Th ht n “H r n n Fr n h F r T l

Christine A. Jones

Marvels & Tales, Volume 27, Number 1, 2013, pp. 1, 15-33 (Article)

P bl h d b n t t n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/mat.2013.0003

For additional information about this article

Access provided by University of Utah (13 Aug 2015 01:09 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mat/summary/v027/27.1.jones.html

2nd Pass Pages

MASTER

AR

TIC

LES

MT_27.1_01.indd 13 21/03/13 2:17 PM

MT_27.1_01.indd 14 19/03/13 12:50 PM

15

Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2013), pp. 15–33. Copyright © 2013 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201.

Christine A. Jones

Thoughts on “Heroinism” in French Fairy Tales

It’s not that women can’t be seen as heroines, it’s that you have to do twice as much to bring attention to them in a crisis situation. . . . In the collec-tive consciousness, men handle this kind of catastrophe.

—Mary Carouba, Women at Ground Zero

A brief anecdote to begin: I had just watched the Hollywood movie G.I. Jane, featuring an amazingly buff Demi Moore, for the first time just before Donald Haase wrote to suggest the topic “Fantasies of War” for the sponsored Folk Nar-rative Section panel at the American Folklore Society 2011 meeting.1 G.I. Jane (1997) was directed by Ridley Scott, no stranger to female heroism, and tells the story of a government experiment to test the wisdom of gender equality in military elite forces. The Navy plans to enlist a beautiful (and capable) woman—Lieutenant Jordan O’Neil, played by Moore—into the all-male ranks of its Combined Reconnaissance Team (or CRT, a fictional version of the SEALs). Her appropriately gender-neutral name, Jordan, and a combination of striking fem-inine and masculine attributes make her an ideal candidate.2 The voluptuous Jordan shaves her head, pumps her body into a machine, and trains her bright smile into a scowl that would curdle milk. The movie positions itself as a heroic epic but unfolds in the form of a fairy-tale plot, and not an untraditional one at that. First, there is the glaring anatomical lack that keeps Jordan down in the military (for which she compensates by turning her biceps into tree trunks). Then, there are trials that test her resolve and her endurance. Finally, there is redress—she is eventually assimilated into the Navy CRT as an exception to the rule, which restores order in its own way. In the final scene the commander

MT_27.1_01.indd 15 19/03/13 12:50 PM

CHRISTINE A. JONES

16

who most stridently doubted her (whose life she resourcefully saved) gives her his Navy Cross in private recognition of her valor and his misjudgment.

As I thought about a possible talk on the subject of fantasies of war, I realized how much the movie reminded me in significant ways of the three heroines in seventeenth-century fairy tales that were the subject of my disser-tation. These women have been the subject of much discussion over the past twenty years.3 As iconic cross-dressers of the French tradition they are now familiar to fairy-tale scholarship: Léonore/Marmoisan, in Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier’s “Marmoisan, ou l’innocente tromperie” (Marmoisan, or the Inno-cent Trick); Belle-Belle/Fortuné, in “Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné” (Belle-Belle or the Knight Fortuné), by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy; and Constantine/Constantin in “Le Sauvage” (The Savage), by Henriette-Julie de Murat.

In contrast to Jordan O’Neil, fairy-tale heroines are called to their tasks with the proviso that they have to fool the king and his army, literally pass as men—hence the obligatory name change in each story. The girls boldly dress and work as knights, exhibiting native skills as honed and deadly as any warrior’s. In anticipation of Jordan O’Neil (if for different reasons), they experience sexual harassment, trials that challenge their resolve, and endurance tests. Although forced by circumstances beyond their control to come to the defense of home and country, maiden warriors are endowed with the right stuff and, like Jordan, they exhibit traditionally masculine predilections and talents. They ride, fence, and hunt by natural inclination. When cross-dressed, they are, to a woman, highly eroticized. Supercharged superheroes—an idea that came to life on the Hollywood screen in G.I. Jane—they excite both genders and succeed where others fail. They are marvels of both femininity and mascu-linity and transcend gender as exemplars in the tradition of saints in the way that they remain faithful to their missions in the face of overwhelming odds and adversity. Although maiden warriors marry in the end, they have earned the respect and admiration of the prince who chooses them by living out the obli-gations of his power and his kingdom more successfully than he does.

The fairy-tale model plainly implies that even sexier than a man in uni-form is a beautiful girl in a man’s uniform doing his job. At the end of the day the cross-dressed heroines join the court they have done battle for as its queen. I argue in “Poetics of Enchantment” that transvestite heroines are an inscrip-tion of the writer—architects of their own fate and allegories for the period, the 1690s, when women writers endeavored to carve their place in the republic of letters. Marrying the prince could then be understood as the equivalent of seeing your name in print or being elected to a literary academy—privileges that d’Aulnoy, L’Héritier, and Murat all enjoyed. Fairies enter into the discus-sion too as an even more literal avatar of the all-knowing storyteller who over-sees and predetermines the outcome of the narrative. On my read, all women

MT_27.1_01.indd 16 19/03/13 12:50 PM

“HEROINISM” IN FRENCH FAIRy TALES

17

writers are warriors: a bit of Joan DeJean’s pen-as-sword vision of writing as a political act (55) coupled with Elizabeth Harries’s perceptive insight about the conteuses, which technically means “female tellers,” positioning themselves as writers and savants (ch. 1). Cross-dressing and war seemed coextensive, and I pushed that affinity to suggest that women’s fairy tales waged a metaphorical war—an assault on exclusion and gender bias in the world of letters.

But in light of the conference panel topic, “Fantasies of War,” which asked me to isolate the motif of battle in the fairy tale, I have jostled my tidy constellation—writer, cross-dresser, war—to see what shakes out. Over the years eloquent studies of women writers—one of them by Anne Duggan,4 who also has a piece in this issue of Marvels & Tales—have led me to rethink the virtue of isolating the cross-dressed heroine from other heroines who do extraordinary things. My own intellectual projects over the past two years also convinced me that I overlooked a trove of interesting gender gaming around heroism in tales written by the godfather of the persecuted heroine, Charles Perrault. Eyes newly opened, I began to see heroism all over the French corpus, which made me think that cross-dressing per se may not be what makes the few stories of cross-dressed warriors exceptional. I take up that possibility here.

The uniqueness of the cross-dressed maiden plotline5 versus the prepon-derance of heroic activity in tales by French writers suggests that separating out the modalities of war from female heroism could yield productive insight. Two parts of this paper explore hero-in-ism, broadly conceived as the way female characters assert themselves, even within terrifically constraining cir-cumstances. The first turns to Charles Perrault to discuss heroines and speech. The second mines Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s tales for a few choice examples of active women. These sections show that heroinism can be found in many unexpected places. In the last part I return to the subject of war with these insights in mind and propose a working theory: the war motif in the French fairy tale has a particularly theatrical flair. I suggest that it operates like a flood-light within the broader field of female empowerment—the kind of “twice as much” suggested in the epigraph that makes sure that women stand out against a cultural backdrop designed to absorb them (Carouba, qtd. in Gérand).6

Say What You Need to Say

A reread of some of the best-loved heroines from all walks of French fairy-tale life reveals that many exhibit traits that either are formally associated with men in the seventeenth century, such as cunning and physical strength, or derive from intellectual traditions, such as education and publishing, that conventionally excluded women. One of the most notable, if easily overlooked, of these com-monplace skills among heroines is linguistic competence.7 Even the famously

MT_27.1_01.indd 17 19/03/13 12:50 PM

CHRISTINE A. JONES

18

passive heroines in the French corpus—including the likes of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty—have a witty, often ironic, command of language. Linguistic competence and, more important, the ability to interpret signs, deduce motive, and use irony are hallmarks of not only the warrior heroines who dissimulate their gender but also the inert heroines who cry or sleep in a coma and wait for a prince. Although I could draw an example from just about every tale writer of the 1690s, my examples of rhetorical verve will come from Charles Perrault’s 1697 Histoires, ou contes du temps passé (Stories, or Tales of Times Past) because they are surprising for readers who have come to know Perrault’s heroines for their weakness and helplessness.8 Returning to the specificity and focus of the language in the 1697 French provides an opportunity for rethinking such hero-ines as Sleeping Beauty who have turned into cultural lore in North America as figures for passive women. As we will see in the personae of Cinderella and Blue Beard’s wife, Perrault’s heroines say what they need to say—all except one, who will end this section as the negative example that proves the rule.

Perrault’s “Cendrillon, ou la Petite Pantoufle de verre” (Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper) helped create one of the most iconic suffering heroines in European history. She appears helpless and needs a healthy dose of fairy magic even to survive. yet, read closely, her story is one of subtle development. Cinderella receives more than magic from the fairy; she learns a lesson in rhetoric. As far as whining goes, she does not spend much of her story in this initial helpless state. Her helplessness appears strongly the first time the sisters leave for the ball and she watches from her window in her dowdy, dirty clothes; she turns into a blubbering inarticulate child: “‘I would really like . . . I would really like . . .’ She sobbed so hard that she could not finish.” At that moment her fairy godmother steps in and delivers what will turn out to be the first of several lessons in the expediency of language: “Her godmother, who was a fairy, said to her: ‘you would really like to go to the ball, right?’ ‘Well, yes,’ said Cinderella, heaving” (95).9 When the fairy speaks this all-important phrase, “go to the ball,” she models for Cinderella the performative power of language. Ask and you shall receive. Henceforth Cinderella learns how to use language to get what she needs.

In the very next line the godmother begins calling for material objects for a coach and its retinue, but she stops short after the pumpkin and the mice; and the narrator reports that “she struggled with what to use for a coachman.” The text does not explicitly state why she struggles, and we might be inclined to accept it as a temporary lapse of creativity or, as Henriette-Julie de Murat sug-gests, a limit on the fairy’s power.10 yet, in the context of this famous scene where the fairy proves most adept at her magic, any hint of failure on her part should also indicate strategy. This hurdle on the road to the ball then seems deliberately erected to test Cinderella, who leaps right over it: “‘Let me see,’ said Cinderella, ‘if

MT_27.1_01.indd 18 19/03/13 12:50 PM

“HEROINISM” IN FRENCH FAIRy TALES

19

by any chance there is a rat in the rattrap. We will make a coachman out of him.’ ‘Good idea,’ said the godmother, ‘Go see’” (96). Again, read straight, we might take the scene as evidence of the ostensible weakness of the fairy; but if we read the fairy’s “good idea” as a validation of Cinderella’s rise to the occasion (she literally steps in for the fairy, telling her what they will do next), then it looks more like a stage in the process of a pedagogical experiment.11 In preparing Cinderella’s finery for the ball, the fairy also prepares lessons in speech acts.

Cinderella indeed proves an excellent student of the fairy. At a piv-otal moment later on in the narrative, after she has been to the ball and tasted greatness, she has the following exchange with her nasty stepsister, Mademoiselle Javotte:

Cinderella was giddy with happiness: she asked the name of the prin-cess, but they answered that no one knew who she was, that the son of the king was just sick about it, and that he would give everything in the world to know who she was. Cinderella smiled and said: “She was really beautiful, then? God, you are so lucky! Could I at least get a glimpse of her? What to do . . . Mademoiselle Javotte, lend me the yellow ensemble that you wear all the time.” “That’s just what I’ll do,” said Mademoiselle Javotte. “Honestly. Lend your clothes to a disgusting Ashwipe like that. I would have to be utterly nuts.” Cinderella naturally expected this refusal and was glad for it because she would have been in quite a bind if her sister had agreed to lend her the clothes. (98)12

Here, in the absence of the fairy and her magical trappings, Cinderella succeeds in commanding the dialogue. This deception has no immediate purpose or effect on the narrative except the pleasure she derives from her sisters’ reac-tion. Moreover, it is no different from the magic the fairy has confected so that the girl can pass as a royal at the ball. Cinderella makes the same rhetorical maneuver before she tries on the slipper and her words prove effective again, this time with the legendary consequence of her marriage:

Cinderella was watching, recognized the slipper and chuckled, say-ing, “Maybe I should see if it fits me!” Her sisters cracked up and made fun of her. The gentleman try-ing the slipper, who had looked carefully at her and found her very attractive, said that this seemed fair and that he had been ordered to try it on every girl. (100)

MT_27.1_01.indd 19 19/03/13 12:50 PM

CHRISTINE A. JONES

20

He had been ordered to try it on every girl, but the implication here is that he would never have noticed Cinderella if she had not spoken up. Is it the shoe, then, or Cinderella’s new wry sense of humor that changes her life? This story demonstrates that language is a kind of magic. Once Cinderella learns to com-mand her voice, in fact, she will no longer need a pumpkin/coach or a rat/coachman; with her words and wiles, she traps a prince.

To take one more unlikely example of rhetorical sophistication from Perrault’s corpus, the nameless wife in “Blue Beard” may be the most surpris-ingly empowered heroine among them. Second only to “Griselda” among Perrault’s fairy tales for its disrepute among feminists, “Barbe bleue” (Blue Beard) tops the list of problematic stories in the Histoires. Even dead Little Red Riding Hood fares better among critics concerned about Perrault’s view of women. As such, “Blue Beard” invites mediation on female power. The traditional take on the nameless, faceless wife finds her radically disempowered, even erased in a narrative that appears set up to break female resolve. As financially strapped as Cinderella and forced for that reason into a marriage with a man she initially finds horrid, the young wife lives under Blue Beard’s control: his house, his temptations, his rules. Like Cinderella, the young wife at first appears to cower before her destiny, unable to speak plainly about what she has seen and what she needs. In fact, she has no direct speech in the narrative until she is forced to answer Blue Beard’s demand for the key. Nevertheless, as soon as she does speak, “I must have left it upstairs on my dressing table” (77), she manifests a caginess that will mark her character throughout the narrative. She responds evasively—already a language of feigned confusion (she knows exactly where the key is).

When Blue Beard’s repeated demands become threatening, she gives him the bloody key; a symbol of what she knows and what she can now use against him. Called to answer for the indelible blood left on it by her folly, she again dissimulates: “‘I know nothing about that,’ replied the miserable wife, pale as death” (77). In a spectral perversion of Cinderella, Blue Beard speaks the words she will not say. They too become a performative but serve to judge her guilty and sentence her to death: “‘you know nothing about that,’ repeated the Blue Beard, ‘I know all about it: you wanted to get into the office! Alright, Madam, you shall go in and shall take your place among the ladies you’ve seen there’” (78). In the lines that follow, she responds to the death sentence with yet another rhetorical game: she acts the blubbering child à la Cinderella. Her blubbering is tactical: “Wailing and begging for forgiveness, she threw herself at her husband’s feet—all signs of sincere remorse for her failure to obey. Her beauty and pain would have melted even stone, but the Blue Beard’s heart was harder than stone” (78). As Perrault wrote the scene, we do not know that the

MT_27.1_01.indd 20 19/03/13 12:50 PM

“HEROINISM” IN FRENCH FAIRy TALES

21

wife feels remorse, only that she shows signs of remorse in word and gesture—the kind one would manifest to exact pity.

The rest of the scene brings out more stagecraft:

“you are going to die, Madam, and right now.” Her eyes wet with tears, she replied, “Since I am going to die, give me some time to pray.” “you can have half of fifteen minutes,” the Blue Beard shot back, “and not one minute more. (78)

If language is her only recourse once wailing fails, she uses it wisely. The request to pray emerges as a strategy that is guaranteed to work by the same Christian concern for salvation that saved Hamlet’s uncle. The wife does not, in fact, pray up in her room—or at least not to the God that the language of supplication would suggest. Instead, she sends up a clear and desperate call to her sister Anne. As a young woman who has not yet entered into the binding stricture of marriage, Anne can speak/see/act in ways that the wife cannot. The wife has words; her sister supplies the body needed to take action. In one of the most poetic (and quotable) refrains in the Perraultian corpus, the wife con-scripts Anne to go to higher ground and be her scope:

Sister Anne climbed to the top of the tower and the poor thing cried out to her now and then, “Anne, sister Anne, is there nothing in sight?” And sister Anne would reply, “I see nothing but the sun dusting and the grass greening.” (78)

Suspense builds as this exchange transpires three times before Anne finds help in the form of her military brothers and signals (ever the physical extension of her sister’s plot, she remarks that they are too far to hear her call) to speed them on their way.

In the hopes of her brothers’ arrival and to initiate the final drama of the tale, the wife descends to face her captor. Even in her final hour, she musters the cheek to strategize, twice more requesting a reprieve even as Blue Beard raises the knife over her head:

Blue Beard started screaming so loudly that the house shook. His miserable wife came down looking distraught and a mess, and was about to throw herself at his feet when he said, “That won’t work. you are going to die.” Then he grabbed her by the hair with one hand and raised the blade with the other, ready to slash her throat. His miserable wife

MT_27.1_01.indd 21 19/03/13 12:50 PM

CHRISTINE A. JONES

22

turned to him with cold, dead eyes and requested a brief moment to collect herself. “No. No!” he said, “Commend your soul to God.” (79)

Several elements of this violent moment are worthy of note. First, the character of Blue Beard has become unhinged. He continues to speak plainly in spite of his fury—a particular talent of Perrault’s dangerous men—but he physically expresses the chaos of his mind in screams and violence. The “miserable wife,” for her part, matches his escalation with calculated inertia: she plays dead. He gets hotter, she gets colder; he burns, the light in her eyes goes out. And her sangfroid strategy stands her in good stead against his explosion; her will to keep speaking, à la Scheherazade, keeps her alive long enough for her brothers to arrive. yes, technically they kill her aggressor, but they could never have known to hasten their journey if she had not talked her way out of death more than once. In a sense, then, her words did save her, and the brothers’ swords (like Cinderella’s slipper) enact that rhetorical triumph.

Many more heroines foil aggressors by talking their way out of a bind, and more could be said about the ones treated here. To end on the counterex-ample: the one heroine in Perrault’s corpus who most emphatically does not understand the subtleties of language, Le Petit Chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), gets caught in the wolf’s linguistic snare and finds no way out. At the end of this cautionary tale about talking to people whose intentions you do not understand, his famous repartees (“The better to . . .”) rock her in a cradle of doom. Significantly, this is one of the first verbal segments initiated by the girl (“Grandma, what big . . .”), who hands the wolf a rhythmic inter-rogation that he is only too happy to exploit and cut off at the end with a grammatical and physical shock (“And with those words, the wolf threw him-self at the little red riding hood and ate her,” 72). If Little Red Riding Hood ends up dead, it is not because the woods are dangerous but because language is seductive and confusing and she has in no way been prepared to perceive its power. It is perhaps not so much the ability to know many words as the ability to perceive the politics behind the usage of words that saves the day in Perrault’s dangerously witty fairy-tale universe. Part of what makes a heroine brave is her ability to interpret and then act in word or, as we will see, in deed.

Do What You Need to Do

At the risk of overgeneralizing, Perrault paints a universe in which women tend to be condemned to immobility by violent authorities, so that words, if they are taught to use them, are their one and only weapon. Male characters find more devious ways to be mobile than female characters—for example, Master Cat and Tom Thumbling. If my arguments suggest that Perrault places strong

MT_27.1_01.indd 22 19/03/13 12:50 PM

“HEROINISM” IN FRENCH FAIRy TALES

23

emphasis on rhetorical, often performative speech in his heroines, then women writers are more likely to call them up for active duty. L’Héritier, d’Aulnoy, and Murat—mentioned as the authors of the three cross-dresser tales—write stories featuring many of the same violent authorities, but they offer women alterna-tives to speech. That does not make their heroines demonstrably more heroic (just as many weep and wail, and just as many succeed and fail), but it does make their plots longer and less overtly depressing to feminists. Again, many stories by women writers could serve as examples of heroinism, a topic that has occupied critics in French studies for the past twenty years.13 Because there is a tradition of excellent scholarship on this subject, I restrict my comments on heroic action to one long, significant tale by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy.

The eponymous heroine of d’Aulnoy’s “Finette Cendron” knows her way around and, in fact, seems familiar with the French fairy-tale tradition. Her story comprises different plotlines from earlier tales, which she uses up one after the other until she finds what she needs. One example of this borrowing is her name: Finette Cendron combines L’Héritier’s Finette with Perrault’s Cendrillon ( Cinderella), whose habits—among others—she adopts. Part Little Thumbling, Finette overhears her parents deciding to send the children away and sets about a plan to return. Instead of relying on her own devices, she heads off directly to her godmother’s house for help. No stranger to how fairies work, she calculates her equation: one request for help equals the ingredients of one “excellent cake” (d’Aulnoy, “Finette Cendron,” 165). In imitation of Little Red Riding Hood, Finette takes an offering of butter and the makings of a cake to her fairy godmother, who will indeed be much more help than the grandmother in the other story.

Abandoned in the forest for the third time, when birds have eaten the peas and Finette and her sisters cannot find their way home, Finette finds an acorn and plants it. Once it begins to grow, Finette climbs it and, eager to figure out where they are, her siblings call out, “Sister, do you see nothing?” (d’Aulnoy, “Finette Cendron,” 169). If her name were Anne, we would hear an unmistak-able echo of Blue Beard, except, again, she is the one in motion, whereas her sisters call out. Her plotline eventually takes her into the lair of the ogre from Little Thumbling, whom she also foils. While they are still lodging at the ogre’s castle, the story borrows from the world of Cinderella: Finette’s well-dressed sisters go out and find a prince hosting a ball, leaving her at home to do chores. No fairy intervenes to give her speech lessons; that is not what she needs. Instead, Finette instinctively senses that some magical object must be in her midst, and then she immediately recognizes its purpose in her narrative:

One evening when Finette was seated near the fire on a mound of ashes, with no idea what to do, she began exploring the cracks in the chimney and, searching around, found a little key that was so old and

MT_27.1_01.indd 23 19/03/13 12:50 PM

CHRISTINE A. JONES

24

so filthy, it took all her effort to clean it. Once it was clean, she understood that it was gold and reasoned that a gold key should open a nice little box. She immediately set off running around the house, trying the key in locks. Finally, she found a little safe that was a mas-terpiece. (d’Aulnoy, “Finette Cendron,” 172)

In the safe Finette finds clothes; she then goes to the ball better dressed than her sisters and otherwise follows Cinderella’s story to the end—in nicer, if even less sensible shoes.14

Finette Cendron is demonstrably more fairy-wise than almost all her counterparts, and in that sense she demonstrates how many things heroines can do, given the chance. Although I have deliberately chosen a particularly spectacular example here, heroines in most of d’Aulnoy’s tales and those of other writers in the corpus are just as surprising in 1690s French literature as cross-dressed warriors.

My examples in the first parts of this paper support a broad understanding of “the masculine” to include not only actions and ostensibly gendered codes of behavior but also the perception and courage to work one’s way out of a bind—to exercise one’s will and navigate through treachery—in other words, the skills of the hero. Expanding the heroic to include small words and deeds makes sense if we take the uniquely dead eponymous character, Little Red Riding Hood, as the high symbol in the 1690s corpus of a domestic, unworldly, unsavvy young woman. Her death opens the path to failure and makes the female characters who do not fail glow with accomplishment. Extending the arguments about Perrault and d’Aulnoy to their logical ends, I want to propose that all French fairy-tale heroines who live to tell about it are gender benders after a fashion. In the literary world of the French fairy tale, there is only one model for successful subjectivity: a default masculine ideal of ingenuity and cunning. Heroines who would not die of stupidity or grief survive by appro-priating behaviors—words and deeds—not culturally designed for them.

Because many heroines display significant cunning both in speech and in action, cross-dressed heroine-soldiers raise a series of questions: What is the valence of war making in French fairy tales? How does the warring heroine who must leave home, cross-dress, join the army, and crusade differ from the heroine whose cleverness and resistance to gender roles emerge instead in speech and ingenuity that are often confined to a homestead? Is there more to it than simply wearing men’s clothes? In the last section of this article I explore a way of reading war that does not anchor the tales in an epic plot of more substance than other plotlines. Instead, I want to emphasize the pageantry of fairy-tale war and speculate on how that might inflect our understanding of gender in the cross-dressed heroine tales.

MT_27.1_01.indd 24 19/03/13 12:50 PM

“HEROINISM” IN FRENCH FAIRy TALES

25

War, What Is It Good For?

By way of investigating the occurrence of battle scenes in cross-dressed heroine tales written by L’Héritier (1695), d’Aulnoy (1698), and Murat (1699), I offer a reading of d’Aulnoy’s “Belle-Belle or the Knight Fortuné” that contrasts this warring heroine with the common heroine. As Belle-Belle, d’Aulnoy’s female lead has the persona of most heroines in the corpus: she is beautiful, taller than her sisters, charming, and gracious. In addition, she happens to hunt regularly, which prepares her physically for the plotline she enters. Her rite of passage is common to several sister stories, including Perrault’s “Les Fées” (Fairies) and L’Héritier’s “Enchantements de l’éloquence” (Enchantments of Eloquence), that involve treating a disguised fairy with compassion—that is, helping her even though she does not look good and has no apparent hereditary claim to civility. Like her counterparts in Perrault and L’Héritier, Belle-Belle acquires a treasure trove of gemstones: she does not spit them out when she opens her mouth like the other two characters but wears them all over her clothing. In other words, she too acquires material signifiers of inner beauty and worth.

This moment of acquisition, again typical of the good girl/bad sister story, also marks the place where this tale diverges from the others. Belle-Belle’s gems and other knightly attributes facilitate more than a marriage with a prince by creating another kind of bond with the prince that precedes and conditions the marriage at the end of the tale. This bond turns on the chivalric code, which forges a special relationship between a king and his first knight. Their union is not explicitly sexual, but it is traditionally homosocial, a detail exploited to its fullest in stories where the knight is female. In these scenarios the king knows he feels too much for him/her, but he cannot stop and remains confused by his passions until the very last. This girl will become not only the wife of the king but also the state’s defender. Whereas the marital relationship can be facilitated in other tales by rubies and diamonds alone, the defender’s commitment requires a hefty supplemental dowry in the form of accoutrements.

Dressed and working as the knight Fortuné, Belle-Belle gains the fol-lowing wardrobe accoutrements: encrusted riding clothes, ascots, swords, and thickly feathered hats. In other words, she is given the means to pass visually as a knight, and not just any knight, but a gloriously theatrical warrior who will outshine her opponents (figuratively and literally, for her entire outfit is encrusted with diamonds). Despite all evidence that these stories purport to be tales of yore, this brand of knighthood exhibits nothing medieval about it at all. Belle-Belle looks every bit the baroque hero that Louis XIV offered to his country as their capable king when he abolished the Prime Ministry and began his personal reign in 1661. In fact, dressed as Fortuné, Belle-Belle exceeds

MT_27.1_01.indd 25 19/03/13 12:50 PM

CHRISTINE A. JONES

26

even the bounds of high theatricality that laid the foundation for royal mythology in images of the Sun King (Burke, plates 22, 28, and 33).

By stepping into a weighty, gem-studded costume, Fortuné walks out onto the world stage with a name made from a masculinized past participle and endowed with many meanings: fortunate, wealthy, destined. These meanings are all visible in the knight’s clothing. Like the boots for Perrault’s Master Cat, finery gives Fortuné social credibility worth a fortune. yet it provides much more ornamentation than would really be necessary for a fairy-tale knight going into battle. To be clear, the surprising element here is not that the outfit is unbe-lievable or too fantastical; rather, the attire seems not to belong to the fairy tale but to the historical pageantry of Versailles. Fortuné’s riding ensemble closely resembles costumes worn at court festivals in late-seventeenth-century France.15 One political and aesthetic tradition at Louis XIV’s court that pertains to a con-versation about textual chivalry deserves particular mention: the carousel.

This mock tournament brought fantasies of knighthood to life in the courtyards of seventeenth-century castles.16 Carousels were staged in 1662 when Louis XIV was solidifying his power as a young monarch and again in 1685 in celebration of the king’s son, Dauphin. During the carousel, members of the high nobility mounted horses, as cavaliers (Figure 1), and competed against one another on teams that represented different parts of the world. Not unlike real wars but with almost none of the negative consequences, carousels staged power as an elaborate pageant that asked players to demonstrate their valor before the king. Significantly, they also brought the battlefield into France’s backyard for everyone to see. In that sense, and minus the casualties, carousels proved to be brilliant power-building exercises for the young king.

Remarkably for their time, women participated in these mock tourna-ments as cavalières (Figure 2) in ways they could not overtly have done in political battles. Putting a woman through this gauntlet, as it were, entered her into a stately tradition reserved for men and also allowed her to build a reputa-tion through the pageantry of war.

The carousel’s reenactment of battle with male and female participants offers a model for Fortuné’s heroism that privileges the equal capacity of men and women to participate in the theater of power. Indeed, while d’Aulnoy’s text clearly puts the character in breeches, descriptions of the ensemble that the knight wears and the finery that decorates the horse he rides correspond to both the cavalier and cavalière costumes as they are depicted in carousel illustrations. Although neither of the riders in Figures 1 and 2 literally depicts Fortuné, both of them wear the type of finery d’Aulnoy evokes in the text. Another historical detail to consider in exploring the possibility that the carousel illustrations somehow influenced the description of d’Aulnoy’s

MT_27.1_01.indd 26 19/03/13 12:50 PM

“HEROINISM” IN FRENCH FAIRy TALES

27

Fig. 1. J. Bérain I (1640–1711), “Carrousel Costume: Design for the Duc de Gramont, aide de camp of the Alabeses Brigade,” 1685. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New york. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles, France. Photo: Franck Raux.

Fig. 2. J. Bérain I (1640–1711), “Carrousel Costume: Design for a Lady of the Alabeses Brigade,” 1685. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New york. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles, France. Photo: Franck Raux.

MT_27.1_01.indd 27 21/03/13 2:17 PM

CHRISTINE A. JONES

28

hero/ine is Charles Perrault’s involvement in documenting the carousel of 1662 for posterity: he authored the text.17

Thus I want to consider that the trope of war in the French fairy tale does not necessarily refer to historical battle but could just as easily correspond cul-turally and historically to war making as a representational strategy.18 Fortuné’s coming into being indeed demands elaborate costuming, and other details in the text suggest theatricality. Over the course of her journey to war, Fortuné acquires seven marvelous helpers, each of whom corresponds to a body part and/or a sensory perception or bodily need and brings her allegorical talents: (1) Forte-échine (Strong Spine), a woodsman, contributes a backbone against fear; (2) Léger (Light), a swift hunter, can be her legs; (3) Bon-tireur (Good Shot), an accurate hunter, gives her excellent vision; (4) Fine-oreille (Sensitive Ear) supplies excellent hearing; (5) Impétueux ( Impetuous), a whistler, brings strong lungs that can level forests with air; (6) Trinquet (Toast), a guzzler, offers thirst; and (7) Grugeon (Simple Bread), an overeater, offers hunger (d’Aulnoy, “Belle-Belle,” 341–43).

War brings to the heroine capacities that are generally not intellectual but physical. Belle-Belle brings charm, grace, potential, and wit to the task—assets she shares with many heroines who come before and after her. Then she is outfitted by the fairy with an entire “body” of capacities as spectacular as her costume that most heroines do not enjoy. In short, her masculine persona lit-eralizes in physical attributes a mechanistic heroism that parallels and comple-ments the linguistic and mental heroism of women in skirts discussed earlier. This physicality would appear to align easily with the strength associated with masculinity. yet in the woman warrior these corporeal attributes overlay and enhance the warrior’s feminine persona. With the male body armor made up of a gleaming costume and an entourage of men who serve her, Fortuné is more beautiful and sexier and a more desirable woman. Riding through the streets wearing plumes and surrounded by magic servants, Fortuné somehow resem-bles Cinderella more than Belle-Belle ever would. Oddly, then, the cross-dressed heroines are only as virile—no less but also no more—as their domesticated counterparts. If we push this parallel further in its implications, the gender paradigm that separates male from female behaviors bends to the breaking point. What, then, of skirts and breeches?

The examples suggest that skirts force women to intellectualize heroism, that is, to sublimate it in language and cleverness. They are rhetorically mascu-line. Logically, then, we might imagine that breeches allow women to express their masculine sides in more interesting and certainly more readily apparent ways. I have argued on the contrary that breeches allow women, paradoxically, to express their femininity as sexuality and to do it theatrically. Covered in heroic trappings, their bodies become a site of erotic desire and mobility.

MT_27.1_01.indd 28 19/03/13 12:50 PM

“HEROINISM” IN FRENCH FAIRy TALES

29

Heroines who have not been separated from their skirts—by which I mean the prescribed behaviors and treatments for which the skirt acts as symbol—often do not enjoy these freedoms in the fairy-tale universe. They do have all kinds of plots to foil and dangers to avoid, but their focus is on outwitting the men and women immediately around them. Without a skirt, women warriors do not have the same local antagonisms and can set their sights on wowing kings with their fantastical personae. In the context of war, feminine sexuality, described in “Belle-Belle” as a relationship to materiality (what I called mecha-nism earlier) becomes a public asset, a virtue of cross-dressed heroines that theatricalizes political life by turning it into a pageant.

To conclude these speculations, I have argued that most French fairy-tale writers strategically masculinized female characters—that is, folded masculine attributes into feminine forms. In contrast, the cross-dressing tales by d’Aulnoy, L’Héritier, and Murat appear boldly to have folded the feminine into the most masculine story of all: war. At least, that would be the logical way to look at gender bending if we begin with the idea that the war trope significantly alters the idea of heroism already prevalent in fairy tales. I have pieced together a series of arguments here to suggest that it does not. My modest proposal is that the language of private and public victory, domestic struggle with paternalism versus public struggle with political threat, offers a more productive way than gender to think about heroinism in the French fairy tale. The crucial difference between these categories as I have laid them out is not gender per se but pag-eantry. In the private struggle the work and recognition stay small. In the public battle they become spectacular. Both types of plotlines promote hero-inism in a tricky, male-dominated world.

Finally, war is good for something in the fairy tale, if not in life: the motif of battle illuminates the importance of theatricality when heroism is writ large as a political struggle. Martial pageantry with its plumes and encrusted fabrics is designed to garner recognition for heroinism in a more obvious way than the plotlines of Blue Beard and Finette Cendron. Still, if pageantry-in-breeches can throw “twice as much” light on a path to glory, it is because brave skirted heroines have already beaten one.

Notes

1. The short version of this paper was delivered as AFS 2011 and had the title, “G.I. Jeanne: Hero(in)ism and War in the French Fairy Tale.” Preparing this essay for publication gave me a welcome opportunity to elaborate on nascent thoughts concerning the relationship between Charles Perrault and the French women writers of the 1690s. Nevertheless, the arguments that follow are speculative in nature and seek to open more questions than they answer.

MT_27.1_01.indd 29 19/03/13 12:50 PM

CHRISTINE A. JONES

30

2. The subplot of the movie is that Jordan is conscripted essentially for her beauty and is expected to fail, which she discovers and which fully ignites her determination.

3. See my “Noble Impropriety.” Studies devoted to cross-dressing in the French fairy tale include Velay-Vallentin, La Fille en garçon; and Zuerner, “Reconstruction Gender.” See also Zuerner’s “Disorderly Wives,” about two real-life transvestite heroines whose highly theatricalized biographies may have influenced fairy-tale writers.

4. See also Hannon, Fabulous Identities.5. Although knights abound as minor figures in fairy tales and are even occasionally

cross-dressed (see d’Aulnoy’s “Princess Belle-Etoile,” 1698), it is rare for warriors of either gender to be the main character of the story in the French tradition. A notable exception to this rule is Jean de Préchac’s “Nonpareil” (1698), the story of a fairy-tale prince whose life parallels the life of Louis XIV and who engages in the battles that occurred during the Sun King’s reign.

6. With Susan Hagen, Mary Carouba produced the only collection of accounts by women first responders on September 11: Women at Ground Zero. Cristelle Gérand interviewed Carouba for the ten-year commemoration of the attack on the World Trade Center. This and all other translations in this article are my own unless otherwise noted.

7. I developed an appreciation for the role of rhetorical savvy in character development through many a discussion with my longtime collaborator, Jennifer Schacker (who also has an article in this issue), and also in translating Perrault’s French and teaching it at the University of Utah. Some of the ideas discussed here are drawn from the introduction to Marvelous Transformations, which I co-wrote with Schacker. They are also the foundation of the introduction to my volume of new translations, Mother Goose Revisited (forthcoming).

8. Critics have long regarded Perrault as a foil for feminist arguments about women writers. Jack Zipes put forth the gender divide in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, and a critical tradition of feminist scholarship on women writers grew up around that study. I am rethinking this paradigm by looking for what heroines do in Perrault besides being confined and abused.

9. Page numbers are for Froloff’s French edition of Perrault. My translations were first published in Marvelous Transformations and will appear again in Mother Goose Revisited.

10. In the preface to Histoires sublimes et allégoriques (1699), Murat contrasts the beautiful and inventive “modern” fairies in the work of women writers with “old” fairies that can only endow girls with the capacity to do things like drop diamonds when they speak, that is, Perrault’s fairies. For a brief layout of the debate, see Tucker and Siemens, “Perrault’s Preface to ‘Griselda.’”

11. In “Charmed Eloquence” Allison Stedman notes the mutually beneficial relation-ship between the heroine Blanche and the fairy in L’Héritier’s “Enchantments of Eloquence” (1696). She puts that observation to the service of a larger argument about the woman writer as fairy.

12. “Ashwipe” is my unorthodox translation of “Cudcendron,” the insulting name the meaner sister uses, prompting the other to invent the less offensive “Cendrillon.” In French and particularly in the context of the story (since she sits in them),

MT_27.1_01.indd 30 19/03/13 12:50 PM

“HEROINISM” IN FRENCH FAIRy TALES

31

cendre means ash. Translators have traditionally opted for the homophonic “cin-der” (braise in French).

13. In addition to Zipes and Harries, important English-language studies that have taken up gender in the French fairy tale include Seifert, Fairy Tales; Hannon, Fabulous Identities; and Duggan, Salonnières. For a collection of studies that cover other fairy-tale traditions, see Haase’s Fairy Tales and Feminism. In his chapter in that volume, Seifert also lists the important French-language studies on the women writers, including books by Sophie Raynard-Leroy and Nadine Jasmine.

14. D’Aulnoy puts Finette in mules, backless low-heeled shoes. This shape of slipper, popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, could be simple and worn at home or decorative and worn in society. Finette wears fashionable mules cov-ered in red velvet with pearl trim for her night at the ball.

15. L’Héritier and Murat’s heroines do not wear such fabulously encrusted costumes, but each exhibits behaviors that fulfill a function similar to one I describe here in “Belle-Belle.”

16. Studies devoted to these events are scarce. See Castelluccio’s full-length study Les Carrousels and Cetre et al.’s “Le Carrousel de 1662.”

17. See the informative undergraduate thesis by Nicholas M. Nelson on Perrault’s text, “Courses de Testes et de Bague and the Cultural Legitimization of Louis XIV’s Personal Rule.” Historians of the Sun King’s “machine” cite it among the weapons in the arsenal of theatricality that helped define Louis XIV’s image (e.g., Burke 166–67).

18. Donald Haase has identified the fairy tale as a site for the exploration of war as personal trauma in “Children, War, and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales.”

Works Cited

Burke, Peter. The Fabrication of Louis XIV. New Haven, CT: yale UP, 1992.Carouba, Mary, and Susan Hagen, eds. Women at Ground Zero: Stories of Courage and

Compassion. New york: Alpha Books, 2003.Castelluccio, Stéphane. Les Carrousels en France du XVIe au XVIIIe Siècle. Paris:

L’insulaire/Les Editions de l’Amateur, 2002.Cetre, Natalie, Iegor Groudiev, and France Gautier. “Le Carrousel de 1662: de l’événement

au livre.” Revue de l’Histoire de Versailles et des Yvelines 86 (2002): 125–62.D’Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, baronne. “Belle-Belle, ou Le Cheva-

lier Fortuné.” Contes des Fées [1698]. Le Cabinet des fées. Ed. Elisabeth Lemirre. Arles, France: Editions Philippe Picquier, 2000. 333–64.

———. “Finette Cendron.” Contes des Fées [1698]. Le Cabinet des fées. Ed. Elisabeth Lemirre. Arles, France: Editions Philippe Picquier, 2000. 164–77.

———. “Princess Belle-Etoile and Prince Chéri” [1698]. The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. Trans. and ed. Jack Zipes. New york: Norton, 2001. 229–63.

DeJean, Joan. Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel. New york: Columbia UP, 1993.

Duggan, Anne. Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2005.

MT_27.1_01.indd 31 19/03/13 12:50 PM

CHRISTINE A. JONES

32

Gérand, Christelle. “Ces héroïnes oubliées.” l’Emilie, Sept. 13, 2011. www. lemilie.org/index.php/ailleurs/279-ces-heroines-oubliees, accessed June 21, 2012.

Haase, Donald. “Children, War, and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales.” The Lion and the Unicorn 24.3 (2000): 360–77.

———, ed. Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004.Hannon, Patricia. Fabulous Identities: Women’s Fairy Tales in Seventeenth-Century France.

Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.Harries, Elizabeth Wanning. Twice upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the

Fairy Tale. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003.Jones, Christine A. “Noble Impropriety: The Maiden Warrior and the Seventeenth-

Century conte de fées.” Diss., Princeton U, 2002.———. “The Poetics of Enchantment (1690–1715).” Marvels & Tales 17.1 (2003):

55–74.Jones, Christine A., and Jennifer Schacker, eds. Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology

of Tales and Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ontario: Broadview, 2012.L’Héritier de Villandon, Marie-Jeanne. “The Enchantments of Eloquence” [1696]. The

Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. Trans. and ed. Jack Zipes. New york: Norton, 2001. 550–64.

———. “Marmoisan ou l’innocente tromperie.” Oeuvres meslées. Paris: Jean Guignard, 1696.

Murat, Henriette-Julie, Comtesse de. “Le Sauvage.” Histoires sublimes et allégoriques par Mme la Comtesse D***, dédiées aux fées modernes. Paris: J. and P. Delaulne, 1699.

Nelson, Nicholas M. “Courses de Testes et de Bague and the Cultural Legitimization of Louis XIV’s Personal Rule, 1661–1671.” Thesis, Swarthmore College, 2008. http://triceratops.brynmawr.edu/dspace/handle/10066/1414, accessed June 22, 2012.

Perrault, Charles. “Barbe bleue.” Histoires, ou contes du temps passé [1697]. Perrault: Contes. Ed. Natalie Froloff. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. 74–81.

———. “La Belle au bois dormant.” Histoires, ou contes du temps passé [1697]. Perrault: Contes. Ed. Natalie Froloff. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. 58–69.

———. “Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre.” Histoires, ou contes du temps passé [1697]. Perrault: Contes. Ed. Natalie Froloff. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. 93–101.

———. Courses de Testes et de Bague Faittes [sic] Par Le Roy et par Les Princes et Seigneurs de sa Cour En l’Année 1662. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1670.

———. “Petit Chaperon rouge.” Histoires, ou contes du temps passé [1697]. Perrault: Contes. Ed. Natalie Froloff. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. 70–73.

Préchac, Jean de. “Sans Parangon” (Nonpareil) [1698]. Contes moins contes que les autres. Ed. Françoise Gevrey. Mayenne, France: Société des textes français modernes, 1993. 107–59.

Seifert, Lewis C. Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France (1690–1715): Nostalgic Utopias. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Stedman, Allison. “Charmed Eloquence: L’Héritier’s Representation of Female Literary Creativity in Late Seventeenth-Century France.” Cahiers du dix-septième siècle 9.2 (2005): 107–21.

Tucker, Holly, and Melanie Siemens. “Perrault’s Preface to Griselda and Murat’s ‘To Modern Fairies.’” Marvels & Tales 19.1 (2005): 126–30.

Velay-Vallentin, Catherine. La Fille en garçon. Carcassonne, France: Garae/Hésiode, 1992.

MT_27.1_01.indd 32 19/03/13 12:50 PM

“HEROINISM” IN FRENCH FAIRy TALES

33

Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. New york: Wildman Press, 1983.Zuerner, Adrienne. “Disorderly Wives, Loyal Subjects: Marriage and War in Early

Modern France.” Dalhousie French Studies 56 (2001): 55–65.———. “Reconstruction Gender: Cross-Dressing in Seventeenth-Century French

Literature.” Diss., U of Michigan, 1993.

MT_27.1_01.indd 33 19/03/13 12:50 PM