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About The Tales Of Mother Goose by Charles Perrault

Charles Perrault published The Tales Of Mother Goose in France in 1697 during what scholars call the first "vogue" of tales produced by learned French writers. The genre that we now know so well was new and an uncommon kind of literature in the epic world of Louis XIV's court. This inaugural collection of French fairy tales features characters like Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Puss in Boots that over the course of the eighteenth century became icons of social history in France and abroad. Perrault's tales are primarily moralistic or didactic, with elements of Christian teaching, about which scholar Lydia Jean says they were written "to reinforce royal absolutism; [Perrault] defended the primacy of the Catholic faith". For example the main character in the first tale, Griselidis, achieves goodness through the blessing of God although she is not of noble birth; the moral is that through her ordeals she becomes worthy to be wife to a nobleman. "Les Souhaits", on the other hand, probably written to shock the sensibilities of his aristocratic audience, is about a common woodcutter who neither knows what to do with the gift of three wishes nor deserves the heavenly gift—because of his low birth and stupidity he squanders the wishes. Perrault was influenced by Church writers such as Camus and Tertullian, and the Fall of Man is a pervasive theme in his stories. Anne Duggan writes about the stories in "Women Subdued: The Abdication and Purification of Female Characters in Perrault's Tales" that the men are passionate whereas women's passions are punished. She goes on to explain that Griselidis and Donkeyskin assume the original sin of all women, and like Mary Magdalen, undergo experiences of penitence and repentance for their sin. The male characters are thus absolved of sin by the female. Duggan writes that in the stories generally the female characters begin in a state of sin: their experiences or ordeals purify and deliver them while simultaneously making them powerless.

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