Women’s Writing and Women’s Literacy in Two “Beauty and the Beast” Tales

Introduction

In her classic study A Literature of Their Own, Showalter (1976) has argued that “we cannot show a pattern of deliberate progress and accumulation” in women’s literary traditions (p. 12). The history of women’s writing “is full of holes and hiatuses, because of what Germaine Greer calls ‘the phenomenon of the transience of female literary fame,’” in which “small group[s] of women have enjoyed dazzling literary prestige during their own lifetimes, only to vanish without trace from records of posterity” (p. 12). Showalter is discussing this phenomenon in the context of British women novelists, but the tendency of women writers to be forgotten by all but specialists is one that affects many genres. The best-known authors of literary fairy tales for children are almost exclusively male, for instance; although the term “fairy tale” first became popularized in English through the title of a 1699 translation of tales by the French writer Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (Schacker, 2007, p. 382), her name is far less well-known than those of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, or Charles Perrault. Mother Goose, the female figure who is perhaps most closely associated with pre-twentieth-century fairy tales in English-speaking popular cultures, is of course not an author at all: she is an imaginary figure－often drawn as an anthropomorphized animal－who tells stories as a member of the illiterate lower classes. Mother Goose may be lauded as a link to vanished folk traditions of oral storytelling, but the stories ostensibly attributed to her were actually written down by male authors such as the Grimms or Perrault, while the many women who wrote literary fairy tales in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries have faded into relative obscurity. This tendency to reify male creators of fairy tales has continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the immensely popular Walt Disney Company’s fairy-tale films. As the face of the Disney brand, Walt Disney has become the de facto “author” of what are perhaps the best-known versions of tales such as Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast－even though the last three films on this list were made nearly thirty years after Disney’s death in 1966.

The tale of “Beauty and the Beast” provides a particularly instructive case study of the ways in which women writers’ contributions to literary fairy tales have been marginalized over time. Today, the tale is generally associated with Walt Disney because of the immense critical and commercial success of the 1991 animated film produced by the company that bears his name. Although Disney’s name is still a household word nearly one hundred years after he founded his company in 1923, the name of Linda Woolverton, who wrote the film’s screenplay and who was the first woman to script a feature-length Disney animated film, is not. Woolverton’s career has been exemplary－she would go on to write the screenplays for The Lion King, Alice in Wonderland, and Maleficent, and would receive a Tony award for adapting The Lion King to the Broadway stage－but in the popular imagination, these productions are still associated almost exclusively with the man who founded the studio that has employed her. Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, the French author and educator whose version of “Beauty and the Beast” is the main literary source for Woolverton’s screenplay, is even less well known to those among twenty-first-century audiences who have not made an academic study of fairy tales. In her day, however, Beaumont was immensely popular. She did not invent the tale; as is the case with many folk tales, the origins of “Beauty and the Beast” are obscure. The oldest known written version is Apuleius’ story of “Cupid and Psyche” from about 150 A.D., but he “probably drew on earlier, oral renditions of the tale from Greek [sources]; and the Greeks, in turn, may have derived their story” from tales that had circulated on the Indian subcontinent (Griswold, 2004, p. 15). The tale had long since spread to Europe by the time Beaumont published her retelling in 1756 in Les Magasin des enfants, an educational publication for upper-class adolescent English girls. Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” was probably the most widely distributed English-language version of the tale before the Disney film appeared. The Magasin went through dozens of editions in England and was translated into multiple languages. It is also an important text in the history of literary fairy tales for young readers, since Beaumont “was one of the very first authors in any language to write fairy tales explicitly and unequivocally for children” (Seifert, 2004, p. 25). In keeping with the pattern of women’s literary history that Showalter (1976) identifies, however, Beaumont’s name began to fade into obscurity as early as the mid-nineteenth century.

The seventeenth-century French women fairy-tale writers to whom Beaumont’s tale is indebted have suffered a similar fate. Beaumont certainly knew the works of earlier French women writers such as Gabrielle de Villeneuve, who published a novel-length version of “Beauty and the Beast” in 1740, and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, whose literary output was widely translated and was instrumental in creating the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French vogue for literary fairy tales. These women, too, were increasingly forgotten during the nineteenth century, and their tales are even less well remembered today than Beaumont’s. One of d’Aulnoy’s tales, “The White Cat,” is especially useful to compare to Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” in a feminist study because it reverses the traditional genders of the beauty and the beast. The plot of “The White Cat” is not an exact analogue to “Beauty and the Beast”－it incorporates many elements of “Rapunzel” into its princess’s back story－but the central relationship between the prince and the princess, who has been transformed into a cat until she can win the love of a worthy man, follows the “Beauty and the Beast” pattern. Here, the human figure who finds a beast in an enchanted castle is a handsome prince, and the powerful beast who gains his love and grants him his fortune is a young princess who has been enchanted by malicious fairies. This princess is no terrifying male monster, but a dainty white cat who appears conventionally feminine even in her animal form. Still, as in “Beauty and the Beast,” much of the tale focuses on the developing romantic relationship between an enchanted animal and the human who stumbles upon its castle. As Beauty does in the traditionally gendered “Beauty and the Beast,” the prince must learn to look beyond the enchanted princess’s animal exterior to appreciate her good character and wisdom. She, in turn, cannot be freed from the spell she is under until he learns to love and trust her absolutely. Their union at the end of the tale, like that in most “Beauty and the Beast” tales, restores the animal partner to human shape while providing a solution to the emotional and financial conflicts that affected the human partner’s family at the beginning of the tale.

Although Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” and d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat” are well known among scholars of literary fairy tales or French women’s writing, their relative obscurity in today’s English-language literary landscape offers an instructive example of the forces which have worked to marginalize women’s writing－particularly that of pre-twentieth-century women whose writing is associated with children. A discussion of this marginalization occupies the first section of this paper. In the paper’s second section, I aim to counter one of the unfortunate side effects of the marginalization of these two tales: it obscures their very real commitment to women’s literacy (subject to the constraints of the times) and their production within close-knit circles of female writers and readers.

The Marginalization of Beaumont and D’Aulnoy

Although Beauty’s love of books isolates her from her sisters in Beaumont’s tale, Beaumont’s own position was quite different. Her career as governess to London’s elite brought her into contact with many members of the Bluestockings, a group of women (and some men) who formed a series of close literary friendships and correspondences beginning in about 1750 (Biancardi, 2012, p. 112). The ways in which Beaumont’s Beauty values her books and learns to govern her emotions is very much in line with progressive ideals of women’s education in England during the 1750s; she may appear a rather passive heroine to modern eyes, but her love of books, her supremely rational approach to relationships, and her upright ethical code are values which many Bluestockings espoused as they attempted to counter the notion that women’s innate frivolity and irrationality make them relatively uneducable.

D’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat,” though written for adults rather than children, is also the product of a group of women writers, readers, and conversationalists: the French literary salon of the late seventeenth century, in which educated aristocratic women gathered to converse about manners, morals, and the events of the day. They often told elaborate literary fairy tales in a friendly competition to see which author could provide the most creative and engaging treatments of familiar themes. Many of these salonières ironically celebrated their connection to the marginalized worlds of the folk and of children’s entertainment: “the allegedly ‘childish’ genre of fairy tales allowed women writers the opportunity to [...] transform from the inside [...] the notion of the [...] frivolous woman” and to “reclai[m] a rhetoric that had [...] been used against them” (Feat, 2012, p. 223). In “The White Cat,” d’Aulnoy displays her own ability to adapt traditional tale types such as “Beauty and the Beast” and “Rapunzel” while presenting the triumph of an intelligent heroine who initially appears to be no more than a pampered little house pet.

Although both Beaumont and d’Aulnoy were extremely popular and influential in their respective time periods, they are far more obscure today. Even basic biographical information about these two women is somewhat difficult to come by; most of d’Aulnoy’s early eighteenth-century English readers, for instance, believed that the Memoirs of the Countess of Dunois was her autobiography, though it was actually a sentimental romance written by Henriette-Julie de Murat (Palmer, 1975, p. 238). D’Aulnoy is still often referred to as a countess, although she was in fact the wife of a baron. Today’s scholars have a somewhat clearer picture than her eighteenth-century readers did of the basic outlines of her life, such as her unhappy arranged marriage to Baron d’Aulnoy, her extensive travels after she fled France to avoid prosecution as an accessory to a plot to kill her husband in 1669, and her eventual return to Paris in about 1690, but beyond this broad outline “little concrete information exists,” including her date of birth, which is estimated to be around 1650 (Jasmin, 2012, p. 61). Reliable biographical details for Beaumont are just as difficult to ascertain. As late as 2004, Griswold presented the longstanding belief that she entered into an unhappy and short-lived arranged marriage with a minor aristocrat, Monsieur de Beaumont, and some thirty years later married again, to Thomas Pichon (p. 47). More recent research, however, has suggested that she took the name of Beaumont, probably from a lover, but was never married to a man of that name, and certainly never entered into an arranged marriage with an aristocrat. Her first marriage was quickly annulled, but it was to a dancer, Claude-Antoine Malter, and occurred without her parents’ permission or support (Biancardi, 2012, p. 110). She may or may not have been legally married to Pichon, with whom she continued an extensive correspondence even after they separated in about 1763; as Biancardi (2012) has put it, Beaumont’s life and relationships seem “to have been considerably more complex” than previously supposed (p. 110).

These discrepancies are enlightening for what they tell us about the ways popular women writers have been presented to their readers, and how these strategies can inadvertently contribute to their marginalization by later critics. In both cases, the supposed biographies conform more closely to stereotypical gender ideals than do the known facts of d’Aulnoy’s or Beaumont’s lives－a sensitive, star-crossed heroine of sentimental romance rather than a young woman who helped her mother accuse her dissipated and debt-ridden husband of treason, or the victim of an arranged marriage who remarried happily rather than a woman who married a dancer over her parents’ objections, annulled the marriage, and went on to have several other romantic relationships as she built her literary career. This pattern follows a dynamic that Lootens (1996) has noted in the reception of popular women writers, in which their lives are edited to conform to contemporary ideals of saintly womanhood and inspired authorship: “Revision and editing [...] make [literary] saints. Yet they do so [...] by transforming sinners [...]. This has [...] been especially true in the case of [...] women” (pp. 8-9). Although d’Aulnoy and Beaumont lived and wrote over one hundred years before the nineteenth-century authors Lootens studies, this pattern of selective editing also seems to have affected their reception history. Lootens argues that this type of canonization process is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it seeks to display a portrait of the woman writer as a “radically ahistorical” embodiment of “the ‘genius of woman,’” which in practice tended to praise women writers “as vessels of the unitary, eternal, and ultimately silent sanctity of womanhood” (1996, p. 10). On the other hand, such a strategy often had the practical effect of making such portraits appear too historical: in adapting the details of a woman writer’s life and works to fit the feminine ideals of one generation, it often ensured she would appear hopelessly dated to later critics (Lootens, 1996, pp. 10-12).

Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century, Beaumont’s and d’Aulnoy’s works were considered somewhat old-fashioned and were being marginalized in English literary circles. D’Aulnoy’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century popularity had rested on her status as a writer of memoirs and sentimental novels as well as fairy tales: “at least thirty-six editions” of her works were translated into English between 1691 and 1740, and her novels, memoirs, and travel writings were frequently reprinted throughout the eighteenth century (Palmer, 1975, p. 238). Nineteenth-century readers, however, knew her almost exclusively for her literary fairy tales, while her previously popular works such as Memoirs of the Court of Spain and A Lady’s Travels Into Spain were all but forgotten. With the exceptions of two rather faithful translations by Planché and by MacDonell and Lee that were geared toward the antiquarian market, her tales were generally “published in children’s editions” which tended to shorten them and omit the elaborate frame stories, lavish description, and elegantly ironic language that had attracted d’Aulnoy’s original adult readers (Palmer, 1975, p. 250). Admittedly, some of the qualities of her original tales remained present in Victorian popular culture, though in theatrical rather than literary form. The lush materiality, elaborate transformations, and “fantasies of costume and disguise” characteristic of French contes des fées such as d’Aulnoy’s reappeared on the Victorian stage in the form of pantomimes, which were often loosely adapted from French tales (Schacker, 2007, p. 395). The playwright J. R. Planché also adapted several of d’Aulnoy’s tales into “one-act ‘fairy extravaganzas’ in verse” (Palmer, 1975, p. 250). In print form, however, her tales were more typically marketed to English children in simplified and abridged forms after mid-century (Palmer, 1975, p. 250; Jasmin, 2012, pp. 64-65). Collections such as J. S. Burke’s Fairy Tales for Little Readers included translations of some of d’Aulnoy’s tales, but her reclassification as a writer for “little readers” or as one of the inspirations for pantomime had the effect of erasing her original appeal to sophisticated adult audiences and repositioning her as a “mere” teller of children’s tales or as the vaguely-remembered inspiration for popular theatrical productions.

Beaumont’s fairy tales had always been directed toward a child audience, but their emphasis on rational discourse and moral lessons fared little better among mid-nineteenth-century English audiences than d’Aulnoy’s more elaborate and ironic style. Beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century, leading authors such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb began criticizing didactic tales for children－a genre that had become closely associated with women writers－for being too narrowly rational, too unemotional, and altogether detrimental to the development of children’s imaginations. In a famous letter to Coleridge in 1802, Lamb exclaimed, “Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with Tales and old wives fables in childhood, you had been crammed with Geography & Natural History? Damn them. I mean the cursed Barbauld crew” (Richardson, 1991, p. 36). Lamb’s choice of a woman writer, Anna Letitia Barbauld, as the main target of his anger is a rhetorical move that was echoed by historians of children’s literature well into the twentieth century, replicating Lamb’s tendency to present the “triumph” of the non-didactic literary fairy tale－typically as defined by male authors and critics－“over a didactic tradition perpetuated by [...] women writers” such as Barbauld (Richardson, 1991, p. 36). In practice, this sharp distinction between the didactic tale and the non-didactic fairy tale was an oversimplification; writers of didactic tales frequently adapted traditional fairy-tale structures to didactic ends (Richardson, 1991, pp. 37-40). Beaumont’s writing, for instance, draws no clear distinctions between didactic tale and non-didactic fairy tale. Her Magasin des enfants, with its mixture of fairy tales, “Bible stories, fables, selections from Greek and Roman mythology, rudimentary science lessons, and instructions on ‘proper’ moral and sociable conduct,” encompasses a variety of genres within its educational framework (Seifert, 2004, p. 28). Ultimately, however, the arguments against didactic children’s tales won out, and tales of the sort Beaumont wrote began to be seen as old-fashioned at best, and harmful to children’s development at worst. By the 1840s, even a reviewer such as Elizabeth Rigby (1844), who championed Barbauld’s Evenings at Home, would introduce her review essay by criticizing “the excessive ardour for teaching which prevails throughout” books for young people (p. 2).

Rigby’s (1844) piece ends with a long list of books “of the old school” which she recommends to contemporary children over more recently published texts (p. 19). Although several fairy tales are listed, including “Beauty and the Beast,” Rigby gives no author for this tale. The only fairy-tale writers named are the Grimms. Beaumont is never mentioned. Rigby’s omission of French writers in a review essay for a conservative, Tory-identified publication such as the Quarterly Review is telling: another factor in the decline of Beaumont’s and d’Aulnoy’s literary fortunes in nineteenth-century England is their nationality. Britain was at war with France from 1793 to 1815, which resulted in an increase in anti-French sympathies and a more general “recoiling from revolutionary ideas [...] a retreat from internationalism and from tendencies that seemed to ignore national boundaries” (Todd, 1986, p. 131). The sentimental literature with which d’Aulnoy had often been associated in the eighteenth century through her romances and historical novels came under sharp attack for being immoral, effeminate, and “Jacobin” (Todd, 1986, pp. 130-133). The contemporary debates about the virtues of non-didactic fairy tales versus moralized tales also had a political dimension. The major English writers of didactic tales for children, such as Barbauld, tended to have reformist political views that their detractors associated with French radicalism, while the proponents of less didactic fairy tales such as Coleridge and Lamb abandoned their early political radicalism for conservative social and political positions. Thus, Lamb’s preference for non-didactic “Tales and old wives’ fables” represents not merely an aesthetic position, but a political one (Richardson, 1991, pp. 40-45). Furthermore, the ways in which many nineteenth-century commentators discussed the fairy tale privileges the Grimms’ “romantic nationalist understanding of the folktale－as naïve, childlike, artless, pure, simple, unadorned, transparent, and impossible to simulate or feign” over the more self-consciously crafted literary fairy tales of the French salon tradition (Schacker, 2007, p. 385). Nineteenth-century English folklorists did not completely ignore the French tradition－Lang includes translations of Villeneuve’s “Beauty and the Beast” and d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat” in his Blue Fairy Book, for instance－but Rigby is hardly alone in praising the Grimms and devaluing French fairy-tale writers. Ruskin, for example, uses his 1868 introduction to an English translation of the Grimms’ German Popular Stories to present an “idealized vision” of fairy tales “as ‘artless,’ ‘unsullied,’ ‘pure,’ and fundamentally ‘childlike’” (Schacker, 2007, p. 389). His definition of the fairy tale “is articulated in gendered terms” which work to exclude French contes de fées from consideration due to their “implicitly feminine” traits of “satire, artifice, vanity, [and] materialism [...] qualities Britons had often projected onto French culture and politics” (Schacker, 2007, pp. 389-390). Ruskin’s view of the fairy tale here is a fine example of the ways in which children’s fiction is often used to further “a philosophy which sets up the child as a pure point of origin in relation to language, sexuality, and the state” (Rose, 1992, p. 8). As Schacker’s discussion of the marginalization of French contes de fées and Lootens’ analysis of the reception history of nineteenth-century women poets suggest, such emphasis on a “pure point of origin” often entails the silencing of women writers, particularly those who wrote for or are associated with children’s literature. In the case of Beaumont’s and d’Aulnoy’s reception in nineteenth-century England, this silencing is compounded by their status as French writers during a period of increasing British nationalism and lingering anti-French sentiments.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Beaumont and d’Aulnoy were remembered, if at all, only as writers of literary fairy tales for children. Although the political debates of the Romantic era were long past, new forces contributed to their continued exclusion from the literary mainstream. The increasing professionalization of literary studies in the early twentieth century was accomplished at the cost of devaluing children’s literature and women writers. As literary studies consolidated itself as a professional discipline, it did so by “appropriating the language of science” and rejecting objects of study that were seen as juvenile and feminine. The new cultural gatekeepers of professionalized literary study were “almost all white males,” and the authors they helped promote to canonical status also tended to be white men who “did not explicitly write for children” (Clark, 2003, pp. 58-59). At the same time, folklore was also establishing itself as a professional academic discipline in ways that worked to exclude literary fairy tales from folkloric studies. Although nineteenth-century folklorists frequently used the term “fairy tale” to refer to both folk and literary tales, the emerging academic discipline of folklore worked to separate the two, attempting “to clarify the boundaries of [its] disciplinary concerns” by rejecting the literary fairy tale in order to focus on folk antecedents, orality, and patterns of tale transmission (Schacker, 2007, p. 383). Critical interest in women writers of literary fairy tales marketed to children thus declined even further. D’Aulnoy’s fairy tales are still occasionally reprinted in children’s collections for the mass market－Robert San Souci published a lovely illustrated version of “The White Cat” in 1990－but she remains relatively obscure, her tales “submerged by a flood of incorrect attributions,” abridgements, and poor translations (Jasmin, 2012, p. 65). Beaumont’s version of “Beauty and the Beast” is better-known, but it is telling that Warner (1995) claims canonicity for this version of the tale by stating that it inspired Disney’s and Jean Cocteau’s film versions (p. 292). Beaumont and d’Aulnoy were popular and accomplished women writers in their day, but they are still all too often reduced to supporting figures in literary histories which focus on male creators.

Women’s Literacy in Beaumont’s and D’Aulnoy’s Tales

Beaumont’s and d’Aulnoy’s new status as supporting figures is unfortunate, because it tends to obscure the ways in which their tales furthered and were embedded within contemporary discourses about women’s literacy, women’s creativity, and women’s emotions. Although I am certainly not claiming that historical context is determinative－texts may be interpreted in a wide variety of ways－it is useful to consider history in the case of authors such as these, who have so often been erased from or misrepresented in the historical record. As Griswold (2004) notes, Beaumont’s literary career in England from 1748 to 1763 largely overlapped with that of John Newbery, the English bookseller and author who figures so prominently in histories of children’s literature as one of the first people to market books specifically to middle-class children (p. 71). Yet Beaumont does not figure in most English-language histories of eighteenth-century children’s literature, in spite of her international readership, her long residence in England, and her status as “one of the first French writers explicitly to recognize the necessity of writing in a style appropriate to the reading abilities of children” (Seifert, 2004, p. 29). Nor has she often been mentioned in accounts of the first generation of Bluestockings, though she moved in those circles during her career as a governess in England. Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” is quite relevant to histories of eighteenth-century children’s literature and women’s literature, however, since it presents several of the educational values espoused by the Bluestockings in a form that is intelligible to young people. Her tale presents Beauty as a rational young woman who studies her feelings as carefully as she studies her books, and is rewarded for it by gaining a prince in place of a beast.

After Beaumont moved from France to England in 1748, she quickly established herself as a governess to a number of influential London families (Biancardi, 2012, p. 112). One of her patrons was Henrietta Louisa Fermor, the Countess of Pomfret, who was a friend of the prominent Bluestocking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and who also supported other women writers such as Elizabeth Carter (Sheflin, 2013, p. 188). Although these first-generation Bluestockings do not appear to have been very familiar with the works of earlier women writers and did not support political rights for women, they were profoundly concerned with women’s education (Myers, 1990, pp. 122-123; Bodek, 1976, p. 196). At a time when antifeminist writers often deemed women frivolous, irrational, and easily misled by their emotions, women such as Beaumont’s patrons believed that the European Enlightenment emphasis on rational thought and freedom of enquiry applied to women as well as to men. They thus “advocate[d] the revolutionary idea that women must think as well as feel,” that they could and “must act with prudence, avoid the pitfalls of sexual desire, and learn from their mistakes” (Mellor, 1993, p. 40). Furthermore, the Bluestockings created an intellectual community “in which friendships supported the intellectual interests and the independent views of a group of women drawn from several levels of society” (Myers, 1990, p. 15). In an era when women’s opportunity for formal education usually ended in their early teens, these gatherings gave them “an informal university,” one of the only places “within which a woman was encouraged to sharpen her wits and gather around herself other educated women and men” (Bodek, 1976, p. 185). Eager to avoid accusations of moral licentiousness “at a time when moral teaching and respectability were becoming central to the acceptance of women’s writing,” the first generation of Bluestockings emphasized propriety and moral behavior (Myers, 1990, p. 10). In spite of their emphasis on conventionally correct behavior for women, however, the Bluestockings’ creation of an intellectual community and their emphasis on education - and on women’s ability to be educated beyond basic literacy－made them important figures in the history of women’s advancement during the eighteenth century.

Admittedly, Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” does not present Beauty as a member of an intellectual community of women; for much of the tale she is isolated by her father’s poverty and her confinement in the Beast’s castle. The tale also places great emphasis on Beauty’s willingness to sacrifice her own desires to help her father (Zipes, 1989, pp. xxiii; Warner, 1995, p. 293; Griswold, 2004, pp. 41-42). Still, Beaumont does depict Beauty’s love of learning, moral uprightness, and capacity for rational thought as elements that are essential to the tale’s happy ending. The story’s overall pedagogical purpose is always clear; Les magasin des enfants is “organized as a series of conversations between a governess, Mrs. Affable, and her six pupils,” who are “aristocrats between the ages of five and thirteen,” and the fairy who appears at the end to reward Beauty and explain the tale’s moral is a wise mentor figure reminiscent of a governess (Griswold, 2004, p. 50). The lessons Beauty is taught in this tale encompass both literacy and love: marriage is treated as a decision to make with care, and only after establishing mutual friendship. Beauty’s ability to apply herself to her books foreshadows her ability to study and act on her developing attachment to the Beast.

In spite of Beauty’s name, Beaumont tends to emphasize her character rather than her appearance: “after the opening paragraphs her looks are not mentioned. Instead, her virtues are stressed” (Griswold, 2004, p. 41). Beauty’s prosperous merchant father has “engaged tutors of every kind” for his three daughters, although only Beauty takes her education seriously (Beaumont, 2009, p. 171). Her sisters are “very arrogant as a result of their wealth” and are always going “to balls and theaters [...] with many a gibe at their little sister, who spent much of her time in reading good books” (Beaumont, 2009, p. 171). This emphasis on a love of “good books” as a sign of good character aligns Beaumont with the Bluestockings’ views, particularly the idea that “the individual who reasoned well by virtue of her learning was in the best possible moral position” (Bodek, 1976, p. 188). Seifert (2004) has argued that “Beaumont’s fairy tales [...] depict a self-conscious reflection on learning and insist on the necessity of such self-consciousness for learning to occur” (p. 32). The development of Beauty’s relationship with the Beast closely follows this pattern. When Beauty first meets the Beast, she is terrified, and with good reason. Three months earlier, the Beast had threatened to kill her father for stealing a rose, unless he or one of his daughters would consent to live in the castle for the rest of their lives. Although Beauty is quite willing to sacrifice herself to save her father’s life, she begins this section of the tale understandably afraid that she will be devoured. She is somewhat comforted by the beautiful books and harpsichord the Beast has provided for her, because she is logical enough to realize that he would not have given her an entire library if he planned to eat her the next day, but she is highly alarmed when he asks her to marry him. Beaumont clearly sympathizes with Beauty’s feelings. At the same time, however, she also suggests that Beauty needs to learn to move beyond her initial disgust at the Beast’s ugliness.

Fortunately for Beauty, her education has rendered her capable of self-reflection. At the beginning of her stay at the castle, Beauty does not love the Beast, though she is quick to recognize that he has a “kind heart” and that he is wise enough “to admit a lack of intelligence” (Beaumont, 2009, p. 177). She considers him a friend, but does not believe she is in love with him. When she returns home on a visit to her family, however, she sees the ways in which an insistence on beautiful or clever husbands, with no regard for character, has harmed her sisters. They are unhappily married to men who are handsome and intellectual, but also vain and cruel. Beauty’s oldest sister “had wedded an exceedingly handsome man, but [he] was so taken up with his own looks that he studied them from morning to night, and despised his wife’s beauty” (Beaumont, 2009, p. 179). The other sister “had married a man with plenty of brains, but he only used them to pay insults to everybody－his wife first and foremost” (Beaumont, 2009, p. 179). Beauty begins to realize that she misses the Beast terribly, and vows to return to the castle, tearfully asking herself, “Is it his fault that he is so ugly, and has so few wits? He is good, and that makes up for all the rest. Why did I not wish to marry him? I should have been a good deal happier with him than my sisters are with their husbands” (Beaumont, 2009, p. 180). She returns to the castle and declares her love for the Beast, who is dying of unrequited love for her. He immediately transforms into a handsome prince and tells her that he had been cursed to hide his beauty and intelligence until he found a woman who would marry him for his kindness alone. A lovely fairy then appears and tells Beauty that “‘You preferred merit to either beauty or wit, and you certainly deserve to find [all of] these qualities combined in one person’” (Beaumont, 2009, p. 181). Now that Beauty has declared her love for him, the Beast can reveal his true intelligence and handsome looks as well as his kindness. Because their happiness “is founded on virtue,” we are told that the two live in harmony for the rest of their lives (Beaumont, 2009, p. 181). The end of the tale thus upholds the mixture of learning, rationality, and virtue often valued by the Bluestockings; because Beauty is educated enough to look beyond appearances and to consider her sisters’ counterexamples, she gains a husband who transforms into a virtuous, wealthy man who is her intellectual companion as well as her lover.

Beaumont was certainly aware of the earlier French literary fairy tales that had written by authors such as d’Aulnoy: “in the Avertissement that precedes the 1777 edition of the Magasin [...] Beaumont defends her decision to include her own contes by citing the stylistic difficulty, the lack of moral value, and the excessive merveillieux of the [existing] literary contes de fées” (Seifert, 2004, pp. 29-30). Her objections to the highly wrought style of writers such as d’Aulnoy were shared by other members of the Bluestocking circle; Montagu, for example, rhetorically asked one of her correspondents, “Would you have me write novelles like the Countess d’Anois? [sic] and is it not better to tell a plain truth?” (Palmer, 1975, p. 240). In spite of their distaste for d’Aulnoy’s elaborate writing style, however, the Bluestocking circles in which Montagu and Beaumont moved were also indebted to the French salons of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As Bodek (1976) points out, “There had always been a cultural exchange across the Channel and English women knew of the French salons” (p. 186). Montagu had visited Paris, and Beaumont was one of the many French citizens who moved to England from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, often becoming “school masters and tutors of English children” (Bodek, 1976, pp. 186, 192).

As Beaumont’s and Montagu’s criticisms suggest, the French salons and Bluestocking circles did function somewhat differently. The French salons, particularly those of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries when d’Aulnoy was writing, were more self-consciously elitist than their eighteenth-century English counterparts (Bodek, 1976, p. 188). They were created and frequented by aristocratic women and a few men who “sought to develop a précieux manner of thinking, speaking, and writing to reveal and celebrate their innate talents that distinguished them from the vulgar elements of society” (Zipes, 1989, p. x). One of the major ways in which they did so was “to invent parlor games based on the plots of [fairy] tales with the purpose of challenging each other in friendly fashion to see who could create the most compelling narrative” (Zipes, 1989, p. xi). These games gave women such as d’Aulnoy a good deal of experience in retelling traditional tales, and challenged them to experiment with fairy-tale motifs in ways that reflected their own imaginative creativity and their interests in issues such as “freedom of choice in marriage, fidelity, and justice” (Zipes, 1989, p. xii). Tales which were popular in the salon setting could then be published in volumes which further enhanced their authors’ reputations in France and abroad. Thus, in spite of their elitism and the exclusivity of their highly mannered styles of expression, these salons provided important intellectual communities for the women who attended and hosted them. As in the case of the Bluestocking gatherings, the French salons of d’Aulnoy’s day enabled women to come together in groups that valued learning; although they could not attend universities, they could attend－and as d’Aulnoy did, lead－salons. These gatherings gave the women who frequented them a voice that extended beyond their homes and a female-centered space in which to gain the “mentoring and mutual admiration that are the basis for [...] female creativity based on a [...] learned－but also relational－ eloquence” shared with other women (Feat, 2012, p. 218).

Although the fairy tales which came out of these salons were not explicitly didactic, they were central to the salonières’ implicit defense of women’s ability to produce literary works and to take active roles in the public sphere. The late sixteenth century was “marked by controversies concerning the proper boundaries of male and female gender roles,” with prominent members of Louis XIV’s court expressing “hostility to women as creative agents of culture and specifically literature” (Seifert, 1996, p. 7). This hostility was particularly focused on upper-class social and cultural gatherings such as the salons, with conservative critics arguing that the French aristocracy and society could only be saved from decadence if women would “turn away from the pleasures of [sophisticated] mondain life, including all forms of ‘worldly divertissements and sociability, to take on instead the duties of domesticity’” (Seifert, 1996, p. 85). These critics thus “promoted an ideal of femininity” that was diametrically opposed to that of the salons, one which “privileged domesticity over sociability, submission over assertiveness, and silence over conversation” (Seifert, 1996, p. 86). Salonières such as d’Aulnoy, then, were engaging in a form of indirect but very real social protest against contemporary attempts to circumscribe women’s roles.

Although d’Aulnoy and her salon contemporaries did not write for children, the fairy tale’s association with the childlike was important to their use of it as social critique. Because the male-dominated literary establishment of the time considered the fairy tale a rather unimportant genre, it was an excellent vehicle for women writers to express discomfort with restrictions against women’s roles without garnering an undue amount of backlash:

[The literary fairy tale] was at once an unthreatening genre that was far from approaching the elite status of tragedy or epic poetry and a mondain form that signified the sociable ideal of aristocratic culture. It was [...] a genre that women could appropriate without threatening male literary figures and a form that enabled them to defend and perpetuate their own locus of cultural authority (Seifert, 1996, p. 9).

Indeed, writers such as d’Aulnoy often used the fairy tale’s apparent insignificance and marginality as means of reclaiming qualities that had been used to denigrate women. The parlor games in which women competed to present the most creative and entertaining turns on familiar fairy-tale themes emphasized an appearance of ease and spontaneity while maintaining a high level of literary craft: “The teller of the tale was to make it ‘seem’ as though the tale were made up on the spot [...] The ‘naturalness’ of the tales was, of course, feigned, since everyone prepared their tales very carefully” (Zipes, 1989, p. xii). By self-consciously treating “storytelling as a social game and the tale itself as a mere ‘bagatelle,’” these writers gave an ironic nod towards the contemporary stereotype of childish, frivolous women while presenting tales that appeared to be trifles but which were actually quite highly crafted (Feat, 2012, pp. 223-228).

In this context, the heroine of d’Aulnoy’s tale “The White Cat” can certainly be read as an idealized image of the late seventeenth-century salonière. In accordance with conventional gender roles, the female beast figure is small, beautiful, and very feminine, even in animal form: “the loveliest little white cat it is possible to imagine” (d’Aulnoy, 2009, p. 193). She proves to be a powerful sorceress, however, and the only individual who can help the Prince fulfill his quest. He has been set a series of impossible tasks by his father, who does not want to relinquish power to his three sons and seeks “to divert [...] [their] minds [...] by promises which he could always get out of when the time came” (d’Aulnoy, 2009, p. 192). This first section of the tale, which focuses on the Prince’s stay at the Cat’s castle, emphasizes her lavish hospitality and the apparent ease with which she fulfills the tasks the King has set for his youngest son; in keeping with the salon ideal, she is a fine hostess who makes sure her guest wants for nothing, while achieving the near-impossible with a great deal of wit and little visible effort. Telling the Prince not to fret about his father’s directive to find the world’s most beautiful dog or “a piece of muslin so fine that it could be drawn through the eye of a needle” (d’Aulnoy, 2009, p. 197), she entertains him with food, music, hunts, and fireworks until the very day he must report back to the King, and then reveals “a dog so small that it could easily be put through a ring” and “a piece of muslin four hundred ells long, woven with the loveliest colors and most wonderful patterns,” which goes through the eye of a needle not one but six times (d’Aulnoy, 2009, pp. 197-198). As Bloom (2015) has argued, the small but wonderful objects the cat gives the prince allow d’Aulnoy to foreground aesthetic elements that are crucial to her own art: they call “attention to the skilled workmanship necessary for creating miniature masterpieces” while engaging “in a self-reflexive move that valorizes her own artistry in creating small but exquisite texts” (p. 210). D’Aulnoy thus questions the ways in which conventional male-dominated society devalues objects that are coded as small, feminine, and decorative, while presenting the cat as a female artist figure who claims her femininity proudly.

As Beaumont’s tale will later do, “The White Cat” emphasizes the gradual development of the relationship between the human and the beast. Here, however, the Prince is in the position of the pupil who must consider his own emotions and obey the Cat’s instructions. Faced with his father’s third and final task－to find the loveliest princess imaginable－he is appalled when the White Cat tells him to cut off her head. In despair, he obeys her, in what Hallett and Karasek (2009) have described as “a moment of supreme trust,” only to see her transform into a beautiful princess (p. 171). Now in human form, the Princess takes up the role of storyteller, using the form of the conte de fée to tell the prince how she came to be turned into a cat. This long account of her life, which “occupies almost half of the narrative,” combines elements of traditional “Rapunzel” tales with those of the enchanted beast (Seifert, 1990, p. 24). The Princess’ pregnant mother, who craved fruit, had angered a fairy by stealing from her garden. In revenge, the fairy took the infant princess and locked her in a tower. The princess attempted to escape with her lover, but the fairies sent a dragon to kill him, then punished her by turning her into a white cat until she might gain “‘the love of a prince who resembled in every way [her] unfortunate lover’” (d’Aulnoy, 2009, p. 202). D’Aulnoy thus situates the Princess as both a romantic heroine who finds her true love and as a talented conteuse who entertains her would-be husband in fine style while relating her own history and ensuring he will gain his inheritance.

At the end of the tale, the Prince returns to his father with the transformed Princess. Seifert (1990) has argued that this ending marks a reassertion of patriarchal power, since the Princess appears in a crystal chariot as the object of the male courtiers’ gaze and resolves the question of the Prince’s inheritance by giving away three of her own kingdoms to his father and two older brothers (pp. 26-28). While the tale does ultimately uphold the King’s power, I would argue that it does so by emphasizing the King’s pettiness and the Princess’ generosity. She is gracious but also grand as she gives kingdoms to him and to the Prince’s brothers, serenely adding, “‘we shall still have three kingdoms left for ourselves’” (d’Aulnoy, 2009, p. 203). As ruler of six kingdoms, she can afford to take the high road. By resolving the crisis of inheritance in her fiancé’s aristocratic family, she has also performed a social role that contemporary critics of the salons wished women to fulfill－but without sacrificing her own voice or retreating into domesticity. Indeed, her appearance in the crystal chariot may be read as a carefully crafted and highly self-conscious public display of salon femininity, one in which the Prince is complicit. When she and the Prince first arrive at the king’s castle, the Princess is hidden by “silken curtains” (d’Aulnoy, 2009, p. 202). The Prince cheerfully teases his father and brothers by saying that he has not found a wife, but “something much rarer－a little white cat” (d’Aulnoy, 2009, p. 202). Inspired by his fiancée, he has taken up the mantle of storyteller, ironically stressing the cat’s smallness and insignificance as a way of intensifying the Princess’ dramatic exit from her chariot. Although the King moves to draw back the silken curtains and expose her, she forestalls him and presents herself: “at a touch from the Princess the crystal shivered into a thousand splinters, and there she stood in all her beauty [...] She saluted the King gracefully, while a murmur of admiration rose from all round” (d’Aulnoy, 2009, p. 203). This final scene is a staged re-enactment of her earlier transformation from cat to princess, made to great public effect. The tale thus ends by privileging the younger generation’s romantic desires over those of the parent figures, who are presented as self-centered, greedy, and less creative than the Princess or Prince. D’Aulnoy’s style and implied audience are quite different from Beaumont’s, but she, too, suggests that women’s intelligence can lead to, rather than detract from, romantic love; mutual trust and affection are essential to the Prince and Princess’s partnership, and the Princess’s sophisticated creativity enables the tale’s happy ending.

Conclusion

Although their specific tales may have been largely forgotten, d’Aulnoy’s and Beaumont’s emphasis on the transforming powers of women’s literate creativity as well as their devoted love is still present in modern versions of Beauty and the Beast, notably in the 1991 animated film. Woolverton’s Belle loves to read, and her reading is central to her romance with the Beast. They court each other through books as well as through snowball fights and dancing; in one scene from the extended DVD edition of the film, education and flirtation merge as Belle and the Beast read Romeo and Juliet together, with Beauty prompting him through the more difficult words. The scene in which the Beast shows Belle the castle’s magnificent library is one of the main turning points in their relationship, signifying that the Beast has so far conquered his earlier selfishness and temper as to recognize Belle’s desires and attempt to fulfill them, even though he is not a very good reader himself. Belle’s love of reading and her ability to imagine alternative scenarios are also important to her own character development in this film; long before she meets the Beast, these qualities allow her to realize she “want[s] much more than this provincial life” in the village (Hahn, Wise, & Trousdale, 1991).

A 2014 interview with Woolverton, however, emphasizes how easily the history of women’s writing and creative work can disappear into the “holes and hiatuses” that Showalter (1976) identifies, even in the twenty-first century (p. 12). Woolverton is asked about her approach to the literary source material for her Beauty and the Beast screenplay, but Beaumont’s name never appears in the published version of the interview (Silverstein, 2014). This omission certainly does not stem from any conscious attempt to marginalize women as creative talents; the interview is dedicated to the topic of “Women in Hollywood,” and both Woolverton and her interviewer Melissa Silverstein talk at some length about the contributions of earlier generations of women to Hollywood film. Instead, the omission of Beaumont’s name most likely stems from a journalistic sense that her name would not be familiar enough to readers of an Indiewire interview with the screenwriter of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast to be newsworthy. Although Beaumont herself might be missing, however, the interview makes clear how the broader shadow of absent women writers and artists has affected Woolverton’s career. Both she and Silverstein remark upon the difficulty she had in “fighting the good fight to protect Belle’s bookishness and bravery” and in convincing male Disney executives not to turn Belle into “a typical damsel in distress” (Silverstein, 2014). Nearly three hundred years after d’Aulnoy’s salon tales presented an oblique challenge to the models of submissive female domesticity that were being promoted by Louis XIV’s court, a female character who is “proactive” and “a reader” as well as a romantic heroine still proved to be a contentious subject among the male creative elite (Silverstein, 2014). More ominously, Woolverton indicates that the social structures which enable women to produce and share creative work with each other are largely absent in the film world in which so many of our contemporary fairy tales are retold. Asked, “How do we move things forward for women in Hollywood?” Woolverton responds, “There’s a boy’s club, definitely, but I haven’t found the girl’s club. I don’t know where it is. I would like to join it” (Silverstein, 2014). Even for a phenomenally successful woman writer of fairy-tale and fantasy screenplays, there is no modern Hollywood equivalent to the literary salons and Bluestocking circles that were essential to d’Aulnoy’s and Beaumont’s literary production. The efforts of women writers of fairy tales, it seems, remain vulnerable to being marginalized and forgotten. D’Aulnoy’s and Beaumont’s works thus serve as a useful case study of the complex reception histories of women writers, who are still so easily edged off the record.

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