The first fairytales were feminist critiques of patriarchy. We need to revive their legacy
Most revolutions begin quietly, in narrative. Take, for instance, fairytales. The popular understanding is that fairytales evolved exclusively from oral folktellers – from the uneducated “Mother Goose” nurse, passing into the imaginations of children by centuries of fireside retellings.
But this story is a myth. Fairytales were invented by the blue blood and pomaded sweat of a coterie of 17th century French female writers known as the conteuses,or storytellers.
The originator of the term “fairytale”, Baroness Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy, didn’t need another hero when she published the very first fairytale in 1690. Her resourceful fairy queen Felicite was a true heroine, ruling over a magnificent kingdom and showering her lover, Prince Adolph, with devotion and gifts, only to be abandoned when he sought fame and glory over their mutual happiness.
In the closing years of Louis XIV’s reign, French society had become dangerously religious and conservative. Prominent clerics argued for the banning of plays at Versailles, and art forms such as female-authored novels suffered increasing criticism.
Women’s lives during this period were deeply constrained. They were married as young as 15 in arranged unions to protect family property, often to men many years older than themselves. They could not divorce, work, nor control their inheritances. And where husbands were allowed mistresses, women could be sent to a convent for two years as punishment for so much as the whiff of rumour at having taken a lover.
It was in the repressive milieu of the troubled last decade of 17th century France that fairytales crystallised as a genre. Performed and recited in literary salons, from 1697 the fairytales of D’Aulnoy, Comtesse HenrietteJulie de Murat, Mademoiselle L’Héritier and Madame Charlotte-Rose de la Force were gathered into collections and published.
In La Mercure Galant, Paris’s most fashionable literary magazine, these new stories and their authors were celebrated as the latest vogue. The subversive genre incorporated motifs and tropes from classical myth, the codes of medieval chivalry, the fables of La Fontaine and novels by the early feminist French writers Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Madame la Fayette.
D’Aulnoy and her peers used exaggeration, parody and references to other stories to unsettle the customs and conventions that constrained women’s freedom and agency. Throughout her writing career, D’Aulnoy’s central theme was the critique of arranged marriage, her heroines repositioned as agents of their own destinies. While the quest continued to be love, it was on the terms of the Baroness’s female readers, whom she took immense care to entertain. Gender roles were reversed; princesses courted princes, bestowing extravagant favours and magnificent gifts – such as a tiny dog encased in a walnut that danced and plays the castanets.
D’Aulnoy’s Prince Charming, from her tale The Blue Bird, still holds appeal to modern readers, particularly for his stamina, enduring many long hours of attentive conversation and devotion to nurturing a courtship with the princess. But she also gently teased and undercut the chivalric code of love. In Finette Cendron, a variant of Cinderella, the prince suffers a life-threatening bout of lovesickness:
D’Aulnoy had no imitators in her brilliant crafting of miniature fantastic worlds – a precursor to spec fiction and fantasy. And into her tiny kingdoms she inserted critiques of the patriarchy – her kings, fathers and rulers were ineffective, passive, unreasonable.
The conteuses created the archetypes of our classic fairytale heroines: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel. They were bestselling writers in their day, their popularity continuing into the 18th century, circulated throughout all levels of society by publication in the Bibliothèque Bleue, a series of cheaply printed and readily affordable chapbooks.
But their tales were complex and their morals ambiguous. Their intended audiences were not children but educated adults. Their stories were long, like novellas, and incorporated character development, dialogue and complicated plots. And they digressed, embroidering an extravagant tapestry of miniature, marvellous detail. And this was, perhaps, their downfall.
In the 19th century, when the Brothers Grimm began their project of collecting and publishing folktales, they dismissed the conteuses as inauthentic, as not representative of the voices of the common volk. But the Grimms’ theory that fairytales had a linear relationship to folktales has been exposed by scholars as a nationalist – and masculinist, as the teller was usually an illiterate female – bias. A furphy.
We need to redress this false belief, because it denies us the ability to acknowledge the contributions individual female authors made to stories that continue to have currency in our culture in ever-changing forms: manga, graphic novels, movies, novels, television series.
The history of the French conteuses is a forgotten story that needs to be retold. One in which women authors invited their readers to imagine greater freedom in their lives, to be their own authors of the most fundamental of all human endeavours – to be able to choose whom to love.
• Melissa Ashley’s new novel, The Bee and the Orange Tree, explores the life of Marie Catherine’s d’Aulnoy and is out now in Australia through Affirm Press
Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy’s central theme was the critique of arranged marriage, her heroines agents of their own destinies