SOURCE: “The Embodiment of Culture: Fairy Tales of the Body in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” in Romanic Review, Vol. 83, No. 4, November, 1992, pp. 427–36.

In the following essay, Méchoulan discusses themes of food and orality in several of Perrault's tales in the context of contemporary religious and political concepts of the body.

Once upon a time there was a body. This body was peculiar indeed. One, it was only produced by a speech act. Two, the subject of its enunciation gave his body as a body which was obviously heterogeneous. Three, this heterogeneous body was manifested only by a deixis, by a “this.” Four, this body alone must represent a whole community of other bodies united by the repetition of this very speech-act. The more we progress into the investigation of this body, the more we come up against language as the sole materiality which could force it...