The Magical Folk of France
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ners and blind duty to the king. On the contrary, Marie-Catherine handled her material freely, making additions, amplifications, and moral reflections to the original tale, which she also used as a vehicle through which to spew venom at what she portrayed as a dark, suffocating social system under Louis XIV, the self-proclaimed Sun King. Her weaving together of incidents is artistic and her style graceful and not unpleasing. It is marked by ornamentation, sumptuousness and French sentimentality. It shows a lack of naivete resulting from the palace setting given to her tales, making them adapted only to children of high rank. Often her tale is founded on a beautiful tradition. The BlueBird, one of the finest of her tales, was found in the poems of Marie de France, in the thirteenth century, whilst three others were borrowed
duce with gentleness, sneak into our beds, and get us there. The sexual undertones are not lost on us — after all, the contemporary French idiom for a girl having lost her virginity was elle avoit vû le loup!
he Bluebird and other stories... France has a rich history of The origin of the word “fairy,” as given by Thomas Keightley in his Fairy Mythology, oral tradition and folklore, the and later in the Appendix of his Tales and Popular Fictions, is the Latin fatum, “to enelements of which became the inchant.” The word was derived directly from the French form of the root. The various spiration for many well known fairy forms of the root were:-- Latin . . . . fatum, “to enchant.” tales, celebrated now more as literFrench . . . . fee, feerie, “illusion.” ary works than for their oral variItalian . . . . fata. ants, and encapsulated for all time Provencal . . . . fada. by 17/18th century writers Charles In old French romance, fee was a “woman skilled in magic.” “All those women were Perrault (author of Cinderella, Puss called Fays who had to do with enchantment and charms and knew the power and virin Boots, Little Red Riding Hood) and tue of words, of stones, and of herbs, by which they were Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy (authoress of The Bluebird, Goldilocks, The Yellow dwarf). from Straparola. In the late 1600s, the French Salons were Charles Perrault (d.1703), whose stories filled with fairy tale writing, primarily by taken from the oral tradition and entreatwomen writers. The telling of fairytales ed to a certain amount of the author’s started almost as a conversational game and own imaginative embellishment,were provided a means for women, unable to hold published in his Histoires ou Contes du office, to prove their intellectual abilities. temps passé (better known amongst naThe fairy stories were often used as a vehicle tive English speakers as ‘Mother Goose through which to rail against moral issues, Tales’) and remain among the most but as well as reinforcing social norms they popular tales today – although in the were also used to subvert them. past decades children have been served One of the most prolific and influential of up somewhat sanitized versions of Perthese women is Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy rault’s original work. In Little Red Riding (d.1705) who published four volumes of Hood, for example, there is no intrepid fairy tales. She was a brilliant, witty counthuntsman placed artfully in the story ess, and brought into her tales, entitled Conto save the poor little girl. Rather, Little tes de Fees, the graces of the court. Red simply strips naked, gets in bed, and She adhered less strictly to tradition than then dies, eaten up by the big bad wolf, her male contemporary, author Charles Perwith no miraculous relief (in another rault, whose own literary fairy tales had won version, she eats her own grandmother him almost instant success, notably ‘Puss in first, her flesh cooked up and her blood Boots’ which idealized the rise of an advenpoured into a wine glass by our wolfish turous cat through the ranks of courtly socifriend). Instead, Perrault gives us a little ety; the story sends the message to young rhyming verse reminding us that not men that nobility is a reward for good manall wolves are wild beasts — some sewww.theheraultandaudetimes.com
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