Kathryn R. Bastin

In 1781 Rétif de La Bretonne (1734–1806) published the unusual pamphlet Lettre d’un singe aux êtres de son espèce, bookending his work of proto-science fiction, La Découverte australe par un homme volant. Rétif decries the barbarous actions of humans through his hybridized protagonist César Singe, described as a ‘singe-Babouin-métis’. His letter takes up debates around the soulless animal and chattel slavery, but more largely lambasts enslavement by first overturning the nascent Enlightenment idea of humanity and secondly by questioning the primacy of scientific discourse over speculative imagination. Through the hybrid simian’s pen, Rétif mobilizes arguments against human destruction and enslavement, exposing essential questions surrounding power and ethics that remain relevant today, forecasting the future radical politics of antiracism.

ABSTRACT

During the late seventeenth-century fairy-tale vogue, a literary genre vanguarded by women, Henriette-Julie de Murat (1670-1716) pushed boundaries and was known for her scandalous behavior, critiquing court life, engaging in affairs with women, and cross-dressing. She was exiled from court in 1694 due to her scathing evaluation of Louis XIV’s court and remained in exile at Loches until after his death in 1715. During her incarceration, she turned to writing. In 1698, she wrote Contes de fées, which included the tale “L’Anguillette” which exemplifies Murat’s penchant for Greek mythology and takes up her interest in dismantling stereotypical depictions of love and happy endings. In this tale, the princess Plousine transforms into Hébé, the Greek goddess of eternal youth. Her portrayal of doomed love in “L’Anguillette” shows clear resistance to traditional narratives of female submission in romance and marriage. At the end of the tale, Hébé tragically ends her own life during a duel between her former lover and her current husband, and the titular fairy Anguillette ultimately metamorphosizes Hébé and her former lover into a pair of trees. Murat shows the destructive power of love and desire through this tale, and thus presents a contemporary reader with a clear warning about the precarious pursuit of love and pleasure. This tale, entwined with floral and vegetal references and resplendently reflecting material culture of the period, evokes a pair of malheureux amants that eschews conventional gender norms of the Grand Siècle. In this tale, Murat ultimately positions the plant as the redeemer of ill-fated desire and love.

In 1672, the French writer and salonnière Madeleine de Scudéry warmly received two reptiles into her Parisian home. Sent from Alexandria, these chameleons represent a turning point in the history of emotions and science, as written by a woman during the Grand Siècle. More than a decade after their arrival, Scudéry published her scientific observations and her deeply emotive account of their lives in New Moral Conversations ( Nouvelles Conversations de Morale ) in 1688 as “Story of Two Chameleons” (“Histoire de deux caméléons”). In this article, I argue that scientific discourse and affective moments coexist to construct a landmark moment in how emotions were written, felt, and understood in seventeenth-century France. Through Scudéry’s brief but evocative text, we see Scudéry first use, and then subvert, the Cartesian animal-machine, and build shared emotional communities through a fusion of science and emotions that tap into cross-species shared affective circuits.

In this article, I study the underexplored question of breastfeeding in late seventeenth-century French fairy tales. At a time when wet-nursing was the cultural norm, fairy tales by Charles Perrault, Jean de Préchac, and Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy trace important shifts in the history of attitudes toward breastfeeding. These tales illustrate examples of breastfeeding that go against the grain of the common custom of wet-nursing and also support this tradition, thus adding to our knowledge about how beliefs regarding maternal breastfeeding began to change at the end of the seventeenth century, paving the way for the Rousseauian ideal of maternity to come.