D'Aulnoy's Histoire d'Hypolite : A Manifesto for the Subversive Power of Music

Abstract

Abstract: It is well known that Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's historical novel, Histoire d'Hypolite, comte de Duglas contains the first literary fairy tale in the French tradition and that the dynamic between novel and fairy tale in this work provided French readers with a model of production and reception for the publication of future tales. However, in creating a manifesto for the fairy tale as a new literary genre, Histoire d'Hypolite also provided a model for the ways in which the incorporation of music in fairy tales could advance the socio-political agendas of authors interested in subverting Louis XIV's absolutism while simultaneously avoiding censorship. This essay examines how the model that the novel's main character Hypolite advances for incorporating music into fairy tales was reprised in the fairy tales and frame novels that d'Aulnoy composed over the course of the decade that followed the publication of Histoire d'Hypolite . Although musical interventions in literary texts are more commonly known for distilling the particularities of fictional and dramatic works into aphorism and for transforming the diegetic universe of the text into the universal appeal of a social or emotional lesson, in Hypolite's model, the musical interventions do not refer back to the diegesis of the tale. Rather, they comment directly on the teller's reality, serving as a means of communication with the tale's intended audience and encouraging cooperation from that audience in a collective endeavor to resist patriarchal oppression and the political systems that sustain it.