Aulnoy, Marie‐Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, baronne d' [or comtesse] (1650/51–1705). The most famous French writer of fairy tales after Perrault, d'Aulnoy had a significant influence on the development of the genre in France and other countries (especially Germany).
Born in Normandy, Marie‐Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville was married at 15 or 16 to François de la Motte, baron d'Aulnoy, who was more than 30 years her elder. The marriage, which had been arranged by her mother, Mme de Gudane, and her mother's companion, Courboyer, quickly turned sour, leading to the most turbulent phase of her life. The baron's financial difficulties and abusive behaviour created a hostile relationship between Marie‐Catherine's mother and husband. In 1669, Mme de Gudane, Courboyer, and other accomplices hatched a plot to accuse M. d'Aulnoy of lèse‐majesté, a capital offence. Although arrested, the baron quickly proved his innocence and turned the tables on his accusers: Courboyer and his accomplices were charged with calumny and executed; Mme de Gudane was forced to flee France, and Marie‐Catherine was briefly imprisoned with her new‐born third daughter (the first two had died in infancy). Little is known of Mme d'Aulnoy's life between her release in 1670 from the Conciergerie prison and 1690, except that she gave birth to two daughters (in 1676 and 1677) and probably travelled to Flanders, England, and Spain. However, by 1690, she had returned to Paris, had established numerous contacts at court, and began a prolific writing career, with the publication of Histoire d'Hypolite, comte de Duglas (Story of Hypolitus, Count of Douglas), which included the first published literary fairy tale in French (which later anthologies called ‘L'Île de la félicité’ (‘The Island of Happiness’)). In 1691, d'Aulnoy published her lively travel narrative Relation du voyage d'Espagne (Travels in Spain), which includes another fairy tale (about a fateful princess named Mira). In the ensuing years she published with great success novels, short stories, devotional works, and collections of historical memoirs. But she is best known for the two collections of fairy tales published in 1697 and 1698: Les Contes des fées (Tales of the Fairies, 1697–8), with 15 tales and two frame narratives (Dom Gabriel Ponce de Léon and Dom Fernand de Tolède), and Contes nouveaux ou les fées à la mode (New Tales, or Fairies in Fashion, 1698), which contains nine more tales and a frame story entitled Le Gentilhomme bourgeois (The Bourgeois Gentleman). By the time of her death a few years later (1705), d'Aulnoy's name had become synonymous with an expression she was the first to use—‘conte de fées’.
D'Aulnoy's fairy tales owe much to the novels of her day. Unlike Perrault (whose prose tales were published only a few months before the first instalment of Les Contes des fées), d'Aulnoy regularly incorporates motifs, characters, and devices that are typical of the pastoral and heroic romances popular in the first part of the century. Hence, her protagonists are always involved in a love story, and the narration examines their emotions at great length. Indeed, this ‘sentimental realism’ makes d'Aulnoy's fairy tales a significant (but generally unacknowledged) transitional moment in the evolution of the 17th‐ and 18th‐century French novel. It also explains in part the reticence many critics express about her stories, beginning especially in the 19th century, when literary fairy tales were increasingly judged in terms of their putative faithfulness to folkloric models. None the less, d'Aulnoy (like Perrault for that matter) had no intention of making her contes ethnographic documents, but rather literary texts suitable for the tastes of refined readers.
Even so, d'Aulnoy displays a wide knowledge of folkloric material. Of all the 17th‐ and 18th‐century French fairy tales, only Perrault's make more frequent use of discernible folkloric tale types (10 out of 11) than d'Aulnoy's (19 out of 25). Whether she knew these in their oral form or exclusively through literary renderings, d'Aulnoy rewrote 15 different oral tale types, ranging from ‘L'Oranger et l'abeille’ (‘The Orange‐tree and the Bee’) to ‘Le Mouton’ (‘The Ram’). She seems to have been particularly fascinated by the animal spouse cycles (the most famous examples of which are Apuleius' ‘Cupid and Psyche’ and Mme Leprince de Beaumont's ‘Beauty and the Beast’), for she wrote five animal groom tales (‘Gracieuse et Percinet’, ‘Le Mouton’, ‘L'Oiseau bleu’ (‘The Blue Bird’), ‘Le Prince Marcassin’ (‘The Boar Prince’), ‘Serpentin vert’ (‘The Green Serpent’)) and two animal bride tales (‘La Chatte blanche’ (‘The White Cat’) and ‘La Biche au bois’ (‘The Doe in the Woods’)).
Perhaps most significant are the multiple ways d'Aulnoy's contes de fées meld literary and folkloric traditions. Not unlike Perrault, she often employs humorous names, expressions, devices, and situations that create an ironic distance from popular oral narratives and their (reductive) association with children. This is the case of the versed morals she almost always places at the end of her tales: the moralités recall the formulaic endings of both the oral storyteller and the illustrious fabulist La Fontaine while often questioning the obvious ‘point’ of the story. D'Aulnoy is also famous for her profuse imagination, and she repeatedly incorporates rich descriptions that fuse supernatural beings or traits with historical and literary allusions from her day. Thus, the fairy characters who appear in her tales, recalling fairies in opera and the term used to honour the hostesses of the salons, play a much more prominent role than those in either oral traditions or the stories of Straparola and Basile. Thus she also creates numerous strong heroines, akin to those of several prominent 17th‐century French female novelists (e.g. Lafayette and Villedieu) but distinct from most of their folkloric homologues. Among others, the heroine of her fascinating ‘Finette‐Cendron’ is a resolutely active character who combines the qualities of both Thumbelina and Cinderella.
The popularity that met d'Aulnoy's fairy tales immediately upon publication continued well into the 18th century, during which her works were often republished and many of her tales found their way into the Bibliothèque bleue. Beginning in the 19th century, however, several critics inaugurated a tradition of comparing d'Aulnoy unfavourably (and unfairly) to Perrault, and only a few of her tales were regularly republished, in editions specifically for children. In the past 20 years, serious scholarly attention to d'Aulnoy has finally begun to gain momentum, and critics have increasingly recognized her important place in the history of French literature and the fairy tale.
Bibliography
- Defrance, Anne, ‘Écriture féminine et dénégation de l'autorité: les Contes de fées de Madame d'Aulnoy et leur récit‐cadre’,
Revue des sciences humaines , 238 (1995). - DeGraff, Amy, The Tower and the Well: A Psychological Interpretation of the Fairy Tales of Madame d'Aulnoy (1984).
- Hannon, Patricia, ‘Feminine Voice and the Motivated Text: Mme d'Aulnoy and the Chevalier de Mailly’,
Marvels and Tales , 2.1 (1988). - Mitchell, Jane Tucker, A Thematic Analysis of Madame d'Aulnoy's Contes de fées (1978).
- Welch, Marcelle Maistre, ‘Les Jeux de l'écriture dans les contes de fées de Mme d'Aulnoy’,
Romanische Forschungen , 101.1 (1989).
— Lewis C. Seifert
