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Audiences and Messages in Perrault's Tales

1987; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chq.0.0185

1553-1201

Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi,

Linguistics and Cultural Studies

Audiences and Messages in Perrault's Tales Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi (bio) For nearly three hundred years since their publication in 1697, Perrault's famous fairy tales have spoken to audiences of different generations and different cultures with undiminished charm and vigor. This universality of appreciation has enshrined the tales as perhaps the most familiar text in the entire corpus of French literature, and has inspired scholarly studies in a vast array of disciplines. Paradoxically, however, this very universality plays utter havoc with our understanding of the original text. In order to develop such an understanding, it is necessary to distinguish between the functions of a text—didactic, cultural, or psychological—and the identity of a text as a discrete artifact whose very existence determines a specific historical and literary context, as well as an intended contemporary audience. In the case of Perrault's tales, that audience is remarkably difficult to define, because the text contains conflicting signals regarding what might be termed the "message" of each story. By examining these conflicts, and by looking to the historical context of the work to provide clues to their interpretation, one may arrive at a greater appreciation of the plurality and profundity of the moral messages which Perrault intended to convey. This plurality, furthermore, accounts in large measure for the tales' bilateral appeal to both adult and juvenile readers. The historical context of the tales is that of late seventeenth-century French society, but beyond that, it encompasses the contemporary activities of the French Academy, of which Perrault was one of the most prolific members. In January of 1687, Perrault had presented to the Academy a poem entitled "The Age of Louis the Great," eulogizing the cultural and scientific accomplishments carried out under the reign of Louis XIV, and claiming that modern writers rivalled and sometimes even surpassed the great masters of antiquity. The debate which ensued, known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, polarized the Academy into two camps, composed of those who defended the superiority of classical writers and those who defended their contemporaries. Not surprisingly, the latter group was headed by Perrault. The significance of this quarrel in relation to the tales is profound, when one considers that between 1691 and 1694, Perrault published three tales in verse which are usually considered to be forerunners of the later tales in prose. They include "The Marquise of Salusses, or the Patience of Griselidis," a tale imitated from Boccaccio; "Peau D'Ane," or "Donkey Skin;" and "The Ridiculous Wishes." As Perrault states in a preface of 1694, those three tales were written for the purpose of demonstrating to "those who can only be moved by the authority and example of the ancients"1 that modern tales were often superior in a moral sense to classical fables. Drawing a specific comparison, Perrault states the following: Tout ce qu'on peut dire, c'est que cette Fable [Psyche] de même que la plupart de celles qui nous restent des Anciencs n'ont été faites que pour plaire sans égard aux bonnes moeurs qu'ils négligeaient beaucoup. Il n'en est pas de même des contes que nos aïeux ont inventés pour leurs Enfants . . . ils ont toujours eu un très grand soin que leurs contes renfermassent une moralité louable et instructive. (51) All that one can say is that this fable, as is the case with most of those left to us by antiquity, was written only to please, without regard for sound morals, which they frequently ignored. This is not the case with the tales which our forebears created for their children . . . they always took great care to make the tale incorporate a praiseworthy and instructive moral. Only one year later, in 1695, there appeared the first known manuscript of the tales in prose,2 and in 1697, their final version was published in Paris by Claude Barbin. Of the eight tales in the collection, not a single one is modelled after a classical story; they are modern moral tales, rivalling both the classical fables and the much-admired contemporary fables of La Fontaine.3 If, as in the case of La Fontaine's Fables...