SOURCE: Duggan, Anne E. “Nature and Culture in the Fairy Tale of Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy.” Marvels and Tales 15, no. 2 (2001): 149-67.

[In the following essay, Duggan examines the tales “The Bee and the Orange Tree” and “Gracieuse et Percinet” to consider how d'Aulnoy employs cultural notions about women's nature.]

Fairy tales of late-seventeenth-century France are replete with images of nature. Stories often take place in forests and idyllic gardens serving as the backdrop for the actions of animal-like characters, as well as princes and princesses momentarily metamorphosed into animals. At the same time, these tales put forth ideals of behavior that seem more appropriate for a court or city culture than for wild forests or the countryside. Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's “L'oranger et l'abeille” (“The Bee and the Orange Tree”) is particularly striking in its representation of a savage nature that sharply contrasts with the civility of the tale's main protagonist, princess Aimée. In many ways the tale can be read as a commentary on the relation between nature and culture, which has implications, as I will argue, regarding d'Aulnoy's perspective on gender and society. In order to highlight the ideological underpinnings of d'Aulnoy's tale with respect to nature and culture, we will first consider the ways in which Charles Perrault defines “feminine nature” in his tale “Grisélidis” (“Patient Griselda”), then look at how d'Aulnoy uses “nature” to legitimate the equality of the sexes in “The Bee and the Orange Tree,” and finally discuss how d'Aulnoy situates her ideal society within the nature-culture spectrum in ways that anticipate the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Since at least the early modern period, particularly after the “discovery” of the New World, European writers, philosophers, and scholars have been preoccupied by the concepts of nature and culture. Frequently these concepts were employed to legitimate the superiority of one civilization or model of society over another, whether we consider the image of the bon sauvage, whose natural goodness was seen to mark the European's fall from nature, or that of the uncivilized savage, who needed to be Christianized and acculturated in European ways.¹ Early modern debates about nature and culture often concerned the relation of Europeans to the non-European other, and furthermore provided indirect ways for writers to criticize their own society. To some degree or another, nature and culture were concepts used to legitimate certain forms of behavior in the determination of and value attributed to being “savage,” “natural,” or “civilized,” with these behavioral models corresponding to particular types of societies.

In seventeenth-century France, the concepts of nature and culture were also used in debates about the status of women. As Linda Timmermans has shown, Jacques Olivier's L'alphabet de l'imperfection et malice des femmes (Alphabet of the Imperfection and Malice of Women) published in 1617 and reprinted no less than eighteen times before 1650, defined women as Bestiale barathrum, literally an “abyss of stupidity,” “stupidity” being a term, in both Latin and French, clearly associated with “beasts” (244). Misogynous writers repeatedly associated women with animals or nature, usually to explain their lack of reason and need to be dominated by men. While some writers insisted on women's inferiority because of their “bestial” nature, others, and salon women in particular, embraced a philosophy that allowed them to dissociate themselves from their bodies—from their “animal” nature. According to Erica Harth, salon women were predisposed to Cartesianism due to their interest in neoplatonism and neostoicism, which “combined to aid the précieuses in their quest for relationships that would free them from the obligations and prejudices attached to their female bodies. A dualism that emphasized the separability of soul and body lent dignity to the intellectual enterprise of the salon and validated women as thinking subjects” (81). Consequently, salon women's model for gender relations was based on a union of minds rather than of bodies, clearly the case in works by the writer exemplary of the salon movement, Madeleine de Scudéry, in which love remains unconsummated.

Although d'Aulnoy can be situated within the trend of the salons and precious women, she also distinguishes herself from them, particularly regarding the question of nature. Whereas salon women in the tradition of Scudéry tended to accept the neoplatonic and Cartesian privileging of the mind over the body (and by extension, culture over nature), d'Aulnoy redefines the relation between nature and culture, for at least three reasons. First, as noted above, d'Aulnoy uses the concept of nature to legitimate the “natural” equality of the sexes. Second, as is clear in “The Bee and the Orange Tree,” d'Aulnoy's model of gender relations does not exclude some sort of physical relation between the sexes. Third, d'Aulnoy attempts to “naturalize” the idea of nobility by locating “true nobility” within the nature-culture spectrum—somewhere between a monstrous nature, represented by the tale's ogres, and alienated “civil” man, represented by princess Linda and by Grognon of “Gracieuse and Percinet” (“Gracieuse et Percinet”). In many respects, d'Aulnoy's tales can be situated within the trend of what Norbert Elias calls “aristocratic romanticism,” characterized by the idealization of nature as an antidote to the social constraints of Parisian court society and social convention—a nature or “natural” society usually situated in a Golden Age of times past (254-55). As we will see, d'Aulnoy's brand of romanticism complicates the Cartesian mind/body nature/culture dichotomy, which distinguishes her from other salon women, on the one hand, and from her fellow fairy-tale writer Charles Perrault, on the other.

D'AULNOY VS. PERRAULT

D'Aulnoy's “The Bee and the Orange Tree” could well be read as a feminist response to Perrault's “Patient Griselda.” In the dedicatory epistle and the first pages of his tale, Perrault sets up a framework in which we are to read the tale, opposing modern Parisian women to Griselda, whose story is the subject of the rest of the tale. As Perrault clearly conveys in the epistle, Parisian women have tilted the balance of power between the sexes in their favor: “Here women are sovereign, and everything is ordered according to their wishes. In a word it is a happy climate inhabited solely by Queens. As such I see that in any case, Griselda will be held in little esteem here, and she will be a laughing stock because of her old-fashioned lessons [antiques leçons]. It is not that Patience is not a virtue of Parisian ladies, but from habitual practice they have learned how to make their husbands exercise it” (Perrault, Contes 57-58; my translation).² By stating that Griselda's example provides old-fashioned or antique lessons, Perrault situates his ideal woman in the past. This past is furthermore associated with nature, for Griselda was raised in and inhabits the forest. On the contrary, Perrault's male-dominating women are located in the city; they are cultured.

Culture, however, seems to have a negative impact on women for Perrault. Whereas the tale's prince can rationally engage in cultural activities (he enjoys the beaux arts), worldly women, women who frequent Parisian society, cannot control their interests, which are represented in the tale in terms of irrational drives: the zealot is excessively religious; the precious woman is “madly curious” about the beaux arts and dares to judge (male) authors; the gambler not only loses her money and her jewelry, but also her clothes, which associates her with the prostitute—arguably the figure for all of Perrault's “culturally active” women.³ The independent, active women represented at the beginning of “Griselda” lose all self-control upon entering the public, cultural space of the city or court: they are excessively and frivolously active. They have a will of their own, which drives them to rule their husbands, something the prince's ideal (that is, “natural”) woman will not have: “find me some young beauty who […] has no will of her own” (Perrault, Fairy 111).

Not surprisingly, the prince finds his ideal woman, the shepherdess Griselda, in “simple and naïve Nature” (Perrault, Contes 64; my translation). Although Griselda is active (she spins as she watches over her flock), her activity is directly tied to something natural (spinning wool, watching sheep) and is itself of a domestic—or domesticated—nature. Unlike the cultured women “alienated” from nature, Griselda—Perrault's model for “feminine nature”—engages in domestic activities associated with nature, not culture. Most importantly, her will will be circumscribed by the will of her husband: “You must swear to me you will never have a will apart from my own.—I swear it, she said […]. If I had married the lowest man of the Village, I would obey him” (Perrault, Contes 71; my translation).⁴ Of course, it could be argued that Griselda, in promising her future husband such obedience, is in fact just as alienated as the corrupt, unnatural women of the city, for her will is no longer her own; but that is not, as we might assume; the point of Perrault's tale.

Through his tale, Perrault puts forth a model of feminine nature—even of nature itself—that is at the basis of his model of patriarchy: woman as mater (that is, matter, nature, and mother) to which man must give form. Posited as subdued nature, a domesticated nature, Griselda is contrasted with the unconquered nature or un-nature of city women, who sow disorder through their excessive and frivolous activity. As opposed to salon women, who used idealist (neoplatonic, Cartesian) philosophy to argue that the mind had no sex, Perrault upholds the traditional idealist association between women and matter, both to exclude women from the public sphere or culture, and more generally to legitimate male domination in society and the family. Jean-Joseph Goux provides an excellent discussion of how idealist philosophy can be used to legitimate male dominance: “What does idealism say? It says that the conscious power of thought is of an entirely different order from that of nature. It bars mother and matter from generative power. Matter is dead; it is mater and not genetrix. It desires an order. It requires a meaning it does not have, which must come from without [in other words, from man]” (Goux 214). Griselda represents the passive wife and mother who blindly respects even the most irrational wishes of her husband. This cannot be better demonstrated than by the episode in which Griselda must endure the removal of her daughter. Under the pretext that their daughter must be properly educated, the prince takes her away to a convent and later tells Griselda that she died. In effect, this part of the story emphasizes woman-as-matter in that Griselda provides the prince with a child and then passively accepts her husband's decisions regarding its fate. Through the tale Perrault suggests that the wife must provide the material child, but the husband both forms and “owns” it. D'Aulnoy, however, clearly works according to an entirely different paradigm. As we will see, d'Aulnoy complicates such idealist dichotomies in large part by redefining the concept of nature.

In “The Bee and the Orange Tree,” d'Aulnoy affirms the “natural” equality of the sexes, and constructs a notion of “natural” nobility. The story concerns the princess Aimée who, as an infant, is shipwrecked and stranded on the island of the ogres Tourmentine and Ravagio. The ogres raise her as their own child, with plans to marry her to one of their ogre sons. Aimée's parents, the king and queen of Happy Island, believe her to be long dead when they send for her cousin Aimé to take over the throne. But Aimé, too, is shipwrecked and finds himself on the same island as his “savage” cousin, who saves him from her ogre stepparents. Through this tale, d'Aulnoy posits the natural equality of the sexes, affirmed in the very names of our heroine and hero, Aimée and Aimé; and, as the “sameness” of their names suggest, in the ways in which d'Aulnoy plays with traditional gender roles. As opposed to Perrault, then, d'Aulnoy suggests that in nature, in the absence of social conventions, women and men are indeed equal.

That Aimée incarnates the “natural” woman in a manner similar yet opposed to Perrault's Griselda is suggested in several ways in the tale. Upon Aimée's arrival on the island, Tourmentine, using her magic wand, calls forth a doe, a sort of surrogate mother, to nurse Aimée. Tourmentine is also a surrogate and animal-like mother since ogres mark a halfway point between the human and the animal: “Never have you seen such hideous figures: each had one squinting eye in the middle of their forehead, a mouth as large as an oven's and a large, flat nose, long asses' ears, hair standing on end, and humps in front and behind” (d'Aulnoy, “Bee” 417; my emphasis). Aimée is closely linked to the animal world through her surrogate mothers, and wears the sign of her own “animality” by dressing in a tiger skin. Aimée's tiger skin further associates her with her ogress stepmother, who towards the end of the story dresses in a snake skin. The animal and especially the snake skin are reminiscent of the fairy Melusine (directly referred to in the tale as Merlusine), who became half-serpent once a week, and who was also the “founding mother” of the Lusignan family line, according to Jean d'Arras's fifteenth-century romance. The figure of Melusine thus carries with it notions of animality or “nature,” motherhood, as well as nobility.⁵ Contrary to Perrault's passive, domesticated representation of nature and women, d'Aulnoy presents us with powerful women associated through their animal skins with wild, undomesticated animals.

The significance of the animal skin in d'Aulnoy, who uses it to symbolize the power of women, is diametrically opposed to the meaning Perrault gives the motif in “Peau d'âne” (“Donkey-Skin”), in which the donkey skin (or the skin of a domesticated animal) that his princess wears to escape her incestuous father makes of her an object of ridicule, a social outcast: “Meanwhile the Princess journeyed on, begging those she met to give her employment. But she looked so filthy and abject under the donkey-skin that none would accept her” (Perrault, Fairy 100).⁶ Perrault highlights the sense of the animal skin as being something dead, something excremental (in the French version, the terms crasse [filth] and ordure [filth, refuse] are used), rather than something that empowers, as in the case of “The Bee and the Orange Tree.” Again, as opposed to Perrault's “dead” or passive nature (and by extension, woman), d'Aulnoy puts forth a version of nature (and of woman) that is “animated,” active, and powerful.

Woman-as-active-nature is interwoven with woman-as-mother, as suggested above. Aimée's role as some sort of mother is played out in the scenes following Aimé's arrival on the island and takes shape according to what we might call “orality.” Sigmund Freud describes orality as follows: “One of the first of such pregenital sexual organizations is the oral, or if one will, the cannibalistic [my emphasis]. Here the sexual activity is not yet separated from the taking of nourishment and the contrasts within it are not yet differentiated. [… T]he sexual aim then consists in the incorporation of the object into one's own body, the prototype of identification, which later plays such an important psychic rôle” (194). Freud associates the idea of orality not only with notions of incorporation and identification (and in the tale, Aimée and Aimé identify with one another, they are identical, as their names suggest), but also with cannibalism. That Aimé and Aimée meet on the island of the ogres is thus not inconsequential.

Like the relation between mother and child, Aimée and Aimé's relation also revolves around the ingestion of food. At the beginning of the tale, Aimée brings Aimé “four parrots and six squirrels cooked by the sun, and strawberries, cherries, raspberries, and other fruits” (d'Aulnoy, “Bee” 422). Significantly, Aimée brings him fruit (an undomesticated product of the land) and game (or undomesticated animals). Aimée roasts the game under the sun, that is to say, “naturally,” which just barely distinguishes her from her ogre family, who eats the “fresh meat” (d'Aulnoy, “Bee” 417) of humans.⁷ Whereas Perrault's Griselda breastfeeds her own daughter (a novel idea at the time, especially in aristocratic circles),⁸ Aimée, like a seventeenth-century Diana, actively hunts wild game to feed her cousin. D'Aulnoy's representation of the “savage” Aimée hunting wild animals could be read as a refusal of models of motherhood and womanhood based on domesticity, and an implicit affirmation of the “natural” equality of the sexes.

INITIATION AND GENDER PLAY

Orality as incorporation and identification is expressed not only by the ingestion of food and by the sameness of Aimée and Aimé's names, but also through the indistinction of their gender roles. In the series of scenes depicting Aimée and Aimé's escape from Tourmentine and Ravagio, gender roles become utterly interchangeable, at the same time that the overall framework of these scenes might be read in terms of a female initiation. First Aimée outwits Ravagio and Tourmentine by transforming herself and her lover into various objects and figures in order to hide their identity from them with the help of a magic wand. Then she defeats the Amazonian Linda before finally regaining her status as princess and taking over her parents' throne with Aimé. This initiation includes, and indeed invites, playful explorations of gender roles. More generally, this series of scenes highlights the playfulness of the fairy-tale genre (and we might recall here that the fairy tale began as a jeu d'esprit in the salons)⁹ which comes out in the metonymic game of transformations with which Aimée outsmarts the ogres.

Aimée flees with Aimé from the ogres' cavern by camel and with the help of Tourmentine's magic wand. When the ogres realize that the wedding bride and wedding meal have taken off together, Ravagio puts on his seven-league boots¹⁰ and hunts them down. When he catches up with the two lovers, Aimée turns the camel into a pond, Aimé into a boat, and herself into an old boatwoman. That the camel becomes water is a metonymic play on the French word chameau which contains within it the word eau (water). Aimé becomes a boat, which in French also contains within it the word eau: bateau.¹¹ Aimée gives herself the more active role of boatwoman who guides the boat in the same way that she has already been guiding Aimé since their first encounter. By means of these metamorphoses, Aimée fools Ravagio. He then reports back to Tourmentine, who immediately recognizes the ruse and sends him after them a second time.

Ravagio soon catches up with them again, whereupon Aimée turns the camel into a pillar, the prince into a portrait of the fairy Merlusine (or Melusine), and herself into a dwarf. Aimé is identified with the feminine in his association with Melusine, and Aimée with the masculine in the figure of the dwarf, a creature often protected by fairies. In d'Aulnoy's other tales, like “Le nain jaune” (“The Yellow Dwarf”) or “La chatte blanche” (“The White Cat”), a fairy serves as the protector of a dwarf and functions much like a mother who arranges marriages for them, and who even takes vengeance on others in their name.¹² Thus the relation between fairy and dwarf, between mother and child, is reversed here, as Aimé is identified with the fairy Melusine, and Aimée with the dwarf.

In Aimée's last test of her wits before Tourmentine, she turns Aimé into an orange tree and herself into a bee. Again d'Aulnoy plays with traditional gender roles by giving Aimée the more active role of the bee who, like a gallant knight, attacks and finally defeats Tourmentine, while the immobile Aimé “was dying with fear the princess would be caught and killed” (d'Aulnoy, “Bee” 433). Having lost possession of the magic wand and unable to return to their “natural” state, Aimé deplores their situation and beckons his bee to be faithful to him: “‘O Love […] Keep my bee away from all danger / Make it such that her heart doesn't change / And despite the metamorphosis / That our bad fortune has caused us / May she love me until death’” (d'Aulnoy, Contes 269; my translation).¹³ Like a woman who entreats her husband or son to remain at home, Aimé attracts Aimée with those things only he can give her: “Why would you go away from me. You will find on my flowers a pleasant dew and a liqueur sweeter than honey. You will be able to nourish yourself with them. My leaves will serve as a couch where you will have nothing to fear from the malice of spiders” (d'Aulnoy, Contes 269-70; my translation).¹⁴ Aimé offers Aimée the nourishment and protection of a mother, the same kind of protection Aimée has provided for him. Thus the relation of orality, of identification, and of ingestion is reciprocal, with both masculine and feminine principles mutually serving each other.¹⁵ Interestingly, ingestion here is expressed as ingestion of the other—Aimé offers himself, his bodily liquids, much like a nursing mother, to Aimée.

Aimée's final trial pits her against the princess Linda, who recalls, in her neoplatonic tendencies, those precious women who rejected marriage and physical love: “Young, beautiful, and witty, she would not marry because she was afraid she would not always be loved by the person she might choose for a husband. And since she was very wealthy, she built a sumptuous castle where she admitted only ladies and old men (more philosophers than gallants) and refused to have young cavaliers come near” (d'Aulnoy, “Bee” 434). Through Linda, d'Aulnoy seems to suggest that such women merely try to repress their physical desires, for Linda, so taken by the aroma of the orange tree (in fact a “young cavalier”), is ready to arm herself as an Amazon warrior and battle the bee in order to possess one of the orange tree's branches. Despite Aimée's attempts to protect Aimé from Linda, the latter does succeed in cutting off one of his branches, as the blood dripped from the severed branch (or Aimé's finger).

We might read the character Linda in terms of the “castrating woman” who, motivated by fear of abandonment, seeks to completely possess or dominate a man. Not only does she transplant Aimé the orange tree into her own garden, but she furthermore desires to have one of his branches. Through Linda, d'Aulnoy seems to criticize the type of gender relations proposed by those salon women who insisted that men must subject themselves to the will of their mistresses. (D'Aulnoy was not the only fairy-tale writer of the period to question female-dominated gender relations. In her Mémoires, the fairy-tale writer Madame de Murat criticizes several times a model of gender relations that gives women an “empire” over their lover).¹⁶ Implicit in Linda's example, then, is a model of gender relations that simply reverses the terms of Perrault's model of patriarchy: while Perrault's prince dominates his wife, d'Aulnoy's Linda similarly wishes to control or possess Aimé. D'Aulnoy, however, by basing her model of gender relations on the identification of the sexes, transcends or undoes the dichotomy between woman and man.

Aimée succeeds in overcoming the obstacles presented to her first and foremost by other women, which suggests that Aimée's female initiation concerns a particular type of womanhood that is neither monstrous (as in the case of Tourmentine) nor castrating (as in the case of Linda). Since we know from the beginning of the tale that Aimée is in fact a princess, this womanhood could be characterized in terms of nobility. The tale hints at Aimée's nobility by the way in which she tastefully decorates her cave, despite her “savage” surroundings.¹⁷ Although Linda, too, is a princess, she might be seen as marking another limit of what constitutes this nobility. One thing is certain: d'Aulnoy intends Aimée's nobility to be something “natural,” for she instinctively shows signs of good taste despite the fact that she was raised by ogres. We might begin to demarcate d'Aulnoy's ideal model of nobility (or noble womanhood) by examining those characters in her tales who mark the limits of that ideal.

SAVAGE, BARBARIC, AND CIVIL MAN

We noted earlier that it is not inconsequential that d'Aulnoy situates her tale on the island of the cannibalistic ogres, and that Freud ties the notion of orality to cannibalism. In “The Bee and the Orange Tree,” d'Aulnoy establishes different levels of orality in the distinction between the type of orality characterizing the relation between Aimée and Aimé (based on identification, indifferentiation) and that characterizing the ogres (based on cannibalism). Although d'Aulnoy precedes Jean-Jacques Rousseau by some two generations, his works may help us elucidate some points in d'Aulnoy's tale.

While Aimé and Aimée's relation to orality is expressed through their mutual identification and nourishing, the ogres' relation to orality translates primarily into their desire to devour raw human flesh. The ogres mark the extreme limits of the natural: their cannibalistic desire to devour not merely uncooked meat, but human flesh to boot, situates them at the “other” side of the cultural prohibition of cannibalism and the raw.¹⁸ Yet d'Aulnoy has Ravagio refer to the eating of raw flesh as a custom, implying that to some extent the cultural and the natural are intertwined, as each “culture” (that of the ogres, for instance) is defined more or less in terms of culture, more or less in terms of nature. That Aimée cooks wild game in the sun to feed Aimé, then, suggests that Aimée, though “savage” or natural, is also (and naturally so) more “cultured” than her surrogate family.

Rousseau's categories of “savage,” “barbaric,” and “civil” societies are quite useful within the context of d'Aulnoy's tales.¹⁹ In many respects, d'Aulnoy's ogres resemble Rousseau's savage man, whom he depicts as having no other society but the family and no notion of “man” as such, for the savage did not perceive a distinction between man and animal. Savages had only “domestic” languages and did not “know themselves”; they were, in Rousseau's words, like ferocious animals.²⁰ D'Aulnoy's ogres, much like Rousseau's savages, live solely within the family unit, having no other evident society or language than a domestic one. Their cannibalism indicates the fact that they do not differentiate between humans and animals, and physically they are akin to animals in their part-animal, part-human heterogeneity. However, as their heterogeneity suggests, they are of a monstrous nature.

The distinction between Aimée and her ogre family can be articulated in terms of what Rousseau calls a “savage” society, as described above, and a “barbaric” one.²¹ In “barbaric” societies, Rousseau asserts, there were national languages that could express the passions, as love and not instinct governed marriages. Whereas savages do not “know” themselves and can therefore feel no pity for their fellow humankind (corresponding to the ogres indifference to human life), the barbarians differ from them primarily with respect to love, born out of mutual dependency between people, which, according to Rousseau, tames: “Girls would come to seek water for the household, young men would come to water their herds. Their eyes, accustomed to the same sights since infancy, began to see with increased pleasure. The heart is moved by these novel objects; an unknown attraction renders it less savage; it feels pleasure at not being alone” (Rousseau, “Essay” 44; my emphasis). Likewise, it is first and foremost love that distinguishes Aimée from her ogre family, permitting her to be integrated into another, less savage world at the end of the tale, when she takes the throne as queen of Happy Island.

Whereas the ogres mark the limits of the natural (as savage or monstrous), other characters, princess Linda to some extent, are located on the “other side” of nature, which Rousseau describes as the state of civil man. The latter is situated at the purely cultural end of the nature-culture spectrum: while the cruelty of savages can be explained by their lack of self-knowledge and sense of self-preservation (or amour de soi) in its purest form, civil man's cruelty resides in his indifference to others out of self-interest, or amour-propre.²² Civil man, the most “reasonable” of human conditions, is characterized first and foremost in terms of separation from nature and from other people. Rousseau states: “It is reason which breeds pride [amour-propre] and reflection which fortifies it; reason which turns man inward into himself; reason which separates him from everything which troubles or affects him. It is philosophy which isolates a man […]” (Discourse 101). It would seem, then, that the barbaric age is a state of nature (or state of “natural” culture) which is based on pity and mutual affection, unlike the savage, and which has not yet degraded into a more complete state of culture in which people are separated from one another by reason and self-interest. The savage, still protected by the maternal hand of nature,²³ and the barbarian, tied to his or her community through the “natural” bonds of love, friendship, and reciprocity, are opposed to the alienated, “unnatural” civil man whose existence depends on reason rather than love, on philosophy rather than instinct.

In d'Aulnoy, civil man—unnatural or alienated man—at times takes the form of characters who transgress class lines. These characters are monstrous in varying degrees, like the ogres, but are situated within the cultural. Grognon of “Gracieuse and Percinet,” perhaps the most monstrous and alienated of all d'Aulnoy's characters, is a case in point. When princess Gracieuse's mother dies, a rich old maid, “called the Duchess Grognon” (d'Aulnoy, Fairy 1; my emphasis) lures Gracieuse's father with her vast riches. That Grognon is merely called the duchess Grognon points to an ambiguity in her social status. Physically, Grognon resembles the ogres: “Her hair was as red as fire, her face of an alarming size, covered with pimples; she had but one blear eye left, and her mouth was so large you would have said she could eat everybody up, only, as she had no teeth, people were not afraid of it; she had a hump before and behind, and limped with both legs. Such monsters envy all handsome persons […]” (d'Aulnoy, Fairy 1; my emphasis). Like the ogres, Grognon only has one eye (although in the ogres' case, this is natural and not accidental), a big mouth, and a hump in front and behind. Unlike the ogres, however, Grognon's cruelty is calculated: she is capable of jealousy and greed.

Furthermore, Grognon's need to devour, suggested by her big mouth, is not cannibalistic (for she has no teeth), but is tied to the cultural: Grognon hoards riches and luxury items.²⁴ The hideousness of Grognon's physique corresponds to the vulgarity, the superfluity of her riches—riches that allow her to marry above her station into royalty.²⁵ Grognon's “transgression,” like that of Perrault's Parisian women, is expressed in terms of excess and boundary crossing. In both cases, transgression also translates into “unnatural” relations of domination: women dominating men (“Griselda”), and lower-ranking subjects oppressing upper-ranking ones (“Gracieuse and Percinet”). Grognon seeks to marry the widowed king, not only, as we might assume, to legitimate herself socially, but also to torture the naturally beautiful and good Gracieuse. The figure of the king, ready to sell his own daughter for Grognon's great riches, could be read as a critique of the French nobility's readiness to trade honor for wealth.

While the ogres embody the extreme of amour de soi or self-preservation, Grognon, it would seem, marks the limits of self interest, or amour-propre. The “unnaturalness” of her being is highlighted in the juxtaposition of the two scenes preceding Grognon's wedding. First, we see Gracieuse preparing for the wedding in such a way as to enhance her “natural” beauty. Dressing in green (the color of nature), Gracieuse adorns herself with but a few things, all of which are natural: gold, emeralds, roses, and jasmines.²⁶ Then we are witness to Grognon's attempts to artificially hide her ugliness. She wears a shoe constructed to hide her limp, a false eye, false hair color, and puts on a dress which excessively (and distastefully) combines colors: purple-red, blue, yellow, and violet.²⁷ In the same way that the ogres' “natural” heterogeneity makes of them monsters, so Grognon's unnatural heterogeneity of artifice and colors makes of her a monster of a “civil” sort.

Whereas Tourmentine marks the border between the human and the animal, Grognon is situated at the limit between the human and the un-human. Together they represent opposite poles of the bad mother: Tourmentine symbolizing the monstrous, devouring mother (or bad nature); Grognon the unnatural, alienated mother (or un-nature). Aimée, whose motherhood resides first in her relation to Aimé, as discussed above, and second in the fact that she will give birth to “Faithful Love” at the end of the tale, borders on the savage and represents the “barbaric” good mother, the perfect embodiment of good nature (or la bonne sauvage).

Significantly, Grognon has no “natural” children in “Gracieuse and Percinet”: she can only be a stepmother, an unnatural mother. Likewise, the castrating Amazonian Linda of “The Bee and the Orange Tree” has no children to speak of, indicating that Linda, though not as monstrous as Grognon, is also somehow unnatural and alienated. Like Rousseau's civil man, Linda allows philosophy to separate her from others, particularly from young men, as she surrounds herself with ladies and philosophical old men. Her existence depends on reason rather than love, on philosophy rather than instinct. She is alone out of her own too rational fear of being rejected or deceived by a man. In effect, Grognon and Linda mark different extremes of the self-interest characteristic of civil man, Linda bordering on the barbaric, and Grognon being almost completely unnatural.

The different categories of humankind represented by Tourmentine, Grognon, Aimée, and Linda also correspond to different perspectives on marriage. In the case of the “savage” ogres, marriage is incestuous (their adoptive daughter Aimée was to marry their son); it is based on instinct, not love. Grognon or civil man marks another extreme: marriage is based not on love, but on pure self-interest, and is a calculated, not instinctive, affair. Linda's refusal of marriage is another example of marriage as a rational calculation, in this case to protect one's ego or amour-propre from being threatened. Finally, the “barbarian” example of Aimé and Aimée is that of marriage based on true love—on passion and not instinct or calculation; on loss of self (through identification and indifferentiation) and not self-preservation or preservation of one's ego autonomy.

The oppositions underlying d'Aulnoy's tales anticipate Rousseau's tripartite scheme of the evolution of humankind. The ogres represent the first state of nature, which is violent and cruel (or savage society); Aimée and Aimé, their passion and their “good nature,” recall Rousseau's pastoral golden age (or barbaric society); finally, Grognon, and Linda are all various incarnations of the civil, alienated, unnatural human being. In d'Aulnoy, then, “natural” nobility is located in the barbaric or pastoral age, in which women and men were naturally equal, and love reigned supremely.

By examining d'Aulnoy's tales in terms of nature and culture, we can situate her works within the broader trend of aristocratic romanticism, itself anticipatory of the romanticism of Rousseau. D'Aulnoy's recuperation of nature as an active force allows her to posit “feminine nature” in terms of activity rather than, as Perrault would have it, passivity and domesticity. Moreover, d'Aulnoy reimagines the relation between nature and culture, woman and man, body and mind, not in terms of oppositions, but rather as concepts that are intertwined or interrelated. As such d'Aulnoy undoes the dichotomies characteristic of idealist philosophy, which distinguishes her from the earlier generation of salon women. Perhaps one reason why d'Aulnoy hesitated to reject the body and nature has to do with her own social identity. As a member of the feudal nobility, whose identity was located in their “blue blood,” repudiating the body would mean eliminating an important indicator of social prestige. As “The Bee and the Orange Tree” makes clear, Aimée's nobility, signified by her grace and good taste, is innate: she is naturally more “civilized” than her ogre family. Through “The Bee and the Orange Tree,” then, d'Aulnoy naturalizes at the same time the equality of the sexes and the idea of nobility.

Notes

1. For an excellent summary of the theories concerning “savage” and “civil” man in the early modern period, see Cocker 3-24.

2. The original French reads as follows: “Les femmes y sont souveraines, / Tout s'y règle selon leurs voeux, / Enfin c'est un climat heureux / Qui n'est habité que de Reines. / Ainsi je vois que de toutes façons, / Grisélidis y sera peu prisée, / Et qu'elle y donnera matière de risée, / Par ses trop antiques leçons. / Ce n'est pas que la Patience / Ne soit une vertu des Dames de Paris, / Mais par un long usage elles ont la science / De la faire exercer par leurs propres maris.”

3. I have paraphrased the original French, which reads: “L'une d'humeur chagrine, et que rien ne récrée / Devient une Dévote outrée, / Qui crie et gronde à tous moments; / L'autre se façonne en Coquette, / Qui sans cesse écoute ou caquette, / Et n'a jamais assez d'Amants; / Celle-ci des beaux Arts follement curieuse, / De tout décide avec hauteur, / Et critiquant le plus habile Auteur, / Prend la forme de Précieuse; / Cette autre s'érige en Joueuse, / Perd tout, argent, bijoux, bagues, meubles de prix, / Et même jusqu'à ses habits” (Perrault, Contes 189-90). For an English version which, however, still tends to paraphrase the French version, see Perrault, Fairy 111. This passage not only recalls but even seems to paraphrase the negative portraits of women in Boileau's “Satire X” of which Perrault was supposedly critical.

4. The original French reads: “Il faudrait me jurer que vous n'aurez jamais / D'autre volonté que la mienne. / —Je le jure, dit-elle […] / Si j'avais épousé le moindre du Village, / J'obéirais […].”

5. For associations between Melusine, motherhood, and nobility, see Arras and Brownlee.

6. For this particular passage, I have used the Brereton translation instead of the Zipes translation (70), for Brereton brings out the sense of the abject present in the original French version, the language of which is quite strong: “L'Infante cependant poursuivait son chemin, / Le visage couvert d'une vilaine crasse; / A tous Passants elle tendait la main, / Et tâchait pour servir de trouver une place. / Mais les moins délicats et les plus malheureux / La voyant si maussade et si pleine d'ordure, / Ne voulaient écouter ni retirer chez eux / Une si sale créature” (Perrault, Contes 105).

7. Later in the story we find another scene where Aimée feeds Aimé: “The prince had no stomach for eating, but his dear mistress cut such delicate pieces with her own hands and gave them to him with so much kindness that he could not possibly refuse them” (d'Aulnoy, “Bee” 426). On the different degrees of “nature” and “culture” as expressed in terms of the cooked and the raw, see Lévi-Strauss.

8. In seventeenth-century France, most upper-class women sent their children off to wet nurses and did not breastfeed themselves. Elisabeth Badinter locates the proliferation of discourses on the importance of breastfeeding in the eighteenth century, which means that Perrault was, so to say, “ahead of his time.” To my knowledge, Perrault's “Griselda” contains the earliest French literary reference on the importance of women breastfeeding their own children. See Badinter, “Plaidoyers pour l'enfant” (191-255).

9. Jack Zipes describes the general context for the production of seventeenth-century literary fairy tales in terms of game or play: “By the 1670s we find various references in letters about the fairy tale as an acceptable jeu d'esprit in the salons. In this type of game, the women would refer to folk tales and use certain motifs spontaneously in their conversations. Eventually they began telling the tales as a literary divertimento, intermezzo, or as a kind of after-dinner dessert invented to amuse other listeners” (3).

10. It is possible that the mention of seven-league boots is a reference to Perrault's “Le petit Poucet” (“Little Thumbling”), which is indirectly referred to earlier in the tale when Aimée saves Aimé two nights in a row. Although Tourmentine and Ravagio had decided to eat Aimé the day of Aimée's marriage to their ogre son, neither Ravagio nor Tourmentine could control their voracious appetites, and on two consecutive nights they wake up with the intention of devouring Aimé. But Aimée, like the Little Thumbling, takes a crown from the head of one of the young ogre boys the first night, and from one of the young ogre girls the second, who are subsequently devoured instead of Aimé by Ravagio and Tourmentine, respectively. Whereas in Perrault's tale a male ogre devours his daughters, in d'Aulnoy's tale the male and female ogre each devour a little one of their own sex. This reference suggests that fairy-tale writers played on each other's tales and responded allegorically to one another.

11. We might read Aimé's transformation into a boat to be a sign of his “femininity.” According to Luce Irigaray, femininity was often figured in terms of something that contains. See for example “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ Has Always Been Appropriated by the ‘Masculine’” (Irigaray 133-46).

12. This special relation between dwarfs and fairies can be traced back to the fifteenth-century story of Melusine. Though none of her children were dwarfs, they each bore traces of their mother's fairy nature through some sort of deformity, like donkey ears, a red eye, a boar's tooth, and so on. According to Pierre Gordon, this association between fairies and physical deformities is pre-Christian and is likened to bodily mutilations which were part of initiation ceremonies: “Some [mutilations] consisted in resecting fingers or toes; others in extracting an eye or an ear, in removing a piece of bone from the cranium, […] in deforming the foot or producing a limp. In a word: no high initiation without corporal deformity” (230; my translation).

13. The French version reads as follows: “Amour […] Conserve-moi ma chère Abeille, / Fais que son coeur ne change pas, / Et malgré la métamorphose / Que notre infortune nous cause, / Qu'elle m'aime jusqu'au trépas.”

14. My translation is a composite of the renderings by Seifert (123) and Zipes (433). The original French reads: “Mais, ajoutoit-il, pourquoi vous éloigneriez-vous de moi? Vous trouverez sur mes fleurs une agréable rosée, et une liqueur plus douce que le miel: vous pourriez vous en nourrir. Mes feuilles vous serviront de lit de repos, où vous n'aurez rien à craindre de la malice des araignées.”

15. For her part, Aimée the bee plays perfectly the role of the chivalric male: “‘Have no fear that I'll ever leave you. Neither the lilies, nor the jasmines, nor the roses, nor all the flowers of the most beautiful gardens, could induce me to be unfaithful to you. You'll see me continually hovering around you, and you'll know that the orange tree is just as dear to the bee as Prince Aimé was to Princess Aimée.’ In short order she shut herself up in one of the largest flowers as though in a palace, and true love, which is never without its consolations, found some even in this union” (d'Aulnoy, “Bee” 434). The femininity of Aimé is emphasized in that he “contains” Aimée (she shut herself up in one of the largest flowers), and especially in his association with flowers, to which women are traditionally compared. In the words of Lewis Seifert, “The text emphasizes her [the heroine's] active role in the sexual relation […] by inverting the courtly love model whereby a knight pledges his fidelity and service to a lady” (124).

16. “Reading Novels brought me to reflect on things I had only vaguely understood until then. Upon reading Novels, I learned there was a passion which gave women an absolute hold [empire absolu] over men, and with joy I felt that I could have such a hold [empire] as well as any other woman; and that perhaps I already had the opportunity to exercise it [… T]here was a man of quality who was in love with me, and who tended to call me his little Queen: I recalled in my journals all the affection he showed me; and I was sure this affection was an effect of the passion that I saw so well expressed in Novels: I regretted having ignored it for so long, and not having taken better advantage of the hold [empire] I believed to have on this lover” (“La lecture des Romans me fit faire réfléxion sur des choses que je n'avois jusques-là comprises que confusément. J'appris en les lisant, qu'il y avoit une passion qui donnoit aux femmes un empire absolu sur les hommes, et je sentis avec joye, que je pouvois aussi-bien qu'une autre, prétendre à cet empire; et que peut-être même j'avois déja eu occasion de l'exercer [… I]l y avoit un homme de qualité qui m'aimoit, et qui m'appelloit d'ordinaire sa petite Reine: je rappellai dans ma mémoire tout l'attachement qu'il m'avoit marqué; et je ne doutai point que cet attachement ne fût un effet de la passion que je voyois si bien exprimée dans les Romans: J'eu regret de l'avoir ignorée si long-temps, et de n'avoir pas mieux profité de l'empire que je croyois avoir eu sur cet Amant”). See Murat 9.

    The narrator realizes that she took on this passion for this man out of her own will to control him: “I only wished to see Blossac to have the glory of subjecting him to my laws” (“Je n'avois souhaité de voir Blossac, que pour avoir la gloire de le soumettre à mes loix”). But the narrator finally gives in to what she mistook for love, and rather than submit Blossac to her own will, begins to do everything to please him. In her confusion, she again criticizes novels: “Even the Novels that had been until then a delight for me began to bore me. I didn't approve of the Heroines who took pleasure in mistreating their lovers” (“Les Romans même qui avoient jusques-là fait mes délices, commencerent à m'ennuyer. Je n'approuvois point que leurs Héroïnes prissent plaisir à maltraiter leur Amans”). See Murat 14-15.

17. “She [Aimée] had manufactured a thousand pretty things, some with fish bones and shells, and others with sea rushes and canes. Despite their simplicity these articles were so exquisitely made that it was easy to judge that the princess had good taste and ingenuity” (d'Aulnoy, “Bee” 422; my emphasis).

18. “[T]he cooked is a cultural transformation of the raw” (Lévi-Strauss 20; my translation). In her tale “La grenouille bienfaisante” (“The Beneficent Frog”), d'Aulnoy gives another example of a wild and monstrous character, the fairy lioness, who also has transgressive eating habits: she eats fly pies (d'Aulnoy, “Frog” 548).

19. In fact, as Norbert Elias has argued, Rousseau's works issue from the same sense of malaise that seventeenth-century aristocrats experienced, and which is at the core of romanticism. See Elias 254-55.

20. “In primitive times the sparse human population had no more social structure than the family, no laws but those of nature, no language but that of gesture and some inarticulate sounds. They were not bound by any idea of common brotherhood and, having no rule but that of force, they believed themselves each other's enemies. […] An individual isolated on the face of the earth, at the mercy of mankind, is bound to be a ferocious animal. […] Never having seen anything beyond their own immediate milieu, they did not even understand that; they did not understand themselves. They had the concept of a father, a son, a brother, but not that of a man. Their hut contained all of their fellow men. Stranger, beast, monster: these were all one to them. Apart from themselves and their family, the whole universe would count as nothing to them” (Rousseau, “Essay” 31-33; my emphasis).

21. In the following quote, Rousseau opposes savage to barbaric society: “there were families [savage], but there were no nations [barbaric]. There were domestic languages, but there were no popular ones. There were marriages but there was no love at all. Each family was self-sufficient and perpetuated itself exclusively by inbreeding […]. Instinct held the place of passion; habit held the place of preference. They became husband and wife without ceasing to be brother and sister. There would be nothing stimulating enough in that to loosen the tongue, nothing to provoke accents of ardent passion often enough to conventionalize them” (Rousseau, “Essay” 45-46). In the English version, the translator does not clearly maintain the distinction between “savage” and “barbaric” found in the original French. See for instance Rousseau, Essai 508.

22. The following passage illustrates particularly well the self-interest of civil man according to Rousseau: “[A] devouring ambition, the burning passion to enlarge one's relative fortune, not so much from real need as to put oneself ahead of others, inspires in all men a dark propensity to injure on another, a secret jealousy which is all the more dangerous in that it often assumes the mask of benevolence in order to do its deeds in greater safety; in a word, there is competition and rivalry on the one hand, conflicts of interest on the other, and always the hidden desire to gain an advantage at the expense of other people. All these evils are the main effects of property and the inseparable consequences of nascent inequality” (Discourse 119).

23. “Let us therefore beware of confusing the savage man with the man we have before our eyes. Nature treats every animal abandoned to her care with a partiality which seems to prove how jealous she is of that right” (Rousseau, Discourse 85).

24. The narrator describes Grognon's riches as follows: “The king followed her, and entering the cellar he saw two hundred barrels placed in rows one above the other. He asked her whether it was only for herself she kept such a stock. ‘Yes, Sire,’ she replied, ‘for myself alone: but I shall be delighted if your majesty will do me the honour to taste my wines. Here is Canary, Saint Laurent, Champagne, Hermitage, Rivesalte, Rossolis, Persicot, Fenouillet; which do you prefer, Sire?’ ‘Frankly,’ said the king, ‘I hold that champagne is worth all the other wines put together.’ Grognon immediately took a small hammer, struck a cask two or three times […] and out came a million of pistoles.” Out of the next cask rolled “a bushel of double Louis-d'ors,” and out of the next “so many pearls and diamonds that the floor of the cellar was covered with them.” The astonished king then states: “There is treasure enough here to buy ten kingdoms, each as big as Paris!” See d'Aulnoy, Fairy 2-3.

25. The sense that Grognon is far from being noble is evoked when she is said to be even less presentable than a peasant woman, “plus laide et plus mal bâtie qu'une paysanne” (d'Aulnoy, Contes 302). In one English translation, “peasant woman” is replaced by “old gipsy,” perhaps to emphasize the sense of social inferiority evoked by Grognon's portrait: “They met Grognon […] looking more ugly and ill-shapen than an old gipsy” (d'Aulnoy, Fairy 5).

26. “She proceeded to dress herself in a gown of green and gold brocade, her long fair hair falling in wavy folds upon her shoulders, and fanned by the passing breezes, as was the fashion in those days, and crowned with a light wreath of roses and jasmine, the leaves of which were made of emeralds” (d'Aulnoy, Fairy 4).

27. “The ugly creature was excessively occupied with her toilette. She had one shoe made half a cubit higher in the heel than the other, in order to appear less lame, a bodice stuffed upon one shoulder to conceal the hump on its fellow. A glass eye, the best she could procure, to replace the one she had lost. She painted her brown skin white, dyed her red hair black, and then put on an open robe of amaranth-coloured satin faced with blue, and a yellow petticoat, trimmed with violet ribbon. She determined to make her entrée on horseback, because she had heard it was a custom of the queens of Spain” (d'Aulnoy, Fairy 4).

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