Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies, revised edition: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France

By Anne E. Duggan

The original edition of Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies, published in 2005, was a pathbreaking work of early modern literary history, exploring women’s role in the rise of the fairy tale and their use of this new genre to carve out roles as major contributors to the literature of their time. This new edition, with a new introduction and a forward by acclaimed scholar Allison Stedman, emphasizes the scholarly legacy of Anne Duggan’s original work, and its continuing field-changing implications. The book studies the works of two of the most prolific seventeenth-century women writers, Madeleine de Scudéry and Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy. Analyzing their use of the novel, the chronicle, and the fairy tale, Duggan examines how Scudéry and d'Aulnoy responded to and participated in the changes of their society, but from different generational and ideological positions. This study also takes into account the history of the salon, an unofficial institution that served as a locus for elite women's participation in the cultural and literary production of their society. In order to highlight the debates that emerged with the increased participation of aristocratic women within the public sphere, the book also explores the responses of two academicians, Nicolas Boileau and Charles Perrault.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Aug 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781644532171

Anne E. Duggan

Anne E. Duggan is associate professor of French and director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies program at Wayne State University. She is author of Salonnières, Fairies, and Furies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France and associate editor of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies.

Book preview

Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies

Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies

The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France

Anne E. Duggan

University of Delaware Press

Newark

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

University of Delaware Press

© 2021 by Anne E. Duggan

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact University of Delaware Press, 200A Morris Library, 181 S. College Ave., Newark, DE 19717. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

udpress.udel.edu

ISBN 978-1-64453-215-7 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-64453-216-4 (pb)

ISBN 978-1-64453-217-1 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

In loving memory of my fairy godmother, Aunt Frieda

And to mon tendre, mon doux, mon merveilleux amour, Víctor

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword, by Allison Stedman

Introduction to the Second Revised Edition

Preface

1. Politics, Gender, and Cultural Change

2. Love Orders Chaos: Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clélie, Histoire Romaine

3. Adults at Play: Les Chroniques des Samedis de Mademoiselle de Scudéry

4. Boileau and Perrault: The Public Sphere and Female Folly

5. The Tyranny of Patriarchs in L’Histoire d’Hypolite, Comte de Duglas

6. Fairy Tales and Mondanité

Afterword

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

I would like to convey my deepest gratitude to Jack Zipes for introducing me to the world of fairies and French salons, and for his generous support and encouragement in my professional development from graduate student to assistant professor to now full professor. In the same vein, I wish to express my appreciation to Susan Noakes, who always had confidence in my work and to whom I am indebted for her constant support and advice, all of which was a great inspiration for me. I would also like to thank: Tom Conley, whose approach to the early modern period is nothing less than electrifying, not to mention inspirational; Mária Brewer, for her generous ongoing encouragement in my early years and for her theoretical finesse; Ellen Messer-Davidow, whom I still wish to thank for making me write that MA essay on Descartes over and over again; Joseph Waldauer (may he rest in peace), for his wonderful stories and sense of humor; and last but not least, Maria Paganini, from whom I feel I learned how to read literature.

At Wayne State University, I am fortunate to have terrific colleagues whose support carried me through the day. Michael Giordano read parts of the first editions of the manuscript and has been a most enthusiastic and supportive colleague. When I first came to WSU, Donald Haase kindly welcomed me into the Wayne fairy world; it was a great pleasure working with him on Marvels & Tales and Folktales and Fairy Tales, and as of 2020 we are still holding fairy-tale working groups through the WSU Humanities Center. I would also like to thank Walter Edwards, Director of the WSU Humanities Center, and Lisabeth Hock, both of whom offered me a room of my own just when I needed it most, without which the completion of this project would have been impossible. I am much obliged for the generous support provided by the WSU Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship Competition, the WSU Research and Inquiry Grant Program, the WSU University Research Grant Program, and the WSU Minority/Women Summer Grant Program.

Regarding the second edition in particular, I would like to thank my truly marvelous husband, Víctor Figueroa, who continually encouraged me to pursue the possibility of a second edition, and the director of the University of Delaware Press, Julia Oestreich, who also saw the value in such a project and made it happen. I would also like to thank Kari Anne Bjerkestrand, who reinvigorated my passion for the Carte de Tendre, sharing with me new perspectives and ways of understanding the beauty of Scudéry’s works. I am also deeply grateful to Allison Stedman for her support of this second edition—I have very much appreciated her perspectives on early modern women writers in general and on Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy in particular. I am also fortunate to work closely with Cristina Bacchilega, with whom I have the privilege of coediting Marvels & Tales, and whose support, encouragement, enthusiasm, and advice I continually cherish. Last but not least, a shout-out to our Women Writing Wonder group: Adrion Dula, Julie Koehler, and Shandi Wagner. We all have a shared dream that all important, talented, and impactful women writers from the past will one day take their rightful place within literary and cultural histories.

An abbreviated version of Chapter 2 appeared in Le savoir en France au XVIIe siècle, Actes du colloque organisé par la North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2003); a section of Chapter 3, Adults at Play is part of a collection of essays entitled Remapping the Humanities: Identity, Community, Memory, (Post)Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008); and a section of Chapter 6, Women and Absolutism in French Opera and Fairy Tale, appears in The French Review (December 2004). I am grateful for the permissions to reprint these pieces here.

Foreword

When Anne Duggan published the original edition of Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies in 2005, I was fortunate to get my hands on one of the first released copies. I had agreed to review the book for Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, and I remember preparing to write the review while sitting at the kitchen table of a university-owned apartment in Tours, France, where I was directing a study-abroad program. As I reread the notes in 2020 that I had taken on Duggan’s book, I was intrigued by the disconnect that I saw emerging between the relatively modest claims that Duggan herself had made for the work in the context of her scholarly preface and the much more far-reaching implications of the study that I had noticed during my own reading.

In the preface to the original edition, Duggan asserted that the goal of her study was to open up the early-modern literary field to allow women writers a more distinctive role in the creation of major genres, in the evolution of the public sphere, and in general/official history.¹ She proposed that she would achieve these ends by limiting her study primarily to two female authors (Madeleine de Scudéry and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy), whose works she would set in dialogue with those of two of their male contemporaries (Nicolas Boileau and Charles Perrault). As such, her book would tell a story, beginning with Scudéry and the public influence of salon women, moving on to the patriarchal reaction of academicians like Boileau and Perrault, and finally focusing on d’Aulnoy’s response to the decline of the salon, the nobility, and the moralist discourses responsible for late seventeenth-century parental and spousal domination.² In this way, according to Duggan, her work would ultimately help to enhance our understanding of the way that women writers wrote within the broad cultural social and political context of their times, while simultaneously elucidating our interpretations of canonical writers like Molière or Boileau, who responded to their influence in society.³

In my reading of the study, however, I noticed that in achieving the ends described above, Duggan’s book ultimately called into question at least three of the reigning scholarly assumptions that had served as the basis for the majority of the work being done on early modern French literature since the 1980s. The first of these was that works by early modern women writers could not be read outside the relatively narrow scopes of those writers’ gender (female), their sociocultural milieu (the salon), and their spheres of socio-political influence (the private or particular). Drawing upon her own close readings of works by Scudéry, Marie-Catherine de Villedieu, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de Lafayette, Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon, Catherine Bernard, and d’Aulnoy, Duggan unsettled this preconception, revealing that women writers in the wake of Scudéry wrote not only as women, but also as individuals—as members of particular social classes, regions, religions, and political affiliations—and that they made use of these alternative authorial stances in order to articulate a range of often conflicting ideological perspectives on topics not necessarily related to their gender. Although d’Aulnoy, for example, broke ranks with Lafayette and Bernard when it came to her perspective on the socio-political implications of marriage (a topic involving gender), her thinking also diverged from that of Maintenon concerning the religious persecution of Protestants during the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and from Scudéry when it came to the derogation of the high nobility.

The second scholarly assumption that Duggan’s book called into question was the notion that those who took the side of the Ancients during the course of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, a lengthy academic debate that spanned several decades and that incorporated a discussion of women’s power and influence in society, were both ideologically united and categorically at odds with those who took the side of the Moderns. As Duggan’s work revealed, in the case of the famed disagreement between Boileau and Perrault during the course of the related Querelle des femmes, the question of the degree to which women should be allowed to assert power and influence in the sociopolitical field at large was in fact not up for debate at all, as neither the Ancient author (Boileau) nor the Modern one (Perrault) actually advocated the ostensibly modern position that women should be given the opportunity to play a more significant role in public affairs. In fact, as Duggan described, beneath the misleading title of his Apologie des femmes, Perrault not only implicitly reinforced Boileau’s misogyny toward public women; he took the position to new heights, advocating that women’s influence should be restricted in the context of the domestic household as well, and that parents and husbands should take conscious measures to manipulate women into submission if they refused to conform to accepted norms.

The third assumption that Duggan’s work addressed involved the relationship between genre and ideology, particularly with respect to the socio-political agendas of the thirteen primarily female authors who developed the literary fairy-tale vogue at the end of the seventeenth century. Although these authors had traditionally been lumped together as being pro-feudal, pro-women, anti-monarchical, and anti-absolutist, Duggan’s work revealed that the authors’ group consciousness was not necessarily an expression of collective solidarity—an observation that Lewis Seifert and Domna Stanton would later echo⁴—for their tales in many instances differed radically from one another both stylistically and ideologically. This was particularly the case when it came to questions of bourgeois arrivisme (the upward social mobility of the bourgeoisie), the essentialist nature of the noble identity, and the influence of women in the public sphere. Although Duggan’s call for scholars to pay closer attention to the ways in which fairy-tale authors used their tales to promote themselves as individuals has gone on to influence future studies, it did not have the direct impact that it could have had on the field at that time, possibly because in the 2005 edition these claims were shown as opposed to being overtly and forcefully stated.

In this edition, Duggan not only clearly articulates the implications of her work for the study of seventeenth-century French literary and cultural history, but she also provides the historical contextualization needed for the argument to resonate with a broader audience of lay readers, students and nonspecialists. In the revised first chapter of the current edition, Duggan does a masterful job of laying out the historical context in which the writers she studies lived and wrote. The chapter brings to life the intricate interplay of politics, religion, and sociability, whose convergence served to create a culture in which educated women of the nobility and the upper classes enjoyed a level of power and influence that was greater than they had in any previous or subsequent historical period with the exception of our own. This chapter alone constitutes a crucial gesture, for if seventeenth-century literary historians can be criticized for using limited methodologies when approaching the study of seventeenth-century women writers, scholars outside the field have been known to take the marginalization of these writers even further, failing to acknowledge that they had influence over the sociocultural field at all despite the hundreds of studies to the contrary that have appeared over the past forty years in Europe, North America, and around the world.

As Duggan points out in the introduction to the revised edition, the divide between how French literary historians of the seventeenth century understand the time period and how fairy-tale scholars and academics specializing in other time periods and literary traditions tend to view it is due to at least three factors. First, there is a tendency among scholars in other disciplines to assume that in France the evolution of women’s rights followed the same trajectory that it took in other countries—namely England, Germany and America—where, as Duggan describes, progress generally took place along a vertical teleological line, with things getting progressively better for each generation.⁵ As Duggan describes in the revised preface to the second edition, the tendency to transpose the history of feminism in one country onto another is due first and foremost due to a lack of ability to see around received cultural paradigms, paradigms that are enforced and perpetuated by the ways in which school curricula are designed and administered.

A second reason that women’s power and influence in seventeenth-century France remains misunderstood stems from a lack of understanding of the nature of the seventeenth-century French public sphere. As Duggan points out in the revised first chapter, the French public sphere differed from those of other European countries during the same time period because in France there were not one but two arenas of public engagement: a politico-economic arena and a sociocultural one. Over the course of the seventeenth century, women gradually lost power in the former public sphere, as they did in other countries, due in large part to the emergence of an absolutist society that placed unprecedented restrictions on women’s legal rights. However, while the monarchy was limiting women’s ability to vote in mixed-gender guilds, to dispose of property, and to wield influence over marital arrangements and reproductive customs, women’s influence in the second public sphere—the sociocultural arena—was rising to unprecedented heights. This counter-phenomenon, which led Dena Goodman and others to refer to early modern France as a double-helix,⁶ can be attributed to the fact that the rise of absolutism took place at the same time as the rise of the salon, a socio-discursive institution hosted and animated by women that allowed people of both genders to come together and converse with one another on subjects ranging from politics and morals to science, literature, and the arts. Unlike the academies that cropped up during the same time period, salons provided women with a space in which to circumvent the legal restrictions that were prejudicial to them in other areas of society, and to fashion themselves instead as elite, rational subjects whose cultural and material production furnished models of polite etiquette and refined taste. Thus, although women’s theoretical power declined over the course of the 1600s, their actual power during the same time period increased to the point that, in the century’s final decade, women were outpublishing their male contemporaries each year by a ratio of thirty-eight books to twenty-nine, as Aurora Wolfgang has shown.⁷

Perhaps the most important reason for discrepancies in our understanding of women’s power and influence in early modern France has to do with the effects of canon formation, the process by which certain authors are chosen for inclusion in school curricula and literary anthologies at the expense of others. In France, this process took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the goal of settling upon the literary exempla deemed most appropriate for educating male students in the collèges, for which women writers and their literary production were deemed unsuitable. This canon formation not only affected the construction of the French literary tradition, however. It also affected the canons of individual types of literature that spanned European literary traditions and that were organized by genre. For this reason, with respect to the theatre canon, male dramatists like Molière and Racine would come to find their place alongside Shakespeare, even though a large number of French female playwrights had published popular and influential plays during the same time period.⁸ The same can be said of the fairy-tale canon, in which Charles Perrault, whose vision of the fairy tale represented a minority perspective, if not an outright anomaly in his own time, would come to be chosen to represent the entire first vogue of French fairy-tale publication. As a result, Perrault finds his place alongside the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen in the fairy-tale canon, even though it is now widely known not only that French women writers wrote more than two-thirds of all the fairy tales published during the first fairy-tale vogue, but also that at least three prominent female fairy-tale authors (d’Aulnoy, Bernard, and Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier de Villandon) had published prose tales before the appearance of Perrault’s now famous Mother Goose Tales [Histoires ou contes du temps passé] in 1697.⁹

That the history of women’s socio-political influence in France still appears to be in need of constant reiteration attests to the fact that modern scholarship has still not adequately superseded the misogynistic efforts of nineteenth and twentieth-century French historiographers, who worked both systematically and deliberately alongside the pedagogues in charge of canon formation during this time period in an effort to erase the influence that French women exerted on the literary and cultural fields during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—a process that Faith Beasley describes in detail in her 2006 Salons, History and the Creation of 17th-Century France.¹⁰ The second edition of Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies thus serves as a much-needed manifesto to continue the kind of work that Duggan undertook in the first edition, which has become increasingly overshadowed by other types of studies in recent years, even as it reiterates the importance of not losing sight of the feminist scholarship that has already been done.

Allison Stedman

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Introduction to the Second Revised Edition

Since the publication in 2005 of Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies, I have found myself debating—particularly with fairy-tale scholars—about the representation of gender in Charles Perrault’s fairy tales and his supposed defense of women writers, which is too often taken as the best the seventeenth century could do, often out of paying insufficient attention to the broader literary field and what was actually thinkable in the period. I have also felt the need to return to the sophisticated feminist and theoretical work Madeleine de Scudéry was accomplishing at that time, along with that of so many early modern women writers like Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, in order to continue to foreground the importance of women writers and their impact on literary history. At times it feels as though many of us who work with women and gender in early modern France need to constantly reiterate the fact that women indeed played important roles in the construction of the early modern literary and cultural fields, and that both women and men advocated for women’s rights, often through the unofficial institution of the salon. Students and even longtime scholars continue to take for granted that recognition of and advocacy for women’s rights did not occur until the nineteenth or even the twentieth century, conceiving of the question of women’s rights along a vertical, teleological line of progress; that is, that things only get better with each future generation, which isn’t always the case.

In France, the extraordinary work of Eliane Viennot and the SEIFAR (Société Internationale pour l’étude des femmes de l’Ancien Régime) team have done much to foreground the extent to which the early modern period offered significant possibilities to women despite legal, social, and political restrictions, and to demonstrate that both female and male writers produced abundant texts during the period on the equality of women and men.¹ In fact, scholars like Joan DeJean and Faith Beasley have documented the extent to which these voices were suppressed through the formation of the canon and the work of literary historians. In Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France (2006), Beasley succinctly summarizes the history of this erasure:

From the late eighteenth century until very recently, the principal veins of scholarship, both historical and literary, have worked to suppress the influence women exerted upon the literary field, as writers and as powerful agents, especially through the salons. The influence we will see attested to by contemporaries in the first half of this study—the development of new criteria for literary evaluation, new genres, particularly the novel, a new public for literature—was systematically and deliberately redefined or erased in a process designed to ensure that France’s literary canon and its luminaries not bear the imprint of female influence. Whereas many in the seventeenth century exalted women’s participation in the literary field and proclaimed it a distinguishing and honorable characteristic of France itself, the nineteenth century in particular opted for another vision of the nation and its cultural heritage, one in which women played a more limited, traditional role, if any role at all. (10)

Our conception of the seventeenth-century literary field is so strongly influenced by this reshaping of literary history that restoring these other voices that had indeed been central and vocal in the period—whether we think of Scudéry’s and d’Aulnoy’s popular works that challenged gender norms and political structures or male writers who contested Nicolas Boileau’s attacks on women—never seems quite enough to undo this erasure.

Numerous scholars, including Elizabeth Goldsmith (1988), Joan DeJean (1991), Perry Gethner (1993; 2006–15), Lewis Seifert (1996), Sophie Raynard (2002), Juliette Cherbuliez (2005), and Faith Beasley (2006), and more recently, Allison Stedman (2013) and Sophie Mariñez (2017), among many others, have continued trying to set the record straight with respect to women’s position and impact within the literary and cultural spheres of the period. In her discussion of the various connections between Christine de Pizan, Symphorien Champier, Anne de Beaujeu, and Christine de Suède, Mariñez foregrounds the continuous networks that bound women and men to a common cause: Indeed, the line being traced here points to the larger chain of transmission of knowledge and literary networks that scholars have identified in sixteenth and seventeenth-century France, a chain that shows how pro-women ideas circulated among female rulers, writers, and philosophers, enabling them to develop networks of like-minded spirits, to address an engaged, supportive audience, and to envision alternate lives in which women could live free of the constraints imposed on them (9). This knowledge about women’s positions in the past is essential for the purposes, on the one hand, of problematizing our conceptions of literary, cultural, social, and political history, and, on the other, of drawing from that history to call into question many contemporary assumptions that continue to circulate about normative constructions of gender, and about women’s place in society and history.

Some of the concerns of early modern women are still relevant today: Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre could be said to represent a seventeenth-century reflection on consent, while d’Aulnoy’s novels and tales address through her critique of notions of female virtue what comes down to a hypocritical shaming of women who do not conform to appropriate feminine behavior in an early modern context. Of course, their works are anchored in different historical contexts, with all that this implies. Yet they also inform us about the history of issues such as consent and what would be referred to today as slut shaming, and about how in these earlier periods there were always women and men who contested problematic constructions of gender that repressed women and limited their agency.

Producing a second edition of Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies is part of this continual need to reiterate the dynamic history of women as cultural producers, as agents who actively shaped early modern French culture, and who posed a threat to and challenged those who sought to uphold repressive gender, social, and political regimes. Putting Scudéry, Boileau, Perrault, and d’Aulnoy into dialogue with each other foregrounds the stakes involved in the transformation of gender, social, and political norms in a period of cultural change, which gave rise to new possibilities as well as old anxieties, and it sheds light on similar patterns of backlash that we have experienced in twenty-first-century America. Importantly, Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies asks us to read Scudéry not as the butt of a Boileau or Molière joke, but rather as a sophisticated writer and thinker who influenced generations of novelists and thinkers; in other words, not as marginal to literary history, but rather as central to the shaping of the early modern literary and cultural fields.

While within the field of fairy-tale studies scholars have shown that Perrault was not the dominant writer during the 1690s, and that in fact d’Aulnoy launched the trend of publishing tales and outpublished her peers, Perrault nevertheless continues to be considered canonical from a historical perspective, along with Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and their classic tales are viewed as the standard form of the fairy tale not only for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but also for their own times. More needs to be done to address this misconception about the literary fields of France, Germany, and England, where works by d’Aulnoy thrived well into the nineteenth century and influenced both female and male writers. Her works also fed into local folklores, perhaps the most striking example being that of Finette-Cendron, which was adapted in Missouri, as Charlotte Trinquet du Lys convincingly illustrates in her 2007 study On the Literary Origins of Folkloric Fairy Tales. As I have shown elsewhere, the Grimms’ tales didn’t really impact the French tale terrain until the twentieth century, whereas d’Aulnoy’s tales continued to influence the literary field in France and beyond with reeditions of her works appearing regularly throughout the nineteenth century (see Reception 282–85). Jennifer Schacker’s 2019 Staging Fairy Land: Folklore, Children’s Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime provides another example of how canonical d’Aulnoy’s tales were even in nineteenth-century British culture, where the characters of such tales provided the inspiration for fancy ball costumes. As such, d’Aulnoy’s Princess Fair Star and Prince Cheri, White Cat, and Fair One with the Golden Locks and Avenant were at least as recognizable to British elites as Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s Beauty and the Beast, the Grimms’ Little Red Riding Hood and the Huntsman, and Perrault’s Cinderella and the Prince.² The fact that this legacy continues to be obscured substantiates the need to continually push ourselves, our colleagues, and our students to rethink what we think we know about literary canons and literary and cultural history.

In my revisions to the second edition, I have sought to integrate recent scholarship, as well as scholarship that came out when the first edition was in production: Jeffrey Peters’s Mapping Discord (2004) takes a similar stance to mine with respect to Boileau’s response to Scudéry (examined in Chapter 4), while echoes can be found between Allison Stedman’s 2005 study on d’Aulnoy and aspects of Chapters 5 and 6. With respect to Chapter 1, which saw the most revisions, I wanted to respond to the concerns of reviewers of the first edition, which lead me to nuance some of the arguments, and eliminate some of the background that digressed from the focus of the following chapters and that might feel obvious to an early modern scholar. At the same time, I maintained what I thought to be the most essential background information for nonspecialist readers, to help them access the cultural and political landscape of early modern France and see what was at stake in the implicit and explicit debates between Scudéry, Boileau, Perrault, and d’Aulnoy, and their interventions in questions of gender and cultural change. Finally, new information has emerged about the biography of d’Aulnoy, thanks to the archival work of Volker Schröder. I have thus made appropriate changes to the manuscript to take these new insights into consideration.

As the idea of a second edition was taking shape, I was fortunate to have been contacted by the Norwegian choreographer Kari Anne Bjerkestrand, who was carrying out background research to create a performance based on Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre. We spent a couple days brainstorming ways to translate the Carte de Tendre into a contemporary performance piece, and I found it exciting to connect to Scudéry’s work from a very different, artistic perspective and to see how Scudéry’s creativity could be reignited and made relevant within a new historical context and medium. As Kari Anne and I talked about Scudéry, her Carte de Tendre, and her philosophies of love and friendship, Kari Anne asked, in a surprised voice, Why hadn’t I ever heard about Madeleine de Scudéry? Why, indeed, is the enduring question.

Preface

We believed romanticism was the historical genre . . . that only recently led our novelists to name their characters Charlemagne, François I, or Henri IV, instead of Amadis, Oronte, or Saint-Albin. Mlle de Scudéry is, I believe, the first example of this trend in France, and many people say bad things about her works without ever having read them . . . But they seem as realistic, better written, and hardly more ridiculous than certain novels of our times that will not be remembered as long.¹

Alfred de Musset, Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet (1836)

Presently I’m reading the children’s tales of Mme d’Aulnoy in an old edition whose pages I colored when I was six or seven. The dragons are pink and the trees blue; there’s one page where everything is colored red, even the sea. They really amuse me, these tales.²

Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance (1853)

The seventeenth century was truly a period of transition and cultural change for French subjects in general and aristocratic women in particular. With the end of the Religious Wars, absolutism increasingly became a political reality, especially under Richelieu, and of course, Louis XIV. Notions of nobility that had already been destabilized in the sixteenth century became only more problematic, evident in the seventeenth-century preoccupation with the distinction between appearance and reality. Uprooted from a crumbling feudal system and freely circulating, traditional signs of prestige could be appropriated by bourgeois social climbers to redefine themselves. At the same time that the upper echelons of the traditional merchant class engaged in a process of self-legitimation, aristocratic women also sought to develop more favorable and dignified definitions of womanhood. With the emergence of the salon at the beginning of the century, elite women now had a place in which to cultivate themselves as critics, writers, and more generally, as beings endowed with reason. By mid-century and especially after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which gave new impetus to the Catholic Counter-Reformation, salon culture and the genres associated with it were criticized for their bad influence on society and particularly on women. By the century’s end, mondain women, or the aristocratic women who participated in salon culture, came under harsh attack.

The present study situates two of the most prolific seventeenth-century women writers, Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (1650/1–1705), within the context of these episodes of French cultural history. I highlight the ways in which both writers responded to and participated in the cultural changes of their society, albeit from different generational and ideological positions, as salon women and as writers who contributed significantly to the evolution of genres like the novel and the fairy tale. I also take into account the response of two male writers and academicians, Nicolas Boileau (1636–1711) and Charles Perrault (1628–1703), to the active presence and participation of mondain women within the public sphere. While scholars traditionally have focused on their differences, particularly within the context of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns), I will draw from Catholic Counter-Reformation discourse to demonstrate that, despite their differing positions on aesthetics and class, Boileau and Perrault both depict mondain women as threats to social and political order. As such, this study puts Scudéry and d’Aulnoy in dialogue with two important male writers who were explicitly (in the case of Boileau) and implicitly (in the case of Perrault) critical of women’s positions within the seventeenth-century literary and cultural field.

To emphasize what I consider to be at stake in the study of these writers, I would like to situate this study within the larger field of early modern studies and particularly early modern women’s studies. On the one hand, it is important to examine the historical reasons, particularly regarding canon formation, that explain the exclusion of Scudéry and d’Aulnoy from the traditional French literary canon, despite the vast popularity of their works in France, England, and beyond. This exclusion resulted in the lack of scholarship on their works, which only began to receive serious critical attention in the late 1980s, not inconsequentially a period when scholars began to challenge the traditional canon.³ On the other hand, and precisely because of the historical marginalization of women writers within literary history, I would like to address some of the theoretical paradigms used by some scholars in the study of early modern women writers that risk marginalizing them yet again by limiting the scope of our approaches to their texts. As we excavate texts by early modern women writers and validate their study, we also need to work on incorporating texts by women writers into the larger field of early modern studies and highlight how women writers contributed to general literary history, influencing generations of both male and female writers.

Literary Legacies

That Scudéry and d’Aulnoy had an impact within the history of French literature is evident in the seventeenth century in the various reactions to their works, which we will explore in relation to Scudéry in Chapter 4, as well as in the extent to which their works were published and read over the century.⁴ Scudéry was perhaps the most influential novelist of the middle of the seventeenth century, and every novelist of the period—male or female—wrote in her wake. Although her novels can appear archaic and inaccessible to a contemporary readership, Frédéric Briot has importantly pointed out that they were published over the course of six years and ten volumes; that is, in the form, in contemporary terms, of a series, not as one long novel.⁵ They were the talk of la cour et la ville in seventeenth-century Paris, and paved the way for other novelists, from Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de Lafayette, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Even the criticism of her works by writers like Molière and Boileau attest to the impact her works made at the time.

In the case of the fairy tale, the often-cited 1677 letter by Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, indicates that tales were already being told at court as a jeu d’esprit. Although few literary critics of the period made references to the 1690 fairy-tale vogue, Lewis Seifert attributes this to critics like Boileau who did not wish to elevate the genre by openly denouncing it (64). Nevertheless, the testimony of the Abbé de Villiers, who wrote an entire treatise against the genre, does suggest that fairy tales indeed had attained the popularity of the novel: "women who used to be enchanted by the Princesse de Clèves are today stubbornly attached to Griselidis and la Belle aux cheveux d’or (qtd. in Seifert 79). Further testifying to the popularity of fairy tales in the period, Christelle Bahier-Porte importantly observes: The very year Histoires ou contes du temps passé, was published, Dufresny and Barante produced Les Fées ou Les Contes de ma mère l’Oye at the Comédie Italienne, and even the Comédie Française, nevertheless hostile to plays with a marvelous subject or consisting of great spectacles, performed Dancourt’s Les Fées in 1699."

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Scudéry’s and d’Aulnoy’s works were regularly included in what Joan DeJean has referred to as worldly anthologies, essentially unofficial canons targeted at a readership of salon-goers (Classical Reeducation 23–27). For the upper-class Parisian literati,