Tales for Future Times:
The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page
Although much
lesser known now than his literary heirs the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian
Andersen, the seventeenth-century French writer Charles Perrault not only
solidified the fairy tale as a literary genre, but he wrote or adapted nearly
all of the genre’s most signature stories, his tales entering the culture in
ways that have far transcended his own personal artistic reach. “Cinderella,”
“Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” “Tom
Thumb,” and the larger designation of “Mother Goose” stories all permeate
virtually every level of modern art and entertainment, from rock songs to
popular films to the most sophisticated stories and novels by such literary fabulists
as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. With all these tales forming a common
cultural currency, the clarity and intent of the originals has often been
either obscured or contorted to serve sometimes questionable meanings, and
while a film such as 1996’s Freeway creates a brilliant and necessary
twist on the “Little Red Riding Hood” story, many more popular versions of
Perrault’s works—from the saccharine Disney films to the grotesquely insulting Pretty
Woman—manipulate their audiences by promoting reactionary gender and class
stereotypes. Much of this is in the originals, though, and it’s often
surprising to see just what is and what isn’t in Charles Perrault’s versions of
these seminal fairy tales.
Perrault published his Stories or Tales from
Times Past (subtitled Mother Goose Tales) in 1697, the work
comprising three of his earlier verse stories and eight new prose tales, and
arriving at the end of a long and not entirely satisfying literary life—Perrault
was nearly seventy, and while he was well-connected, his contributions had been
more intellectual than artistic—this slim volume achieved a success that hadn’t
seemed possible to the man who’d long made his main living as a civil servant.
Some of the stories were adapted from oral tradition, and some were inspired by
episodes from earlier works, including Boccaccio’s The Decameron and
Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, and some were inventions wholly new to
Perrault, but what was most significantly new in his work was the idea of
turning magical folk tales into sophisticated and subtle forms of written
literature. While we now think of fairy tales as primarily children’s
literature, there was no such thing as children’s literature in Perrault’s
time, and with this in mind we can see that the “morals” of these tales take on
more worldly purposes, despite their slyly clever packaging within the
fantastical universe of fairies and ogres and talking animals.
Philippe Lallemand’s portrait of Charles Perrault (detail), 1672 |
Like “Puss in Boots,” Perrault’s “Cinderella” also has two competing and contradictory morals, and they likewise discuss questions of marriageability and class connection. One moral claims that charm is more important than looks when it comes to winning a man’s heart, an idea that suggests that anyone can achieve happiness, regardless of their conventional assets. But the second moral declares that no matter what natural gifts you have, you need a godfather or godmother in order to put them to good use, a message that acknowledges—and perhaps supports—ordinary society’s profoundly uneven playing field.
Catherine Deneuve in the film version of Donkey Skin, 1970 |
Perrault’s original tales are hardly the reactionary
versions that were fed to us as children, but they also can’t be expected to be
the feminist and socialist alternate versions that we might wish them to be,
such we find in Angela Carter’s 1979 story collection The Bloody Chamber,
whose modern twists she was inspired to write after translating an edition of
Perrault’s fairy tales in 1977. Perrault was an upper-class intellectual during
the reign of the despotic Sun King, and unlike the fable-writer Jean de La
Fontaine, whose rich narratives often criticized the powerful and took the side
of the underdog—and who himself was not in favor with the megalomaniacal Louis
Quatorze—Perrault didn’t have much of an interest in rocking the boat. Instead,
as a leading figure on the modern side of the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the
Moderns,” he brought new forms and sources to literature to create something
that even the ancients had never seen. La Fontaine was on the side of the
ancients and wrote fables in the vein of Aesop, and while La Fontaine was much
more intellectually clever and lyrically sophisticated, it was Perrault’s
modernity that lay the foundation for a new kind of literature that’s created a
culture all its own. Perrault may have been writing for adults, but the fairy
tales that he first put on paper spawned a revolution in what kinds of stories
could be made into literature, and soon writing for children spread throughout
Europe and eventually across the rest of the world. The trajectory of the resulting
literature—and even of his own stories—may have gone far out of Perrault’s
intent and control, but that’s what often happens when you introduce something
new into the world. It seems that there’s a moral somewhere in that.
—David Wiley