Chapter 4 – La Chatte Blanche by Madame d’Aulnoy

Fairy tales as an accepted writing style were born in the French salons held by educated aristocratic ladies in the 17^th century. A true pioneer of the genre was Madame d’Aulnoy (1650-1712), a most remarkable and fruitful writer who published her fairy tale collections from the early 1690s and originated the term conte de fées.

Madame d’Auloy’s tales were remarkably femicentric, presenting strong, independent women characters, friendship between women and their mutual support. La Belle aux cheveux d’or rules her realm independently and she herself chooses and crowns a king; La Chatte Blanche (who turns out to be a princess) bestows an entire kingdom upon her loved one since she owns several; La bonne petite souris (who is, again, a princess), with her mother the queen and her fairy godmother successfully fight an intruder. These fabulous realms, governed by women, bear great resemblance to the real-life feminine salon circles of those days.

Thanks to the Salonnieres, a boom of literary fairy tales appeared and quickly spread among intellectual circles in France. For a glimpse, limited in time and space, a literary genre was dominated by women authors ­– a rare, perhaps unique example in the history of Western literature. In later tradition, their contribution was overtaken (and interpreted far more conventionally) by male writers such as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, to mention only the most well-known.