Often credited as the father of fairy tales as we know them today, Charles Perrault wrote in seventeenth century France, under the reign of King Louis XIV. Perrault supported Louis’ regime to ‘civilize’ Europe and the rest of the world, and so he used his prominence in society, and his pen, to proliferate his political ideals through his collection of fairytales: Histoires ou Contes du Temps. Intended for children, Perrault’s Contes aimed to disseminate the values and interests of the “civilizing process” through literary socialization. His Contes, however, highlight the incongruence between the required uniformity of the “civilizing process” and the desire for human exceptionalism intrinsic to the humanist tradition from which Perrault’s writing and the “civilizing process” spring. While promoting Louis XIV’s “civilizing” agenda, these tales simultaneously restore the discourse of human exceptionalism established by the Humanist tradition: the belief that man is separate and superior to all animals due to his distinct ability to determine his own creation.
This paper focuses on Perrault’s narrative poem, Donkey-Skin, which emphases the facet of human exceptionalism that assumes humans are inherently unique individuals. In Donkey-Skin “a search is ordered by the King/ To find the finger that will fit the ring.” This plot convention relies on the premise that no two humans are alike. The story’s contrasting treatment of animals as inherently undifferentiated highlights the ontological uniqueness that sets man above animal on the chain of being. The story’s insistence on the uniqueness of man emerges from the Humanist conceptions expressed by Pico and Aristotle, which champion the uniqueness of man in comparison with the sameness of animals, and defines human exceptionalism as a result of this comparison. Perrault’s ultimate inability to reconcile the tension between the “civilizing process” and the humanist tradition reveals fallacies intrinsic to seventeenth-century French society.
About the presenterJade Hage
Jade Hage is a second-year English M.A. candidate at Georgetown University. She received her B.A. in English from UCLA in 2015, and is currently working on her M.A. thesis on the use of ‘the animal’ as the cross-section of faith and imagination in C.S. Lewis’ “The Chronicles of Narnia.”