La Force, Charlotte‐Rose Caumont de (1654–1724), French writer born to a high‐ranking noble family known for defending the Protestant cause during the Wars of Religion. She converted to Catholicism in 1686, which allowed her to nurture numerous connections important for her subsequent career as a writer: she was lady‐in‐waiting to the Dauphine, was intimately acquainted with Mademoiselle (Elisabeth Charlotte, duchesse d'Orléans), dedicated several of her novels to the princesses of Conti, and even received a pension from Louis XIV. Like several other late 17th‐century French women writers (notably Mme d' Aulnoy and Mme de Murat), her name was associated with several public scandals: she was known to have had love affairs; her marriage, which had been contracted without parental consent, was annulled by her father‐in‐law; and she was exiled for a time to a convent for composing impious Noëls. This period of exile was particularly productive, for during it she wrote several historical novels and a volume of fairy tales, Les Contes des contes (The Tales of the Tales, 1697).
La Force's fairy tales are witty commentaries on conventions of novels and contes de fées of late 17th‐century France. Although none of them are parodic, several of them deftly poke fun at metaphorical and mythological portrayals of love. In ‘La Puissance d'Amour’ (‘The Power of Love’), for instance, literal flames become the pleasurable flames of love for both hero and heroine. Such playfulness allows La Force to defy the period's almost exclusively psychological representations of love with physical and, sometimes, erotic descriptions. Thus, in ‘Vert et bleu’ (‘Green and Blue’), perhaps the most daring of her collection, the narrator describes with delectation the heroine bathing nude all the while exchanging impassioned glances with her voyeuristic admirer.
La Force's eight fairy tales span a wide range of narrative sub‐genres, including the mythological (‘Plus Belle que fée’ (‘More a Beauty than a Fairy’), ‘The Power of Love’, ‘Tourbillon’ (‘Whirlwind’), ‘Vert et bleu’ (‘Green and Blue’), the pastoral (‘La Bonne Femme’ (‘The Good Woman’), ‘Le Pays des délices’ (‘The Country of Delights’)); the chivalric (‘L'Enchanteur’ (‘The Sorcerer’)); and the folkloric (‘Persinette’). Among her contemporary writers, perhaps only d'Aulnoy wrote a greater variety of fairy tales. Particularly noteworthy are ‘The Sorcerer’, a retelling of an episode in the medieval Perceval romance in which La Force pastiches old French (an innovation at the time), and ‘Persinette’, an early literary version of the Grimms' more famous ‘Rapunzel’. In La Force's ‘Persinette’ the heroine's secret marriage is revealed not by her naïveté (as in ‘Rapunzel’) but by her pregnant state, and at the end of their punishment it is the fairy's powers and not the princess's tears that restore their happiness. Overall, La Force's fairy tales stand out among those of her fellow fairy‐tale writers for their diversity, wit, and sensuality, as well as their (relative) brevity.
Bibliography
- Welch, Marcelle Maistre, “‘L'Éros féminin dans les contes de fées de Mlle de la Force’”, Actes de Las Vegas (1991).
- Vellenga, Carolyn, ‘Rapunzel's Desire: A Reading of Mlle de la Force’,
Merveilles et Contes , 6.1 (May 1992).
— Lewis C. Seifert
