eJournals Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 39/76

Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature
pfscl
0343-0758
2941-086X
Narr Verlag Tübingen
61
2012
3976

Lewis C. Seifert and Domna C. Stanton (eds. and trans.): Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by Seventeenth-Century French Women Writers. Toronto: Inter Inc. and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010 («The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series», 9). 310 p. + Appendix, Bibliography and Index

61
2012
Anne E. Duggan
pfscl39760270
PFSCL XXXIX, 76 (2012) 270 debate, despite its potentially explosive religious and political consequences, is minimized. We are told that Louis XIV chose to take a backseat in the quarrel, though it is surprising that he should have chosen both Boileau and Racine, both stalwart supporters of the Ancient party, as his royal historiographers. An expanded commentary on that seeming paradox would be welcomed. However, to find fault here is to nitpick. In his conclusion, Norman takes us into the French and British Enlightenment to trace the effects of how the seventeenth-century Ancients’ elevation of emotive response influenced the philosophes of the two nations. This study of literary transformations recovers a neoclassical world that had been lost to us, obscured, ironically, by the consequences of a later quarrel—the Romantics’ debate with neoclassicism. Norman makes evident what the Romantics made us forget: just how scandalous those ancients were. Hélène Bilis Lewis C. Seifert and Domna C. Stanton (eds. and trans.) : Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by Seventeenth-Century French Women Writers. Toronto : Inter Inc. and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010 (« The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series », 9). 310 p. + Appendix, Bibliography and Index. Enchanted Eloquence is a most welcome addition to works in English about the seventeenth-century conteuses. Anthologies by Jack Zipes, including Beauties, Beasts, and Enchantments (1989) and The Great Fairy Tale Tradition (2001), were the first in English to provide an inclusive view of tales by the 1690s conteuses in a literary and scholarly field that had been dominated by the works of male authors and collectors such as the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, and for which Charles Perrault served as the primary representative of the French tradition. Lewis Seifert and Domna Stanton’s translations of tales by the conteuses complement these earlier anthologies at the same time that their focus on women authors offers the Anglophone reader a unique perspective on the seventeenth-century French literary field as well as the tradition of the fairy tale. While new critical editions of tales by the conteuses have been available in French with the tricentennial edition of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s tales (1997-98) and Honoré Champion’s Bibliothèque des Génies et des fées (2004-), there are few Comptes rendus 271 contemporary collections in English that include them. Seifert and Stanton’s is the first to focus exclusively on the French women writers of the 1690s. The anthology consists of an introduction; a selection of tales by Catherine Bernard, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon, d’Aulnoy, Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force, and Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, comtesse de Murat; critical texts by L’Héritier and Pierre de Villiers; a comprehensive appendix of the conteuses; and a bibliography. The editors’ introduction nicely situates works by the conteuses in relation to the fairy tale, with all of the genre’s associations with women and femininity, and in relation to contemporary women authors of fairy-tale works such as A. S. Byatt, Olga Broumas, Angela Carter, and Emma Donoghue. As such, Seifert and Stanton implicitly suggest that, like these contemporary women writers, the seventeenth-century conteuses play with, innovate, and subvert literary traditions and social conventions through their tales. Seifert and Stanton importantly insist that the heroines of these tales “contradict the image of passive and mindless fairy-tale princesses propagated by mass media today” (27). Moreover, the narratives themselves, as the introduction makes clear, mark so many engagements in aesthetic debates, most notably the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, as well as critiques of social mores, including marriage practices, gender norms, and sexuality. The introduction characterizes the social and cultural climate of the conteuses and briefly examines the reception of their tales, from the period of the seventeenth century to the present. As the editors explain, “[t]he fairy tales of the conteuses were actually singled out as examples of what was wrong with women’s writing, literature, and fashionable society in general” (35) by certain male critics of the period, the most notable being Pierre de Villiers, whose “Conversations on Fairy Tales and Other Contemporary Works, To Protect against Bad Taste,” is made available in English for the first time at the end of the anthology. The history of the reception of the conteuses gives us a sense of why, so popular in their own period, amateurs, students, and scholars of fairy tales have known so little about them until fairly recently. Seifert and Stanton give an overview of the continued negative reception by critics of the conteuses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, finally leading us to the work of Jacques Barchilon, Raymonde Robert, and Seifert himself, all of whom contributed to the renewed interest, in the United States and France, in the tales of the conteuses. The selection of tales is an interesting one. As the editors explain, they chose tales, on the one hand, that had not been previously translated into English, at least not in the twentieth century; and on the other, tales that were representative of the genre. What this choice highlights are the ways PFSCL XXXIX, 76 (2012) 272 in which tales by the conteuses do not fit into conventional notions many people have of the genre. In Bernard’s “Prince Rosebush,” jealousy gets in the way of love to bring an unhappy end; Murat’s “Little Eel” and “Wasted Effort” also end unhappily, thus undermining conventional wisdom that fairy tales must have a “fairy-tale” ending. L’Héritier’s “Marmoisan” and d’Aulnoy’s “Princess Little Carp” present us with Amazonian characters, strong female figures that bring about happy endings. And La Force’s tales prove particularly interesting in their eroticism and challenges to normative views of female sexuality. The editors’ introduction to each of the authors includes information about their publishing history and literary works, their social position, and their relation to figures at court and to each other. Such contextualization provides insights into the tales themselves insofar as we see, for instance, L’Héritier as a strong defender of women’s writing, d’Aulnoy as unhappily married, or La Force subjected to scandal for her sexuality. Their explorations of female empowerment, marriage, and sexuality in the realm of the marvelous were indeed very real. The tales are accompanied by copious notes that weave each tale into the social, cultural, and political fabric of late seventeenth-century France as well as literary history, and they provide suggestions for further reading. For those not familiar with the period or the conteuses, Enchanted Eloquence offers an excellent framework and ample support material to understand their tales, at the same time that it suggests new ways of thinking about the fairy tale to students and scholars in the field. Anne E. Duggan Philippe Sellier : Port-Royal et la littérature : Pascal. Deuxième édition augmentée de douze études. Paris : Honoré Champion, 2010 (« Champion Classiques, Série Essais »). 697 p. Une double aubaine que ce volume, pour les lecteurs de Pascal, et plus généralement pour tous les amateurs du XVII e siècle ! La librairie Champion prend l’heureuse initiative de rééditer, dans sa collection de poche, c’est-àdire sous une forme très largement accessible, le recueil d’études de Philippe Sellier paru il y a un peu plus de dix ans. Pour l’occasion, l’ensemble est augmenté de douze nouvelles contributions, qui s’insèrent dans les sections originelles et enrichissent encore un ouvrage qui appartient d’ores et déjà aux références bibliographiques majeures.