SOURCE: Farrell, Michèle L. “Celebration and Repression of Feminine Desire in Mme d'Aulnoy's Fairy Tale: La Chatte blanche.” L'Esprit Createur XXIX, no. 3 (fall 1989): 52-64.

In this essay, Farrell questions the power of d'Aulnoy's tales to subvert gender stereotypes.

Mme d'Aulnoy's Contes des Fées (1698) can be read as a register of aristocratic feminine desire inscribed against a sober charting of privileged woman's place in the social order at the end of the 17th Century.¹ Her “wish-fulfilling narratives” afford an intimate glimpse of woman imaging herself in the veiled security of the marvelous and suggest discrete early answers to the more recently formulated question—“what does woman want?”² Mme d'Aulnoy's tales take into account the 17th-century female protagonist as heroine of her own life, socially circumscribed by and apparently chafing against the code of propriety governing her role in Louis XIV's world. As Gérard Genette, Joan DeJean...