A Fairy Godmother of Her Own in 17Th Century France: Subversive Female Agency in Madame D'aulnoy's “The White Cat”
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A Fairy Godmother of her own in 17th Century France: Subversive Female Agency in Madame d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat” Alexandra Cheira ULICES – University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies ISSN: 0873-0628ANGLO SAXONICA SER. III N. 8 2014 A Fairy Godmother of her own in 17th Century France: Subversive Female Agency in Madame d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat”1 agic and metamorphosis always go hand in hand in wonder tales: Cinderella’s rags are changed into a marvellous ball gown Mcomplete with magic glass slippers courtesy of Fairy Godmother, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty plunge into a deep sleep intended to kill them through black magic, the Little Mermaid exchanges her tongue for a pair of shapely legs through a magic potion... The examples from well- known tales by Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christien Andersen are endless. However, when we come to consider less celebrated tales by the French women writers who were Perrault’s contemporaries, it would be more accurate to say that magic and metamorphosis go paw in hand: these women writers favoured the mythological theme of animal metamorphosis in which a lover who had been turned into a beast would only become human again after long years of patient suffering. The literary motif of metamorphosis served a particular purpose, which can only be fully comprehended if the specific time and place of the writing, as well as the gender roles ascribed to that historically located context, are taken in due consideration. In other words, I will anchor my analysis of a wonder tale by Marie-Cathérine d’Aulnoy, the writer whose production far surpassed any other during the twenty-five-year height of the genre, in the 1 This article is a much more expanded version of my paper “Change your princesses, change thyself: magic and metamorphosis in Madame d’Aulnoy’s wonder tales and wondrous life in 17th century France”. This was published as a position paper in the e-Book (Re)Presenting Magic, (Un)Doing Evil: Of Human Inner Light and Darkness (Ed. Alexandra Cheira, Oxford, Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2012, 3-10, http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/), which collected papers from the 13th Global Conference Perspectives on Evil and the 3rd Global Conference Magic and the Supernatural, held in Prague in March 2012. 220 REVISTA ANGLO SAXONICA specific historical context it was written, as well as in its author’s personal life, which was in itself a perpetual tale of wonder. D’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat” will show how, in order to be happy, the eponymous female animal lover had to suffer first until she met the man who fell in love with her still in her animal form because she was beautiful, learned and pleasant: only after they proved themselves worthy of each other was the evil spell broken and human form restored to its victim. Marie-Cathérine le Jumel de Barneville was born in 1650 or 1651 in Normandy.2 The daughter of a noble family, she had been placed in a convent for her education when, according to her colourful Memoirs of the Court of Spain, she was abducted at the tender age of sixteen by François de la Motte, Baron d’Aulnoy, a Parisian nobleman thirty years her senior. She claimed this charming transaction, which stemmed from the arranged marriage that was to follow, was performed with the help, and to the financial profit, of her father. Three years and three children later, rumour had it that Marie-Cathérine d’Aulnoy was a flirtatious adulteress who was not exactly in love with Baron d’Aulnoy, an abusive husband by some accounts, to the point she became enmeshed in a juicy scandal: due to the testimony of two noblemen, her husband was accused of high treason against the king and thus incarcerated in the Bastille waiting to be executed. He was spared capital punishment when it was discovered, by the harsh persuasion of torture, that the two men had been lying — and that both Marie-Cathérine d’Aulnoy and her mother, the Marquise de Gadagne, were implicated as fellow conspirators. Because the men were believed to be their lovers, the whole episode was deemed a skilful, carefully planned arrangement to do away with Baron d’Aulnoy once and for all. A twenty-year separation — there was no possibility of divorce — from her husband and from Paris ensued and Madame d’Aulnoy was, not surprisingly under these circumstances, cut from her husband’s will when 2 For a detailed account of Madame d’Aulnoy’s life and writing career, see Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995, 161-170) and Introduction to Wonder Tales: Six Stories of Enchantment (London: Vintage, 1996, 3-17); see also Patricia Hannon, Fabulous Identities: Women’s Fairy Tales in Seventeenth-Century France (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998, 78-121). SUBVERSIVE FEMALE AGENCY IN MADAME D’AULNOY’S “THE WHITE CAT” 221 he died in 1700. Although recorded, these twenty years remain somewhat obscure: according to one account, mother and daughter fled Paris for Madrid, where they lived for some years; a more fanciful version has it that they were bestowed a royal pardon on condition they worked as spies for the French in England, but this voyage has yet to be confirmed. The established fact in her Memoirs is that, whereas her mother remained in Madrid, Marie-Cathérine d’Aulnoy returned alone to Paris around 1685. Five years later, aged forty, she would publish her two-volume Memoirs of the Court of Spain, a very popular, if arguably fictional, travel narrative which enjoyed a wide readership in France, England and Italy. Between 1690 and 1695, she also published her three-volume Account of the Voyage to Spain, her Memories of the Court of England and the historical novel History of Jean de Bourbon, Prince of Carency. Although in her time history was not deemed a chronological record of significant events documented by textual evidence and her “historical” writings were valued for their enticing unfamiliarity rather than for their factual scrupulousness, they played a leading role in her writing career: they earned her a reputation as a historian and a story keeper of tales outside France, a membership at the Paduan Accademia dei Ricovatri and the nickname Clio, in honour of the Muse of History. However, even before she was known for her writings, she had long been reputed a prominently fashionable and leading figure in the literary scene of Paris, a woman who could boast of congregating around her the élite of writers and thinkers of her time. Despite, or because of, her notoriety, she became a renowned salonnière, an aristocratic and highly educated woman who, much like her foremothers the précieuses in the first half of the seventeenth century, hosted gatherings where accomplished men and women wittily yet seriously discussed art, literature, morality, meta physics or politics. George Eliot would praise the salons and, by extension, the précieuses, a century later when commenting on what she regarded as a sad state of affairs as far as some literature written by women in England was concerned: Those famous habitués of the Hôtel de Rambouillet did not, apparently, first lay themselves out to entertain the ladies with grimacing “small-talk”, and then take each other by the swordknot to discuss matters of real interest in a corner; they 222 REVISTA ANGLO SAXONICA rather sought to present their best ideas in the guise most acceptable to intelligent and accomplished women. And the conversation was not of literature only; war, politics, religion, the lightest details of daily news — everything was admissible, if only it were treated with refinement and intelligence. The Hôtel de Rambouillet was no mere literary réunion; it included hommes d’affaires and soldiers as well as authors, and in such a circle, women would not become bas bleus or dreamy moralizers, ignorant of the world and of human nature, but intelligent observers of character and events. (Eliot 13-14) Far from being a gynoecium enlivened only by topics close to the salonnières’ own hearts, such as their cherished female freedom or love and marriage, the salons were the elected space where learned women matured a unique style of talking which celebrated the innate gifts that distinguished them from ordinary individuals. They did that so as to criticise and reform social customs but also because they reclaimed the right to be treated more consistently as intellectuals by their male peers, whose reaction was polarised into admiring and gallantly defending them or vehemently attacking and satirizing them as “the ridiculous précieuses” or “the sage women”. Thus had the précieuses, fifty years before the Enlightenment, fought long and hard for more independence for aristocratic women, only to be faced by ever-growing restrictions on women’s legal rights which, as Patricia Hannon points out in Fabulous Identities: Women’s Fairy Tales in Seventeenth-Century France, “accompanied absolutism’s strengthening of patriarchal authority”. (16) Borrowing from the universe of the wonder tale, it could be said that the conteuses, the aristocratic women storytellers who gave birth to the literary fairy tale in the salons in late seventeenth-century France, refused the traditional but socially accepted status of the submissive Cinderella Perrault had created in his 1697 Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals. A passive object to another’s will who waited patiently for her release at the hands of Prince Charming, Cinderella did not fit in the conteuses’ definition of femininity: they had nothing to do with sweet, lachrymose, domestic(ated) heroines, either in their life or in their tales, as Henriette- Julie de Murat made clear in the introduction to her 1699 Sublime and Allegorical Stories, explicitly dedicated to her fellow “modern fairies”: SUBVERSIVE FEMALE AGENCY IN MADAME D’AULNOY’S “THE WHITE CAT” 223 The old fairies, your predecessors, were just gossips compared to you.