The Female Origins of the Fairy Tale
Ooh, I love a fairy tale.
Are you interested in their female history? Let me enlighten you with an excerpt from my Master’s research - and don’t forget to check out the women writers mentioned towards the end. Pure gold.
The label fairy tale did not fully enter the English language until the mid-eighteenth century; according to The Oxford English Dictionary, its first recorded use was in 1749.
Now used as a generic label for magical stories for children, the term is derived from the French conte de fées, a modified form of the epithet contes des fées coined by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy for the title of her first published collection of tales for adults in 1698.
Although the grammatical change in the phrase is minimal, it reveals an overlooked yet critical contextual foundation of the genre. The contes des fées were tales from fairies not tales about fairies.
D’Aulnoy’s expression did not define a fantastical genre with fairy content but a female genre with the lives of contemporary women writers at its source. The French conteuses often referred to themselves as fairies to reflect their specifically female, innovative, and frivolous style, which was intentionally “Modern” in its aesthetic in order to oppose what they considered the “Ancient” style of male writers, who sought to imitate classical Greek and Roman texts.
Conversely, the women aimed to promote a new literary aesthetic that entertained without the limitations of traditional rhetoric or didacticism. In fact, d’Aulnoy and her fellow female writers, known as Les Fées Modernes, distinguish their work not only from anciens like Charles Perrault but also from their uncultivated female predecessors, peasant nursemaids and storytellers.
Thus, the literary fairy tale, as opposed to its oral ancestor, ultimately began as an art form of the upper classes, written both by and for adult members of the French aristocracy.
Despite its female origins, from the seventeenth century onward the fairy-tale canon has been governed by male writers: Charles Perrault in France, the Brothers Grimm in Germany, Hans Christian Andersen in Denmark, George Macdonald and Oscar Wilde in England. Although male writers such as Perrault and the Grimms openly acknowledged that their source material came largely or entirely from female storytellers, critics of women writers commonly dismissed the female tales as merely substandard imitations of the male contes.
The common misconception remains that women dropped out of the history of fairy tales once they became a literary form and existed only in the background as anonymous pantomime figures like the old peasant Mother Goose in the eighteenth century or the commercialized Mother Bunch in the nineteenth century.
In recent years, such a perspective has been challenged by fairy-tale scholars such as Jack Zipes, Marina Warner, and Lewis Seifert, who have begun to reclaim the history of the French contes de fées by studying their publication.
In her 2012 book The Teller’s Tale, Sophie Raynard reveals that it is, in fact, to the pen of seven women writers — Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, Henriette-Julie de Murat, Catherine Barnard, Louise d’Auneuil, Charlotte-Rose de La Force, and Catherine Durand — that we owe more than two-thirds of the fairy tales published in the 1690s.
Thus, the early literary fairy tale was not only adult and aristocratic but also predominantly female. It is imperative for those interested in the literary fairy tale to read the works of the bold and creative women who both wrote and inspired others to write the well-known and well-loved fairy tales that we enjoy to this day.
