#like basile and sraparola

[starberry-cupcake]

wait, can you tell me more about D'Aulnoy being inspired by midwives and nurses? one thing that stands out a lot to me when reading her stories is how much more classism, racism and ableism her stories contain, so hearing about the working class influence on them would be interesting

I am going to apologize beforehand for the length of this response, I hope that at least some of this is interesting :/ 

To put it out there from the get-go, she was a high class woman in the late 17th century/very early 18th century who had the means to publish so yes, her stories are problematic. I think the classism continues pretty unquestioned all the way until HCA in European fairy tales, but the racism and ableism don’t stop there. Some of that is even carried out to fairy tales of the European colonies, later independent countries, in which the class system remains the same, albeit the figures of heroes tend to come most frequently from low class workers (the figure of “peones de campo” in Latin American stories, who win fights against Kings, for example). 

But, back to Madame d’Aulnoy, the presence of midwives and nurses in d’Aulnoy’s life, and pretty much across the conteuses of the time, was what is said to have actually influenced the early presence of fairy “godmothers”, which would later be known as one of the “donor” archetypes. She had several stories with fairies in baptisms who cursed or blessed children, depending on the parents’ behavior, and some of them were present through their entire lives. The presence of fairies in births is said to come, at least partially, from midwives and nurses. 

Madame d’Aulnoy was given in marriage to a 45 year old man when she was 15 years old, 4 of her children were born when she was a teenager (it is said one of them might have died when she was imprisoned). Her husband was a known unlikable character with political influence and has been described also as a “libertine” and “depraved” by scholars (her imprisonment was actually because she tried to get him arrested for treason and it backfired on her). Basically, she was not in a healthy marriage and she had 4 children when she herself was a child. 

Because of this, the figure of midwives and nurses was very present during her life, some academics say that the fact that they were present during birth and in several instances of the development of children was important for her and the other women telling stories in salons, and that carried into the figure of the fairies. 

The conteuses tended to have conflicting relationships with men in their lives and many shared these sort of experiences with d’Aulnoy (it is said that she aided Angélique Ticquet, for example). So many of them had this same experience, when it comes to the relying on these other figures for the birth and care of their children. 

The uses of fairies, witches and goddesses as prominent characters was also derived from folklore and paganism as a way to establish a separation with the patriarchal figures of the court and the King, and many of those figures related to both art accessible to the high classes (opera, Greek and Roman myths) and the stories these working women were known to tell (many of the aspects of pagan beliefs were carried as memes— in the academic use of the word, although it’s similar to the current use of it— to the fairies in stories).  

d’Aulnoy is said to have coined the term “fairy tale”, in her stories and those of her contemporaries the presence of fairies was used as an expression of female empowerment (for the women of that class at that time), but they carried memetically beliefs, stories and characteristics of women who had been around in their lives, especially midwives and nurses. 

Now, when Perrault published his book of fairy tales (under the name of his son, because he wanted to distance himself from them), he also took these ideas, both from the stories the nurses told his children and from the way in which the archetype of fairy had developed in the salons where women narrated and then published their stories. The main difference between him and the women in salons, which would I believe influence the genre from then onward and establish the classism more deeply, is that he had a more morally-charged intent to educate through them, “translating” the stories to what people of his own class would appreciate and giving lessons and morals (especially to young women). The salonniers were more into their own depiction and their own enjoyment, even if morals or ideals were carried in their stories, Perrault was the one who coined the whole moral at the end of the story to educate society as a whole. Or, the part of society he cared about.  

It’s important to note that most women storytellers of this time and further down the line continued with the classism, even if the inspiration of some working women was there. I think a distinct point of change from widely known fairy tales might have been, in the mid 18th century, when Beaumont adapted Villeneuve’s Beauty and the Beast and made her Beauty of common descent rather than a princess. Still, Beaumont’s intent was to have young girls with enough means to “marry well” and get an education in different languages to settle with a convenient high class husband, so even if it’s a distinctive point, it’s still classist. 

Later on, compilers like Laura Gonzenbach with her Sicilian compilation, for example, would be more respectful of the class depiction of women and kept the narrator voices as faithful as possible, but there was still a type of editing from a higher class woman into another language (she published them in German, for reasons long to explain here), which created still a sort of barrier, as much as she tried to respect the source. In the early 20th century, Berta Elena Vidal de Battini did a similar but larger work in Argentina and kept the entire voice of the narrators without editing their speech, jargon, pronunciation or any of the words that came from languages like Quechua, Mapuche, Guaraní, etc., with extensive notes. There is still the separation of class between interviewer and source, but the focus to keep true and respectful to the source became more and more important. 

I really hope this is interesting or at least helps understand the context of my tags!