Perrault captured the vital role women have always played in the transmission of tales by ascribing authorship of his Histoire et contes du temps passé to the fantastical “ma Mère l’oye.”  Her name appeared in the original title and frontispiece to the 1695 edition of stories that pictured a woman reading to a group of small children in front of a fireplace. As Elizabeth Harries describes it, Perrault’s frontispiece is revelatory of his conception of oral story telling. He glosses his authorship with this reference to a conventional scenario in which the teller is old and female. Catherine Velay-Vallantin has argued, too, that the frontispiece scene recreates the atmosphere of peasant story telling intentionally and falsely (it introduces written tales, after all), perhaps as an indication of how these gentrified stories might be read by the aristocracy.

    Yet in his acknowledgement of a female/maternal source for his moral wisdom, Perrault appeals to an ancient tradition of telling. The names for the tale that reappeared as passing references or actual titles to stories in Europe since the early Renaissance link the tale to the old woman, as sexual educator, protector, as well as loose-tongued gossip. The fantastical source, Mother Goose also reminds us that mothers and nannies were traditionally charged with tending to young children. In linking himself intimately with “my” Mother Goose, Perrault himself becomes a vehicle for her ancient wisdom. In this way, Perrault invokes the tradition, but establishes his superiority to the archetypal woman who was its convention medium.

    The 17th-century women writers of the tale also understood their role in a tradition of telling, but claimed a very different antecedent as their symbol.  In the work of Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy, the tale first became inextricably linked to the young fairy.  The titles of her fist and second collections, Contes nouveaux, ou les fées à la mode (1698/1711) and Les Contes des fées (1710) announce the vogue of the fairy and give fairies a role in tale production. The qualifier nouveaux and the inflection des fées (the possessive “of the fairies”) immediately suggest a departure from the tales of popular culture, which Perrault had immortalized.  His stories, known proverbially as contes d’ogres et de fées, “tales of ogres and fairies,” were, the grammar explains, stories about fairies, not stories credited to them.  D’Aulnoy’s slight twist on the older turn of phrase in contes des fées, in which de becomes des, suggests possession rather than subject matter.  Inflected with a possessive in their title, her stories become the product of magical invention, not folklore.

    D’Aulnoy was right to give her stories a name other than the one Perrault used (conte).  The text that bears this title is an allegory of poetic inspiration.  It depicts an idyllic visitation in which a renowned teller, Madame D…, waits by a fountain to listen to the tales of a woodland nymph.  The female immortal in this piece might be described as an informant fairy.  The gift of the story gives the woman teller the raw material necessary to engage in the privileged social craft of spinning tales -- "which involves translating them and writing them down.  The tale she tells, we find out later, is the gallant tale of a noble prince that has come for the weekend to his country chateau.  The tale thus reflects what the actual nobles in the story (Madame D… and her entourage) have just done.

    In this paper, I will discuss the title, illustration and subject matter of D’Aulnoy’s tale, Les Contes des fées.  I suggest that in this story and its paratext, she elaborates a new ideology of telling that restores dignity to the woman teller.  Further, it emphasizes the role of literary technology and court gossip in the construction of a fairy tale.

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