Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale

In this elegantly written, provocative and impeccably researched book, Elizabeth Wanning Harries argues that our commonly held expectations about fairy tales are based on repression and myth. The myth, fostered in the seventeenth century by France’s most famous practitioner of the genre, Charles Perrault, and with resounding success by the brothers Grimm in the nineteenth, is that fairy tales are essentially transcriptions of popular oral tales, that they are ‘timeless’ and give access to a traditional, nonliterary, authentic folk culture, predating the artifices of the written word. Harries asserts, instead, that “though the early writers of fairy tales in Italy and France in the seventeenth century often claimed that they were reproducing stories they had been told (by their nurses or grandmothers, from peasant sources), they were usually following written models. The history of fairy tales,” she insists, “is not primarily a history of oral transmission but rather a history of print” (4). Owing in great part to the propagation of this myth, only one kind of fairy tale has come down to us as canonical or classic: simple, short, third-person, ‘distressed’ narratives made to seem old and addressed to children, their artfully ‘naive’ style meant to simulate the artlessness of their supposed oral sources in peasant culture. This ‘compact’ model effectively repressed a whole other—‘complex’—tradition originating in the long, worldly, self-conscious, self-referential tales of Perrault’s contemporaries, the French conteuses (women tale-tellers) of the 1690s: Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, author in 1690 of the first published literary fairy tale in France, Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier, Catherine Bernard, and Charlotte-Rose Caumont de La Force. If these names seem unfamiliar to most Anglo-Saxon readers, it is largely because literary history buried them under those of Perrault, the Grimms, and, to a lesser extent, Hans Christian Andersen. Worried about the incursion of women in the republic of letters—women were then the principal authors of novels and fairy tales in France—misogynist critics set the process of repression in motion as early as 1699 (abbé de Villiers, Entretiens sur les contes de fées et sur quelques autres ouvrages du temps, pour servir de préservatif contre le mauvais goût); spurred by Enlightenment rationalism, it culminated with the rise of romantic nationalism and the corresponding success of the ‘folk art’ ideal of the Grimms. Harries traces the history of this neglected tradition, showing how the conteuses’ dissident tactics resurface in late-twentieth-century revisions of fairy tales, in particular those written by women (Anne Sexton, Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Emma Donoghue, Christa Wolf, Carolyn Kay Steedman, among others), and arguing convincingly for a more capacious understanding of what constitutes a ‘good’ fairy tale as well as a more inclusive definition of orality.

Sweeping, transhistorical, interdisciplinary, Twice Upon a Time takes on canon-formation, women writers’ nettled access to, and exclusion from, the republic of letters, as well as cultural history. It would have been easy for Harries to get lost in a forest of details. But the book is logically structured and wonderfully illustrated (frontispieces, original title pages, line drawings, engravings, and other art objects, even some very amusing cartoons, drive home her points). Practicing what she calls a “feminist formalism” (18) and drawing on a wealth of both visual and verbal sources, Harries advances her polemical argument with passion and clarity, much to the pleasure and enlightenment of the reader.

The book is divided into two parts; an “Interlude” following the third of five chapters makes the transition between seventeenth- through early-nineteenth-century fairy tales and twentieth-century revisions of classic ones. In the first of two chapters devoted to the conteuses, Harries explains how, in spite of their number (more than two thirds of all fairy tales published between 1690 and 1715) and popularity, their tales were eventually winnowed out of the fairy tale canon and Perrault, rather than Aulnoy, was given credit for inventing the genre. Adopting a deconstructive approach, she questions the relationship between center and margins. Like modern-day fairy-tale writers who, as she puts it, “transliterate,” taking a minor detail of a classic story and making it central to their own, so Harries focuses on this supposedly minor genre and the doubly marginalized conteuses to illuminate “in miniature” (21) the broad issues of gender in literature and canon-formation. Similarly, she attends to the peripheral—frontispieces, typesetting of title pages, frame-narratives and the like—to show how Perrault contributed to a stereotype that confined women to the role of oral, peasant, illiterate storyteller, mere transmitter of tradition, while reserving for men that of literate story writer. Instead, the conteuses sought to confound the boundaries between oral and written (their frontispieces tend to portray them as both tellers and writers, as literate aristocratic women, ‘modern fairies,’ sibyls or Greek goddesses reading aloud to a sophisticated, adult audience from a book of their own tales) and tried to undo the association between fairy tales and the primitive by imitating a different orality, the scintillating conversation of aristocratic salons, and, skirting literary, social and marketplace norms, to negotiate a place for themselves in high culture.

Harries’ brilliant insight into the peculiar orality of the conteuses, developed in chapter two, is her unique and important contribution to our understanding of the fairy tale tradition, effectively countering repeated dismissal of their writing in the past as digressive, shapeless, or insufficiently ‘naive.’ Contrasting their frontispieces and elaborate conversational frames with the simulated voice of the lower-class female storyteller in Perrault, she concludes:

D’Aulnoy, Lhéritier, Murat, and Bernard ... reject the models of orality and of femininity that Perrault both accepts and promotes. By framing their tales with traces of salon conversation, they represent their tales as part of an aristocratic oral culture. By writing their tales down, they contest the notion that women can only tell the tales that men transcribe and transmit in print. By explicitly setting their work within the traditions of fairy-tale writing, they establish themselves as not only literate but learned. And, in a final paradox, by including traces of the oral culture of the salons, they create a new model of femininity: the woman who not only talks—by the fireside to children or in the salon—but also writes. (72)

Although she admits that the conteuses probably did in fact adapt oral folk sources in addition to written sources such as the fairy tales of Giambattista Basile (Lo cunto de li cunti or Il Pentamerone, 1634-1636) and Giovanni Francesco Straparola (Le piacevoli notti, 1550-1553), in her worthwhile efforts to debunk Perrault’s image of the old peasant spinner-tale-teller and to accentuate the contrast between his compact model and their complex one, she occasionally goes too far in downplaying traditional oral sources and the ancestral role of women as storytellers and as guardians and transmitters of tradition. Just as Perrault ascribes this role to them in his verse tale “Peau d’âne” (1694), so too does his niece Lhéritier two years later in “Les enchantements de l’éloquence,” as Harries herself points out (58). The roles of brilliant causeuse and successor to the traditional female storyteller are not necessarily incompatible. French women writers have from the beginning worked the border between the oral and the written, between popular and high culture, even as they emphasized their literary credentials and strove to place their writing in the realm of high culture. Thus, the very first known French woman writer, Marie de France, collector and reteller of oral folk narratives, Breton lais, in the late twelfth century, ended the highly learned statement of artistic intention in her general prologue with this paradoxical exhortation to the reader—“Et maintenant écoutez le commencement!”—and Marguerite de Navarre framed L’Heptaméron, her sixteenth-century collection of tales, many of which were popular in origin, as an aristocratic conversation conteuse (Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, La Conversation conteuse: Les Nouvelles de Marguerite de Navarre, 1992), not unlike the seventeenth-century women tale-tellers.

But such examples would not have been in the foreground of Harries’ thinking, as the ‘we’ she refers to throughout, readers/listeners of fairy tales, is an Anglo-Saxon one. This deictic points to a specific time and place: now and the English-speaking world. Chapter three, “The Invention of the Fairy Tale in Britain,” may perhaps seem at first peripheral to the story of the French conteuses’ previously unacknowledged influence on twentieth-century women writers, but it is in fact essential to Harries’ argument regarding how ‘our’ traditional ideas about fairy tales, and modern subversions thereof, came about—hence its central position in the book. Shaped in the eighteenth century in both popular chapbooks and moral tales for ‘polite’ society, the English canon, she argues, is based almost exclusively on translations and revisions of French, Italian and, later, German fairy tales, rarely on indigenous oral sources, which, in any event, were not likely to have existed as anything more than “scraps and rhymes” (97). Consolidating the ‘compact’ model of Perrault and the Grimms, it was invented as an oral form out of nostalgia for the past and romantic nationalism. “The pure rural peasant community, telling stories free from the contamination of print, is really,” Harries concludes, “a late-eighteenth-century invention” (76). Orlando Figes expresses a similarly skeptical and very modern view of European cultural history in his monumental Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (2002): “there is no quintessential national culture, only mythic images of it, like Natasha’s version of the peasant dance” (xxix).

In-depth analysis of the embedded didactic tales in Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749) and in Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont’s Le Magasin des enfants (London, 1756), leads Harries to the conclusion that, by using the conversational frame to press fairy tales into the service of the moral education of young ladies, these women writers actually contributed to the triumph of the simple pedagogical form, domesticating what they borrowed from the conteuses, just as they reinforced, perhaps even produced, “a restrictive set of gender norms” (87) and suspicion of the fairy tale as “an unstable, untrustworthy agent in the Enlightenment civilizing process” (90). I’m not sure this is an entirely fair portrayal of Le Prince de Beaumont’s intentions in Le Magasin des enfants. Though it certainly looks as if she were preaching submissiveness, docility and self-sacrifice on behalf of father and husband, especially in her expurgated, extremely condensed version of “Beauty and the Beast,” we discover a more feminist Le Prince de Beaumont whose professed intentions undercut the subservience preached in the frame dialogues between the governess and her pupils if we zoom outward beyond the moralistic frame conversation adduced by Harries in support of her argument and include the whole preface as part of the frame, not just her rejection of “dangerous ideas” in existing fairy tales: “Oui, Messieurs les tyrans, j’ai dessein de les tirer de cette ignorance crasse à laquelle vous les avez condamnées. Certainement, j’ai dessein d’en faire des Logiciennes, des Géomètres, et même des Philosophes. Je veux leur apprendre à penser, à penser juste, pour parvenir à bien vivre.” In spite of appearances, the conteuses’ ironic use of the frame to challenge conventional values and promote female autonomy was not entirely lost. Le Prince de Beaumont’s stated pedagogical goals were in fact quite radical for mid-eighteenth-century England. As Paule Constant (Un Monde à l’usage des Demoiselles, 1987) has argued, the secret discourse of such pedagogical works by women is a “source de perpétuelle sédition” (361), one that transmits the utopian dream, different from that of fairy tales, of waking up the princess (362). But this dissident and reformist voice was effectively stifled when “Beauty and the Beast” and other didactic tales were wrested from their frames to make them more chaste, more proper, more ‘compact.’

In spite of the predominance of the compact model for the past two hundred years, storytellers such as Anne Thackeray Ritchie or the comtesse de Ségur in the nineteenth century continued to produce “more complex and layered narratives” (“Interlude: Once Again,” 99) and found ways of retelling old stories, of putting ‘new wine into old bottles’ (a revised New Testament metaphor borrowed from Angela Carter that runs through the book) to make the bottles ‘explode.’

The last two chapters detail this “return of the repressed” (99) in a variety of twentieth-century fairy tales whose revisions of old stories depend on narrative framing and transliteration. Recalling the long tradition of frame narratives and interpolated tales beginning way before the conteuses and reaching to the present, Harries illustrates the rich possibilities of this technique with John Barth’s “Frame-Tale” (Lost in the Funhouse, 1968) and A.S. Byatt, “The Glass Coffin” and “Gode’s Tale.” Embedded in Byatt’s novel Possession (1990), “The Glass Coffin,” she contends, “resonates with meanings,” but printed as a discrete entity in her fairy-tale collection, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994), “it seems simply an accomplished reworking of one of the Grimms’ tales” (113). Striking visual confirmation of the deconstructive effects of reframing traditional fairy-tale material is provided by the artist Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes of the 1940s. But it is Harries’ ingenious feminist linkage of the framing techniques of seventeenth-century conteuses with the ironic, contemporary pop-art frames Anne Sexton uses to undercut ‘that story’ and American consumerism in Transformations (1971), and of the conteuses’ plural narrative voices to the open-ended concatenation of first-person prequels imagined by the Irish writer Emma Donoghue in Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997) that offers the reader the freshest, most stimulating, and most exciting insights. Harries enriches our understanding of recent women tale-tellers by giving us the ‘long view.’ Telling old stories in new voices, placing them in new frames, as did their conteuses forebears, seem to be these modern writers’ abiding women’s ways of radically questioning and altering their meanings.

Chapter five, “The Art of Transliteration,” focuses on recent women writers who have fragmented and transformed old fairy-tale sequences and repetitive, confining plots, arranging sometimes minor details of classic tales (such as those popularized in the late nineteenth century by Andrew Lang in his rainbow series and by the Disney industry) into “new and unexpected patterns” (135). Harries shows how, in their autobiographical writing, Christa Wolf (Kindheitsmuster: Ein Roman, 1976), Carolyn Kay Steedman (Landscape for a Good Woman, 1986) and Olga Broumas (Beginning with O, 1977) have used fairy tales as “scattered models for resistance and interpretation” (142), turning “iconic images” into “letters of an unfamiliar language” (152). Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979) provides a graphic illustration of how recent women writers have used romance figures (the innocent young woman, the heroic, avenging mother. . .) “to refuse romance” (157). Carter, Harries writes, “plays with shards of fairy tales and other stories in order to suggest the narrow boundaries between the beastly and the human and the importance of acknowledging our animal nature” (157, emphasis mine). Carter’s fairy tales thus become the occasion for a final undercutting of the ‘we’ which has represented throughout the book Anglo-Saxon adherents to the dominant preference for the compact fairy tale, with its singular—patriarchal?—voice and its frame-less, time-less certainty.

From my position of scholar and teacher of French literature, I would wish for a still more capacious ‘we’ than does Harries, one that would include French readers and today’s teachers and scholars in France as well as the English-speaking world. Given the importance she attributes to the late-seventeenth-century French conteuses, I wish she had included their twentieth-century French female counterparts and examined continuities in the French literary tradition. Monique Wittig is mentioned, Hélène Cixous is discussed briefly, but what about Chantal Chawaf, Pierrette Fleutiaux and many others—witness Chawaf’s recent Mélusine des détritus (2002), a modern Mélusine’s indictment of France’s ecological blindness—who have reworked fairy tales and continue to do so? Today’s children know Perrault, the Grimms and Andersen, no doubt via Disney, but they may also have been exposed to revisionist feminist tales. Furthermore, with Champion’s slated publication of the Bibliothèque des Génies et des Fées (twenty volumes edited by major scholars, including all fairy tales published in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) coming on the heels of several recent editions of Aulnoy’s and other conteuses’ tales as well as important scholarly books—Anne Defrance, Les contes de fées et les nouvelles de Madame d’Aulnoy (1690-1698): L’imaginaire féminin à rebours de la tradition, 1998 (Harries mentions it in an endnote); Jean Mainil, Madame d’Aulnoy et le rire des fées: essai sur la subversion féerique et le merveilleux comique sous l’Ancien Régime, 2001; Nadine Jasmin, Naissance du conte féminin: Mots et merveilles: Les Contes de fées de Madame d’Aulnoy (1690-1698), 2002; an updated edition of Raymonde Robert’s foundational Le conte de fées littéraire en France de la fin du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, 2002; Marie-Agnès Thirard, Les Contes de fées de Madame d’Aulnoy: une écriture de subversion, 2003—‘we’ may no longer think of Perrault as the originator and sole model of the literary fairy tale. The conteuses are finally getting their due, and, for readers of French as well as Anglophone literature, Twice Upon a Time marks a crucial moment in this development.