Women subdued: The abjectification and purification of female characters in Perrault's tales

Charles Perrault has been heralded by Marina Warner as "the champion of womankind, defender of old wives' wisdom (169). Joan DeJean has argued that Perrault defended the modernist position in the famous Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns by suggesting that "it was necessary to think, to judge, and to reason as a Woman" (67). Many critics have taken Perrault's defense of women, best displayed in his Apologie des femmes (1694), at face value, neglecting to situate his Apologie and statements about women within the larger quarrel that erupted with the publication of Nicolas Boileau's misogynous "Satire X," or within Perrault's own corpus. (1) Moreover, critics have yet to take into account the importance of religion in Perrault's oeuvre and how religion impacted his conception of women. (2) In what follows, I would like to foreground the religious element in Perrault's tales, particularly as it relates to the representation of women. As I have argued elsewhere, Perrault takes his heroines through what I call a penitential process of abjectification and purification. (3) In order to understand this pattern, we will consider specific influences and how this pattern gets reconfigured in different tales, looking in particular at Perrault's choice of subject matter and his sources. As part of this analysis we will take a detailed look at how Perrault drew from the tragic story "La princesse jalouse" by the Catholic Reformer Jean-Pierre Camus in order to write "La belle au bois dormant." For Julia Kristeva, the abject is "what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite" (4). At the level of the individual body, the abject is that which simultaneously is and is not the body, such as excrement or bodily fluids, which must be eliminated or purged. The disfigured body also is a form of the abject for, like excrement and bodily fluids, it threatens the integrity, the oneness, the wholeness of the body. In relation to the body politic, the abject similarly regulates norms of sexuality, law, and morality by designating as impure, unholy, criminal, sinful, or loathsome certain practices, objects, or individuals that threaten the hegemonic order of the same, and which must be eliminated or expelled in some way. In Judith Butler's words, "the repudiation of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or coloris an 'expulsion' followed by a 'repulsion' that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of differentiation" (133). In what follows I will argue that for Perrault women indeed incarnate the abject, and in order to alleviate any threat women pose to male authority or the body politic, they must either be expelled from the public sphere or be put through a process of purification that renders them powerless and that reintegrates them as passive vessels into the domestic order of the family, an order guaranteed by a male and implicitly Catholic authority. Perrault's Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences (1688), his novella "Griselidis" (1691), and his Apologie des femmes (1694) all ostensibly defend women's role within public discourse and society. In the Parallele, Perrault uses aristocratic women and their tastes to legitimate the modernist cause. "Griselidis" was written in response to the Ancient Jean de La Bruyere's misogynous "Des femmes," and the Apologie des femmes in response to the "Satire X" against women by the spokesman for the Ancients, Nicolas Boileau. In both texts Perrault's defense of women resides in his affirmation that good women indeed exist, but they are often hidden from the public eye, for they inhabit obscure and private spaces where they serve and care for others. (4) In both texts, however, Perrault implicitly pits worldly public women against rather meek women whose sphere of action is limited to the domestic sphere, which seems to contradict the role reserved for women in the Parallele. …