Introduction: Božena Němcová Adapts into Czech Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s “Finette-Cendron”

Abstract

IntroductionBožena Němcová Adapts into Czech Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s “Finette-Cendron” Anne E. Duggan (bio) and Rebecca Cravens (bio) While Charlotte Trinquet du Lys has traced the diffusion of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s “Finette-Cendron” from France to French Missouri in her fascinating 2007 article that appeared in Marvels & Tales, I followed another path the tale took, this time moving eastward. I was intrigued to uncover another history of the tale, which continues to resonate today, unbeknownst to many folklore and fairy-tale scholars and fairy-tale film enthusiasts. Specifically mentioning “Finette-Cendron,” Dil Prvni claimed in 1902 that French fairy tales traveled from France to Germany to Czechoslovakia (328). Providing further evidence for this theory in 1930, Václav Tille published an overview of Czech versions of d’Aulnoy’s “L’oranger et l’abeille” (“The Bee and the Orange Tree”) and “Finette-Cendron.” He emphasized the important role played by Václav Matěj Kramerius (1753–1808), a Czech publisher and writer who founded the publishing house Czech Dispatch in order to translate and adapt into Czech works “capable of instructing or amusing the lower classes” (Tille 285), and to foster a literary culture at a time when there was not yet an established Czech literary tradition; Kramerius had translated and published a version of d’Aulnoy’s “The Bee and the Orange Tree” in 1794. Citing Josef Jungmann, Tille suggests there may have been in Jindřichův Hradec (southern Bohemia) a translation of “Finette-Cendron” from German into Czech as early as 1761, which was reprinted several times in the nineteenth century. Later, Kramerius’s son, Václav Rodomil Kramerius (1792–1861), produced a Czech version of “Finette-Cendron” in which, according to Tille, the youngest of three daughters, Finette, assisted by the female magician Tamarinde, [End Page 353] manages to kill the ogres and take over their castle, and rides a white horse, gifted by Tamarinde, to the palace, where she meets the prince, Otmar, whom she eventually marries. Tille documents several other oral variants of “Finette-Cendron,” including a Moravian variant published by Matouš Václavek (1842–1908), which includes only the first part of the tale; a version by Václav Popelka in Pohádky z Poličska (Fairy Tales from Policka, 1888), in which the ogress, instead of being fifteen feet wide, has fifteen toes; and another Moravian variant told by the informant Kateřina Vidláková and collected and published by Beneš Method Kulda (1820–1903), in which the wife of the ogre is happy that her husband is killed in the oven, and Finette rides on her white horse to mass instead of a ball. Kram Zuzana Raková maintains that, along with dramatic works by French playwrights like Molière and Marivaux, “French fairy tales, for example Finette Cendron (Pohádka o Popelce [A Fairy Tale about Cinderella]) in the version by Madame d’Aulnoy … represented another source of inspiration for different Czech adaptations and for indigenous literary production, especially in the 1840s” (15). As d’Aulnoy’s tales were circulating throughout Bohemia via German and Czech translations and oral storytelling, Božena Němcová (ca. 1820–62) was coming into her own as a writer. The daughter of a servant and a coachman, and unhappily married to Josef Němec in 1837, Němcová frequented Czech nationalist salons and in this spirit changed her first name from “Barbora,” which comes from the Greek for “foreigner,” to “Božena,” which derives from Slavic roots and importantly can translate as “woman of God” or “blessed by God”; her chosen name thus reinforces her identification with her Slavic heritage.1 Alfred Thomas characterizes Němcová and her works in the following terms: “Influenced by the French novelist George Sand, Božena Němcová was the first feminist writer in Czech literature. But she was also a nationalist writer who believed deeply in the Czech and Slovak right to equal political representation within the Habsburg Empire” (281). Her work collecting tales is thus grounded in the type of nationalist and democratic impulses evident in the oeuvre of the Brothers Grimm, with Němcová specifically identifying as socialist. At...