Individuation in "La Chatte Blanche"

Abstract

Individuation in "La Chatte Blanche" Jane Merrill Filstrup (bio) An important custom for women in seventeenth-century France was to gather at the bedside of a woman with child. The visiting ladies would redact news and gossip to the woman confined, and their presence reassured her. Often relatives and neighbors sat in on the event of delivery, and a parade of visitors came to peer at the infant and offer congratulatory and cautionary remarks to the bedridden mother. Not only were girls child-brides at twelve, but they were often promised from the cradle; so women were keenly interested in girl babies of means. Women gave birth year in and year out, so that nannies (mies) and as well the custom of storytelling (mitonner, which took its name from the artistry of these storytellers) were familiar even to salon visitors. The first prose fairy tale published as a discrete literary unit, Perrault's "Belle au bois dormant," made famous the formal occasion of parturition with its attendant fairies. Mme. la Comtesse d'Aulnoy (1650-1705), who played a central role in creating the fairy tale as a French literary genre, in many of her stories makes the tacit connection between fairy power and the particularly felicitous occasion presented by the rite of birth. Ten of her fifteen Contes des Fées and five of her nine Contes Nouveaux take the conventional birth or name-giving ceremony as the initial peripeteia. In each instance in which birth provides the initial action, the event somehow goes asunder—typically as an awryness either in the pregnancy desire of a previously childless woman or in the conferring of blessings by the fairies. Just as central characters in her stories come into reality in extraordinary circumstances, so Mme. d'Aulnoy's own experiences of accouchement were tumultuous and irregular. The countess gave birth to six children. The first two, born in the first and second years of her marriage to the Baron d'Aulnoy, a profiteer in war who purchased his barony and whom she and her mother considered a moneyed boor, died in infancy. The baron wrote le père absent on the birth certificates of the next three children: their true father is unknown. Mme. d'Aulnoy tried to dispose of her husband by falsely accusing him of lèse-majesté, and they were definitively separated. At the date of the arrest of her [End Page 77] husband in 1669, Mme. d'Aulnoy was seven months pregnant. The trials showed her guilty of perjury against the baron. And since she was unable to make a midwinter escape with her mother to Spain, the authorities imprisoned the notorious and very pregnant young woman in a gentlewoman's cell in the Bastille. Her fairy tales, written after she had retired to the quiet of a convent, were intended as an amusing commentary on love for girls of the salon. They also fortified the girls for the experience most hazardous and most honorable in a woman's life, giving birth. By rehearsing with them the event and aftermath of giving birth, she taught them how to face the sexual and societal assaults on their selfhood presented by marriage and childbearing—which occurred in most of their young lives by the mid-teens. Unlike the Grimm brothers a century later, Mme. d'Aulnoy did not merely collect and redact oral tales (Märchen) but modified them to suit the literary tastes of salon audiences. From the building blocks of oral folk tales, Mme. d'Aulnoy constructed literary works which treat love and individuation in a fashion markedly different from the oral material. Whereas the oral folk tale exhibits a mythical sense of naïvete', the fairy tales taken by Mme. d'Aulnoy from Norman sources reflect a sense of self-consciousness and irony appropriate to an author who stands somewhat outside the oral tradition. Her fairy tales lie between a traditional literary form and the fiction of romance and novels. They recognized and suggested solutions for problems preoccupying the female listeners. Of Mme. d'Aulnoy's fairy tales, "La Chatte blanche" is the most successful admixture of folk material and literary art.1 "Chatte blanche" is the...