A Fairy Godmother of her own in 17thCentury France : Subversive Female Agency in Madame d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat”

Magic and metamorphosis always go hand in hand in wonder tales. I argue that in Marie Cathérine d’Aulnoy’s wonder tales, however, it would be more accurate to say that magic and metamorphosis go paw in hand: I will analyse d’ Aulnoy’s wonder tale “The White Cat” in order to illustrate the way she favours the mythological theme of animal metamorphosis. Herself the victim of an unhappy arranged marriage in seventeenth-century France, Madame d’Aulnoy was highly critical of forced marriages, so much so that her tales seriously commented on love, courtship and marriage. D’Aulnoy’s buoyant tales tell their author’s search for magic in her own life, marked by scandal and rebellion against the marriage mores of her time from a very early age on. She is Fairy Godmother to her heroines, granting them happiness after sore trials and tribulations, and to herself, by refusing to be a passive object submitted to another’s will and reclaiming instead the agency of changing her life. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion