Abstract
In this slim, tightly focused volume, Bronwyn Reddan takes as her subject the fairy tales written by a group of French women writers—aptly named the Conteuses—in the last decade of the seventeenth century and first decade of the eighteenth. Reddan makes a number of major arguments: Supporting recent historiography, she argues that the corpus of work produced by these authors should count as fairy tales, an identity they have traditionally been denied by literary scholars. But rather than situate her argument explicitly in the literature on female authorial autonomy in this period, Reddan instead directs her attention to the role and social power of emotions—specifically love—in the tales.
The Conteuses, she argues, were an emotional community constituted by their shared use of emotion vocabulary and emotion scripts that established norms of emotional expression, particularly that of love. These scripts, however, were not flat representations of contemporary practices of courtship and marriage but rather a pointed critique of them. Reddan argues that the Conteuses’ varied portrayals of love, including situations in which love does not conquer all, the couple does not live happily ever after, or the gender dynamics of the relationship were upended, comprised a theory of love. Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales sits in the nexus between history and literary studies, leaning hard towards the latter. Underlying its arguments is the foundational claim of the field of the history of emotions, that emotions have a history and thus, in this case, that the play of love in fairy tales is not timeless but reflects the social and cultural realities of their writers.
The book is divided into two sections. In the two chapters that make up the first part, Reddan develops the argument that the Conteuses were an emotional community on the basis of their personal connections and literary interchange. In the second part, Reddan builds on this argument to examine and exegete the Conteuses's emotion scripts and shared vocabulary of emotion to show how they formed a critique of the gender politics of courtship and marriage. Each of the three chapters in this second part considers a step in the sequence of heterosexual romantic love: courtship, marriage, and love in marriage. The book also contains a lengthy set of appendices that provide metadata on the tales and data on their emotion scripts.
In chapter 1, Reddan examines the role of the Conteuses in developing the fairy tale as a female literary genre. With her publication of L’île de la félicité in 1690, Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, baronne d’Aulonoy triggered a vogue for a new kind of fantastical story, giving it the name of conte de fée. Women, argues Reddan, were singularly important in the emergence of this genre. Of the 104 tales published between 1690 and 1709, which marked the apex of fairy tales publication, 63 were written by female authors, while only 35 were written by men (the authorship of 6 having not been attributed). The Conteuses's contes des fées emerged out of salon culture and in many ways replicated if not expanded salon sociability in how they told their tales and interacted with each other. Their efforts, Reddan argues, “reshaped the aesthetic of salon conversation”; while salon conversation was used as a framing device for many tales, these works were written for and disseminated to a broader audience. (25) Through their actions and writing, the Conteuses self-identified as a literary community. They did not necessarily know each other personally, though they moved in the same social circles and knew each other's work. Rather, Reddan finds ample evidence of “textual solidarity” in which these authors used the same characters and names, and even the same publishers. More purposefully, they used meta- and paratexts to maintain that they were modern authors shaping a new literary genre that included stories by and about women.
In chapter 2, Reddan turns her attention explicitly to the Conteuses as an emotional community. Barbara Rosenwein, who developed the concept, defined an emotional community as one that was “underpinned by systems of feeling based on shared emotional norms.” (50) For Reddan, the Conteuses constituted an emotional community because of the very importance of love in their fairy tales (in contrast to its role in the work of their male counterparts), including their larger conversation about love and its impact on the lives of women. The Conteuses shared a theory of emotion that located love in the bodily organ of the heart and imbued the heart with a certain degree of agency. They understood love as both necessary for human happiness and something that humans could not avoid, being vulnerable to it. Collectively, the Conteuses allowed their female characters more power in negotiating their romantic relationships than Reddan presumes was the norm in real life. In developing these ideas, the Conteuses pulled on two major theories of love in circulation in the late seventeenth century. These included the passions theory of emotion, as formulated by Descartes, in which love was an uncontrollable force and the body a site of its physical expression. Second was Madame Scudéry's psychological definition of emotion, in which love was a rational act, the outcome of a set of performances.
In chapter 3, Reddan argues that the Conteuses constructed an emotional model of courtship in which love was a necessary precursor to marriage; characters followed an emotion script meant to develop a loving emotional bond between them. Here the Conteuses aligned their thinking with Madame Scud´ery's Carte de Tendre, as Scudéry' presented an “alternative to the traditional, transactional model of marriage and redefined marriage as an individual personal commitment to a spouse chosen for the purposes of intimacy and companionship as well as material support and reproduction.” (77) The script itself was still highly gendered, particularly with regard to one of its key elements, the declaration of love; male suitors could declare their love directly while the female objects of those suits could do so only indirectly. Reddan argues that female characters, however, were not without agency in the Conteuses's tales. They could reject a suit on the basis of the failure to make an emotional connection. But that agency had profound limits. Reddan notes that this model merely shifted power from fathers to suitors, thereby confirming the patriarchal structure of marriage and the problematization of female desire.
In chapter 4, Reddan examines the role of gift giving in the formation of an emotional bond during courtship. She argues that gift-giving generated a reciprocal obligation and thus an emotional bond, the nature of which depended on how the couple negotiated the process. As in chapter 3, Reddan is interested in how the Conteuses manipulated these structures to enhance the agency of their female characters. While in chapter 3, Reddan explored how female characters were limited in their capacity to make love declarations, in chapter 4, in contrast, Reddan traces how many initiated gifts and even marriage suits. Reddan explores this theme by analyzing two versions of the tale of Riquet à la Houppe—one by Charles Perrault and the other by Catherine Bernard—in which an ugly groom (Riquet) offers his dim-witted prospective bride the gift of intelligence in return for her love. In Perrault's version, the heroine accepts the gift, subsequently loves the groom, and her love physically transforms him, beautifying him. For Perrault, love is transformative and thus while marriage in his tale is still both transactional and patriarchal, its social and economic bases are clouded by the union's emotional content. In Bernard's rendering, the exchange does not work. The bride becomes more intelligent, but this very intelligence leads her to find love with another. Riquet then leashes that intelligence so the bride is only intelligent when with him, a man she never comes to love. Reddan reads Bernard's tale as a critique of marriage; marriage is a source of unhappiness for women and the expectation of love becomes an extension of husbandly authority over his wife.
In chapter 5, Reddan examines the marriage closure and the Conteuses's critique of “happily ever after.” Conteuses varied in their opinion of post-wedding love, but collectively were ambivalent on whether love could produce happiness in marriage, for a number of reasons: love is the antithesis of reason, yet managing love requires reason; perfect love is not attainable; love leads to misfortune. Reddan argues that this moral instruction—a moral poetic of love—was expressed and developed by the Conteuses in their tales’ maxims, letters, prefaces, dedications, frame-tale narratives, and verse morals. In addition, she argues, the Conteuses deliberately engaged in an aesthetic of frivolity as a way to develop a distinctly female style, while still delivering a moral for and about women. This aesthetic was another factor uniting the Conteuses as an emotional community.
Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales makes compelling arguments about the challenge the Conteuses posed to the gender politics of love and the power of using emotion as a lens to understand gender politics more broadly. Reddan has limpid prose and a clear talent for explaining complicated ideas—pulling together three different fields. Her use of emotion scripts allows for a thorough exposition of the operation of love in the fairy tales. The book will be of great interest to experts in the fields of fairy tales, the history of love and the seventeenth-century salonnières.
Yet, what is frustrating in a book that did so much so well is that there was room for more. The text runs about 140 pages (with another 85 pages in appendices, notes, and bibliography), leaving space to develop a number of the text's burgeoning and exciting arguments. Reddan is well placed to intervene more fully in debates around the nature of love and marriage in this period, female authorial and social autonomy in the late seventeenth century, shifts in the nature of salon sociability, and how canons are formed. In particular, and from the perspective of the history of the family, Reddan's analysis of love in fairy tales and her analysis of their use of emotion scripts might have benefited from a wider and indeed longer history of marriage, rather than focusing the salon attacks on marriage, which had as their social referent the experience of a very small section of the Parisian elite. It would also have been helpful to distinguish between spousal choice, marrying for love, and companionate marriage, each of which have their own histories. Nevertheless, Reddan's discussion of the ways in which this group developed a new genre and used it to critique ideas and the operation of love is persuasive and interesting.