[In this essay, Tucker draws a parallel between the depiction of fairies in d'Aulnoy's fairy tales and contemporary beliefs about midwives.]

In oral and literary contes de fées, fairies are no strangers to the drama of birth. Fairies do more than attend the birth scene in these tales, they also orchestrate every stage of reproduction. They predict conception and, if angry, cast spells of infertility. They determine the circumstances and the outcome of pregnancy by providing—or withholding—aid to the mother to be. Following labor, they attend to the needs of the newborn and dictate the child's path in life through their gifts, beneficent or malevolent. And in true fairy fashion, woe be to those who forget or refuse to offer up adequate compensation for the fairies' contributions to these rites of fertility.

The fairy tale as a genre is defined, of course, by its frequent binarism. There are good fairies; there are bad fairies. However, when placed within the historically specific moment of the late seventeenth century, the dual nature of this character takes on new meaning. Reading late seventeenth-contes de fée in the light of early modern medical, legal, and popular writings on midwiferys, I will consider how binaristic representations of the fairy echo in many ways wide-spread beliefs regarding the midwife's own role behind the closed doors of the birth scene.¹

In an era in which about one of every ten married women could expect to die as result of pregnancy,² the early-modern midwife was—like the fairy—at once welcomed and feared. She wielded powers that could bring about a happy delivery but that could also provoke an accouchement contre nature and even death itself. Not surprisingly, the midwife was often a target of criticism within the male-dominated medical community. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century gynecological and obstetric manuals frequently describe the horrors caused by the «imprudence des matrones.» Their authors assert that unsuccessful labor is generally the result of the impatience, arrogance, and stubbornness of midwives. In his Des maladies des femmes grosses et accouchées (1668), for example, François Mauriceau frequently disagrees with common midwife practices and dedicates entire chapters to the injuries that these women inflict on their patients (e.g., «D'une femme qui mourut dès le même jour qu'elle fut accouchée, sa sage-femme luy ayant fait trop de violence pour la délivrer de l'arrière-faix resté en sa matrice» [382]).³

In the contes de fées, fairies consistently perform tasks that are not unlike those of the midwife. Moving from birth to birth, the fairy in Perrault's «Riquet à la Houppe» is summoned at two different moments in the tale by pregnant queens. Absent from the narrative immediately following her work at the birth scene, the fairy's identity is defined solely in terms of her function as attendant to labor and delivery. D'Aulnoy's «La Grenouille bienfaisante» stresses still more clearly the function of the fairy as midwife. A pregnant queen finds herself imprisoned in the horrific cave of the vicious Fée Lionne. After she saves a fairy-frog from being killed, the frog shows its gratitude by protecting the queen throughout her pregnancy. Scared and alone, the queen begs the frog: «soyez à mes couches, puisque je suis condamnée à les faire ici» (4: 322).⁴ The frog agrees to be «sa Lucine» and consoles the queen to the best of her ability. The frog's reference to Lucine, Roman goddess of childbirth, echoes the midwife Louise Bourgeois's own acknowledgment of her own mentors from Antiquity, Phanerote (Socrates' mother) and Lucine: «Comme Lucine, déesse des accouchements, jalouse d'honneur, vit que Phanerote m'avait départi de si grandes faveurs, à l'envi me départit des siennes, m'apprit de quel pied il faut marcher en telle affaire.»⁵

As Laurent Joubert explains in his Erreurs populaires, the early-modern era associated the midwife with predictive powers. Midwives «who wanted to be considered prophetesses» pretended to be able to interpret the umbilical cord. The more knots, wrinkles, and kinks there were, the more children a woman would have; the intervals between those spaces indicated the timing between each pregnancy. Furthermore, if the knots were black or red in color, the woman would probably bear more sons. For white knots, a daughter was more likely.⁶

The fairy-midwife also has the power to predict, and even to control, future fertility. In d'Aulnoy's «Le Prince Marcassin,» a barren queen prays to the gods and to the fairies that they will help her. Her prayers will be answered one day in the woods during a nap («elle fut saisie d'un si profond sommeil, qu'elle se couche au pié d'un arbre & s'endormit» [5: 295]). She dreams that a fairy flying above takes pity on her and decides to «gift» her with a child. With this, the queen's decision to se coucher leads to ses couches: «Au bout de quelques mois, la reine s'apperçut qu'elle étoit grosse» (5: 297). In «La Biche au bois,» an infertile queen—persuaded that «le roi l'aimeroit encore davantage si elle avoit [un enfant]» (4: 349)—makes a pilgrimage to springs reputed for their healing powers. As she sits at the fountain mourning her infertility, a fairy in the shape of a large crawfish appears and ushers her to a nearby castle, explaining that the queen will soon have all she desires. The fairy-as-crawfish is herself a signifier of fertility: «Vivant sous une carapace protectrice … l'écrevisse rappelle que les ébauches et préfigurations de la vie renaissante … oeufs, foetus … sont entourés de coquilles, matrices et enveloppes.»⁷ Indeed, this contact with the fairy serves as clear catalyst for a transition from barrenness to fertility. The path to the fairy castle is usually «fermé de ronces & d'épine[s].» However, as the queen and her fairy companion move through the brush, «les ronces poussèrent des roses, les jasmins & les orangers entrelacèrent leurs branches pour faire un berceau couvert de feuilles & de fleurs» (4: 351). The queen's journey through once impenetrable vegetation to a berceau of lush, fruit-producing flowers reflects metaphorically the transition of the womb from an infertile state to a fertile one.

If a fairy is welcomed because she has the ability to speed conception, she is also feared because she can render women of childbearing age sterile. Infertility in the tales is often a function of previous, ill-fated birth scenes. In Mme d'Aulnoy's «Babiole,» a queen believes that her infertility was predestined at birth and is the result of a fairy's angry revenge against her mother: «la fée Fanferluche étant venue à sa naissance, & n'ayant pas été satisfaite de la reine sa mère, s'étoit mise en furie, & ne lui avoit souhaité que des chagrins» (4: 51). In «La Princesse Carpillon,» a mean-spirited son asks a fairy to prevent his father's new wife from having a child, which would complicate his inheritance. The fairy apologizes: «vous êtes venu trop tard: la reine est grosse d'un fils, je ne veux point lui faire de mal; mais s'il meurt ou qu'il lui arrive quelque chose, je vous promets que je l'empêcherai d'en avoir d'autres» (4: 229-30).

As the frequent temper tantrums of fairies at birth celebrations suggest, a benevolent fairy-midwife could easily become a malevolent witch. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the early seventeenth century, when la chasse aux sorcières had reached its paroxysm, descriptions of the demonic works of the midwife-witch abound in lay and learned writings. For example, Kramer and Sprenger's influential Malleus Maleficarum, first published in 1486 and reprinted no fewer than thirty times between 1487 and 1669, makes frequent references to midwives, witches, and their horrific acts toward new mothers and their offspring. Like the midwife-witch, nasty fairies can have a formidable influence over the outcome of the pregnancy. They withhold food from the mother-to-be, frighten her, or force her to complete arduous, impossible tasks. Through benevolent helpers or sometimes by sheer luck, these women carry their babies to term. However, the birth of the baby provides still more opportunity for the fairy-witch to torment the family.⁸

Early-modern women took every precaution to keep at bay those whose intentions might be mean spirited. From the moment contractions began, doors and windows of the expectant mother's home were kept tightly shut and remained so for at least the first five days after delivery. Inside this closed space, the woman was surrounded by female family members, friends, and a professional midwife or an experienced family member acting as matrone. The closed, family space of birth and recovery served to prevent cold drafts which caused illness. It was also essential in preventing the afterbirth from being stolen and to ward away evil spirits.⁹

In many of Mme d'Aulnoy's childbirth tales, the excluded, evil fairy-midwife is able to bypass all such efforts to keep her from influencing negatively l'heureux événement. In «La Princesse Printanière,» the brutal Carabosse extracts vengeance for unspecified deeds committed against her by the king by striking dead every wetnurse interviewed prior to the birth of his long-awaited daughter. The king and queen meet in secret with their aides («l'on ferma bien les portes & les fenêtres pour n'être pas entendus» [3:188]) and decide that they will invite all of the good fairies they know in an effort to protect the queen and the future princess during birth. The fairies arrive at the birthbed of the queen at the first signs of labor. Once the child is born, the fairies begin endowing the child with qualities that only fairies can give (beauty, esprit, music, letters). Before they are able to finish their work, Carabosse comes down the chimney and hexes the child: «De guignon guigonnant, jusqu'à l'âge de vingt ans» (3:190).

That the midwife-witch could «claim» the child and infuse it with vile qualities is a common fear in both lay and religious criticism of midwifery. Midwives were often accused of stealing babies from their mothers at the birth scene in order to use them in demonic rituals. The Malleus Maleficarum alleges that a midwife in Strasbourg confessed that she had killed more children than she could count after kidnapping them by tucking newborns in her cloak as she walked out the door. According to witnesses, her disrespect for her fragile cargo was made clear when a mutilated newborn fell out of her coat as she simply walked about. She was arrested shortly after and convicted of infanticide.¹⁰ Even if evil midwives did not end up killing the child, they could be counted on to do horrible damage to its soul by baptizing the child in the name of the devil.

At a moment when Church, state, and medical community were attempting to control the powers of sages femmes, d'Aulnoy's bivalent fairy reflects intense anxieties about the birth scene and about the power of women to either nurture or destroy. Lewis Seifert has argued that the development of the literary fairy tale in France coincided with an emerging awareness of the potentially threatening power of motherhood in society. Examining late seventeenth century treatises on marriage and family, he concludes that the binary presentation of good and bad mothers in the fairy tale vogue (1690-1715) reflects heightened concerns of “the dangerous ability of mothers to vacillate between good and evil” that fueled prescriptive moralist writings on the domestic duties of the married woman as mother.¹¹ Seifert's observations regarding the ambivalent dynamic between mères and belles-mères can in many ways be extended to the midwife who was herself referred to as belle-mère in some early-modern treatises.¹² Fairy-midwife-witch, the early-modern birth attendant is at once life-giver and bourreau. Daughter of Clothos and her sisters, the fairy's role as menace in the late seventeenth-century tale takes into account many of the moral and physical dangers with which the midwife was associated in early-modern culture. At a moment when Church and state were unable to curb the work of poorly trained or ill-intentioned sages femmes, female fairy-tale authors like d'Aulnoy use the bivalent character of the fairy to foster an awareness among women of the caution that is necessary when engaging one of their own at such an important moment of their lives.

Notes

1. For a more detailed study of midwifery in the late seventeenth century as it pertains to the tales of Charles Perrault and Madame d'Aulnoy, see Holly Tucker, Pregnant Fictions: Tales of Childbirth in Early-Modern France (forthcoming).

2. Jacques Gélis, Mireille Laget, and M.-F. Morel, Entrer dans la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 95.

3. François Mauriceau, Des maladies des femmes grosses et accouchees avec la bonne et veritable méthode de les bien aider en leurs accouchemens naturels … (Paris: Henault, 1668), p. 382.

4. All reference to tales are from Nouveau Cabinet des Fées, ed. Jacques Barchilon, 18 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine, 1785-1786).

5. Louise Bourgeois, Observations diverses sur la stérilité, perte de fruits, fécondité, accouchements et maladies des femmes et enfants nouveau-nés suivi de Instructions à ma fille, ed. Françoise Olive (Paris: Côté-femmes, 1992), p. 174.

6. Laurent Joubert, Popular Errors [1678], trans. Gregory David de Rocher (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1989), p. 174.

7. Anne Defrance, Les contes de fées et les nouvelles de Madame d'Aulnoy (Geneva: Droz, 1998), p. 106.

8. The affinities between the fairy and the witch have also been explored by Catherine Marin in her study of feminine subversion in the contes de fées (Pouvoir et subversion féminine: Les Contes de fées à l'époque classique en France, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1991).

9. Jacques Guillemeau, De l'heureux accouchement des femmes où il est traicté du gouvernement de leur grossesse, de leur travail naturel et contre nature (1609). See also Mireille Laget, Naissances: L'Accouchement avant l'âge de la clinique (Paris: Seuil, 1982); and Jacques Gélis, History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy, and Birth in Early Modern Europe, trans. Rosemary Morris (Boston: Northeast U P, 1991).

10. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Montague Summers (London: Pushkin Press, 1951), p. 140.

11. Lewis Seifert, Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690-1715 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) pp. 178-191.

12. For example, the full title of Gervais de La Tousche's critique of midwifery evokes the fairy-tale commonplace evil stepmothers and mothers-in-law who bring much suffering to innocents. La tres-haute et tres souveraine science de l'art et industrie naturelle d'enfanter contre la maudicte et perverse impericie des femmes que l'on appelle saiges femmes, ou belles meres, lesquelles par leur ignorance font journellement perir une infinité de femmes & d'enfans à l'enfantement