CHARLES PERRAULT’S PARADOX: HOW ARISTOCRATIC FAIRY TALES BECAME SYNONYMOUS WITH FOLKLORE CONSERVATION

Abstract

1. Introduction The first image that usually comes to mind when Charles Perrault is mentioned is a kindly old man listening to a nurse telling children wonderful fairy tales. This nice Mr. Perrault is supposed to have collected those fairy tales to amuse his own children, and eventually to save those stories from oblivion. This widespread idea is called 'the myth of good Mr. Perrault' in this paper. This myth is based on the idea that Perrault wrote his Histoires et Contes du temps passe, also called Contes de ma mere l'Oye, in a spirit of genuine respect for traditional folklore. Perrault wrote twelve tales in total: La Patience de Griselidis (Patient Griselda), Les Souhaits (Ridiculous Wishes), Peau d'Ane (Donkeyskin), all written in verse; Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), La Belle au Bois Dormant (The Sleeping Beauty), Le Chat botte (Puss in Boots), Cendrillon (Cinderella), Barbe Bleue (Bluebeard), Le Petit Poucet (Hop o' My Thumb), Les Fees (Diamonds and Toads), and Ricquet a la houppe (Ricky of the Tuft), all written in prose with a moral at the end. Almost all of those tales have their origins in traditional folklore, but they have been modified by Perrault to fit the audience he was aiming at: the aristocracy. To think that Perrault was interested in popular culture would be a mistake. This widespread belief can be explained by the fact that his tales did indeed become a part of the folk tradition. Perrault modified the traditional tales to amuse aristocratic audiences but his own work has been modified as well. Popular culture had its tales back again, but Perrault's name remains inseparable from these stories. It is the process of folktales being rewritten by Perrault and thus becoming ascribed to him that this paper will try to analyse. 2. Aristocratic fairy tales 2.1. The fashion of preciosite Perrault's fairy tales were written between 1694 and 1697, at a time when preciosite was fashionable in France, and all over Europe. Preciosite, or preciosity, was inseparable from aristocracy. Those who called themselves precieux thought that brilliant conversation, spirit, and elegance of the language were means to show their distinction. Aristocrats, precieux, valued humour and critical thinking and their writings mostly expressed a lifestyle. Their refined background conditioned their works and they consider the bourgeois way of life as the height of vulgarity. As a minor literary genre, coming from popular culture and using mainly simple phrases, tales should have been despised by preciosity. But it was all the rage in the salons, and at that time, everybody aiming for literary recognition was writing tales (Storer 1928). They were elaborate versions and cannot really be regarded as popular tales. Even if folktales often inspired precieux fairy tales, the writers modified the original versions beyond recognition. The fairy tales written in the salons were usually long, they used an elaborate style and many of them were fully invented: they had no popular roots and did not respect any of the traditional tales' characteristics. Those tales were then a pretext to libertine undercurrent and understanding between cultivated persons: naivety is here anything but innocent. The precieux fairy tale is designed for the entertainment of aristocracy and has almost nothing to do with the popular fairy tale that is the origin of it. It has to be understood that Perrault's fairy tales definitely belong to preciosite (Robert 1982). Some of the morals that end the tales and some details in the texts are quite obviously witty remarks to educated people. Those details cannot have been taken from folktales, and even less from children's tales. However, as we will see later on, Perrault kept many things from traditional tales. The blend of preciosity and tradition provided his work with a unique polymorphism that is probably the reason of its success. 2. …