Women’s Writing and Women’s Literacy in Two “Beauty and the Beast” Tales

Abstract

This essay focuses on Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” (1756) and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat” (1797) as examples of the ways in which these French women writers’ contributions to literary fairy tales have been marginalized in English-speaking popular cultures. Although these writers were extremely popular in English translation during the eighteenth century, their gender, nationality, writing styles, and association with children’s literature led to their increasing marginalization during the nineteenth century, a process which has continued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This marginalization is unfortunate, because it tends to obscure the ways in which Beaumont’s and d’Aulnoy’s tales furthered and were embedded within contemporary discourses about the education of young women. It also obscures these tales’ production within close-knit circles of female writers and readers: the Bluestocking circles within which Beaumont moved and d’Aulnoy’s seventeenth-century salon culture. The ways in which Beaumont’s Beauty values her books and learns to govern her emotions is very much in line with progressive ideals of women’s education in England during the 1750s; she may appear a rather passive heroine to modern eyes, but her love of books and her rational approach to relationships are values many Bluestockings espoused in opposition to contemporary stereotypes of frivolous, irrational, and essentially uneducable women; Beaumont’s tale presents these values to adolescents. The heroine of d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat,” for her part, functions as an idealized image of the late seventeenth-century saloniere: an apparently insignificant, small, and childlike female character who in fact wields great social and imaginative power. The Cat appears to be nothing more than a pampered house pet but is actually a powerful sorceress whose creativity and command of hospitality and storytelling enable her to resolve the Prince’s dilemmas and gain his love.