Le Royaume de Féerie: Women's Writing and Women's Autonomy in the Late Seventeenth-Century France
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2015
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Bi-College users only
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Abstract
As a conscious literary product of their historical moment, seventeenth-century French fairy tales written by female writers explore social and political issues of the grand siècle. Seventeenth-century France was characterized by the culture of absolutism and political centralization. Marital laws granted the crown and noble parents authority over elite women's marriages to ensure that marital alliances suited the interests of the state and family. Louis XIV also attempted to monopolize his control over cultural spaces to subjugate nobles to the royal will. The monarch's political and cultural centralization reinforced patriarchy, undermined elite women's independence and prohibited women from expressing ideas that were not in accordance with the royal will. Under such circumstances, the salons emerged as a subversive and exploratory place for literary production. Rooted deeply in the salons, fairy tales developed as a genre for and by women to exert their voices, to condemn the oppression they encountered, to experiment with new ideas, and to gain autonomy. In this thesis, I will situate Madame d'Aulnoy and two of her fairy tales, Princess Little Carp and The Doe in the Woods in the broader historical and cultural contexts of late seventeenth-century France to explore how she used her pen to criticize the politicization of marriage and female submission in absolutist France and to suggest alternative gender relations and gender roles. In the last section, I will also demonstrate how writing and publishing fairy tales empowered the conteuses as autonomous writers.
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Wei Liu was a Bryn Mawr College student.