SOURCE: Duggan, Anne E. “Feminine Genealogy, Matriarchy, and Utopia in the Fairy Tale of Marie-Catherine D'Aulnoy.” Neophilologus 82, no. 2 (April 1998): 199-208.

[In the essay below, Duggan argues that d'Aulnoy created a fairy-tale version of salon culture in her stories as a means of envisioning a utopian space for aristocratic women.]

The rise of Louis XIV's absolutist regime marks the fall of both the nobility of the sword and the précieuses of the salons. Over the course of the seventeenth century, all hopes of retaining a feudal or feudal-like order were lost; consequently, the nobility lost the legitimate foundation of its political, social and economic identity. What was left of this “feudal” identity was in part recuperated by the salons. Feudalism became a sort of fashion, where nick-names functioned like titles conveying social worth earned by one's polite conversation and civility, and the salons themselves might be seen as so many chivalric orders. But what differed from previous such orders is that women were at their centers, directing conversations, prescribing a code of behavior, and affirming the equality of the sexes. Salons were influential institutions in French society, in which there developed a new nobility or elite, oftentimes including members of the Haute-Bourgeoisie.

When Louis XIV began his direct rule in 1661, the court surpassed the salons in influencing French cultural affairs. Since at least the Fronde (1648-1652),¹ salons had become rather suspect in the eyes of the monarchy as salon women such as Mademoiselle de Montpensier and Madame de Longueville, who frequented the salon of Madame de Rambouillet, became active opponents of Louis XIII's monarchy. Already by the beginning of the century, nobles were losing governmental positions to the bourgeoisie and the nobility of the robe, for they represented a potential threat to the constitution of the monarchy. Writers such as Charles Perrault identified salon women, or “independent” women, as a threat both to the rule of men and to the monarchy itself. That the rule of men or parents over women was reinforced in the latter part of the century can be demonstrated in part by the laws passed requiring widows and working women to get the consent of their parents and their employers in order to marry.²

The modern literary fairy tale is a phenomenon of the end of the century: it is post-Fronde and post-preciosity. It might be said that the fairy tale provides a place, or rather, a no-place (ou-topos), in which the traditional nobility and salon women can resolve the contradiction of their very existence in a pre-capitalist, patriarchal monarchy. These fairy tale resolutions take the form of idealized feudal and matriarchal worlds, based on reciprocal relations between all nobles, regardless of their gender.

Marie Catherine d'Aulnoy, the great initiator of the literary fairy tale, created through her tales utopic spaces in which feudal lords reign independently or in harmonious co-existence with a monarch, and noble women and men live in perfect equality. Her utopias may be characterized as matriarchal in two respects. First, women are usually the rulers, governing according to conventionally feminine values. Second, d'Aulnoy creates a female heritage or genealogy in her tales, drawing from and continuing a female mythology, indicating and inscribing in her tales a transfer of power from generation to generation of women.

This is evident in the very genre of fairy tales, for the evocation of fairies is the evocation of female powers themselves. D'Aulnoy makes this explicit in her choice of stories and characters. She draws from at least two French traditions of fairy tales, those about the fairy Morgane, who lures a mortal man into her fairy world, and Mélusine, who went to live among mortals and became the founder of a noble line. Fairies often marked the beginning of a noble family's lineage, but in d'Aulnoy's tales, they protect them. We might consider d'Aulnoy's Amazons to be fairy-like in their supernatural powers. Even princesses have fairy-powers, like their ancestors Morgane and Mélusine, both of whom where “fairy-princesses.” Salon women, in their grace and virtue, are the fairies and Amazons of the recent past, leading good conversations as well as soldiers against those of an absolute monarch. By drawing from such feminine “mythologies,” d'Aulnoy creates salon-like utopias, a world in which women play an essential role in the well-being of all those worthy of entry.

That noble women are essential to a perfect society is best demonstrated in d'Aulnoy's tale, L'île de la Félicité, the first of her fairy tales to be published. In this tale, a mortal man, the prince Adolphe, is lured away from his cold and sterile Russia to the island of Félicité. “Félicité” refers both, and quite consequently, to the perfect happiness and satisfaction that can be acquired on the island (eu-topos, or place of happiness),³ and to the princess who is the source of all things here, whose name is Félicité. Such an identification of the women Félicité with the place of the island is reminiscent of the salon, where the space of the salon is identified with and organized in conformity to the personal style of the maîtresse de maison. According to Joan DeJean, it was she “who dictated the style of the salon,” embodying its very essence.⁴ Given the structural parallel between the salon-maîtresse de maison on the one hand, and the island-Félicité on the other, L'île de la Félicité could be read as the story of the rise and fall of a feminine utopic space, allegorizing the decline of the salon after its golden age as best represented by Madame de Rambouillet and Madeleine de Scudéry.

Prince Adolphe can only reach the island with the help of the wind Zéphir, for “le sort des humains est tel qu'on ne saurait la trouver.”⁵ Mere mortals are refused admittance onto the island, which protects itself from an undesirable “outside” by being in-suitable (in that it is no-place, ou-topos) and by having monsters guard its boundaries. Like admittance to an exclusive salon, only those who conform to a particular code of behavior, which consequently confers ontological superiority to them (they are not mere mortals, but wind gods, fairy princesses, characterized by their “civility”), are admitted into Félicité.

This code is indicated to us in the opposition between Zéphir and his brother winds. On his way to Félicité, Adolphe stops at the cavern of the winds. The narrator informs us of their uncivil behavior:

leurs manières n'étaient pas civiles, ni polies et lorsqu'ils voulurent parler au prince ils faillirent à le gêler de leur haleine. L'un raconta qu'il venait de disperser une armée navale; l'autre qu'il avait fait périr plusieurs vaisseaux … enfin chacun se vanta de ses exploits.⁶

What makes Zéphir's brothers uncivil is their conversation: they speak only of destruction and death. In effect, they sound like soldiers discussing battles and politics, subjects to be avoided in polite salon conversation. So their breath (haleine) freezes the atmosphere. The fact that they boast (se vantent) of their exploits shows their bad manners and is manifested in their very nature: they are winds, or vents, which sounds like se vanter.

That Zéphir's uncivil brothers are also wind gods suggests first, that he and his brothers are all of the noblesse d'épée. D'Aulnoy, as Scudéry did before her, deifies the elite for whom she writes; neither bourgeois nor peasant have supernatural powers in her tales. Second, Zéphir's brothers seem to illustrate the violence of the traditional nobility in their function as soldiers, defined by their physical force. They serve as negative examples of the nobility, the image of which d'Aulnoy hopes to rehabilitate and to civilize through her tales.

But not all of the winds are so uncivil. Contrary to his cold, violent brothers, Zéphir has an agreeable “air” about him, and is the only wind allowed onto the island of Félicité. As can be expected, his conversation is qualitatively different from that of his brothers. Whereas his brothers speak of death and destruction, implying relations of domination, Zéphir's language offers delectable descriptions of the island and its beautiful inhabitants, recounting not actions, but conversations:

Zéphir, disait-elle [Félicité], que je te trouve agréable! que tu me fais de plaisir! tant que tu seras ici, je ne quitterai point la promenade … Je [Zéphir] vous avoue que des douceurs prononcées par une si charmante personne, m'enchantaient et j'étais si peu maître de moi même que je n'aurais pu me résoudre à la quitter, si je n'eusse appréhendé de vous déplaire.⁷

Zéphir's language can be characterized by a desire to please and to satisfy his interlocutor, which, according to Elizabeth Goldsmith, is typical of polite conversation of this period: “The classical ideal of civility, it would seem, depends on a kind of perpetual verbal potlatch within a circumscribed social circle. Social contact is a kind of constant circulation of verbal gifts.”⁸ This “verbal potlatch” assures that relations are based on reciprocity rather than domination, for ideally everyone should strive to please everyone else within the salon, or in our case, within the confines of the island of Félicité.

Zéphir incarnates those codes which are constitutive of the space of the island, or in other words, constitutive of the way in which relations between people are organized: the desire to please, civility, and polite conversation. Relations in Félicité, and more generally in fairy-land, are based on reciprocity, on the mutual pleasure or satisfaction of all those admitted. In this way, d'Aulnoy's fairy utopias reproduce the structure of salons such as those of Madame de Rambouillet and Madeleine de Scudéry. Although salonniers were in reality quite politically active, “outside” politics, wars, and relations based on domination of any sort were formally excluded from the space of the salon, from its discourse about itself, and from the conversations between its members.

When Adolphe finally arrives on the island, he discovers a world in which one need not look far to satisfy one's needs and desires: “on trouvait dans toute l'île des tables couvertes et servies délicatement aussitôt qu'on le souhaitait.”⁹ In a sense, one is like a baby in the womb, who is immediately satisfied through the umbilical cord. This interpretation is suggested by the numerous metaphors of the womb and the female sex in d'Aulnoy's tales, from delicious gardens to “des grottes faites exprès pour les plaisirs.”¹⁰ In one of these caves Adolphe finds a white statue of Cupid from whose torch spurts unceasingly a jet of water, a sign perhaps of the eternal satisfaction offered to man in this world governed by a woman.

After enjoying some of the island's pleasures, the prince finally finds the princess Félicité: “Elle était sur un trône fait d'une seule escarboucle plus brillante que le soleil; mais les yeux de la princesse Félicité étaient encore plus brillants que l'escarboucle.”¹¹ Carbuncle has quite a marvelous history, as it was associated with both Morgane and Mélusine. By associating the carbuncle with Félicité, d'Aulnoy not only indicates Félicité's fairy-like nature, but also inscribes her in a tradition of fairy-princesses of which she is the continuation. This continuation constitutes, as it were, a “feminine genealogy,” the antithesis to a patriarchal and absolutist monarchy legitimated by salic law. It is to mark an opposition to such a monarchy that d'Aulnoy alludes to Félicité as a sort of Sun Queen (Félicité's eyes, brighter than carbuncle, are like two suns), center and source of all light and life of the island, of this “other” heliocentric world from which linear time, changing fashions and death are excluded.

Yet, in her tale Belle Belle ou le Chevalier Fortuné, d'Aulnoy does find a way to overcome the apparently insurmountable opposition between the monarchy and her own aspirations as a woman of the noblesse d'épée. For it is not the monarchy itself that she attacks, but the way in which it is being constituted to the detriment of noble women and the feudal nobility, and to the profit of the rising bourgeoisie and those nobles who have adapted themselves to the new bourgeois order. Through this tale, d'Aulnoy proposes another solution, the re-establishment of the former alliance between the feudal nobility and the monarchy, along with the participation of noble women in political affairs.

In the beginning of the tale, the kingdom of the gentle king is being pillaged by Emperor Matapa's army. In the meantime, Belle's father, a dispossessed marquis who has no sons, has been ordered to provide a son or money to support the king's war effort. D'Aulnoy parallels the situation of the dispossessed nobility to that of the pillaged king or monarch, both of whom must unite in order to ward off a dangerous and destabilizing “outside.” The marquis' daughter Belle will be responsible for the economic stability of both the kingdom and of her own family, a stability accomplished only by the alliance between the nobility and the monarch. The story closes with the marriage of Belle to the monarch, a marriage which reintegrates the nobility, to the exclusion of the bourgeoisie, into a kinder, gentler monarchy.

Belle, the heroine of the tale, accomplishes such an alliance and brings stability to the kingdom by dressing up as a knight and thus passing herself off as a man. She recalls such salon women as Mademoiselle de Montpensier and Madame de Longueville, both of whom led troops against the monarchy during the Fronde. Through Belle, d'Aulnoy tries to rehabilitate the image of such women by having Belle lead troops to protect, rather than to destroy, the monarchy, at the same time that the tale pays homage to these Amazons of the Old Regime. In many of her tales d'Aulnoy contests the image of the threatening woman, demonstrating time and time again that noble women can play an active role in the constitution of a more perfect society—for both women and men. But this more perfect world is mere chimera without the complicity of noble men.

One day Adolphe asks how much time has passed since his arrival, and is more than surprised by Félicité's answer:

Trois cent ans! … en quel état est donc le monde? qui le gouverne à présent? qu'y fait on? quand j'y retournerai, qui me reconnaîtra et qui pourrai-je reconnaître? Mes états sont sans doute tombés en d'autres mains que celle de mes proches … je vais être un prince dépouillee, l'on me regardera comme un fantôme, je ne saurai plus les mœurs ni les coûtumes de ceux avec qui j'aurai à vivre.¹²

His first concerns are for the state of the world and of the government; that is to say, for political power which has traditionally been defined as a masculine power. His next and analogous concern is for his own lands and masculine genealogy. In this masculine world of kings and fathers, everything (mœurs, coûtumes) changes, is inconstant, whereas the feminine world of Félicité is constant and never-changing. By invoking linear time and patriarchal values, Adolphe threatens the matriarchal order of the island. He must therefore leave the island to meet his fate in the world of men.

It is no surprise that time, personified as an old man, takes the life of Adolphe as soon as he leaves the island. This old man symbolizes sterility and death, as opposed to Félicité, figured as the young mother.¹³ By taking the life of Adolphe, Father Time also takes the life of the island, for princess Félicité, source of all life here, has now become a widow, source of tears and mourning. The departure of Adolphe leads not only to his own death, but by causing Félicité to be filled with sorrow, brings about as well the end of utopia: the utopic world of the sun Queen has been abandoned for that of the Sun King, a world of death.

This tale is significant in that it is an introduction to all of d'Aulnoy's tales, which, although they may end with a “happily ever after,” having resolved through fiction the contradictions presented by her society and can thus be qualified as “utopic,” are at the same time many tales of the Félicité that was already lost. Félicité represents those salon women, centers of French cultural production in the first half of the century, who saw their decline with the rise of Louis XIV. D'Aulnoy inscribes in this tale the loss of place, of function, felt by both salon women and mothers, in a society that was becoming a court society and that was reaffirming the authority of the father in the family. Hence the need to create an-other place, a no-place or place of happiness where those disenfranchised noble women, endowed with fairy powers, find themselves again at the center of life.

While L'île de la Félicité tells the story of the rise and fall of the salon, L'oranger et l'abeille draws from the myth of Mélusine, and takes the reader back to an Amazonian past, to the “natural” matriarchal world of the “savage” ogres (or cannibals?). The tale is about princess Aimée, and her cousin, prince Aimé, who on separate occasions get stranded on the island of the ogres Tourmentine and Ravagio, far from the future destination which they will reach together, the île heureuse. We might envision this detour from utopia, from the île heureuse, as a visit to “nature,” to a lawless and thus dangerous place in which the true or natural powers of women, as well as the natural relation between the sexes, will be discovered.

Shipwrecked and then stranded on the ogres' island, princess Aimée is raised by the ogress Tourmentine, who becomes her adoptive mother. Although Tourmentine may be seen as the negative opposite of Aimée, they share, like mother and daughter, a certain “heritage” or transfer of powers. Aimée will “earn” Tourmentine's magic wand through a series of tricks to outsmart Tourmentine and Ravagio, which might be considered as Aimée's initiation into womanhood. Furthermore, they both wear animal skins, signs of women's sacredness at the time of the matriarchy.¹⁴ Tourmentine's snake skin evokes more specifically the fairies Morgane and Mélusine,¹⁵ both of whom took the form of snakes. In d'Aulnoy's tale, the animal skin is a sign of feminine power.

In writing his tale Peau d'Ane, Charles Perrault, conversely, desacrilizes the animal skin by making it a sign not of power, but of ridicule and ugliness, the result of which is becoming a social outcast:

L'Infante … poursuivait son chemin, / Le visage couvert d'une vilaine crasse; / A tous Passant elle tendait la main, / Et tâcher 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.¹⁶

By recuperating this ancient symbol belonging to a matriarchal past and reintegrating it into his tale in such a way as to negate its symbolism, Perrault represses an-other history or mythology in order to naturalize the domination of men over women. L'oranger et l'abeille and Peu d'Ane can be read as engagements, albeit conflicting ones, in a political debate over the definition of gender relations.

Contrary to Perrault, however, d'Aulnoy did not simply advocate the domination of women over men. Both Linda, the castrating Amazon, and Tourmentine, the cannibalistic ogre, are implicitly excluded from the île heureuse, or in other words, from utopia, at the end of the tale. Like her precursor Madeleine de Scudéry, d'Aulnoy puts forth a utopia based on reciprocity, and furthermore, on civility. Though she is stranded on a “savage” island, Aimée nevertheless builds for herself a “civil,” utopic space, much as Robinson Crusoe will do one generation later. In a cave, where she takes and protects her cousin Aimé, she re-creates the comforts befitting of a princess:

comme elle avoit beaucoup de proprêté et d'adresse, elle l'avoit meublé d'un tissu d'ailes de papillons de plusieurs couleurs … elle mettoit dans de grandes et profondes coquilles des branches de fleurs, cela faisoit comme des vases, qu'elle remplissait d'eau pour conserver ses bouquets … ces petits ouvrages, malgré leur simplicité, avoient quelque chose de si délicat, qu'il étoit aisé de juger par eux du bon goût et de l'adresse de la princesse.¹⁷

Her cave recalls those from L'île de la Félicité, and more generally the island itself, in that is constituted as a feminine space which provides both comfort and protection to worthy (noble) men. At the same time, the use of words such as “adresse” and “bon goût” suggests that, although she roams the island wearing a tiger skin, Aimée is nonetheless like the women of the salons.

That d'Aulnoy promotes reciprocal relations between (noble) men and women is evident in the names of the main protagonists, which mark this equality: Aimée and Aimé. In order to demonstrate this “natural” equality, d'Aulnoy temporarily inverts conventional gender roles, evident as well in the examples of Belle and Félicité. For instance, Aimée rescues the shipwrecked Aimé while hunting, then protects him from the ogres in her salon-like cave. Finally, it is by means of Aimée's wit and fairy wand that allows them to escape from Tourmentine and Ravagio. This inversion is symbolized most explicitly in the scene where Aimée turns herself into a bee, eliciting images of the natural, matriarchal society of the bees, and Aimé into a flower, conventionally a metaphor for women. The very form of the bee and the flower, in addition to their multiple attributes, further confuses (or fuses) the sexual identity of Aimé and Aimée. By situating the two in “nature,” d'Aulnoy concocts a myth of a primordial matriarchal society at the same time that she affirms a “natural” equality or sameness of the sexes.

Yet, an essential feature of the constitution of utopia is difference, or otherness. Such difference is created by the way in which the utopian world rejects the negative or “other” outside and includes the positive or “same” within its boundaries.¹⁸ In d'Aulnoy's utopias, difference is not constructed on the basis of gender, but rather, on such criteria as nationality, race, class, or more generally, a failure to conform to the code of behavior constitutive of utopia. In L'île de la Félicité, the uncivil winds are excluded; in Belle-Belle ou le Chevalier Fortuné, the alliance or sameness of the monarchy and nobility is based on their common opposition to the apparently non-European, non-French Emperor Matapa; in L'Oranger et l'abeille, ogres fulfill the role of the other in their cannibalism, perhaps modeled on the Indians of Brazil, so popular in sixteenth and seventeenth century relations de voyage; and the castrating Amazonian Linda is excluded for her extremism. In tales such as Gracieuse et Percinet, d'Aulnoy constructs gender sameness in opposition to the apparently bourgeoise Grognon. Only noble men and women who uphold the principles of civility and reciprocity enjoy the fruits of her utopias.

D'Aulnoy's project is twofold. First, she is concerned with the role and representation of women, particularly noble women, in French society. By linking the salon women of the recent past to fairies and Amazons of a much earlier period, she establishes, on the one hand, a sort of female genealogy, a literary and cultural heritage or transfer of powers, and on the other, she legitimates a more active female role based on historical precedent. Second, d'Aulnoy quite nostalgically attempts to resuscitate and at the same time rehabilitate a feudal culture that has all but disappeared. Both of these objectives are opposed to the formation of a patriarchal and absolutist state that allied itself with the bourgeoisie, and whose proponents, such as Charles Perrault, call for the submission of women to men.

These objectives come together in the figure of the salon, repeated and refigured ad infinitum throughout all of d'Aulony's tales, in the nobility, civility, or more precisely, in the ontological superiority of those accepted into her salon-like utopias, as well as in the reciprocity governing relations between the sexes. Originating in the noble milieu of the late Middle Ages and often used to legitimate a noble line by positing a fairy princess such as Mélusine at its origin, the genre of the fairy tale has historically united the notion of feminine genealogy and power to the legitimation of the nobility.¹⁹

It is thus no surprise that the genre attracted writers such as Charlotte-Rose Caumont de La Force and Henriette Julie de Murat, who, like d'Aulnoy, were from old noble families and provoked scandal due to their sometimes not so “feminine,” and even “scandalous” behavior, questioning in their tales and their lives restrictions put to them due to their gender and an absolutist state.²⁰ Yet these writers often uphold the notion of nobility to the detriment of those peoples and classes who support utopia symbolically in their otherness, and even physically, as does the virtually invisible servant class, represented in La Chatte Blanche “by disembodied ‘little white hands.’”²¹ While her status as noblesse d'épée and as a women impelled d'Aulnoy to question her society, she nevertheless placed restrictions on who could enjoy the freedoms and pleasures offered by her utopias.

Notes

1. In brief, the Fronde was a general protest against the cardinal Mazarin, the principal minister under the regency of Anne d'Autriche, during the minority of Louis XIV (1648-1652). The protest was provoked by his unpopular financial policies and more generally by both popular and noble discontent with the monarchy.

2. Maïté Albistur and Daniel Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français, 2 vols. (Paris: des Femmes, 1977) 1: 198-199.

3. Louis Marin argues that utopia has two senses: “Utopie, c'est ou-topos, le non-lieu, mais c'est aussi eu-topos, le lieu de bonheur.” See Louis Marin, Utopiques: Jeux d'espaces (Paris: Minuit, 1973) 123.

4. Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 77.

5. Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine de. “L'île de la Félicité,” Le cabinet des fées, ed. Elisabeth Lemirre, 3 vols. (Arles: Editions Philippe Picquier, 1988) 1: 13.

6. Aulnoy, “L'île” 12-13.

7. Aulnoy, “L'île” 13.

8. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, “Exclusive Conversations”: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1988) 11.

9. Aulnoy, “L'île” 15.

10. Aulnoy, “L'île” 16.

11. Aulnoy, “L'île” 19

12. Aulnoy, “L'île” 21.

13. In the tale, Félicité is surrounded by cupids, children of Venus. The tale makes of Félicité a new Morgan, who also symbolized motherhood, by virtue of the morganian plot. On the basic structure and symbolism of Morganian and Melusinian tales, see Laurence Harf-Lancer, Les fées au Moyen Age: Morgane et Mélusine: La naissance des fées (Genève: Editions Slatkine, 1984).

14. Pierre Gordon, “Mélusine,” Cahiers du Sud 324 (1954): 228.

15. Mélusine is specifically referred to when Aimé is turned into a portrait of “Merlusine,” or in other words, Mélusine.

16. Charles Perrault. Contes, ed. Marc Soriano (Paris: Flammarion, 1989) 224.

17. Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, “L'oranger et l'abeille,” Le cabinet des fées ou collection choisie des contes de fées, et autres contes merveilleux, ornés de figures, ed. Charles Joseph Mayer, 41 vols. (Amsterdam: 1785-1789) 2: 314-315.

18. Marin 141.

19. Claude Lecouteux, Mélusine et le Chevalier au Cygne (Paris: Payot, 1982) 36-46.

20. Jack Zipes, trans., Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment: Classic French Fairy Tales (New York: New American Library, 1989) 101-102, 129-130, 295-297.

21. Michele L. Farrell, “Celebration and Repression of Feminine Desire in Mme d'Aulnoy's Fairy Tale: La Chatte Blanche,” Esprit Créateur 29:3 (1989): 54.