Pregnant Fictions: Childbirth and the Fairy Tale in Early-Modern France (review)

In eighteenth-century France, it was not a question of the chicken or the egg but of the egg or the "animalcule." Both "ovism" and "animalculism" were "preformationist" embryological theories—imagining preformed humans in the egg or the sperm—but they ascribed differing power to women and men in reproduction, and they relied on different types of observation, with the animalculists having the microscope on their side. At the time, and in the name of a scientific revolution, preformationism competed in medical science with the older, authoritative discourses of Aristotle and Galen. Nowadays, we regard these theories as fictions. Holly Tucker's well-researched book builds on the understanding that these and other early-modern debates about fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth demonstrate how "the boundaries between scientific 'facts' and marvelous fictions [are] remarkably tenuous" (p. 4). Specifically, Tucker shows how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literary writers used the fairy tale to weigh in on debates concerning the pregnant womb.

The book's six chapters are framed at either end by "Embarkment" and "Mal de Mère," these sections' titles gesturing toward the wondrous-travel metaphor that prevailed in early-modern French medical texts about pregnancy. "Embarkment" prepares readers for Tucker's larger argument. She points out how the fairy tale "has long represented reproductive realities" (p. 8), and she foregrounds the seventeenth century's "new valorization of the homebound wife" (p. 9). She also identifies her scope to be sixteenth- to eighteenth-century French "printed texts" (p. 4) and clarifies her methodology—the analysis of how fiction and nonfiction alike make "truth claims" (pp. 6–7) within specific historical and cultural contexts. To close the book, "Mal de Mère" plays in French feminist fashion with the mère/mer homophony associating "mother" and "sea" in order to draw a parallel between the "one-sex model" of the body (p. 144)—a model resisted by some women writers of fairy tales—and the "logic of the same" that pervaded representations of nature and the transoceanic colonized Other during that same early-modern period.

"Uterine Legends" (chapter 1) will be of particular interest to folklorists, because Tucker reads medical reports of three "post-term pregnancies" (respectively in 1582, 1678, and 1748) as "early-modern performances of the contemporary legend" (p. 5) in order to focus on the construction of their truth claims, especially as they articulate the evolving struggle between the authority of midwives and medical doctors at childbirth. This original and successful argument foregrounds a gendered competition between types of knowledge and effectively sets up the ensuing discussion of literary fairy tales by showing how scientific and literary publications participated in an intertextual dialog in early-modern French salons.

The other chapters demonstrate how, by using female reproduction to empower women and by rethinking the "facts" of childbirth, certain early-modern French fairy tales functioned as a counterdiscourse to medical "fictions." While science increasingly called attention to women's bodies to exclude them from the public sphere, or, especially in the political context of fertility and succession issues in the royal family, to confine women's worth to their ability to produce a male heir, literary fairy tales by women asserted women's bodily experience, knowledge, and value. In chapter 2, Tucker establishes that the conteuses—literary and learned French women writers who produced fairy tales from 1690 to 1715—read medical texts, had a keen interest in anatomy, and were familiar with childbirth manuals. Chapter 3 then elaborates on the "shared genealogy of fairies and midwives" (p. 56) to show how a good/bad binary opposition is at work in the representation of each category and to demonstrate how the conteuses valorize the knowledge and power of midwifery. This discussion is particularly effective in showing how, in contrast to those of Charles Perrault, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's fairy tales continued to assert the legitimacy of midwives at childbirth at the same time...