et s’applique à me corriger.
Aimons donc sa rigueur utilement cruelle,
                    On n’est heureux qu’autant qu’on
a souffert,
                                        Aimons sa bonté paternelle
                                        Et la main dont elle se sert. (34)(1)

Such a representation of the suffering of women foreshadows that in the works of Sade and raises questions about the interrelations of the fairy tale form and the representation of women. In parallel but reverse fashion, Sade's work shows stylistic affinities with Perrault's, rather than with the oriental tales and the conte libertin that gradually supplanted the fairy tale during the course of the 18th century and that are his precursors in subject-matter. It is not that Sade copies or plagiarizes from Perrault, but rather that the way of looking at women that characterizes the fairy tales conditioned his—and our—view of women. Reading Sade through Perrault, then, leads to an anachronistic but revelatory reading of Perrault through Sade.

Critics have often noted the passivity of the idealized female presented in fairy tales and the role of this image in the development of children of both sexes. Perrault's misogyny is evident in his jibes at women throughout the tales and in their moralités, the morals appended to the prose tales. Not only does he portray women as long-suffering martyrs, but in these morals he expresses regret that the women of his time do not sufficiently manifest these “virtues.” He says the story of “Griselidis” could no longer take place, since in Paris “les femmes [… ] sont souveraines” (15), and it is their husbands whose patience is tried. “La Barbe bleue” is clearly a story of the olden ways, he claims: today, one doesn’t know who is master, the husband or the wife.

The structure of the tales shows a deeper level of repression of female desire and even threats to their existence, and it is in this respect that they prefigure the representation of women in the novels of Sade. An examination of the similarities between these works, in their settings, their descriptions of characters, and the situations presented, shows that the woman as victim is already inscribed in the Perrault stories. On the other hand, the lessons implied by Sade, his “immorality” are the antithesis of those implied by the plots and made explicit in the “moralités” of Perrault, that the good are rewarded and the wicked punished. Yet it can be shown that this reversal in Sade's text does not represent a way out of the fairy tale plot that could affirm power and freedom for women. Finally, an examination of fairy tales with similar plot structures, but written by women, shows another kind of rewriting of Perrault, a use of the conventional structures that does not entail a Sadeian story.

I. PERRAULT AND SADE: SETTINGS, CHARACTERS, SITUATIONS

One is struck at the outset by the similar settings in the works of both authors: isolated castles and thick woods prevent the victims from escaping or calling for help.² They have entered an enchanted but dangerous world, where ordinary laws and rules do not apply. Typical examples can be found in Perrault's “Le Petit Poucet” and Sade's Les Infortunes de la vertu. In both, the characters, lost in the woods, find a sign of habitation. They think they have arrived at a refuge in the forest, symbolized by the light in the fairy tale and the sound of the bell in Justine, only to have fallen into the hands of ogres. Petit Poucet and his brothers have been abandoned in the forest; he climbs a tree and sees a light, a common motif in tales of this story-type (Robert, 107):

Il vit une petite lueur comme d’une chandelle, mais qui était bien loin par-delà la Forêt. Il descendit de l’arbre; et lorsqu’il fut à terre, il ne vit plus rien; cela le désola. […] Ils arrivèrent enfin à la maison où était cette chandelle, non sans bien des frayeurs, car souvent ils la perdaient de vue, ce qui leur arrivait toutes les fois qu’ils descendaient dans quelques fonds. (191)

The descriptions of Justine's arrival at the monastery of Sainte-Marie-des-bois is remarkably similar. She sees the bell tower, but cannot reach it in the forest:

J’entendis enfin le son d’une cloche à moins d’une lieue de moi. Je me dirige vers le bruit, je me hâte […] Rien de plus agreste que cette solitude; elle était située dans un fond, il m’avait fallu beaucoup descendre pour y arriver, et telle était la raison qui m’avait fait perdre le clocher de vue dès que je m’étais trouvée dans la plaine. (109-10)³

In both these stories, the refuge turns out to be the dwelling of monsters, ready to destroy the weak, helpless victims who have arrived at their doors.

The presentation of these victims points to similarities between characters in the two works. It has been noted that Sade's descriptions of women make use of the clichés to be found in the sentimental novels of the 17th and 18th centuries, presenting the ideal of the feminine heroine.⁴ These clichés are, in fact, those found in fairy tales. What is interesting is that in Sade the heroine has turned into a victim, her qualities serving only to make her sacrifice more piquant. The characteristics that make her a victim, however, are already present in Perrault. First, she is very young. Griselidis' daughter is fifteen, La Belle au bois is fifteen or sixteen; the bride in “La Barbe bleue” is the youngest daughter; Le Petit chaperon rouge is a “petite fille.” Sade's heroines are also very young: Eugénie de Franval is fourteen when her father seduces her, Eugénie de Mistival is fifteen (“La Philosophie dans le boudoir”), and Justine and Juliette twelve and fifteen respectively at the beginning of their stories. The other Sadeian victims may be of all ages, from infants to very old women (and some are, of course, men), but those who have descriptions other than the mere mention of their ages (as is frequent in works like La Nouvelle Justine) and whose tortures are to be described in detail are generally also pre-pubescent or adolescents. One reason is common to both works: both are concerned with sexual initiation.⁵ In Perrault, the heroine must be uncorrupted in order to be worthy of the honors and the marriage that await her; in Sade she must be uncorrupted so as to produce greater scandal when she is either corrupted or destroyed despite her innocence.

For similar reasons, the heroines/victims in the works of both authors are “parfaitement belles” (“La Barbe bleue,” 123). The superlatives, vague adjectives, and standard similies are remarkably close. In Sade's Infortunes de la vertu, Octavie is a young girl abducted and brought to the infamous abbey of Sainte-Marie-des-bois:

Nous vimes une jeune fille de l’âge de quinze ans, de la figure la plus agréable et la plus délicate qu’il fût possible de voir; ses yeux quoique humides de larmes nous parurent de la plus intéressante langueur, elle les leva avec grâce sur chacune de nous et je puis dire que je n’ai vu de ma vie des regards plus attendrissants; elle avait de grands cheveux blonds cendrées flottant sur ses épaules en boucles naturelles, une bouche fraîche et vermeille … (137)

Such a description is an echo of the rosy cheeks and coral lips of Perrault's young heroines. In “Peau d’Ane,” for instance, the prince is taken with the princess' “beauté du visage, / Son beau tour, sa vive blancheur, / Ses traits fins, sa jeune fraîcheur” as well as “une sage et modeste pudeur” (68). When the fairies' gifts are granted to La Belle au bois, it is as though the process concretizes the list of perfections characteristic of the fairy tale heroine. The first is to be the most beautiful person in the world. In Perrault's tales, as in Sade, the heroine's beauty can attract interest that is “criminel”: Peau d’Ane is “jeune, vermeille et blanche” (66) and has “certains tendres appas” that arouse her father's incestuous attentions. Whereas Sade's text recalls Perrault, such a passage has a Sadeian echo.

One element of the descriptions of the heroines (for Sade, the victims) seems indispensible for both authors: their douceur. Beauty of face coincides with sweetness of character.⁶ The strong women who are their enemies are not only ugly, they are wicked stepmothers or ogresses. But the heroines' sweetness makes them passive and meek. No matter what Cendrillon is made to undergo by her cruel sisters, she has “une douceur et [… ] une bonté sans pareil [… ] la pauvre fille souffrait tout avec patience” (157). We will see what such passivity entails in the fairy tales and especially in Sade.

There are similarities in the male characters as well that determine the intersexual relations portrayed in the works of both Perrault and Sade. Like the women, the men in Perrault's tales fall into two groups: the good kings and princes and the evil monsters. The former, however, have the potential of turning into the latter: the good king in “Peau d’Ane” turns his attentions to his young daughter after the death of his wife; and there is a hint of possible violence and menace even in the description of such heroes as the prince in this same tale: “Son air était Royal, sa mine martiale / Propre à faire trembler” (67). It is the ogres of the tales, however, that most resemble the male characters in Sade: La Barbe bleue is a prefiguration of the murderous husbands who proliferate in Sade's works. Of course there are ogresses (and a wicked stepmother), too, in Perrault's tales: in the second half of the story, La Belle au bois's mother-in-law, her prince's mother, is an ogress who wants to eat her and her children, served in Sauce Robert. Sade's libertines, male and female, are very like these fairy tale characters. Some are called ogres, like Minski in Juliette and Gernand in Les Malheurs de la vertu, for instance; and some literally eat their victims. Also like Perrault's ogres, they are deaf to the pleas of the helpless victims who cry for mercy: a passage from Perrault like the following has many echoes in Sade: “Elle aurait attendri un rocher, belle et affligée comme elle était, mais la Barbe bleue avait le coeur plus dur qu’un rocher” (126). A similar passage appears in “Le Petit Poucet”: “Ces pauvres enfants se mirent à genoux en lui demandant pardon: mais ils avaient affaire au plus cruel de tous les Ogres, qui bien loin d’avoir de la pitié les dévorait déjà des yeux” (192). In Sade, it is most often women who make such pleas, and it is most often to men that they are made. His presentation of males as entirely dominating females is prefigured by similar conceptions in Perrault. In his introduction to “Griselidis” Perrault says that women are the sex born to please, as his story shows. The heroine in this tale is told by her future husband that “Il faudrait jurer que vous n’aurez jamais / D’autre volonté que la mienne” (29).

Given this concept of women and the relation between the sexes underlying these descriptions, it is not surprising to find further similarities between the two works in the situations in which the women find themselves. The basic story is very similar: innocent, weak virtue is attacked by unscrupulous villainy. The threats to the victims actualized in Sade are present already in Perrault: murder (“La Barbe bleue,” “La Belle au bois dormant”) or cannibalism (“Le Petit Poucet,” “La Belle au bois dormant”), and rape. The victims are always young women or children.⁷

In some Perrault tales, the threats are explicitly sexual in nature, as in the danger of incest in both “Peau d’Ane” and “Griselidis” and in the thinly veiled threat of rape in “Le Petit Chaperon rouge,” where the little girl undresses and gets into bed with the wolf before he eats her. The moral at the end of this story makes it clear that it is about young women and men rather than wolves in a literal sense: “On voit ici que de jeunes enfants, / Surtout de jeunes filles / Belles, bien faites, et gentilles, / Font très mal d’écouter toute sorte de gens, / Et que ce n’est pas chose étrange, / S’il en est tant que le loup mange”; there are wolves who “suivent les jeunes demoiselles / Jusque dans les maisons, jusque dans les ruelles” (115). This moral also places the blame squarely on the little girl, as do many psychoanalytic readings of the tale.⁸ Bettelheim, for instance, feels that the little girl is at fault: “the wolf's swallowing Little Red Cap is the merited punishment for her arranging things so that the wolf can do away with a mother figure” (172); he feels that the story “deals with the daughter's unconscious wish to be seduced by her father (the wolf)” (175). In Perrault's version of the story, however, the girl does not disobey her mother's orders; she is punished despite her intention to do a good deed. In this respect, she is like the Sadeian victim, who does not merit punishment: the injustice of this outcome gives it the full force of transgression.

Sometimes, Sade seems to take the very story lines from Perrault. The beginning of “Faxelange,” from Les Crimes de l’amour, is essentially a rewriting of “La Barbe bleue.” In the Perrault story, a young girl is sought in marriage by an older man who dazzles her with his riches:

La Barbe bleue, pour faire connaissance, les mena avec leur Mère, et trois ou quatre de leurs meilleures amies, et quelques jeunes gens du voisinage, à une de ses maisons de Campagne, où on demeura huit jours entiers. Ce n’était que promenades, que parties de chasse et de pêche, que danses et festins, que collations: on ne dormait point, et on passait toute la nuit à se faire des malices les uns aux autres; enfin tout alla si bien, que la Cadette commença à trouver que le Maître n’avait plus la barbe si bleue, et que c’était un fort honnête homme. (123)

In Sade's story, the bandit also wants to impress a young girl, Mlle de Faxelange, and her parents.

Il loue une maison charmante à deux lieues de Paris, et y donne, pendant huit jours de suite, des fêtes délicieuses à la maîtresse. Ne cessant de joindre ainsi la séduction la plus adroite aux démarches sérieuses qui doivent tout conclure, il a bientôt tourné la tête de notre chère fille, il en a bientôt effacé son rival. (64)

The ironic, superior tone taken in regard to the young girls is also very similar. After the marriages, both husbands leave their wives in charge of their properties, but with a strict interdiction. La Barbe bleue's wife must not enter the locked room; Faxelange must not write. The bandit, clearly a new bluebeard, tells her she is not his first wife and that her predecessor had made the mistake of trying to write for help. Though the stories diverge at this point, in the end both heroines are saved just as they are about to be killed, and they faint in the arms of their (male) saviors.

A similar parallel could be drawn between “Eugénie de Franval” and “Griselidis,” where the mother endures uncomplainingly the sufferings her husband inflicts, even when he takes her child away from her, and despite the threat (or reality, in Sade) of father-daughter incest. Such stylistic and structural similarities show that Sade and Perrault often have the same story to tell, about the same characters and in the same settings.

II. MASTERS AND VICTIMS

If the texts of Sade echo those of Perrault, it is partly because an underlying dynamic of victimization associated with Sade is already present in Perrault. We can see it in his presentation of the woman as victim, in its links with sexuality, and in the contrast between his male and female protagonists.

First, his fairy tales show that women are particularly interesting when they are in distress (Lieberman, 389-90). We are supposed to admire Cendrillon's quiet suffering, Sleeping Beauty's putting out her neck to the knife when her stepmother wants her killed, Griselidis' meek acceptance of the trials her husband imposes on her. The following lines from “Griselidis” show that the woman in tears is especially attractive: “Et sans que la douleur diminuât ses charmes, / De ses beaux yeux tombaient de grosses larmes” (38). The woman made more beautiful by her tears is found often in the 18th century novel as a sign of superiority of feeling. It is likewise very common in Sade, where it takes on the value we associate with the word “sadistic”. There are many passages in which Sade calls his victims “interesting,” like the one quoted earlier describing Octavie arriving at the monastery. A typical one appears in “Eugénie de Franval”: “Quelle victime, hélas! […] une impression de tristesse, inévitable d’après les chagrins qui la consumaient, la rendait plus intéressante encore; inondée de ses larmes, dans l’abattement de la mélancolie …” (Les Crimes de l’amour, 218). Hélas is ironic in this context: this story is characterized by a tension between its action and descriptions and narratorial interventions expressing horror and shock at the events and characters described. In Perrault, as in Sade, the woman's suffering redounds to the glory of the man who imposes it: in “Griselidis” the husband says he will try his wife's patience further not because he doubts her love any longer, “mais pour faire éclater aux yeux de tout le Monde / Sa Bonté, sa Douceur, sa Sagesse profonde” (38). Even when the couple is living happily together, he sometimes tries her just to keep the course of his love running smooth:

Si quelquefois par caprice
Il prend plaisir à la fâcher,
C’est seulement pour empêcher
Que l’amour ne se ralentisse (37)

Such a passage makes clear the connection between woman's suffering and man's pleasure.⁹

Second, this suffering is intimately linked with sexuality, as in Sade. Woman's place, Perrault implies, is in bed. Cixous finds “La Belle au bois” particularly expressive of this concept of women: she goes from her hundred year's sleep to marriage: in other words, back to bed (43). Indeed, she also begins the story in bed—in her cradle. Her only real action in the tale is to take the spindle from the old woman to see if she can spin; and this attempt at action leads to disaster. It is significant that Bettelheim sees Sleeping Beauty as “the incarnation of perfect femininity” (236).

Finally, Sade's division between victims and masters, usually on male/female lines, can be found in Perrault as well. Sade's criminals are usually characterized by intelligence, force, and action; they prey on helpless figures who seem to call for victimization. Such associations can be seen in Perrault by reading “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge” against “Le Petit Poucet”: in these two tales, the central elements are present but reversed; they are female and male versions of the same story. In both, the “petit” character is sent by parents into the forest, and each arrives at a seemingly welcoming house only to be confronted with a wolf/ogre eager to devour him or her. But what becomes of them could not be more different. The unthinking petit chaperon rouge talks away unthinkingly to the wolf and puts herself at risk; le petit Poucet, smarter than his brothers, “parlait peu mais il écoutait beaucoup.” Thus she cannot understand the implications of the wolf's questions, while le petit Poucet picks up the sounds of danger, like his parents' conversations and the ogre's movements in the night. Le petit chaperon rouge obviously takes after her mother and grandmother, incapable both of foreseeing danger and of controlling their emotions: we are told at the beginning of the story that “sa mère en était folle, et sa mère-grand plus folle encore” (113). The credulous girl takes the long way through the woods; the clever little boy doesn’t believe a word he hears, even from his parents, and manages to leave a trail to return home, to find a way through the woods to the ogre's house, to escape the ogre's pursuit, and to return home safely. She goes too slowly; he steals the ogre's seven-league boots, and in the end he becomes a courrier between the court and the king's army. Le petit Poucet springs into action again and again, saving himself and his brothers. The female is a victim, the male a hero; the hood is no match for the thumb.¹⁰

In “Le Petit Poucet,” the little boys are potential victims, but they are replaced by female ones. The ogress has begged her husband not to eat the boys right away, to wait until the morning. In the night, Petit Poucet notices that the ogre's children, seven little ogresses, wear crowns on their heads as they sleep in their bed. Petit Poucet exchanges the crowns for the caps he and his brothers are wearing. The ogre is unable to wait until morning for his fresh meat; he feels around for his victims, and in Perrault's Sadeian world, the ogre “coupa sans balancer la gorge à ses sept filles” (194). They are seven sleeping beauties ready for slaughter. We see here, as well as from what happens to le petit chaperon rouge, that lying down in bed may bring death instead of prince charming, that sexuality is intimately linked with death. Perrault's message, then, seems to be the same as Sade's.

III. MORALITY AND MORALITéS

On the other hand, the lesson implied by Sade, his “immoralité,” is the antithesis of that implied by the plots and made explicit in the “moralités” of Perrault. In Perrault, the ogres are outwitted; suffering virtue is rewarded. In “Les Fées,” for instance, the beautiful, submissive sister is granted the gift of having her words turn to precious jewels, while the ugly, aggressive sister has hers turned to toads and snakes. Male characters such as le petit Poucet save themselves and their family through their own enterprise, but beautiful, passive characters like Cendrillon are saved too; they have only to bear their distress until their prince comes and their dreams come true.

In Sade, the reverse obtains: a beautiful and passive woman is thereby defined as a victim, and she can expect only rape, torture, and murder. The moral of “Peau d’Ane” could serve as the motto for most of Perrault's tales: “Que la Vertu peut être infortunée / Mais qu’elle est toujours couronnée” (175). In Sade, virtue is punished, vice rewarded. Sade contradicts Perrault's aphorism in the title of the first version of his most famous novel, Les Infortunes de la vertu, and in the whole body of his work. No one comes to save the victim at the last moment. Marriage does not lead to living happily ever after. In the fairy tales, evil is concentrated in a few malevolent figures; once they are destroyed, the world is safe for the main characters.¹¹ For Sade, on the other hand, the destructive impulse is at the core of each human self; it is natural, waiting only to be allowed free rein.

One might be tempted to say that Sade uncovers the real story of the tales, stripping away hypocrisy and masks, revealing the oppression of women for what it is: if woman accepts the role of the passive sufferer, that is how she will be treated; the bourgeois ideal of marriage does not lead to her fulfillment. Angela Carter gives such a reading of Sade, especially of La Philosophie dans le boudoir. Other feminist readings have maintained that Sade does not encourage woman to throw off all her traditional roles, pointing to the disquisitions of his libertines, who base man's “rights” on his physical and historical domination over women.¹² In La Philosophie dans le boudoir, for instance, Sade makes an impassioned plea for women's rights to sexual pleasure and freedom from the limitations of marriage and motherhood. But in exchange, she must satisfy, “avec autant d’humilité que de soumission,” all the desires a man may have (515). The possible injuries to her health or well-being resulting from his “caprices” are not to be taken into account: “n’ai-je pas déjà prouvé qu’il était légal de contraindre la volonté d’une femme sur cet objet, et qu’aussitôt qu’elle inspirait le désir de la jouissance, elle devait se soumettre à cette jouissance, abstraction faite de tout sentiment égoïste? Il en est de même de sa santé” (515-16). In Sade, just as in Perrault's tales, woman's place is in bed; and she should submit, with Cinderella-like humility, to the wishes of others. Words like the repeated soumettre and livrée in this section are absent from that describing what women will have the right to do to men in exchange; they will be free to “se livrer à autant d’hommes que bon leur semblera” (516, my italics).

The renewal of interest in Sade in the 20th century is due in large measure to his rebuttal of all supposedly “natural” laws, his rejection of the hypocrisies of bourgeois society, morality, and order, the unconstrained nature of his undigestible texts, the way he breaks all the rules. It is related to the modernist valorization of the concept of transgression. As Bataille writes: “[I]l allait le plus loin qu’il est imaginable d’aller: rien de respecté qu’il ne le bafoue, rien de pur qu’il ne le souille, rien de riant qu’il ne le comble d’effroi” (143).¹³

But there are some things Sade does not contest, some rules he does not break. We have seen that the conventions governing the description of woman characters are intact in his novels. More important, but a related point, he does not transgress against the rule common to so much literature and film, the rule that says violence done to women is pleasureable, that the text plays out its functions on the bodies of women.¹⁴ Reading Sade through Perrault or Perrault through Sade is possible, then, because woman as a beautiful, helpless victim is inscribed in the texture of their works. I have pointed out the fairy tale elements in Sade and the Sadeian elements in Perrault: there seems to be a kind of inevitability about the presentation of such characters in such settings. Can these rules be transgressed?

IV. WOMEN'S STORIES

Contemporary fairy tales often attempt to create positive images of women and girls, and there have been a number of feminist rewritings of traditional tales. But already in the 17th and 18th centuries there was a large body of tales written by women. Although the quickly canonized works of Perrault, building on folk sources, confirmed and constructed a horizon of expectations regarding women in the genre, it was women writers who dominated and developed the fairy tale. What space could they make for their female figures in a genre so overdetermined? In order to answer this question, it will be necessary first, to look at the representation of women in these stories in comparison to Perrault and second, to examine their treatment of similar tale-types.

At first glance, the settings, character descriptions, and plots of tales written by women seem quite similar to those in Perrault, although they tend to be longer, filled with rich detail, the recital of many adventures, presentation of the emotions and motivations of the characters, and narratorial commentary. Some critics have painted a rosy picture of the independence of the heroines in women's tales (see Welch, for instance); but this often amounts merely to a free choice of mates/masters. They are often helpless, at least for a time. For example, Prince Marcassin in Mme d’Aulnoy's tale kills two wives who refuse his sexual advances before his third wife tames him and brings about his transformation into a handsome prince. A passage in “Gracieuse et Percinet” even has indications of the kind of preoccupation with the heroine's suffering we have seen in Perrault and Sade.¹⁵ The précieux theme of the creation of a perfect love, central to the stories by Mme d’Aulnoy and Mme de Murat, does not in itself lead to a different male/female dynamics: the princes fall in love because of the princesses' beauty; and the constancy the lovers prove in the trials they undergo makes them worthy of the happy ending, which is almost always a marriage. Indeed, these tales codified the traditional “marry and live happily ever after” ending to the romance plot, what we call a “fairy tale ending.”

The settings in women's stories, woods and castles, are the same as those in Perrault. What is different is the long descriptions of the luxuries to be found in the castles and the toilettes of the main characters. The authors seem concerned with preparing young girls for marriages based on solid financial and social position as well as esteem.

When we turn to descriptions of female characters, we find that the heroines are all beautiful princesses. But their presentation is somewhat different from that in Perrault: in women's tales, they can have other qualities. Contrasting visions of the feminine ideal in Perrault and d’Aulnoy can be seen in the description of gifts granted to baby princesses by fairy godmothers. In Perrault's “La Belle au bois”:

La plus jeune lui donna pour don qu’elle serait la plus belle personne du monde, celle d’après qu’elle aurait de l’esprit comme un Ange, la troisième qu’elle aurait une grâce admirable à tout ce qu’elle ferait, la quatrième qu’elle danserait parfaitement bien, la cinquième qu’elle chanterait comme un Rossignol, et la sixième qu’elle jouerait de toutes sortes d’instruments dans la dernière perfection.” (Collinet ed., 132)

La Belle au bois is obviously destined to be an ornament to her society and a credit to her husband. In contrast, the gifts given to the princess in Mme d’Aulnoy's “La Biche au bois” emphasize other, interior qualities and make her an active character:

L’une la dota de vertu et l’autre d’esprit; la troisième, d’une beauté miraculeuse; celle d’après d’une heureuse fortune; la cinquième lui promit une longue santé; et la dernière, qu’elle ferait bien toutes les choses qu’elle entreprendrait.” (197)

Characters so described play very different roles than those in the stories of Perrault. In Mlle d’Aulnoy's “La Chatte blanche,” for instance, the female figure occupies the position of power. It is she who exercises authority, who tells her suitor what to do, who arranges her marriage and her life.¹⁶ An even better example of a heroine unlike Perrault's passive, victimized women is Mlle L’Héritier's Leonore, in “Marmoisan, ou L’Innocente Tromperie.” Like the heroine in Mme d’Aulnoy's “Belle-Belle ou Le Chevalier Fortuné,” she dons male garb and fights in the wars, but unlike Belle-Belle, she depends on neither fairies nor male assistance, and she saves her prince's life on the battlefield. Such a heroine is very far indeed from those in the stories of Perrault.

These differences between women authors and Perrault can be seen clearly by examining two of Mme d’Aulnoy's stories that contain the main story elements of Perrault's “Petit Poucet,” “Finette-Cendron” and “L’Oranger et l’Abeille.” In both, the young heroine has the role Perrault assigned to Petit Poucet.¹⁷ As its title shows, “Finette-Cendron” combines this story with the Cinderella story, but Finette, a nickname for “Fine-Oreille,” is the clever one of the family, not just a submissive heroine. Though she is sometimes aided by her fairy godmother, like Petit Poucet she overhears her parents planning to abandon their children: “la cadette [… ] n’avait pas nom Fine Oreille pour rien” (62). The roles of the parents are reversed too: it is the father who cries at the thought of losing the children: “il était bon père, mais la reine était la maîtresse” (58). After pigeons have eaten the peas the children had left to mark the way, like Petit Poucet Finette climbs to the top of a tree (the oak the girls have planted) and sees the ogre's castle. As in Perrault's tale, the ogre's wife greets them with dismay, hides them from the ogre (who sniffs them out anyway), and persuades him not to eat them just yet. In Mme d’Aulnoy's story, Finette tricks the ogre into getting into the oven and burns him up; then she cuts off the ogress' head. She is an active and successful heroine; in this story, Cendrillon has met the ogre and destroyed him.

In “L’Oranger et l’Abeille,” we find the parallel to the massacre of the seven little ogresses in “Petit Poucet.” To save the prince she loves, the princess Aimée puts on his head one of the crowns the baby ogres wear in the night. In this tale, the ogre eats a little ogrichon, and the ogress a little ogrelette, though she is described as more clever than her husband (Contes [1785], II, 337, 340). Throughout the tale, the princess “ne cessoit point de rêver aux moyens de sauver le prince” (II, 327); when she hears him cry out, “elle ne ressentit plus rien qui put l’arrêter” (II, 324); she is the one who ressuscitates him shipwrecked on a beach, helps him elude the ogres, finds a way to escape, and finally, thinks of turning into different forms to fool the ogres. In the last transformation, he is an orange tree, and she is a bee, so she can fly around and defend him. As in Perrault and Sade, the young woman is perfectly beautiful, kind, and self-sacrificing. But in these two stories, she is also intelligent, resourceful, and courageous. There is no longer a conflict between the feminine and the heroic. The woman does not give up positive “womanly” qualities to become a hero: they are part of what makes her heroic. Aimée has no fear of the ogre, she says, because “j’étois seule exposée à sa fureur [… ] enfin je donnerois ma vie pour conserver la vôtre” (II, 339).

As we have seen in the tales of Mme d’Aulnoy and Mlle L’Héritier, women writers in some instances introduce an alternate version of the fairy tale, related but not limited to their introduction of the theme of courtly love. The overdetermined nature of its genre means that the fairy tale, written by both men and women, often presents a weak, passive woman who is exposed to dangers only male characters can combat, the prototype of a Sadeian woman. We have seen that the stylistic and structural parallels in Sade and Perrault reflect a similar dynamics of victimization. The tales by women writers, however, point to a way out of the woods; they begin to tell a different story.

Notes

1. Quotations from Perrault are taken from Rouger's edition of the Contes, unless otherwise noted.

2. Barthes points out that the obstacles surrounding the castle of Silling are like those in some fairy tales.

3. This description is essentially unchanged in the subsequent versions of the novel.

4. Tourné, 75 and Miller, 218. See, for example, the presentation of Mlle de Chartres in La Princesse de Clèves and the description of Hortense in Crébillon's Les Egarements du coeur et de l’esprit.

5. Work on sexuality in fairy tales from a psychoanalytic perspective has been considerable. The best-known example is Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, which has a good bibliography. See also Rowe, 255, note 7. Dundes gives a comprehensive overview of psychoanalytic approaches to folklore, including fairy tales; and he also traces the importance of folklore for psychoanalysis.

6. See Lieberman, especially 385-86 and 391-92.

7. For the question of the woman as victim in Sade, see Lee, Williams, and Fink.

8. It has often been noted that the story deals with the relations between the adolescent girl and the male seducer. Bettelheim associates the color red with emotions and Fromm with the onset of menstruation (240); Cixous sees the little red cap as the clitoris (43). Delarue had pointed out already in 1957, however, that the red cap was an innovation of Perrault's and does not appear in folk versions of the tale (Soriano, 158). Cixous points out that the tale serves to warn the girls not to “try to go out and explore their forest without the psychoanalyst's permission” (44), an interpretation borne out by the moral and readings like Bettelheim's. In The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood Zipes shows that Perrault's and other literary versions of the story have changed a folk tale type about a resourceful heroine into a story about rape for which the girl is responsible.

9. On the political resonances of this structure (control over the powerless wielded by the powerful), see Farrell, “Griselidis.”

10. Other women are credulous and weak in “Le Petit Poucet”: the woodcutter's wife is convinced by her husband to abandon her children: the ogress is browbeaten by hers.

11. Bettelheim has shown how important this affirmation of stability in the world is for the young child.

12. See in particular Dworkin and Kappeler, 133-47.

13. On the renewal of interest in Sade in the context of 20th avant-garde movements, see Hulbert. Bataille's role in the process of canonizing Sade is treated pp. 126-29.

14. Suleiman makes this point forcefully in an essay on Bataille's fiction. She asks, “Is there a model of Textuality possible that would not necessarily play out, in discourse, the eternal Oedipal drama of transgression and the Law—a drama which always, ultimately, ends up maintaining the latter?” (134).

15. “[Q]uatre femmes, qui ressemblaient à quatre furies, se jèterent sur elle par l’ordre de leur maîtresse, lui arrachèrent ses beaux habits, et déchirèrent sa chemise. Quand ses épaules furent découvertes, ces cruelles mégères ne pouvaient soutenir l’éclat de leur blancheur [… ] En toute autre détresse, Gracieuse aurait souhaité le beau Percinet; mais se voyant presque nue, elle était trop modeste pour vouloir que ce prince en fût témoin; et elle se préparait à tout souffrir comme un pauvre mouton” (303). Quotations from Mme d’Aulnoy's stories, except for “L’Oranger et l’abeille,” are taken from the 1988 reedition of selected texts from Le Cabinet des fées.

16. See Farrell on “La Chatte blanche” in “Celebration and Repression.”

17. Robert studies the folk sources of the petit-poucet tale (100-09) and notes that of 82 versions of the motif of children abandoned in the forest, only three feature a girl and her sisters. Hubert details the elements in “Finette-Cendron” that are found in this Perrault tale, as well as in his “Cendrillon” and “Peau d’Ane.”

Works Cited

Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine (Mme d’). Contes de Madame d’Aulnoy. Tome I du Cabinet des fées. Ed. Elisabeth Lemirre. Arles: Editions Philippe Picquier, 1988.

———. “L’Oranger et l’abeille” In Les Contes des Fées et Nouveaux contes de fées ou les Fées à la mode. Tome II du Cabinet des fées. 1785. Rpt. Le Nouveau Cabinet des fées. 18 vols. Genève: Slatkine, 1978.

Barthes, Roland. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Paris: Seuil, 1971.

Bataille, Georges. La Littérature et le mal. Paris: Gallimard, 1957.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. 1975. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

Carter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman. NY: Pantheon, 1979.

Cixous, Hélène. “Castration or Decapitation?” Signs 7 (1981): 41-55.

Dundes, Alan. “The Psychoanalytic Study of Folklore.” Parsing through Customs: Essays by a Freudian Folklorist. Madison: U. of Wisconsin P. 1978. 3-46.

Dworkin, Andrea. “The Marquis de Sade.” Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Putnam, 1981. 70-100.

Farrell, Michèle. “Celebration and Repression of Feminine Desire in the Fairy Tale Narratives of Mme d’Aulnoy.” Paper presented at the MLA Convention, San Francisco, December 1987.

———. “Griselidis: Issues of Gender, Genre and Authority.” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 14 (1988).

Fink, Béatrice. “Ambivalence in the Gynogram: Sade's Utopian Woman.” Women and Literature 7 (1979): 24-37.

Fromm, Erich. The Forgotten Language. 1951. NY: Grove Press, 1957.

Hubert, Renée Riese. “Le Sens du voyage dans quelques contes de Madame d’Aulnoy.” French Review 46 (1973): 931-37.

Hulbert, James. “The Problems of Canon Formation and the ‘Example’ of Sade: Orthodox Exclusion and Orthodox Inclusion.” Modern Language Studies 18 (1968): 120-33.

Kappeler, Susanne. The Pornography of Representation. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P., 1986.

Lee, Vera. “The Sade Machine.” SVEC 98 (1972): 207-18.

L’Héritier, Marie-Jeanne (Mlle). Oeuvres meslées. Paris: J. Guignard, 1696.

Lieberman, Marcia R. “Some Day My Prince Will Come: Female Acculturation Through the Fairy Tale.” College English 34 (1972): 383-95.

Miller, Nancy K. “Justine, Or, The Vicious Circle,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 5 (1976): 215-28.

Perrault, Charles. Contes. Ed. Gilbert Rouger. Paris: Garnier, 1967.

———. Contes. Ed. Jean-Pierre Collinet. Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1981.

Robert, Raymonde. Le Conte des fées littéraire en France de la fin du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Nancy: Presses Universitaires, 1981.

Rowe, Karen. “Feminism and Fairy Tales.” Woman's Studies 6 (1979): 237-57.

Sade, Donatien. Les Crimes de l’amour. Paris: 10/18, 1971.

———. Les Infortunes de la vertu. Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1969.

———. La Philosophie dans le boudoir. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Pauvert, 1986. III: 375-561.

Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “Pornography, Transgression and the Avant-Garde: Bataille's Story of the Eye.” In The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. NY: Columbia U.P., 1986. 117-36.

Tourné, M. “Pénélope et Circé ou les mythes de la femme dans l’œuvre de Sade,” Europe, No. 522 (1972): 71-88.

Welch, Marcelle. “La Femme, le mariage, et l’amour dans les contes de fées mondains du XVIIème siècle français.” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 10 (1983): 47-58.

Williams, David. “Another Look at the Sadeian Heroine: The Prospects for Femininity.” Essays on French Literature 13 (1976): 28-43.

Zipes, Jack. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1982.