Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France 1690-1715: Nostalgic Utopias (review)

REVIEWS 121 Noting such ungleaned titles, one must as quickly note that the bibliographer harvests a thick field. And while every other scholar may aspire to praise, the bibliographer, like Samuel Johnson's lexicographer, can only hope to escape reproach . Regardless, Letellier's is a major reference work that will aid researchers at all levels. Most bibliographies have a short shelf-life, but this one should prove, as did Johnson's Dictionary, a capital exception. H. George Hahn Towson University Lewis C. Seifert. Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France 1690-1715: Nostalgic Utopias. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xii + 276pp. ISBN 0-521-55005-X. Positioned both at the margins and at the centre of culture, the fairy tale is a paradoxical form. Lewis C. Seifert's magisterial study exploits that status in order to illuminate how authors of the first vogue of French contes defées—two-thirds ofthem women—used the genre to explore gender and sexuality. This exploration was conducted between nostalgia, in the sense of an idealized, anti-modern, and fixed fiction of the past, and Utopia, in Bloch's sense of Utopian surplus and process. The conte de fées, argues Seifert, allows a constant exchange between those contradictory impulses. This study ofa wonderfully broad range oftales familiar and unfamiliar by such authors as d'Aulnoy, d'Auneuil, Bernard, La Force, Lhéritier, Mailly, Murat, and Perrault, among others, is informed by thorough historical background as well as a judicious, stimulating use of structuralist, poststructuralist, and socio-historical criticisms. While the interrogation of fairy tales for information about gender is not new, Seifert argues that work to date has focused on static demonstrations of "the genre's overwhelming complicity with patriarchal gender roles" (p. 4). He therefore considers gender/sex roles in the contes dynamically, as systems—and unstable systems at that, showing how the contes "relate a complex story about the persistence but also the instability of patriarchy at a decisive moment in the history of French literature and culture" (p. 4). Given that the romance flourishes at times of social and cultural unease, the appeal of the contes was strong in the changing society of the seventeenth century. The first three chapters explore theoretical premises. First, Seifert examines the Marvellous in the context of a contemporary crisis concerning literary vraisemblance and religious and moral strictures on writing what was "true." The Marvellous was both subversive and affirmative in challenging the real and yet defining its boundaries from without. Specifically, the Marvellous in the contes focuses in a hyperbolic, Utopian manner on the body (which was becoming the object of increasing control at the time) and a desire to exceed its limits. 122 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:1 Second, Seifert shows how authors used the Marvellous ironically to legitimize their (to some) morally and intellectually suspect writing, by "infantilizing" it and using the pretext of transmitting moral messages. However, such ironizing of the form paradoxically permitted even greater indulgence in it. The third chapter asks why the Marvellous emerged so forcefully in seventeenthcentury France, concluding that the conte defées had a strategic meaning in the Quarrel ofthe Ancients and Moderns. On one hand it stood for modern, indigenous culture; on the other, it could express nostalgia for past grandeur in the face of a new, disturbing social permeability. It permitted aristocracy and bourgeoisie alike to indulge in nostalgic fantasies ofvirtue and nobility. In particular, women "found in the ... form a means ofdefining and defending their own stake in these conflicts" (p. 61). In a period of patriarchal backlash which sought to exclude women from cultural production, the genre allowed them to glorify themselves as authors and "fées modernes." The book's second section examines specific, thematically arranged groups of tales. The fourth chapter shows how the tales treated love and sexuality. Often the tales propagated conservative, nostalgic gender roles in plots ending with the closure ofmarriage, thus seeking to deny an underlying sense ofa fundamental incompatability between the sexes and human subjects in general, and to neutralize the disturbing force ofsexuality. Yet some exceptional tales, such as d'Aulnoy's L'Oranger et l 'abeille, used Marvellous metamorphosis...