French Fairy Tales

Bettina L. Knapp is Thomas Hunter Professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of many books, including A Jungian Approach to Literature and three SUNY Press books: Gambling, Game, and Psyche; Women in Myth; and Women, Myth, and the Feminine Principle. She is also a Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters, an honor presented by the French government.

"Within the area of French fairy tales, I know of no other critical work with such vast chronological range. This is really a trip through the centuries as far as French or comparative literature scholars are concerned. Some of the tales chosen for discussion are original in themselves and have perhaps never been discussed, certainly never this competently: Diderot's The White Bird, Rousseau's The Fantastic Queen, Nodier's The Crumb Fairy, Gautier's Arria Marcella, George Sand's The Castle of the Crooked Peak, and Chedid's The Suspended Heart. The very discussion of these lesser-known tales comes as a happy surprise even to specialists in French literature and is a tribute to Bettina Knapp's encyclopedic erudition and in-depth knowledge of these tales. In other cases, she deals with tales we might think we know well—Perrault's, Maeterlinck's, Cocteau's, for example—but she makes us feel like we are being introduced to them for the first time, so fresh is her approach." — Paul Archambault, author of Seven French Chroniclers: Witnesses to History

• IntroductionPART I. THE MIDDLE AGES: FEUDALISM AND "LA SOCIéTé COURTOISE" 1. Melusine: "The Beauty of Things is Fleet and Swift" PART II. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: "LE GRAND SIÈCLE" 2. Charles Perrault's Multi-Veined Donkey Skin, Sleeping Beauty, and Bluebeard 3. Mme d'Aulnoy's The Bluebird—Metamorphosis, an Unconscious Readjustment PART III. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: "L'ESPRIT PHILOSOPHIQUE" 4. Denis Diderot's The White Bird—As Holy Ghost/Holy Spirit 5. Was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Fantastic Queen Merely a Tongue-in-Cheek Fairy Tale? PART IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: "LE ROMANTISME"—ESTHETIC AND UTILITARIAN 6. Charles Nodier's The Crumb Fairy—A Sacred Marriage of Sun and Moon 7. Théophile Gautier's Parapsychological Hetaera/Fairy: Arria Marcella 8. Countess Sophie De Ségur's Rosette—A Manichean Merry-Go-Round 9. George Sand's The Castle Of Crooked Peak—The Topography of Memory Manipulation 10. Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas and Mélisande—The Dying Complex PART V. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: SLAUGHTER/SCIENCE/ SPIRITUALITY 11. Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast—"The Plucking of a Rose" 12. Andrée Chedid's The Suspended Heart—The Mystery of Being CONCLUSION NOTES REFERENCES INDEX