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Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 135; Issue: 537 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/15351882.135.537.11

1535-1882

Adrion Dula,

Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes

Aiming to analyze the “gendered social codes for the performance of love,” Bronwyn Reddan applies a methodology in Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales that is grounded in the notion that “emotions have a history that provides insight into the cultural and social dynamics of the society in which they are expressed” (p. 14). Drawing on the scholarship of Monique Scheer, Barbara Rosenwein, and Pierre Bourdieu, Reddan views the expression of emotions of love as a performative, active, and learned practice in which members of an emotional community use shared “emotion scripts” and thus challenge or revise social and cultural norms (pp. 14–8). Through extensive close readings of the emotion scripts in seventeenth-century fairy tales, particularly those penned by upper-class salon women, collectively known as the conteuses, Reddan clarifies how gender influenced the experience and expression of love in early modern France. In particular, Reddan convincingly argues that the conteuses’ tales provide “insight into the gendered power dynamics of courtship and marriage in seventeenth-century France,” and most importantly, that their love scripts challenge such gender politics (p. 4). This makes it indispensable for scholars interested in the gendered power dynamics of love in early modern French literary fairy tales, and specifically in the conteuses’ work.The book contains two main sections. In order to substantiate her view of the conteuses as writers engaged in a shared literary project and to reinforce her reading of the conteuses’ corpus of tales as the productions of an emotional community, Reddan devotes the first chapter in Part I to examining the metatextual and paratextual materials, such as the dedications and frame narratives that accompany early modern fairy-tale texts. Although not a completely new assertion, Reddan's thorough examination of the intertextual references to other tales found in the conteuses’ works, primarily to the tales by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, writings from Henriette-Julie de Murat's journal, and the reports from Le Mercure Galant, further the claim that these salonnières formed a literary and emotional community with a distinct authorial identity.Chapter 2 provides close readings of the conteuses’ tales in order to expose the shared vocabulary of love in their corpus, followed by a comparison of the conteuses’ love scripts with the works of other seventeenth-century authors. Building on research by Joan DeJean and Anne E. Duggan, among others, Reddan focuses on the influence from texts by René Descartes and Madeleine de Scudéry on the conteuses’ attitudes about love as a passion of the heart or a social practice. Reddan highlights the prevalent use of the terms tendresse and inclination from Scudéry's Carte de Tendre and unpacks notions of love often taken for granted by modern readers. In addition, Reddan contrasts the conteuses’ notions of love as an uncontrollable force or as a rational and thus controllable emotion with the theory of male love as passion and female love as obedience prevalent in conteurs’ tales, such as those by Charles Perrault or Louis de Mailly.Part II explores in detail the three essential moments in the social and moral norms of courtship and marriage in the tales—the first encounter between the hero and heroine, their union, and the endings—in order to illustrate the gendered power constructs in early modern France. Chapter 3 examines conversations about love in the tales themselves, analyzing declarations of love as either active (mostly by heroes who initiate the conversation) or passive (often indirect language by heroines). In contrast to traditional marriage practices in which parental consent was most important in the successful outcome of courtship, in the conteuses’ tales, a declaration of love must be reciprocated. Reddan highlights the transition in salon conversations and literary works from a transactional and economic view of marriage as arranged between the couple's parents to an “emotional model” of courtship and the “companionate model of marriage” negotiated by the couple themselves and dependent on mutual affection in the conteuses’ work (p. 75).Chapter 4 analyzes the theme of gift giving as a practice that imposes reciprocal emotional obligations on the hero and heroine first in two versions of the “Riquet à la houppe” by Perrault and Catherine Bernard before moving to other examples in the conteuses’ corpus. According to Reddan, the lack of reciprocity in Bernard's variant, in which the heroine receives intelligence from the hero but is unable to reciprocate his gift with beauty, in contrast to Perrault's version, results in a failed emotional bond that spells disaster for their marriage. Reddan reads the conteuses’ tales involving gift giving as engaging with the salon criticism of arranged marriages based on the economic and patriarchal model of marriage. Moreover, this failed exchange in Bernard's tale displays the limitations on women's ability to “negotiate the gendered power imbalance” in early modern courtship and marriage in which the transfer of power is still from father to groom (p. 117).The final chapter logically examines the morals that conclude many of the early modern literary tales, and tales that contain unhappy endings. Extending the work of Sophie Raynard and Christine Jones, Reddan reads the morals and various endings beyond the common marriage closure in the conteuses’ works as sophisticated and deliberate strategies “designed to conceal a subversive politics of love and marriage as entertainment” (p. 121). Finally, Reddan concludes that the moral poetics in the conteuses’ tales exemplify their ambivalent attitude toward and critique of the image of marriage as contributing to women's happily-ever-after and also contributing to the development of a “nuanced set of emotion scripts” used by women to mediate the gendered power structures in early modern courtship and marriage.The book's informative introduction will benefit scholars new to the discipline of French fairy-tale studies as it discusses the difficulties of defining the genre of the literary fairy tale, the reasons behind excluding the conteuses’ work from the literary canon, and the most important scholarly contributions to the field. Following the brief conclusion, Reddan supplies several useful appendices that trace the vast production history of the first wave of French fairy tales (1690–1709), and two that divide the declarations of love by gender. Although much of Reddan's book reiterates previous scholarship, she extends and reframes this work in terms of the history of emotions. A major contribution to the field of early modern French literary fairy-tale studies resides in Reddan's illustration of the ways in which gendered patterns in the expression of emotions elucidate hierarchies of power and the patriarchal framework in early modern courtship and marriage. Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales is a notable addition to scholarship of the conteuses’ literary tales and provides a multi-dimensional view of the gendered experience of love and of the trope of the happily-ever-after.