Charles Perrault by Jacques Barchilón and Peter Flinders (review)

Book Reviews281 Jacques Barchilón and Peter Flinders. Charles Perrault. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981. 192 p. This first full length critical biography of Charles Perrault in English will appeal to the non-specialist unacquainted with the author of the world's most familiar fairy tales. Chapters 1 through 3, the result ofclose collaboration between the two authors, present a portrait of Perrault as public servant, père de famille, and panegyrist of Louis XIVs reign. Perrault's early poèmes de circonstance reveal an author firmly rooted in the mythological atmosphere of the classical tradition. Their interest is more historical than literary. They do, however, serve to illustrate in advance some of the allegorical and oneiric elements later developed in the poetic world of the fairy tale. Of greater interest is the Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (1688-1697), a four-volume polemical dialogue, one of several works in which Perrault champions the cause of the "liberal moderns" against the classical traditionalists and emerges as a precursor, if not already a philosophe, oí the Age of Enlightenment. In Chapters 4 and 5, Barchilón takes up the analysis of the 11 Contes de Ma Mère VOye {Tales of Mother Goose) in the order of their publication. The three verse tales, Patient Griselda, The Ridiculous Wishes, and Donkey-Skin, appeared respectively in 1691, 1693, and 1694. The more familiar prose tales, published in 1697, were: Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Rickey with the Tuft, and Tom Thumb. He tends to avoid psychoanalytic interpretation of the tales, and readers interested in pursuing structural and semiological studies are referred to the critical bibliography at the end of the volume. The question of authorship is discussed at length: was Perrault indeed the author of Mother Goose, or did he simply add psychological, moral, and descriptive digressions to a collection ofstories authored by his son Pierre? The authors' summary of both sides of the question leads them to the conclusion that father and son probably collaborated on the tales, the greatest contribution coming from the father. The summary of each tale is followed by a brief analysis of its moral in a sociohistorical context. Little Red Riding Hood, for example, is a symbolic account of the seduction of a young girl by a "wolf." Tom Thumb offers consolation to the family's youngest, shortest, and most unnoticed child. The motifs of the majority of the tales are briefly traced to their ancient and more recent sources, Perrault's most original creation seeming to be the cruel husband in Bluebeard. The authors enter Freudian terrain in their analysis of Cindere//a. Taking issue with Bettelheim's dismissal of the carriage as a useless addition to the story, they propose a symbolic interpretation of the carriage as the womb in which Cinderella "was reborn again...as a full blown woman ready to mate, ready to meet her prince" (p. 124). Perrault's conscious application of the logic of the supernatural is amply illustrated in Chapter 4, not without, however, an apparent contradiction that seems to have escaped unnoticed: the emphatic claim that "in fairy tales, by convention, the tragic is abo/ished" (p. 96) loses some of its force when one recalls the catastrophic fate of Little Red Riding Hood, who, in Perrault's account, is devoured whole by the wicked wolf. The last chapter, devoted to Perrault's return to his career as a public poet, confirms the authors' contention that "apart from his fairy tales Perrault was a second-rate poet who may in his own time have passed for first rate" (p. 160). But such considerations are minor in the light of Perrault's immense influence on the folklore of the western world. For the reader who believes that it all began with the Brothers Grimm, this volume offers a vivid and pleasant portrait of the real father of Mother Goose. PATRICIA HOPKINS Texas Tech University ...