Madame D'Aulnoy: The Origin of the Term "Fairy Tale" and How It Spread like Wildfire

In one of his latest books, The Irresistable Fairy Tale (2012), Jack Zipes builds on what he discusses in his 2006 book, Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre. I haven't read "Why Fairy Tales Stick" but the former is at my public library so I've gotten a chance to peruse it recently. In both books, Zipes seeks to look into and answer the question of the undeniable long-term popularity of fairy tales. Although they have changed over the years, evolving and adapting according to each culture, fairy tales have managed to remain in public general knowledge and popularity for an impressive longevity. In fact, really the only other thing I can think of that compares to fairy tales in its universal human appeal over completely varied human cultures is religion.

Zipes discusses the science of memetics, or to use a term most people are familiar with, "memes." Memes can be more than pictures of cats with funny captions-a meme is anything that captures the public imagination and spreads in popularity. Memes generally rise and fall over time, but fairy tales have stayed afloat for hundreds of years. What makes a meme stick with us is its relevancy. Therefore, general human consensus for most of known history would indicate that we find fairy tales relevant to our lives. Zipes points to the fact that fairy tales start in conflict, as do our real lives. Although I might point out that basically every story has some form of conflict, so there has to be some other common thread that indicates why fairy tales and not other literature remain so prevalent.

However, tracing the history of fairy tales themselves is incredibly difficult. Zipes says, "Almost all endeavors by scholars to define the fairy tale as a genre have failed. Their failure is predictable because the genre is so volatile and fluid." Not only that, but he goes on to mention that the term "fairy tale" never existed until Madame d'Aulnoy coined it as the title of a book in 1697. Her collection of stories about fairies prompted a trend with far-reaching impact she could not have imagined at the time. For now we use the term to cover a multitude of stories, but most of them don't actually involve actual fairies. How did that specific term explode to cover the undefinable genre we now call fairy tale?

Rare copy of D'Aulnoy's Fairy Tales-only $5,500 Euros

(Fun fact: the original French, conte des fees, was originally translated into English as Tales of the Fairies in 1707. Sound like a certain blog name?!? I wish I could say my blog title was a direct reference to this original French term, but it was really a quick decision made when I impulsively decided to make a fairy tale blog, and I thought the title should simply convey what I would be talking about. I wasn't very creative.)

Adrienne Segur

Illustration for "The Royal Ram" by D'Aulnoy

Although the French fairy tales were very influenced by the Italian collections of Straparola and Basile, those works were only self titled as "tales" and not necessarily associated with, or strongly featuring, fairies (although a few do make an appearance). Yet D'Aulnoy made fairies central characters and put the word in the title of her book, creating an association between a term and a genre that are inseparable today. Why fairies, and why all of a sudden? And what was it about D'Aulnoy's newly coined "fairy tales" that made them so popular?

D'Aulnoy lived in a time when women's rights were severely limited. She created a world of fiction in which human lives and destinies are governed by powerful female fairies-the fairies influence everything from fertility and birth, to arranging destinies and love. Some fairies are more evil and witch-like, others good and just, but they are all powerful and fearsome, and in control of the fate of humans. In a time when women had little to no power either in society or in the home, she created a world where women could vicariously live through fairies to have responsibility, supernatural powers, and control. D'Aulnoy and the other female writers who followed in her footsteps self-identified with the fairies and used them to create alternate ideals for society.

Madame D'Aulnoy

The human characters in the first official fairy tales turned not to government, or the church, to solve their problems-but to the fairies that were a throwback to old mythological dieties and goddesses. For the first French fairy tale writers, "the fairies in their tales signal their actual differences with male writers and resistance to the conditions under which they lived...it was only in a fairy-tale realm, not supervised by the church or subject to the dictates of King Louis XIV, that they could project alternatives stemming from their desires and needs."