Rebellious Voices: The Unofficial Discourse of Cross-dressing in d'Aulnoy, de Murat, and Perrault

Titles such as "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Yellow Dwarf" often call to mind contemporary or at least post-eighteenth-century interpretive versions of their original counterparts. Some Disney films, for example, have contributed to the cultural homogenization of the fairy tale genre. In effect, consciously or otherwise, we tend to perceive and evaluate these narratives as children's tales, as stories primarily designed for and consumed by young people. In recent years, for instance, much invaluable criticism has been directed toward the often chauvinistic representation of women within these tales and their possible detrimental effect on today's young readers or viewers.¹ However, in determining the signification and weighing the significance of such literary fairy tales, it is essential that we situate them within their historical and social-cultural milieu—in effect, evaluating the tales in light of the specific discursive formations out of which they arose and with which they were in dialogue. The original reading community of seventeenth-century French fairy tales was not children, but rather adults. More specifically, they were members of court society for, as Henriette-Julie de Murat reveals in her fairy tale "Starlight": "all the intelligentsia of the country spent their time reading nothing else" (159).

These tales, then, deserve examination as prominent and incisive literary and social discourse because they were one of the more popular and prevalent forms of expression during the latter decades of the ancien régime. It seems necessary to examine the dynamics behind canon formation: why have these tales come to be regarded as only for the nursery, when their original audience was highly sophisticated members of the French court? It is my contention that the authors of these wonder tales used the "genre" of children's stories not only as a vehicle for the instillment of normative social codes of conduct, but also as a means of voicing an implicit and often explicit social critique. As such, these tales can be regarded, instead, as valuable examples of socio-political commentary.

From the motif of cross-dressing that surfaces in some of the fairy tales produced during this period arises significant statements, challenges, and—most crucially—queries about the nature of the social order. I will examine three non-canonical tales: "The Counterfeit Marquise," attributed to the collaborative efforts of Charles Perrault and Francois-Timoléon de Choisy; "Starlight," by Henriette-Julie de Murat; and "Belle-Belle ou le Chevalier Fortuné," by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy. All of these tales employ the cross-dressed figure as a touchstone to contest official order and socially constructed representations of power. In effect, they launch a potent critique of the status quo that begins with an examination of gender norms. I would contend that these tales, by highlighting the performativity of gender and gender relations, also call into question the production of other modes of power that claim a "natural" status to sanctify their existence and dominance. As Judith Butler has revealed in her influential study: "gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being....Gender is a construction that regularly conceals its genesis" (Gender Trouble 33, 140).

As the body is synechdotal of the social system, "its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious" (Douglas 115). The ancien régime, in particular, relied heavily upon the symbolic equation between the body politic and the individual body—more specifically, the king's body. Representations of these bodies, moreover, relied upon the audience for whom they were created to imbue them with signification (Outram 4). In this sense, then, it seems plausible to argue that representations of the body within the ancien régime were highly performative.² To critique the performativity of gender, then, would be tantamount to critiquing all socially constructed identity posited as "natural"—from gender, to the family, to the state. I propose that within the three tales I will examine, the cross-dressed...