SOURCE: Farrell, Michèle L. “Celebration and Repression of Feminine Desire in Mme d'Aulnoy's Fairy Tale: La Chatte blanche.” L'Esprit Createur XXIX, no. 3 (fall 1989): 52-64.

[In this essay, Farrell questions the power of d'Aulnoy's tales to subvert gender stereotypes.]

Mme d'Aulnoy's Contes des Fées (1698) can be read as a register of aristocratic feminine desire inscribed against a sober charting of privileged woman's place in the social order at the end of the 17th Century.¹ Her “wish-fulfilling narratives” afford an intimate glimpse of woman imaging herself in the veiled security of the marvelous and suggest discrete early answers to the more recently formulated question—“what does woman want?”² Mme d'Aulnoy's tales take into account the 17th-century female protagonist as heroine of her own life, socially circumscribed by and apparently chafing against the code of propriety governing her role in Louis XIV's world. As Gérard Genette, Joan DeJean and Nancy Miller have shown, that code translates textually into constraints of plausibility regulating acceptable possibilities of plot for her as feminine persona in fiction.³ Unlike the historically grounded novel genre through which writers such as Mme de Villedieu and Mme de Lafayette more directly contested a normative masculine version of “reality” (as demonstrated by DeJean, Miller and Arthur Flannigan),⁴ the fairy tale genre freed the woman writer to challenge those restricted options of plot through the exercise of the right to phantasize contracted in the practice of the fairy tale as genre.

The liberative character of the fairy-tale genre allows for the determinative inscription of the feminine psyche into the story. But, at the same time, the ideology endemic to the formal features of the genre limits the resolutions available to its female practitioners, and effectively contains feminine desire as it articulates itself within this mode. Nevertheless, the feminine psyche will out, and will erupt in the self-figurative framed tales within the tales, systematically featuring women narrators shaped by women writers, faithfully representing themselves as they spin their tales and spell out their world of desire.⁵

Mme d'Aulnoy was one of many women to pass from the activity of telling stories to the act of writing them down at this time.⁶ As Raymonde Robert points out, these women were for the most part aristocrats and their literary activity was viewed as a fashionable salon pastime, a game, responding to a need to occupy leisure time by amusing themselves and one another. Their stories reflect the collective concerns of a limited circle at a particular historical juncture.⁷ They mirror the shared desires and ideals of a feminine elite, the locus both of their inscribed origination and of their immediate destination; hence they constitute a class-and gender-inflected genre.

The aristocracy, infantilized under the absolutist reign of Louis XIV, appears to at once acknowledge its reduced status through espousal of this genre by its signifying women, and to project that infantilization hierarchically onto the masses from which it claims to borrow the genre. The literary fairy tale occupies a particular socio-cultural niche; on the one hand, as opposed to its folkloric counterpart, it is a written form produced in a setting of privilege, hence enjoying status as a dimension of official culture. On the other, borrowing as it does from popular oral tradition, it shares with folk culture a position of marginality in relation to the institution of the official esthetics of the period. The attitude structuring the fairy tale is at once condescending and dependent, reflecting a crucial relationship that binds the aristocracy to the masses at that time—that of the “nourrice”—the servant/mother, herself nurturing and dependent, the very persona who will be identified as the transmitter of tales from the common folk to the nobility.⁸ This pivotal figure, if not necessarily the actual agent, functions symbolically as symptom of the asymmetry of the class relationship obtaining between the aristocracy and the people—the tension between the patronizing paternalistic and the subservient maternalistic. And the feminine elite occupies a conflicted position between the two.

Aristocratic women, assigned the role of signifying infantalization for a feminized, disempowered class, will entertain themselves and one another with stories supposedly purveyed by women of the people. They write from a doubly marginalized position, but always from within an officially sanctioned space. In their protected inconsequence they are free of the censure of official esthetic constraints, and their story telling operates as a means of self-confirming empowerment. They can point to the common people from whom their stories come as indicators of those stories' powerlessness and harmlessness, and as signifiers of the frivolity of their enterprise. Their activity in no way threatens the status quo and is not to be taken seriously. At the same time, in this world of supposed fantasy, they can wrestle with the realities of their awkward position—that of privileged women. The stories produced escape the “real” only to more profoundly engage with its constraints. They reflect the subjectivity of a specific group of women and, in mirroring its concerns, attest to a will to transform stories told elsewhere according to their own desires. Thus, for example, as both Darnton and Robert note, preoccupations with the motifs of hunger and satiety that inform popular versions, generated by the imagination of the masses, will be replaced with an obsession for riches, rarity, exquisite and spectacular settings more proper to the aristocratic experience.⁹ And interpersonal relations will be realigned to reflect a feminine utopic vision.

The fairy tale genre allows, indeed is premised on, access to the realm of imagination, the privileged domain of fear and desire. And it traces the trajectories of desire in the elaboration of those fantasies that can only be articulated in the guise of the marvelous. But, as Rosemary Jackson quotes Freud, “the ‘creative’ imagination, indeed, is quite incapable of inventing anything; it can only combine components that are strange to one another” (Jackson, 8). Princesses can become monkeys, and frogs princes, fairies can be good or evil, young or old, but none of these can be anything not already known to the people writing them out. So that, often enough, what appears to be a flight of fancy is merely a transparent veiling of the present order of things as they are.

For example, the notion of subjecthood in 17th-century France appears to be a class as well as gender-restricted phenomenon. Accordingly, La Chatte blanche (the tale from which I draw most of my illustrations here),¹⁰ will present a familiar social configuration: human beings are featured as the bona fide subjects—kings, queens, princes and princesses at the head of the great chain of being; cats represent an obsequious court attached to its sovereign; and a population of rats is invented to fill the slot of the requisite enemy, the “other.” The servant class, that mediating group so necessary, so dispensable, will be represented by disembodied “little white hands.” This is no ornamental flight of fancy, nor is it merely a legitimizing literary allusion (to the Apuleius tale of “Psyche and Cupid” from The Golden Ass), or simply a passing gesture to the “mythologisme généralisé” of the period; rather, it is an accurate and itself emblematic rendering of 17th-century class relations.¹¹ And in the role (as opposed to the character) of the tale's privileged subject and sometime narrator, the heroine-sovereign, Chatte blanche, we find nothing exotic, apart from her transmogrification, but simply those acts traditionally performed by the hero, in a willful inversion of gender-typing. Thus does the fairy tale delineate the realm of convention through the repeated act of transgression of its bounds, charting the course of feminine desire through instances of safe passage into the realm of the perhaps not-so-marvelous.

At the heart of Mme d'Aulnoy's imaginative act appears to be a profound concern to map out, encode, and revise a cultural construct shaping the reality of her shared world—familial and inter-familial politics traditionally romanticized and valorized through the fabrication of the love story. Relations of men and women, in all their possible combinations, are investigated from a feminine point of view. Patriarchal society is under scrutiny, and women's place in it is analyzed and interrogated, ultimately reproposed through transformation of the received story. But that transformation is constrained by the limited number of versions of resolution that are available to the aristocratic feminine imagination, those already at play in her world.

In Mme d'Aulnoy's La Chatte blanche, a gender-organized paradigm repeated itself regularly, featuring a dialectic between the “real” and the “imaginary” (both of these categories being understood as cultural constructs): the traditional order encoded in the universalized historicizing of the “Once upon a time …” mode is complicated and challenged by the passage into magical time and space, into a world where gender relations can be reversed. In the first domain, the female is featured as object of desire, and repressed as desiring subject; in the second, the female (although protectively described as being in thrall to powers beyond her own—disguised, metamorphosed and veiled) functions as active desiring subject. She exercises authority and wields power, and experiences pleasure in doing so. She occupies the position of “donor” as opposed to that of “gift.” She and the male protagonist enjoy a mutual courtship enabled by the neutralizing factor of dépaysement. The passage from the first to the second domain is catalyzed by a disruptive and threatening instance of female experience of desire. The resolution of the contradiction between the two worlds is spelled out in the utopic vision of the “happy ending”: here, the female protagonist passes from the realm of the marvelous back into the “real” world, but carries with her the valorization experienced in the magical realm, asserts herself and is confirmed as subject in her relations with others, thus transforming the traditional order and spelling out the feminine notion of what might constitute the basis for “happy-ever-afterness.”

That traditional order is epitomized in the “happy ending” convention for fairy tales, most often a marriage. Variations on that closure are revealing, and afford a close look at feminine desire. We can measure oral versions of the tail of the tale La Chatte blanche against Mme d'Aulnoy's, as well as various marriage endings from Perrault's tales, and thereby determine the specificity of her vision as contrasted with the popular and masculine norms. La Chatte blanche is classed by Aarne and Thompson in The Types of the Folktale as a variant of the master-tale type #402, known as The Mouse as Bride.¹² Told versions are apparently still extant: in the 1950s, Geneviève Massignon, doing field work throughout the west of France, collected, transcribed and classed two surviving folktales under the AT 402 rubric. She claims them to be untouched versions of an ancient oral tradition, but she also recognizes their commonality with La Chatte blanche.¹³ From Haut Poitou she cites a tale she numbers #23, entitled “La Pièce de Toile,” noting that this is the very one made famous by Mme d'Aulnoy. And from Basse Marche, she relates one numbered #29 entitled “Cheveux d'or ou La petite grenouille.” The two oral tales, #23, #29, and the authored one, La Chatte blanche, share the normative “masculine” closure, but Mme d'Aulnoy's marriage resolution differs significantly from the two others.

The most obvious differences between the two oral stories and the literary tale are that the written version is significantly longer, embellished, embroidered, elaborated, and it features a distinctive embedded story.¹⁴ The patriarchal law of primogeniture is the point of departure for all three, and in a typical inversion of that law, the youngest son is privileged in the story. There are three competitive missions set by the father, pitting the brothers against one another. In each story, a heroine metamorphosed as an animal, in two instances a cat, in one a frog, assists the prince, and at the end of each there is a marriage. It is this common feature that intrigues me. In #23, “le drôle s'est marié avec la chatte,” and “ils sont retournés au château” (p. 173). In #29, “le jeune homme s'est marié avec Cheveux d'or, et puis il a eu le château de son père” (p. 205). In each instance, the man actively marries the woman and they establish residence in one or the other's castle. This is the normative popular marriage closure.

Charles Perrault inscribed this same general pattern in his Contes. He wrote during the same period as Mme d'Aulnoy, but from a different vantage. He occupied an interstitial position as a member of the burgeoning intellectual bourgeoisie. This social group had been identified by the king's minister Colbert as a more reliable corps to serve the needs of state than the traditional elite, and his staffing of the meritocracy was in the process of displacing the aristocracy as the extended reach of monarchical power. Loyal to the cause, and sensitive to the patronage system, Perrault offered his tales to the service of the state. He drew directly from the folk tradition, and transcribed faithfully the preoccupations of the popular imagination without embroidering over them other class-marked signifiers of desire. Indeed, almost as a sociologist compiling his ethnography, Perrault insists on the humble and authentic origins of his material: “Il est vrai que ces Contes donnent une image de ce qui se passe dans les moindres Familles …”; he also signals its political usefulness to the ruling body: “mais à qui convient-il mieux de connaître comment vivent les Peuples, qu'aux Personnes que le Ciel destine à les conduire?”¹⁵ He further aligns himself with the ruling class and positions himself as loyal and assiduous informant:

Le désir de cette connaissance a poussé des héros, et même des Héros de votre Race, jusque dans des huttes et dans des cabanes, pour y voir de près et par eux-mêmes ce qui s'y passait de particulier: cette connaissance leur ayant paru nécessaire pour leur parfaite instruction.

(pp. 89-90)

While assuming an emphatically “modern” stance in privileging an uncanonized and indigenous genre, Perrault subscribed conservatively through such rhetorical gestures to the prevailing order. If there are traces of subversive messages in his tales, they do not challenge the “happy ending” convention, but offer mainly strategic suggestions gleaned from popular wisdom for getting there. He transmitted without question the folk lesson of the marriage closure. From Cendrillon, “il la trouva encore plus belle que jamais, et peu de jours après, il l'épousa” (p. 164). In Le Chat botté, “Le marquis, faisant de grandes révérences, accepta l'honneur que lui faisait le Roi, et dès le même jour épousa la Princesse” (pp. 141-42). In Les fées, “Le fils du Roi en devint amoureux …, l'emmena au Palais du Roi son père, où il l'épousa” (p. 149). In these instances, just as in the oral tales cited above, the heroine functions as object of the hero's desire and, even more explicitly, as medium of exchange, symbol of bonding between and solidarity among men.

In contrast, in d'Aulnoy's La Chatte blanche, it is the princess who negotiates her marriage, who acts as her own ambassador to represent her own desire. She deals directly with her beloved's father, the king, from a position of power. Her privileged birth constitutes the basis of her sense of entitlement, guaranteeing the expansive dowry that enables her own self-empowering generosity:

Seigneur, lui dit-elle, je ne suis pas venue pour vous arracher un trône que vous remplissez si dignement; je suis née avec six royaumes: permettez que je vous en offre un et que j'en donne autant à chacun de vos fils. Je ne vous demande pour toute récompense que votre amitié, et ce jeune prince pour époux. Nous aurons encore assez de trois royaumes.

(II, 145)

This is not a replication of the inherited version but an “immanent critique” of that version through the recombination of available elements already existing within the cultural repertoire (Jameson, 129). Chatte blanche shapes her own happy ending here, assuming the position typically occupied by the male in such narratives, demonstrating thus both the power and the limitations of the feminine imagination.¹⁶ The solution to the dilemma of primogeniture is an accommodating proliferation of kingdoms, a conveniently expanding pie. There is something for everyone in the princess's proposal, so no one is threatened or excluded. Thus is the potentially disruptive consequence of such an explicit expression of feminine desire anticipated and neutralized. Although D'Aulnoy recasts the standard marriage plot, she does not reject it as a fitting and desirable end for her heroine's story. In fact, she takes every precaution to ensure that a wedding will be allowed despite the unorthodox gender of the suitor. She thus positions herself at once oppositionally genderically and conservatively generically.

It is worth pausing to note that Perrault and d'Aulnoy write in the same elegant register: even in the few samplings above, their polished prose contrasts with the more simple language evidenced in the transcription of the popular oral tales. Their “discours soigné” distinguishes them together from tellers of tales who transmitted their stories in the vernacular (however reliably transcribed). On the other hand, their thematics are distinct from one another's, as demonstrated above with regard to the closure convention. While Perrault and d'Aulnoy shared a world of privilege mirrored in their verbal refinement, Perrault was at home with the popular vision of gender relations—the normative lesson—and d'Aulnoy had to rewrite it. While their worlds touched, they did not coincide.

In spite of d'Aulnoy's novel closure revision featuring the heroine as active and empowered subject, shaping her destiny, not to mention that of others, according to her own desire, the ostensible lesson of the story, encapsulated in the final rhymed moral, issues a stern warning to women against the gratification of desire:

Tairai-je cette mère et cette folle envie,
Qui fit à Chatte Blanche éprouver tant d'ennuis,
Pour goûter de si funestes fruits!
…
Détestez sa conduite et ne l'imitez pas.

(p. 145)

D'Aulnoy's text proliferates at those very junctures that celebrate the experience of woman as active desiring subject, but is punctuated with lessons designed to disguise and repress that experience. Attentive, lingering descriptions dwell in celebratory extension on those moments of feminine affirmation, but are carefully framed and contained within a conservative code of repression that asserts itself regularly, reproducing the tensions at play in the salons of the tales' inscriptions. Here women were being accorded the right to self-expression as long as they respected the prevailing dispensation and remained within the confines of their marginalized centrality.¹⁷

The alternation of celebration and repression is elaborated in the tale within the tale, a feature radically distinguishing d'Aulnoy's version from others. The crux of the story's intrigue is located in relations between a mother, a father and their daughter within the patriarchal system. The queen, charged by her husband to bear him a child, jeopardizes fulfillment of that obligation in pursuing gratification of her own desire—her love of travel (“son inclination dominante … de voyager,” p. 127), and her yearning for the inaccessible, forbidden fruits of the fairies' orchard. Interestingly, the king does not oppose but indulges her wanderlust: “Il aimait tendrement ma mère, et la laissait dans une entière liberté de faire tout ce qu'elle voulait” (p. 127). It is the fairies who refuse her access to the fruits of their garden. In this sense, the interdiction of her desire can be understood as framed or internalized within a feminine generational continuum, drawing on the “tried and proven” normative or self-constraining wisdom of older women (epitomized in the mediator fairy who negotiates their pact with the queen: “une petite vieille, laide et décrépite,” p. 128), rather than imposed directly by an outside masculine will.

The queen's assigned maternal function and her personal desire are in conflict. In acting on her desire, she puts herself first. The dire consequences are visited on her husband's kingdom and on the daughter she bears after her self-indulgence. Such is the disruptive nature of female desire. But the text passes quickly through this narrative sequence. Where it waxes eloquent is at the description of the magnificent fruits of all seasons, that so tempt the queen—not to mention the reader. The narrative textually celebrates the occasion and the history of the queen's desire (pp. 128-31).

The daughter, relating this background story of her mother to explain her own present plight, shows a degree of psychological insight unusual for fairy-tale heroines as they were rendered by male authors in the Perrault, Grimm, Andersen tradition, and as they have been sanitized, sterilized, lobotomized more recently through the media nursery of the Disney empire. She reflects on her past and understands her place to be one that provokes dissension between mother and father: “Il semblait que je devais toujours être un sujet de discorde entre mon père et ma mère” (pp. 133-34). Since she is the one telling the tale within the tale, speaking rather than being portrayed, there is a collapse of distinction between the narrator and the daughter, both invested in this “je.” The daughter is granted a more complex subjectivity by being privileged as a speaking person by a female narrator invented by a female author than she is typically in masculine versions. Compare with this thoughtful reflection Perrault's Sleeping Beauty's flippant exclamation, when awakened from her 100-year sleep by the Prince's kiss: “Est-ce vous, mon prince? … vous vous êtes bien fait attendre” (p. 102).¹⁸ Chatte blanche's reflective ruminations and Sleeping Beauty's humorous quip are telling fabrications of their respective narrators' psyches.

The mother's sin is visited on the daughter who is whisked off to be brought up by the fairies in a tower of ignorance.¹⁹ As soon as she comes of age and acts in turn on her desire, loving the prince at first sight, repudiating the husband the fairies choose for her, marrying her prince (after a fashion) and promptly consummating that marriage (it is suggested), she is punished and transformed into a cat. But the prison to which she is then condemned resembles nothing so much as Versailles in all of its magnificence and ostentation, with endless diversions and entertainments, exquisite decor and ceremonious etiquette, and here she reigns in splendor over her court (pp. 113-14).

It is here once again, in this temple of pleasure, the site of desire's gratification, that the narrator lingers and the text proliferates. Here is where the text operates seductively and appeals to the taste of its structuring readership. Ultimately the princess regains her human figure by asserting her will over the prince, by demanding that he perform the act of violence that will operate her transformation. She controls that moment by organizing it herself. Her reentry into the “real” world is a triumphal display of feminine empowered desire. The ostensible moral then (“ne l'imitez pas”), neatly tacked on in a final fit of protective repression, covers for the celebration of feminine desire that motivates the narrative and finally shapes the conclusion of the tale.

The encoding of desire for women as both dangerous and attractive, to be articulated, explored, but veiled, points to the dilemma in which aristocratic women found themselves at the end of the 17th Century as they recognized their status as active subjects to be diminished in the rigorously controlled court society of Louis XIV. Their salons, while still influential, were no longer the pluralistic loci of cultural authority. Further, the empowering example of Anne d'Autriche's regency (1643-1661) had been effectively muted by her son's cult of himself as king. Nevertheless, women discreetly continued to claim the right to desire. They imaginatively sought to reorder the patriarchal economy that was predicated on their objectification, but to negotiate this transformation without jeopardizing their position of privilege within that system which implicated them as complicitous subscribers to that order.

In spite of the transformative thrust of d'Aulnoy's story, especially as considered against other versions, we are left to wonder whether the gender-inflected social critique it conveys is not coopted by its containment within the salon, within the nursery, within the generic constraints of the fairy tale form itself, and, most recently, within the increasingly institutionalized, and thereby compartmentalized, practice of feminist criticism. As Rosemary Jackson states: “Fantasies are not counter-cultural. On the contrary, they frequently serve to reconfirm institutional order by supplying a vicarious fulfillment of desire and neutralizing an urge towards transgression” (p. 72).

History and fantasy intersect and play off each other in crucial and mutually determining ways. I am reminded of Mme de Sévigné's words of consolation to her pregnant daughter in 1671, when she interpreted her reports of a physical complaint as portent that she was carrying a daughter rather than a son: “Mais qu'est-ce que vous me dites d'avoir mal à la hanche? Votre petit garçon serait-il devenu fille? Ne vous embarrassez pas; je vous aiderai à l'exposer sur le Rhône dans un petit panier de jonc et puis elle abordera dans quelque royaume où sa beautè sera le sujet d'un roman.”²⁰ Relegated to literature by the phantasizing fairy grandmother, the as-yet-unborn but already victimized daughter will find safe haven there. Inscribed in fairy tales, so also will feminine desire. Such creative problem-solving leaves intact the internalized system of gender hierarchy, and identifies fiction as the proper place for an estheticized feminine subjectivity. Mme de Sévigné's accommodating solution epitomizes the contradiction between gestures of evasion and engagement profoundly inscribed in the production of women's fairy tales.

Feminine utopic visions framed within structures of containment mirror the officially tolerated if marginalized cultural positions of the women writers that produce them. The tensions of occupying that assigned contradictory place, authorized and thereby neutralized of subversive potential by inclusion, characterize not only the elite salon scene of Mme d'Aulnoy's fairy-tale production, but the increasingly institutionalized, and thereby contained, scene of the production of feminist criticism today in the academy. While the archaeological project of recovering early instances of feminine desire is sanctioned and materially enabled by the legitimated practice of feminist literary criticism, it is also subject to and informed by the interests of the structuring institution that supports the practice. Analogously, the law of genre extends beyond the confines of the text, and spawns the very possibility of marginality, that uncomfortable place, at once conservative and oppositional, with its traditions and history, both ever in process and ever on trial, in “reality” as well as in “fiction.” A happy ending has yet to be imagined, if indeed desired.

Notes

1. Madame d'Aulnoy, Les Contes des fées, 2 vols. (Paris: Mercure, 1956).

2. Both Rosemary Jackson in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (New York: Methuen, 1981), and Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981) discuss the social and political functions of literature of the fantastic and of “magical narratives,” and I draw on their theorizing here. I also thank Joan DeJean and Elizabeth Long for their comments and suggestions on this piece, originally presented at the MLA Convention, December 1987.

3. Gérard Genette, “Vraisemblance et Motivation,” Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 71-99; Joan DeJean, “La Princesse de Clèves: The Poetics of Suppression,” PFSCL X, 18 (1983): 79-97, and “Lafayette's Ellipses: The Privileges of Anonymity,” PMLA 99, 5 (1984): 884-901; Nancy Miller, “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction,” PMLA 96, 1 (1981): 36-48.

4. Arthur Flannigan, “Mme de Villedieu's Les Désordres de l'amour: The Feminization of History,” L'Esprit Créateur 23, 2 (Summer 1983): 94-106; Joan DeJean, see note 3; Nancy Miller, “Tender Economies: Mme de Villedieu and the Costs of Indifference,” L'Esprit Créateur 23, 2 (Summer 1983): 80-93.

5. Bernard Magné comments on the self-reflexive nature indicated in women authors' gestures of constructing female narrators in their embedded stories in “Le Chocolat et l'ambroisie: Le Statut de la mythologie dans les contes de fées,” Cahiers de Littérature du XVII^e siècle, 2 (1980): 127.

6. I am referring specifically to the years 1690-1710 which witnessed a significant production of literary fairy tales authored by women, among them: Mlle Lhéritier, Mlle Bernard, Mlle de la Force, Mme de Murat, Mme Durand, Mme d'Auneuil. That this fashion was a gender-particular phenomenon at this time is substantiated by the fact that only two men, Le Chevalier de Mailly and Charles Perrault, engaged in any extensive way with this genre.

7. Raymonde Robert, Le Conte de fées littéraire en France de la fin du XVII^e à la fin du XVIII^e siècle (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1982), pp. 328-29. In her brilliant and comprehensive study, Raymonde Robert takes into account class and gender, but, in her concern to be all-inclusive, she elides the two crucial categories aristocratic, female, incorporates the rare exceptions to these groupings, and globally characterizes the authorship of the written fairy tales as mondains. She thereby effaces and fails to examine the feminine elite ideologically constructing fairy tales as a distinct class- and gender-conflicted group; and therefore, although her analysis of this literary moment is most perspicacious and informed, her interpretation leaves unaddressed the issue of the politics in play throughout these writings.

8. Robert, 85, 385-86. Once again, although Robert performs a most interesting class analysis on the function of the “nourrice” as mediating agent between the masses and the aristocracy, because she does not coordinate this with a gender analysis, her resulting insight is limited. It is through keeping the class and gender inflections in tension and at play with each other that a more telling picture of this literary production emerges.

9. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), p. 30; and Raymonde Robert, 103. If the issue of food and drink is invoked in Mme d'Aulnoy's Contes, it is not in the register of simple physical need, but functions as a display of exquisite taste (see e.g., “Gracieuse et Percinet,” I, 10.

10. Madame d'Aulnoy, II, 111-45. “La Chatte blanche” is a highly representative tale, and therefore I am using it to illustrate features that are in fact salient in most of the tales, albeit in different forms and guises.

11. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, trans. Robert Graves (New York: The Pocket Library, 1954), pp. 87-130; and Bernard Magné, 95-146.

12. Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tuedeakatemia, 1961), pp. 131-32.

13. Geneviève Massignon, De Bouche à oreilles: le conte populaire français (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1983), pp. 169-73, 203-06; the extent to which these may have been contaminated over time by contact with written versions of themselves is not satisfactorily addressed in Massignon's book, assembled posthumously.

14. For a discussion of the particularizing function of amplification in Mme d'Aulnoy's fairy tales, see Patricia Hamon, “Feminine Voice and the Motivated Text: Madame d'Aulnoy and the Chevalier de Mailly,” Special Session: “Imagining Women and Their Fairy Tales,” MLA Convention, San Francisco, 27 Dec. 1987.

15. Charles Perrault, Contes de Perrault, ed. Gilbert Rouger (Paris: Garnier, 1967). Perrault dedicated his Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé, avec des moralités to Mlle Elisabeth-Charlotte d'Orléans (89).

16. One of the consistent features of Mme d'Aulnoy's heroines is that they actively engage in the shaping of their destiny and significantly determine that of others. See, e.g., “La Princesse Carpillon,” or “Belle-Belle ou le Chevalier Fortuné”: “Ainsi l'amoureux roi attacha sa destinée à celle de sa maîtresse” (II: 189-90).

17. That order endorsed the epistolary genre, relational writing, as appropriate vehicle for feminine self-expression, for example, thus subscribing to a particular social function for women epitomized in the generic form, but was less at ease with the more serious challenges to masculine hegemony represented in the revision of gender relations being both voiced in women's salons and spelled out in their fiction, notably Mlle de Scudéry's. See Jean de la Bruyère, Les Caractères ou les mœurs de ce siècle (Paris: Garnier, 1962), pp. 79-80, 170-71, 177.

18. Such thoughtful analysis of feeling and interpersonal relations is not particular to “La Chatte blanche,” but is woven regularly into the tales, e.g., from “Serpentin vert” (I, 323): “l'amour se saisit de son cœur sous le nom spécieux d'une généreuse pitié.”

19. See Amy Vanderlyn DeGraff, The Tower and the Well: A Psychological Interpretation of the Fairy Tales of Mme d'Aulnoy (Birmingham: Summa Publications, Inc., 1984), p. 21, with regard to the tower figuring in La Princesse printanière, but with comparable significance in La Chatte blanche.

20. Madame de Sévigné, Correspondance, 3 vols., ed. Roger Duchêne (Paris: Pléiade, 1978), I, 1.190, 317. For further discussion of this passage, see my manuscript: Sévigné's “Correspondance.” The Performance of Maternity, forthcoming, 346; this particular resolution for the problematic infant daughter is echoed as well in the fate of Aimée in “L'Oranger et l'Abeille,” I, 179.