Lubert, Marguerite de (c.1710–79), one of the most important women writers of 18th‐century French fairy tales. She is said to have been acquainted with Fontenelle and Voltaire and to have spurned marriage so as to pursue a writing career. Beyond this, little is known of her life.
Lubert wrote six novel‐length fairy tales: La Princesse Camion (1743), La Princesse Couleur‐de‐Rose et le prince Céladon (Princess Rose Colour and Prince Celadon, 1743), Le Prince Glacé et la princesse Étincelante (Prince Frozen and Princess Sparkling, 1743), La Princesse Lionnette et le prince Coquerico (Princess Lionnette and Prince Cockadoodledoo, 1743), La Princesse Sensible et le prince Typhon (Princess Sensitive and Prince Typhoon, 1743), and Sec et Noir, ou la Princesse des fleurs et le prince des autruches (Dry and Black, or the Flower Princess and the Ostrich Prince, 1737). In addition, Lubert inserted shorter tales in frame narratives, such as ‘Le Petit chien blanc’ (‘The Little White Dog’) in La Veillée galante (The Galant Gathering, 1747); ‘Étoilette’ (‘Starlet’) and ‘Peau d'ours’ (‘Bearskin’) in her edition of Mme de Murat's Les Lutins du château de Kernosy (The Ghosts of the Castle of Kernosy, 1753).
Lubert develops and pushes to its limits the fairy‐tale discourse of her time. Like d'Aulnoy, d'Auneuil, and Murat before her, Lubert writes tales that are sentimental love stories that highlight magical opponents and helpers. Yet, she adds more twists and turns to her plots and, especially, amplifies several stock features consecrated by her precursors. Magical objects and characters proliferate at every turn, which accentuates the implausibility of her stories. Lubert also delights in lengthy descriptions of luxurious but also horrifying settings. On the level of narrative structure, her stories place particular emphasis on the opposition between ‘good’ and ‘evil’—so common to fairy tales—by multiplying the rivalries among characters. ‘Prince Frozen and Princess Sparkling’, for instance, features rivalries between the hero and another man, the heroine and another woman, two fairies, as well as a sorcerer and a sylph. Particularly noteworthy is the frequency with which Lubert depicts conflicts among fairies, who are decidedly more ambivalent than their counterparts in late 17th‐century fairy tales. These and other characteristics exaggerate the implausibility of the obstacles to love and, thus, underscore their phantasmagorical quality. Sometimes these obstacles include monstrosity if not sadism, as in ‘Princess Camion’. In whatever form, they always give the appearance that the lovers are incompatible, an appearance Lubert is careful to sustain until the last possible moment. Thus, in ‘Dry and Black’, the heroine, destined to love a man who does not love her, is eventually united with the hero, whose indifference was only caused by a fairy's spell.
In the preface to ‘Dry and Black’, Lubert is the first writer to defend the fairy tale in terms of pleasure alone. It is not surprising, then, that didacticism is not much in evidence in her tales. Nor is it surprising that they contain highly original and often comical situations and characters that none the less conform to the fundamental structure of the wonder tale. In the end, Lubert's corpus is perhaps best described as playful. Her light‐hearted approach to the genre and its conventions borders—but never crosses the line of—parody. For enthusiasts and detractors alike, hers were the epitome of non‐parodic, non‐satirical literary fairy tales in 18th‐century France.
Bibliography
- Duggan, Maryse‐Madeleine‐Elisabeth, “‘Les Contes de Mlle de Lubert: les textualités du ludique’” (Diss., University of British Columbia, 1996).
— Lewis C. Seifert
