Playing the Game of Frivolity: Seventeenth-Century Conteuses and the Transformation of Female Identity

When Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy published the first literary fairy tale of the French tradition in 1690 with the interpolated tale “L’île de la Félicité” in her novel L’Histoire d’Hypolite, comte de Duglas, she did more than introduce the fairy tale as a literary genre; she also pioneered a new publication technique combining novel and tales that would soon become prevalent in France. More than thirteen authors, many of them women, contributed to this literary trend from 1690 to 1715.¹ Seventeenth-century France, as a result, has often been considered what Carolyn Lougee called in the title of her 1976 book on salon culture “Le Paradis des Femmes.” Scholars such as Faith Beasley and Benedetta Craveri see in the salon the site of women’s fostering of their creative and intellectual development. The writing and sharing of fairy tales was a preeminent feature of these salons, and tales were meant to translate noble taste and the ideals of mondain culture into literary form. Elizabeth Wanning Harries, in her article “Fairy Tales about Fairy Tales,” stresses the preeminence of aristocratic women writers as the “original” fairy-tale writers (153). And France was, as Joan DeJean points out in Tender Geographies, the only country where “the written transcription of fairy tales was not totally controlled by men” (233). As a result, most of the studies about seventeenth-century contes have focused on “the practice of writing fairy tales [as] an exercise in freedom” (Jones 56), since this new literary genre allowed women “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” (Farrell 52). As Louis XIV attempted to subordinate art and literature to his official ideology, through his numerous Académies, literary fairy tales written at the end of the seventeenth century often indeed carried subversive messages behind their simple appearance. Despite the subversive nature of the fairy-tale genre as a whole in terms of politics and the representation of authority, I argue, however, that women-written ones are subversive in a different way. Framing narratives functioned as clandestine signals of women writers attempting to reclaim the voice that society from Boileau to Perrault himself was hoping to suppress.

This article proposes to challenge the usual conception of seventeenth-century contes as either the transcription of folk oral tales or as a mere game for eloquent, learned précieuses. I hope to show that behind the staging of storytelling as a mondain entertainment,² the storytellers’ “politics of frivolity” subverted critiques leveled at women writers by redefining the terms of aesthetic value. The results often are parodies of the very genre that women writers have initially helped popularize. These parodies reflect attempts at creating a new powerful authorial feminine persona highlighting a new form of female solidarity. The relationships articulated in the contes form a model of “matrilinear” mentoring and mutual admiration that are the basis for understanding a new form of female creativity based on a kind of learned—but also relational—eloquence.

As Faith Beasley’s work on French salons, Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France: Mastering Memory (2006), has shown, the eighteenth-century salon has overshadowed our collective understanding of seventeenth-century salons. In the seventeenth-century salon, women enjoyed far greater autonomy and agency than their successors, whose main role was that of hostess. The greater autonomy gave a form of public voice to aristocratic ladies. The salon not only authorized and staged female conversation; it also functioned as a site of exemplary female engagement. The seventeenth-century salon was a female-controlled environment, and such scholars as Carolyn Lougee and Joan DeJean have also shown that salon women, though often married, did not favor their roles as wives and mothers and were opposed to the compulsory connection of womanhood with family duty. Within this feminocentric space, there was a new goal: to celebrate exemplary women and craft a new model of female discourse.

Many studies of seventeenth-century tales...